“From my breakfast table in the Hotel Hesselet’s dining room, I watch a lone canoeist glide across the still Baltic Sea just steps away. A seagull, perched on the end of the swimming pier, also observes his progress. I marvel at the serenity of the scene as mist slowly lifts off the water. The breakfast buffet laid out in this baby-blue room with pale yellow table linens is included in the room price. It’s a Danish delight with everything from marinated herring and smoked salmon to Fontina cheese, freshly baked flaky pastries, and preserves home-made from local berries….The food looks even more delicious when served on Royal Copenhagen Fajance china.”

Although this glowing description reads like a brochure, it is from an article that appeared in The Globe and Mail in May 2000. Sadly, it mirrors many newspaper travel stories, in that it transforms a hotel or a destination into a veritable utopia. And despite the fact that there is no mention of it in the article, the writer’s stay was a “freebie,” a gift handed out under the assumption that he would not bite the hand that fed him.

These days, the majority of Canadian newspaper travel stories are based on free trips and accommodations offered by airlines, tourist boards and hotels, handed out on the tacit understanding that the writer will be disinclined to give a bad review to a generous sponsor. While many of Canada’s dailies have forbidden staff writers to accept freebies, the majority of the bylines in the travel sections belong to freelancers. In general, staffers contribute travel stories as one small and occasional aspect of their job. The Globe and Mail is one of those papers that has a policy stating that no staff member is permitted to accept complimentary trips, but freelancers are excluded from the policy. And according to Andrew Gorham, former travel editor at the Globe, freelancers write 70 percent of the section’s stories. Gorham says he often didn’t know-or ask-where the trips came from.

As far as freelance writers themselves are concerned, accepting a complimentary trip is often the only way they are able to get to a destination. Occasionally, writers submit stories from vacations or trips they have already taken. It earns them a bit of extra money for writing about their personal vacation, and it’s also handy, if you’re a freelancer, to be able to write off the jaunt as a business expense. In other instances, seasoned writers may be commissioned to write travel stories with substance. Writer and broadcaster Ian Brown, for instance, wrote a story last August for the Globe called “The Hottest Place on Earth.” He paid for his trip to the African nation of Djibouti himself, to be later reimbursed by the paper. He was also paid his writer’s fee for the story.

Most often, though, the writer wants to travel somewhere by the cheapest method possible, and no one can beat the price of a free hotel or airfare. Complimentary trips come in one of two guises. There are the individual perks offered to individual writers: the hotel room, the complimentary airfare, the tourist board that pays for a rental car once you reach your destination. Then there are the junkets to far-flung places around the globe. These excursions, called fams, short for familiarization trips, are organized by travel agencies or tourist boards, and tend to be group affairs, during which six or so journalists are flung together and taken en mass to a destination. It’s not always a great way to travel, especially for crowd-averse people; it also isn’t necessarily the best way to see much of a place outside the limits defined by your host. On the other hand, as full-time freelance travel writer Jeremy Ferguson says, “The trip’s organizers provide a lot of the experience if you’re going to a country where you’ve never been.”

There are a number of economic reasons for freebies having become the status quo of travel writing-some reasonable, some not quite so defensible. For a start, it’s clearly much more cost-effective for newspapers to use freelancers to write their travel pieces: no salaries or benefits to fork out, and no travel expenses to push up editorial costs. And if objectivity is sacrificed, the general attitude seems to be what the readers don’t know won’t hurt them.

From the writers’ point of view, accepting a freebie not only enables them to get to a destination but also means they won’t be too much out of pocket when they get home. Newspapers are notorious for paying their freelancers as little as possible, which is what deters so many writers from becoming full-time travel writers or expending the effort to write a great travel piece. According to Bruce Bishop, a freelance travel writer for the past six years who stepped down as president of the Travel Media Association of Canada (TMAC) in February of this year, pay for freelancers in the travel business is, on average, $250 to $300 for an article in a major newspaper. Writers such as Ferguson and Brown agree with Bishop’s assessment: “The assumption is always, ‘Travel writers don’t need to make much money because they get to travel on somebody’s tab.'”

This somebody, however, is not handing out free trips without an ulterior motive. The purpose behind complimentary travel is to get people to a place so they can write about it-favourably. It’s an affordable way to advertise, and much more effective. People are drawn to articles more than advertisements, and if a company can get its name in print, with the only costs being accommodation and meals for the writer, it’s the cheapest advertising method out there. “Advertising is not a credible medium for talking about a country or culture,” says Ferguson. “So what the organizations benefit from is the exposure for their country, their culture, their airline, whatever-the exposure that comes out of the stories you write. And the newspapers and magazines benefit from getting very good, very expensive material for a pretty low price.”

Brown contends that what is found in newspaper travel sections is not the essence of travel writing. “Travel writing’s very different from the travel section of the paper, which is basically an advertising vehicle. Newspapers never pay, and that’s why you get so much shitty writing in the travel section, because they only want to sing the praises of places that will advertise there. But that’s not writing, that’s advertising.”

Then again, newspaper travel writing has always been a different beast from magazine travel writing, which tends to be more discursive and less service-oriented. In these pared-back, cautious times, people are travelling less, and this is reflected in the fact that few magazines run travel stories these days. Although there are a number of U.S. travel magazines on the newsstands-Conde Nast Traveler being perhaps the most high-profile example-all that’s left of travel publications in the Canadian print media are Outpost, an adventure travel magazine; enRoute, Air Canada’s magazine; Canadian Geographic; Travel Canada Magazine; and the travel sections in the dailies. Gone are the days of Destinations (which was published by the Globe and Mail from March 1986 to October 1993). Even general-interest magazines rarely run travel stories any more, as the advertising does not back up the editorial. According to Rona Maynard, editor ofChatelaine, “There’s not a lot of money in travel advertising, and Chatelaine‘s rates are at the high end of the scale.” Jeremy Ferguson counters that the reason general-interest magazines do not write travel is because they believe their readers just aren’t interested in the subject.

In part, it’s the old Canadian problem of trying to sustain a special-interest magazine in a country with a relatively small, very dispersed population. It’s also the ongoing problem of competition from the U.S. “The Americans have sucked us dry,” Ferguson says. “Our own travel publications just don’t make it. What’s changed in Canada is the shrinkage of the publishing stream. There’s almost nothing left.” There’s also the question of the times in which we live. “A lot of people have decided they’re not going to travel,” says Ferguson. “They’re going to put the energies of their lives into accumulating whatever they can accumulate, and not take any chances. I think people who haven’t travelled that much look at newspaper headlines at face value and ultimately decide they shouldn’t go anywhere because it’s not safe.”

It shouldn’t be surprising, then, given the current pinched economic climate, that a few Canadian dailies have actually embraced the use of complimentary travel. Ferguson believes more newspapers will be making the change as budgets continue to shrink. The Hamilton Spectator, for example, changed its policy two years ago to one similar to the Montreal Gazette‘s. The Spectator doesn’t pay the expenses for any travel-story trips, including those of staff writers, and rarely hires freelancers, unless the staff know them well. The paper pays for the article, but the writer, who often works in another department, must make his or her own arrangements for transportation and accommodation, usually through travel agencies.

Jeff Day, the Spectator‘s travel editor, maintains that, with the acceptance of freebies, the paper now gets better quality and more honest writing. He doesn’t hide the fact that writers have accepted a complimentary trip; the information is included in the article. “From my point of view,” says Day, “the policy of accepting trips from tourist boards and so on has improved the integrity of the stories that I get back.”

But in the end, what’s a poor newspaper reader to do? Can we expect to have a flawless trip to Aruba, say, just because the travel writer says she did? Should we dish out upwards of $200 a night to stay at the Hotel Hesselet in Denmark under the assumption that we will be paying for near-perfection? The sticky question of whether this kind of sponsored travel influences a writer’s perspective-and therefore the objectivity of the story-is not as straightforward as it might seem. Most writers maintain that complimentary trips do not influence their stories, but most of the travel stories that appear in newspapers these days read like puff pieces-advertising masquerading as editorial. True, travel organizations may not directly affect the article because they have no right to see or comment on the story before it’s published, but the sense of obligation on the writer’s part is inevitably present in most of the stories.

However, travel writers-not surprisingly-adamantly deny the influence of a free ride, including Ferguson, who says he has never had anyone tell him what to write. He adds that he has been blacklisted by organizations because of what he has said in articles.

But accepting a freebie can be a slippery slope. According to Klaus Pohle, an associate professor of journalism at Carleton University and the chair of its research ethics committee, journalists must distance themselves from those they write about. By accepting a freebie, that distance is eliminated, as well as the ability to be a neutral observer. “A journalist who lets a source influence the story is not a journalist,” he says. “In fact, freebies may never influence the writer. But it’s the perception that counts. If the public perceives a conflict of interest or undue influence, the damage is done.”

Michael Hanlon, a freelance travel writer and member of TMAC and the Society of American Travel Writers, says that in his experience, a writer’s story isn’t negatively influenced by a free ride. All his trips are sponsored by the host destination or tourism organization, but he says that “travel writers don’t look on getting a free trip to some exotic destination and being pampered and treated like royalty as some sort of cookie that’s given out for niceness. We don’t spend the time on the beach or loafing by the pool. As for legitimacy, that’s up to the reader to decide.”

The reasons most writers list for not writing negative travel stories is that a trip can’t be all bad. Some, likeToronto Star feature writer and author Oakland Ross, who has written a few travel stories and also taught the subject, feel it’s rude to criticize someone who has paid your way, although he’s quick to point out this doesn’t influence his writing. “I don’t really see the purpose of travel writing as being to complain or to criticize anything,” he says. “It’s to describe the experience of travel.” But according to Brown, “A lot of travel writing is about hardship and agony and pain.” As we all know, a perfect vacation is almost a contradiction in terms, but many mishaps can be presented humourously, adding a human element to the story with which readers can identify.

While every writer has his or her own distinct style and reasons for writing travel, the difference between good travel writing and bad is crystal clear. According to Ferguson, “everyone has a different take on what they’re looking for from travel. Mine is very much a sense of wonder in the world-it’s the delight, the discovery. Those are the things that come through in my stories, and I think it’s that individual perspective and an openness to the world. It’s a personal mix-you follow your own lights.”

“I think what makes a good travel story is the same thing that makes any good story, and that is powerful narrative,” says Ross. “There is a purpose to the story, there is a purpose to the writer doing whatever it is the writer is doing, or going wherever they are going, and the story should be told in a powerful, narrative fashion.” Brown’s views on travel writing slightly differ from those of most travel journalists you read in the papers. He says that “the best travel writing is mostly not about resorts and places where you can vacation. There’s a difference between travelling and vacationing.”

Most writers and critics agree that travel and freebies will continue to go hand-in-hand simply because there are few reasonable, reality-based solutions. Some people believe that there is nothing wrong with a system that is as old as the trade. Pohle thinks that the acceptance of freebies “will continue until newspaper publishers and travel writers realize that this is no more ethical than a politician accepting free trips, about which the media editorialize endlessly. It’s nothing more than moral hypocrisy, because they are doing exactly the same thing, except the public often doesn’t find out.”

However, as budgets shrink and more people lose the curiosity to see what the world has to offer, the fact that travel sections still exist may be a blessing in disguise. Sadly, perhaps Oakland Ross sums it up best when he says, “It’s not so much whether travel writing is good or bad, it’s whether the travel writing gets done or not.”

The picture was taken with a box Brownie on the infield at Yankee Stadium just before the first game of the 1941 World Series. That’s Joe DiMaggio in his home whites, staring inward as DiMaggio so often did. The young man beside him is Billy Frayne, 23, all the way from Winnipeg, and he’s in uniform too-the sports scribe’s requisite suit and fedora. He’d purchased that suit, made to measure, at Tip Top Tailors for $27.50. That was more than Billy made in a week writing sports for the Tribune, but he wasn’t about to look out of place at his first Fall Classic, even if it was on his own dime. No, if he was going to rub padded shoulders with the likes of Red Smith, Jimmy Cannon, John Larnder, and even old Grantland Rice, he had to fit in, right down to the pack of Camels in his pocket. These guys, after all, were his heroes whose style, in print and in person, he tried to imitate. They were the elite of the sporting press, the gatekeepers of a powerful North American sports mythology. Without them, DiMaggio was just a shy fisherman’s son who happened to be the best baseball player of his time. But in their hands, he was poetry in pinstripes. “If you saw him play, you’ll never forget him,” wrote Jimmy Cannon. “No one ran with such unhurried grace. His gifts as an athlete were marvelous because they were so subdued. Here was an outfielder who followed the flight of the ball with a deft serenity as though his progress had been plotted by a choreographer concerned only with the defeat of awkwardness.” There were no TV cameras in the Bronx that day to bring such images down to earth, just the men at the typewriters weaving their legends.

Trent Frayne-Billy was a nickname he left behind in Winnipeg in 1942-is 83 now. Over the years he has watched as a new breed of writer and a different set of values have taken over the craft. The mean pages of the sports press rarely create legends anymore; they’re mostly filled instead with the greed of the business pages, the criminality of cops-and-courts coverage, and the marketing mania of the real estate sections. Though they don’t shrink from the dark side of sports (even DiMaggio’s lofty legend fell victim to that), too often it’s at the expense of what David Halberstam called “some measure of literary grace.” More than anything else, Frayne and his contemporaries-Scott Young, Ted Reeve, Jim Coleman-were a pleasure to read. Little of their wit, their playfulness, their sheer irreverence, has survived. The late Dick Beddoes, whoseGlobe and Mail column embodied all these qualities, probably put it best: “Sport is all hoke and hype, but I find it outrageous and wonderful.”

“Don Cherry is widely known as Grapes (if his last name were Grapes, he’d likely be known as Cherry).” Trent Frayne has been tossing off lines like that for 60 years. His ironic, easygoing style never shows sweat. He deals in finesse, not fist-shaking. It’s a style he learned in Winnipeg and Toronto during the ’40s, when the sports department was the creative writing lab of the newspaper. He brought it to a high shine in the ’50s among the legendary wordsmiths at Maclean’s. Pierre Berton, then the magazine’s managing editor, found Frayne’s prose “refreshingly free of the curious jargon that haunts some sports pages.” Indeed, it haunts them still.

Frayne’s first full-time sports-writing job in Toronto was on the old Telegram, where he covered the Argonauts of the CFL, then called the Big Four, and the baseball Maple Leafs, who played in the International League, which was one step down from the majors. In the fall of ’49, the Leafs were about to play a series that was crucial to their playoff chances. “To prevent people from collapsing on psychiatrists’ couches,” Frayne wrote, “the Leafs merely need to win today behind [starter] Nick Strincevich and tomorrow behind everybody but Burrhead the batboy.” As for the CFL, Frayne found things then were as they had always been and would always be. “Across the country,” he observed, “sylvan rivulets large enough for trout are coursing down the cheeks of football coaches as they describe their starting lineups as the greatest in the history of Canada and their reserves as little, one-armed boys with the brains and ability of a gnu. A very young gnu.”

At the Tely, Frayne was joined in the gnu journalism by Jim Coleman and Ted Reeve, entertainers of the first order. “The man who takes the post of coaching the Black Hawks,” wrote Coleman of the 1950 Chicago team, “can be compared only to the man who insists upon riding over the big drop at Niagara Falls on a chaise lounge.” Reeve, a former football and lacrosse star who liked to call himself the Moaner, was a literary journalist long before the term was coined. Here he is in 1956 on the 25th anniversary of Maple Leaf Gardens: “[T]he Gardens, with its ever pressing program of events, becomes as much a part of a Toronto sports chronicler’s life and daily journal as Mr. Crusoe’s stockade was to the sturdy sailor with the steady habits. Or Mons. Cristo’s air-conditioned tunnel, Master Thoreau’s pond-side retreat at Walden or Tim Linkinwater’s set of ledgers in the counting-house of Cheeryble Bros.” Defoe, Dumas, Thoreau, and Dickens all in one swoop. The Moaner should have had a library, not a hockey arena, named after him.

Frayne and company, who included the likes of Scott Young at the Globe and Milt Dunnell at the Star-you’ll find all three, along with Coleman, in the writers section of the Hockey Hall of Fame-wrote on the assumption that their words were the first anyone knew of what went on in the previous day’s games, and readers looked beneath their bylines for the kind of word pictures that would soon be lost to TV. If a contest wasn’t exciting enough, they had the chops to make it so. “[S]tyle with the language enabled them to reflect much more than the sting of the sweat and the flight of the ball,” the late Ron Poulton, no mean stylist himself, once wrote. They could fit a feature article into 750 words and they loved to write, a fact perhaps best illustrated by Frayne’s golfing partner, Young, who has penned 45 books. Dunnell-who could never call anything by its real name (the Stanley Cup, for example, was “Lord Stanley’s battered old beaker”)-later wrote six columns, hosted 10 radio sportscasts, and appeared on two TV shows every week. Frayne, on the other hand, was about to become less prolific but more polished.

Maclean‘s in the ’50s was a legendary shop, both for the man who ran it and the writers who filled its glossy pages. It was a biweekly periodical, which meant Frayne, as a regular contributor, had more time and space in which to try to meet the standards of its storied editor, Ralph Allen. A former sportswriter and war correspondent (it was Allen’s departure from the Tribune in 1938, in fact, that made room for Frayne), Allen was so demanding of his writers and editors-who included Berton, Barbara Moon, Bruce Hutchison, Peter C. Newman, Peter Gzowski, and Frayne’s wife, June Callwood-that he once declared of a freelance piece: “This is so bad, it’ll have to be rewritten before it’s rejected.” Though the authenticity of the story may be questioned, it is, given Allen’s reputation, easy to believe. Frayne thrived under Allen, churning out some of his best work ever, particularly profiles such as “The Greatest Fighter Who Ever Lived,” his moving account of the life of Sam Langford, and “That Man in the Greens,” his uncompromising look at Conn Smythe, in which Smythe’s famously self-revealing quote-“If you can’t beat them in the alley, you can’t beat them in here on the ice”-first appeared.

In 1959, Ralph Allen left Maclean‘s and soon turned up writing sports for the Tely. Frayne followed with a gig as a feature writer for The Toronto Star, later rejoining the sports-writing fraternity as a columnist for The Toronto Sun. It was during this time Frayne picked up his National Newspaper Award, but more important to him, he had the opportunity to pass on some of what he had learned to a younger generation. “He was an incredibly generous guy with his experience and his talent,” says Ottawa Sun columnist Earl McRae, who met Frayne when they were both at the Star. Despite their age difference, McRae says that Frayne is “like a generational compatriot. He probably thinks he’s still 23 years old.” Allen Abel, who met Frayne when they were both covering the Jays in 1977, thinks so too. “He seemed to act like he was in dreamland. And maybe sports writers should have that attitude because that’s what sports is, dreamland.”

But for Frayne’s generation, the dream was going sour. No longer did the writers take you out to the game; television did that now. The writers were left on the sidelines, often building themselves up as much as the athletes. “The first-person singular became popular, but I rarely tried it,” Frayne says. If he had to refer to himself, he was usually “your agent.” He’d learned that from Ralph Allen; readers, Allen would say, are interested in the subject, not the person writing about it. There was something classy about the continued use of self-deprecating references like “the ink-stained wretch.” They signaled the guys who could still write. Allan Fotheringham (a.k.a. “this scribbler”) broke in as a sportswriter at The Vancouver Sun in the same department where Beddoes (“y’r ob’t servant”) practised his prolific prose. “Television offers one thing,” Fotheringham says, “but reading a beautiful sentence about how Gordie Howe actually played is something else.”

According to Frayne, TV has had another negative effect on the trade. “[S]portswriting once inspired an inventiveness not easy to find nowadays,” he once wrote. “I think the change can be traced to the money television has put into the pockets of professional athletes. It used to be that players and scribes shared a mutual economic scale and common social level. Today’s athletes have climbed to such heights on the economic ladder that setting up an interview with one is like making an appointment with the prime minister.”

“What do they write?” says George (the Baron) Gross, corporate sports editor at the Sun, of today’s practitioners. “They go to the dressing room and they quote five or 10 players, then they write who slept with whose wife, what their salary is, who their agent is-crap like this.” After the death of Casey Stengel, Frayne used his Sun column to bring back an era the Baron still treasures: “They [the writers] listened to Ol’ Case hour after hour, drinking with him, laughing with him, filling their heads with stories about him, and then writing a reasonable facsimile in their papers.” But that time’s gone now, remaining only in the memories and the books of those who lived it-and on enough microfiche to wrap around the SkyDome a few dozen times.

To borrow a phrase from Frayne himself, he made his first appearance here on God’s green footstool on September 13, 1918, in Brandon, Manitoba. And he just missed being named Dorothy. His parents-Homer, a CPR railroader, and his wife, Ella-had been expecting a girl and had the name all ready, so when the boy arrived he was given Trent Gardiner, after the surnames of his mother and his paternal grandmother. But no little boy could live with a handle like that, so Ella’s best friend suggested Billy, which would remain his moniker for the next 24 years.

Billy Frayne considered his parents an odd match. In his memoir, The Tales of an Athletic Supporter, Frayne described his father as “a gregarious, charming man who loved sitting around with other railroaders in the hotel beer parlors swapping tales.” His mother, who was fiercely concerned about appearances, “didn’t have much humour and took almost everything literally.” Somehow she just couldn’t see the funny side of sending Billy out to the pubs to fetch his dad long after supper had gone cold.

As his father took to the beverage halls, Billy took to the playing fields. He surrounded himself with sports, playing them, reading about them, and eventually writing them. He was the boy standing outside the office of the Brandon Sun waiting for someone to post the half-inning scores of the World Series. Billy started by sending in the results of his own games to be printed in the Sun, and by the time he was about 15, he was covering minor hockey for the paper. To write his copy, he’d wake up at 5 a.m., lock himself in the bathroom of his parents’ one-bedroom apartment so as not to disturb his folks, and compose on the can.

When it came time for college, tuition was too steep for the Fraynes, so Billy made a deal with the Sun. During the Depression years, the paper gave advertising space to Brandon College (now Brandon University) on credit and Billy brainstormed that the college could reduce its debt to the Sun by educating one of its young writers. He spent the next three years attending classes and pounding out local copy, but left college and Brandon before graduation when the Canadian Press in Winnipeg offered him a full-time job at $18 a week.

In Winnipeg, he found a roommate, Scott Young, a sportswriter at the Free Press, and a mentor, Ralph Allen, a columnist for the Tribune. His apprenticeship-and his future-could not have been in better hands. After a four-year stint at CP and the Trib, during which he took time out to make Joe DiMaggio’s acquaintance, Billy decided to follow Scott and Ralph, who had gone to Toronto. He went to the Globe, where he was given a general reporting job for $45 a week and a new byline-Trent Frayne was much more suitable for the country’s national newspaper.

But working at the Globe brought him more than bylines. Shortly after he arrived, a young woman-“stunningly beautiful” to borrow Pierre Berton’s words-began spinning heads in the newsroom. Her name was June Callwood and she was attracted to just one guy there. She’d seen Frayne’s picture in the Globe while she was still working for The Expositor in Brantford, Ontario and sought him out when she got to Toronto. “I liked that he was a good writer and a good-looking man,” Callwood says. “He still is.” They were married in 1944.

Always the realist to Callwood’s idealist, Frayne likes to offer another reason for his attraction: since Callwood was a teetotaler, he could increase his wartime beer ration by drinking hers too. But Frayne can’t hide behind that joke for long. “They were very much in love, a handsome couple who called each other ‘Dreamy,'” Berton observed when they moved to Maclean‘s six years later. “We thought we were the luckiest people in the world,” Callwood says of those freelance years. “We all had young children and not very much money. We always took two typewriters on vacation.” Between them, Berton has written, they probably produced more pieces for Maclean’s than anybody else.

They’ve both kept at it, writing, at latest count, a total of 44 books. They also had four kids whom they raised in the Etobicoke home they bought 49 years ago and still live in. Callwood went on to become, well, June Callwood (it takes Canadian Who’s Who more than a column of tiny type to list her accomplishments, affiliations, awards, and honorary degrees). As she moved deeper into activism, Frayne stuck with his sports, something, he says “she wasn’t remotely interested in.” But they were always there for each other. She for him from 1962 to 1968 when he worked as a reluctant PR man for the Ontario Jockey Club and drank too much (he got busted for driving under the influence, she bailed him out, and he never drank again). He for her in ’68 when the cops hauled her off to jail for joining a hippie protest in Yorkville, and in 1991 when some board members at Nellie’s, a women’s shelter she helped found, tried to label her, of all things, a racist. But never was this mutual support more needed than in 1982.

While returning to Queen’s University, Casey Frayne, 20, was killed in a motorcycle accident. Frayne’s friends say he has never recovered from the death of his youngest child and it’s easy to see why. Sitting in his home office, he’s as restless as a 10 year old until the talk turns to Casey and how much they miss him. He lowers his voice and shrinks down in his chair, taking a moment to choose his words. “I think she still dreams of him every night,” he finally says. “But you have to go on with your everyday life.”

They did go on, returning together to where they’d met, The Globe and Mail, from 1983 to 1989. After that Frayne went home still again, this time for an eight-year stint writing an elegant monthly column forMaclean‘s. He was 78 when he left and he’d seen enough Grey Cups, Olympic Games, World Series, Wimbledons, and Kentucky Derbies. “It is an axiom of sports that the legs go first,” he wrote in his memoir. “For sportswriters, it’s the enthusiasm.” He spends a lot of time at home these days, where he watches sports on TV, preferring the comforts of his couch to the confines of the press box. It’s as his old friend, Ralph Allen, mentioned to him at Maple Leaf Gardens a long time ago: “I don’t mind writing the bloody column; it’s the goddam games I can’t stand.”

Allen died in 1966, Ted Reeve in ’83, and Jim Coleman last year. And a splendid era in Canadian sports writing died with them. Trent Frayne’s byline, a jewel of that era, seldom appears anymore. But, as he once wrote of Joe DiMaggio, he carries on-“as always, dignity intact.”

On February 5, 2001, Izzy Asper, executive chairman of CanWest Global Communications Corp., Canada’s largest media and publishing company, threw a party at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The atmosphere was more like a Liberal love-in than a corporate gathering-the crowd included Finance Minister Paul Martin, Herb Gray, then deputy prime minister, and former New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna. Asper and his two sons, David and Leonard, schmoozed with cabinet ministers, senators, and members of parliament over cocktails and canapés while CanWest executives glad-handed members of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. Lawrence Martin, arguably the most widely read political journalist in the country at the time, worked the room as expertly as any politician. As the national affairs columnist for Southam newspapers, Martin knew most of the people in the room, but not his new de facto employer, David Asper. Inevitably, they would meet.

Asper, of course, was familiar with Martin’s columns and was not indifferent to the political pundit’s point of view. In particular, he was irritated by a column Martin had written advocating more funding for the cash-strapped CBC. As Asper saw it, the column collided with his family’s corporate interests. In addition to the 14 major metropolitan dailies, 50 percent share in the National Post, and more than 120 community papers CanWest acquired from Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. in November 2000, the Aspers also own the Global Television Network, a CBC competitor. “David was still clearly annoyed about the column that evening,” Martin says. “I was a little surprised because I hadn’t thought twice about offending my employers when I wrote it. If the CBC had more money, then it wouldn’t have to compete in the advertising market against networks like Global. I told him it was natural that he wouldn’t agree with some of my columns, because no two people agree about everything.”

Martin’s deft response comes after years of practice. Such minor antagonisms make up the consistent thread in a lengthy and varied career as reporter, columnist, and author. At age 54, he has the air of someone who likes to work within his own parameters, impervious to any outside pressure-the kind of man who does what he wants and says what he thinks, whether people agree with him or not. “He was an editor’s dream and an editor’s nightmare,” says John Fraser, one of Martin’s former editors at The Globe and Mail and now master of Massey College in Toronto. “He always got the good story, but it was never what the editor conceived.” As far as David Asper was concerned at that National Gallery party, Martin probably didn’t fall into the nightmare category-yet.

Not long after their first meeting, Asper took exception to another column. This time Martin had suggested that Kim Campbell, former minister of justice and attorney general, and the first woman prime minister of Canada, should be appointed to the Senate. “Campbell would be ideal for the Senate slot,” he wrote. “As a former PM, she would bring some well-needed prestige to the body. At 54, she is still young, full of creative energy and sizzle.” Asper was furious, his anger rooted in his own past. A lawyer by training, he worked to free David Milgaard after he was charged with murder in 1969. As justice minister, Campbell repeatedly shelved Asper’s appeals on Milgaard’s behalf, though eventually his client was exonerated. Martin’s column ran on a Saturday. On Monday he received an e-mail from Asper saying, “You’ve ruined my weekend.” Martin says that he was unaware of Asper’s history with Campbell, though “even if I did know, I still would have written it.” But he concedes that the e-mail made it clear that Asper “really hated that column.”

Martin continued with his work as national affairs columnist, and continued to chafe against the views of CanWest management. Shawinigate, the name coined in reference to investigations into Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s interests in a hotel and golf course in his hometown of Shawinigan, Quebec, was an especially contentious point. Not surprisingly, as Izzy Asper used to be the leader of the Manitoba Liberal Party and, according to Martin, is friends with the prime minister, Martin kept coming back to the subject in his columns, questioning everything from Chrétien’s future in Ottawa to why the media weren’t probing the affair more deeply. In late February 2001, he even wrote a 7,000-word essay that pulled the elements of the story together into a comprehensive summary of the situation. David Asper responded in a letter to the editor published in the National Post and Southam’s other major dailies 10 days later. “The time is now long overdue for Mr. Chrétien’s accusers to ‘put up or shut up’ with facts and hard evidence,” he wrote. In late March, Martin wrote, “Chrétien built his reputation as a politician on an image of a straight shooter. More and more, this is being called into question. More and more, his word is being invalidated.” And indeed, more and more, Martin was keeping the Shawinigate issue in the public eye. “I continued writing about Shawinigate because I knew that if its many tentacles were fleshed out, it was a major scandal, and that others would see and understand this,” he says.

The turning point in Martin’s relations with his corporate owners came the following July. He had just finished a round of golf at the Royal Ottawa Golf Course, with-in an ironic twist of fate-PMO communications director Francie Ducros. Martin knew that Southam’s editor-in-chief, Murdoch Davis, was due to arrive from Winnipeg that day, and he assumed it was a routine sojourn for shoptalk. He recalls that just before he started pushing the Shawinigate issue, Davis had sent him an e-mail saying, “Your work has been superlative-great reporting, wonderful detail, fine writing.”

Martin says, “He followed the spectacular compliment later, telling Peter Robb, my Ottawa bureau chief, how he was so satisfied with my column.” When Davis arrived, they met in Robb’s office, where Davis said to Martin, “Let’s get right to the point, I’ve got bad news.” In no uncertain terms, the national affairs columnist was told that his contract would not be renewed, though Davis insisted that “it’s not because of the quality of your work.” As Davis went on to explain it, Martin’s position would be terminated, though a national political column would be maintained, albeit in a different form. On this point, the Aspers have followed through. Martin’s column has been replaced with the highly controversial national editorials in the National Post and Southam’s other dailies. The editorials come from CanWest’s head office in Winnipeg and are written or assigned by Murdoch Davis. Neither Davis nor the Aspers are willing to talk publicly about the circumstances of Martin’s dismissal, except through a company representative who says such a discussion might be a conflict of interest. Martin, though resigned to his fate, is almost as circumspect. “I’ve been told that Chrétien and the PMO put pressure on the Aspers in regard to my coverage of Shawinigate and I believe it,” he says. “People can draw their own conclusions as to whether that pressure was a significant factor in my dismissal.”

Martin appears strangely unassuming for someone who looms at 6-foot-4, considers a 79 a decent golf score, and slams his tennis serve hard and fast enough to stun his opponents into submission-when he actually gets it over the net. But when he sits down to talk about his career, his massive hands seem to grasp nervously for anything within reach, or play through his thick mop of dead straight silver hair. He crosses and uncrosses his long legs. He doesn’t look you in the eye when he talks, and his voice is barely perceptible, making it hard to believe that he is a figure who has gained such notoriety in the journalistic community. But his work has reverberated all the way from the PMO to the walls of professional athletes’ shower rooms.

When Martin started out as a sports reporter for the Globe in 1974, the coach of the Toronto Maple Leafs went so far as to appoint Dave Dunn, one of the defencemen on the team, to keep him off the team bus and out of the locker room. In one case he quoted team owner Harold Ballard as saying, “Inge Hammerstrom could skate into a corner with a half-dozen eggs in his pocket and not break any of them.” At the time, Swedish players had a reputation for being quite weak, and the comment caused a ruckus-the Swedish players were upset about his harsh statements. Then there was the friction between Martin and Hockey Hall-of-Famer Dave Keon. “In response to several assertive stories, Keon marched down the aisle of a plane on a flight to Los Angeles, stopped at my seat, and began berating me, saying my hair was too long and that he and some of the other players were planning to shorten it,” Martin recalls.

The pattern of confrontation continued as Martin shifted his interests to domestic and international political affairs in the ensuing years. In 1975, he covered the preparations for the Montreal Olympics, where he refused to be taken in by the euphoria of the event and instead focused on the corruption that was being ignored by most of his colleagues. When he returned from Montreal, he started to cover politics, asserting his iconoclastic view on Joe Clark, then Progressive Conservative Party leader. “All his reporting on Clark alienated him from the Ottawa bureau,” says John Fraser, his national editor at the time. “I was always defending him. Because he was in Toronto, he wasn’t caught up in the niceties and genial deals between the journalists and the politicians.” And in the end, Martin’s alienation worked to his advantage. Clark’s leadership was very fragile and it collapsed.

The Globe subsequently sent Martin to Washington to cover American politics, though even this posting was far from straightforward. Prior to leaving, Martin and Paul Palango worked on a story about doctors and nurses in Toronto hospitals leaking files to the RCMP. That story led to a royal commission enquiry, which wanted to know where Palango and Martin found the information. While Palango faced the heat, Martin’s Washington posting kept him out of the spotlight. “I could have gone to jail for contempt of court,” he says, “but they couldn’t get me if I was out of the country.”

After Washington, Martin was posted to Moscow. He lobbied hard for the job, anxious to get a glimpse of the other side of the Cold War. He began his three-year stint in 1985, at the inception of Gorbachev’s term as Soviet leader. “Gorbachev made promises of reform and I believed him,” Martin says. “I sensed he was genuine, so I cast my stories in a positive framework.” That didn’t sit well with Martin’s American colleagues in Moscow, who saw him as a pushover for Soviet propaganda. As it turns out, Martin was right. “What I remember most is that he made that call,” says Norman Webster, the editor who assigned Martin to Moscow. “He knew that Gorbachev wasn’t just a pretty face, another old communist, but someone who was going to change things dramatically and irreversibly.”

Talk to Martin’s colleagues and peers and you always get a similar story. He’s a journalist who doesn’t like to run with the pack, who goes his own way no matter what the consequences. Geoffrey Stevens, a former colleague from Martin’s Globe days, says, “He is not part of the journalists’ fraternity-he’s a square peg. He really believes what he writes is the truth, and if that stirs up a little shit, then all the better.”

But even as an outsider, he’s well connected. Growing up in Hamilton, he studied political science at McMaster University and consorted with quite a crew. He recalls that Martin Short used to do imitations of him, Eugene Levy used to throw back beers with him, and Dave Thomas succeeded him as the editor of the university newspaper, The Silhouette. Even now, Martin attracts great contacts, seemingly through luck, but it takes an undeniable skill to make the sorts of connections that come so easily to him. He goes for lunch with Finance Minister Paul Martin. Before Shawinigate, he played golf with Jean Chrétien, despite unearthing some of the juicier anecdotes for the first volume of his Chrétien biography, Chrétien: The Will to Win. After doing more than 250 interviews for the best-selling book, Martin found some stories that Chrétien likely hoped would never catch up with him. One of these recounted an adolescent Chrétien feigning appendicitis, going as far as having a perfectly healthy appendix removed to avoid time at his much-detested boarding school.

For all Martin’s achievements as a journalist and status as an insider in Canadian politics, there remains the question of why CanWest failed to renew his contract as Southam’s national affairs columnist. If, as Davis told Martin, it had nothing to do with the quality of his work, then what was the thinking? Martin expresses frustration at one aspect of the way things were handled-none of the editors at the papers in which his columns appeared were contacted prior to his dismissal. Scott Anderson, editor of the Ottawa Citizen, says he had ongoing discussions with his bosses at Southam, but was never approached specifically in reference to this situation. “I thought very highly of Larry. He was obviously very thorough, very good at digging, he writes well and has a good sense of humour,” he says. Neil Reynolds, editor of Southam’s Vancouver Sun, also had no problems with Martin’s work. “He is an exceptionally wise (and often witty) analyst of people and events-one of the very best, if not the very best, in the country. With Lawrence, you always get a quality piece of work at the end of the day.”

Ostensibly, Martin was laid off because CanWest’s Southam wanted to take a new direction with the column, and the financial burden of keeping Martin on staff, at a salary of about $112,000 a year, was too onerous. In fairness, the monetary argument has to be given consideration. Martin surmises that the corporate course of thought went something like this: “To please our bosses who grant us our TV licence, let’s get rid of this idiot.” The double profit of saving Martin’s salary and silencing a squawking columnist turned out to be an unexpected cause celebre. But Martin, who usually pines for gossip, has been tightlipped about the issue. “A proprietor is a proprietor,” he says. “If you go to the trouble of owning something, you’re going to want to have your finger in the pie. I realize I have to have a mature attitude about this.”

But while Martin hasn’t gone public with his account of the circumstances surrounding his demise at Southam, other journalists have. Globe columnist Lysiane Gagnon bluntly claimed that Martin’s contract was not renewed because of the columns he had written about the Shawinigate issue. CanWest’s Davis addressed Gagnon’s article in a letter to the editor, dismissing her comment as “pure conjecture.”

Compelling conjecture, in the view of many. “He was doing good work, and no one else was fired at the time,” notes Stevens. “When you do layoffs, you do comprehensive layoffs, you don’t pick them off individually. When his three-year contract came up with the Aspers, the message was very clear. They were attacking their own staff for being anti-Chrétien.”

Since the transfer of ownership from Conrad Black to the Aspers, a certain paranoia has pervaded the country’s Southam-run newspaper offices. Some journalists claim their work has been stifled. A couple of writers have resigned. The fear is that the new owners are exerting the rights and privileges of ownership through editorial control. Competing media have wasted no time picking up the story. The Globe was quick to report, for example, that published versions of columns for Montreal’s The Gazette had been altered from the original versions. In early December, many reporters at The Gazette pulled their bylines and composed an open letter of protest to CanWest’s national editorial. In late February, some at the Regina Leader-Postfollowed suit, pulling their bylines after some arguable editing. Stephen Kimber and Stephanie Domet, both columnists for Halifax’s Southam-owned Daily News, resigned because of what they perceive to be CanWest’s censorship, and the ball of dissent is quickly gaining momentum. “People are generally more apprehensive about what they write,” said Globe columnist Jeffrey Simpson in November of last year. “The Aspers are tightening the belt.”

Even Martin himself will concede that things did change with the transfer of ownership. “I’m considerably to the left of Conrad Black and the Aspers are more centralist,” he says. “But I have had more trouble with them.”

Martin, who old friends describe as bright enough to be a brain surgeon but who instead opted for journalism, doesn’t let his apprehension obscure his judgement. After a long career of run-ins with athletes, politicians, editors, and even the law, backing down when it came to a run-in with his employers was inconceivable. And after a very public history of rabblerousing, redirecting his career, and re-emerging in surprisingly favourable positions, he seems to have done it again.

He recently signed a six-figure deal to write the second half of his Chrétien biography, and believes books are a concrete contribution that last longer than the short-lived stories that occupy newspaper pages. It’s a lonely endeavour, and he misses the lively banter of the newsroom, but not the “pack journalism” that he believes sways many writers to compromise their own ideologies by succumbing to peer pressure. He is also writing an intermittent column for the Globe and becoming a familiar figure on the speech and TV commentary circuit, usually focusing on the topic of journalistic perspective. As he says, “I try to be independent-I am not beholden to ideologies, political figures, or fashion of the times.”

It’s a bleary Wednesday morning in October, and I’ve just exited Highway 401 near Belleville, Ontario, in my rented 1998 Ford Contour. The car shudders, the brakes squeak, and the engine vibrates as I stop on a deserted rural route and wipe fog from the windshield. I look for a sign telling me which way to go. Suddenly, a midnight blue Infiniti Q45 swooshes through the fog. Its curvaceous body passes in a heartbeat, moving down the road and around a bend. It should be going where I’m headed, so I follow.

A few minutes later, I arrive at the small town of Shannonville and the Shannonville Motor Sport Park. Usually, the park’s racetrack is home to car and motorcycle racing, but today there’s no derelict Detroit metal to be seen. Instead, the park is packed with brand-new Mercedes, Audis, Jaguars, and just about every other new car for sale in Canada.

It’s also packed with the men and women who write about them. They’re here for TestFest, the biggest gathering of car writers in the country. Sponsored by the Automobile Journalists Association of Canada (AJAC) and in its 20th year, TestFest assembles virtually every automotive journalist in Canada over four days for a look at the following year’s crop of new vehicles.

Not long after I arrive, I hop up into the passenger seat of a beast of a machine, a white Dodge Ram. Sitting in the driver’s seat is Ted Laturnus, a stocky, middle-aged automotive journalist with a reputation for speaking his mind. He answers questions about automotive journalism, and then I ask him whether he thinks that the free trips car writers accept from car companies might influence their objectivity. He slams the steering wheel.

“All I can say to the people who think we shouldn’t be taking free trips is, ‘Go fuck yourself. Come back to me when you’ve grown up.’ They don’t know the side of reality to this business. I do. I’ve been in it for 20 years. I have no patience for that sorta thing. It’s the way the game is played.”

Not that long ago, the game of automotive journalism in Canada was decidedly minor league-one-page advertorials leading into the car classified ads. In 1987, Dennis Morgan, special sections editor of The Toronto Star, decided to increase the paper’s automotive coverage, and launched the Wheels section. The section grew to 20 pages in its first year, and became one of the paper’s top revenue-generating subsections. The Star‘s success prompted many imitators, including The Globe and Mail in 1998 and the National Post in 1999. Today, many small-town papers even have auto sections. It seems most newspapers have discovered what the Star found out 15 years ago: when it comes to advertising, those who make and sell cars have deep pockets.

Unfortunately, the newspapers’ pockets, by comparison, don’t seem very deep at all. The vast majority of auto writers in this country are freelancers, and they typically make between $200 and $400 per week, if they’re published regularly. They also have virtually nonexistent expense accounts.

Laurance Yap is a regular freelancer for the Star‘s Wheels section. He has to supplement his modest income from auto reporting by writing other types of articles and doing freelance computer consulting. “Automotive journalism doesn’t pay very well, but people do it because they love being around cars.”

At TestFest, it’s clear Jim Kenzie-the premier reviewer for Wheels-loves cars. “Now I’ll show you the difference between a BMW M3 and other cars,” he says as I hop in the passenger side of the neon green convertible. Once he checks the specifications and makes some adjustments to his seat and mirrors, we’re off to the racetrack. After receiving clearance, we merge out to the pebbled asphalt, and the fun begins. Kenzie revs the engine almost to redline before shifting, bringing a muted roar from the Beemer’s engine and gluing me to the green leather seat. He tromps on the gas: 100, 110, 120 klicks pass instantly. As Kenzie steers the car into a corner, he comments that its steering feels a bit light, before squealing around to the next straight stretch. As we go into the curves, he describes how to take corners on a racetrack like a race driver, making a straight line from the outer edge of the first curve to the inner edge of the second. After a lap, he glances over and tells me to let him know if I’m going to throw up. I do feel queasy, but also have a delightful sensation of speed and excitement pulsing through my body. I just grin, say I’m fine, and we’re off again. Toward the end of lap two, he expresses regret that he can’t spend the whole day on the track with the M3. As we take it back to the testing area, Kenzie says that everyone wants to do his job, “to fly off to Europe and test Porsches and Beemers. That’s until they have to come home and live on the salary.”

While newspapers may not be willing to spend much money on their automotive journalists, car manufacturers have no such reluctance, as is made especially clear with their lavish press trips. Top car reviewers such as Kenzie can receive anywhere from 30 to 40 invitations a year for new model launches around the world. With these invitations come airfare, accommodation, meals, and receptions, all paid for by car companies.

Like Ted Laturnus, the Post‘s automotive freelancer David Booth has no problem with the way the game is played. A 19-year veteran of automotive and motorcycle writing, he’s circled the globe for his craft, amassing an impressive roster of destinations. He’s stayed at some of the world’s finest hotels, including the Hotel du Cap on the French Riviera, usually associated with Europe’s jet set. And he’s done it all on the car companies’ dime. Booth knows the reason he’s treated so well is that car makers want positive coverage of new models. But it doesn’t bother him-he claims his objectivity can’t be affected by a few business-class plane tickets and a room at the new Hotel Savoy in Cannes.

As well as free trips, companies also hand out generous gifts on occasion. Mark Richardson, a Star editor who also writes a freelance motorcycle column for Wheels, was the recipient of one such present. In August of 1999, BMW flew Richardson to Calgary for a press event the likes of which he had never seen before. Upon arrival, he was wined and dined, put up in a four-star hotel, and given a special $2,600 motorcycle suit-a gift to the journalists for coming, so BMW said. “It was funny to see all the journalists’ eyes light up when they brought the suits out,” chuckles Richardson. He was unsure of the ethical problems that might arise from accepting such an expensive gift, but after he returned from the trip, the Star‘s ombudsman told him to keep the suit if he wanted. He used the suit and eventually featured it in a story. (In the article, he compared it to other suits, saying that it was excellent but prohibitively priced.) After writing the story, Richardson was called into the editor’s office and forced to give the suit back or risk termination. He gave it back.

David Booth went on the same trip, was given the same suit, and still has it. “Yeah, I kept mine. It doesn’t bother me. I never gave it a second thought. My price is way higher than a suit.”

That kind of thinking does trouble some journalists outside the field. Peter Desbarats, former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario and a specialist in media ethics, believes that by accepting free trips and gifts, auto journalists seriously compromise their integrity. “This obviously affects their ability to write critically about cars.” Desbarats compares auto journalism to the bad old days of newspaper reporting in the late 1950s, when some journalists sold out to industrial or political organizations. He views auto sections as an anomaly these days, and says readers shouldn’t expect objective coverage.

However, the editors of the large newspapers’ car sections insist their content is not affected by the automotive industry’s PR machine. Patricia Cancilla, the editor of the Post’s automotive section, Driver’s Edge, maintains no writers for her section have been swayed favourably by car companies, but also stresses that car reviewing is a highly subjective practice. She says her reporters must provide clear reasons for why they love (or hate) a particular vehicle. She also says the editorial and advertising sections at the National Post are completely removed from each other, and that advertiser complaints rarely get back to the reporters themselves.

Adam Gutteridge has been the editor of the Star‘s Wheels for just over a year. Like Cancilla, he says his writers are objective about the cars they review, and are never affected by the companies treating them well. “When I read our reviews, they are not characterized by hype, they are neutral and factual. If I felt someone had been influenced [by car companies] then they wouldn’t be working here.” Gutteridge mentions one example of a Wheels review that got the paper into trouble with an advertiser. In 1995, when Ford released its Contour/Mystique-a model heralded in auto journalism circles as a huge step forward for the company-Jim Kenzie criticized its suspension and gave it a less-than-enthusiastic review. This so upset Ford of Canada that the company pulled its ads from the section for three weeks. Nonetheless, the Wheels editor stood by the opinion of his reviewer. Gutteridge says that Wheels can deal with a temporary loss of revenue because it has established itself as an authority on automotive reporting in Canada and has a wide enough readership and ad base to emerge from such instances unscathed.

Alex Gillis, however, begs to differ about the Star‘s willingness to stand up to the car industry. In 1996, he took a job writing monthly columns and articles on car-related consumer issues for Wheels. He left two years later, largely because he was disgruntled with how much advertisers tried to quash or influence his opinion. He recalls one instance in August 1998 when he wrote a brief description of one of Canada’s first online car-sales websites, autodepot.ca, saying it was strange and disorganized. The company didn’t like his review and threatened to sue. When Gillis tried to write a more comprehensive piece on the site, his editor killed the story, saying it would be unwise to run it. The autodepot.ca site eventually went belly-up in July 1999, causing many customers to lose money. Gillis’s career as an auto journalist went belly-up too. He quit the Star in 1998. “If anyone ever tells you that car advertisers don’t influence content,” says Gillis, “they’re either lying through their teeth or they don’t know what they’re talking about.”

If there’s a problem-at least with the optics-in accepting free trips and gifts, there’s a similar problem with the way the writers get the cars they’re going to test. Most of the time, the reviewers test cars long before they become available to the public, which means they’re driving vehicles that are delivered to them by the manufacturers. So unlike, say, the world of restaurant reviews, in which a restaurant never knows when a reviewer may drop in and sample its fare, car manufacturers know exactly which vehicles will be evaluated, and they make them the best they can be. “The test vehicles can be much more carefully prepared and put together than the consumer ones might be,” says Globe and Mail reviewer Richard Russell. “In that sense, you get the very best.” But Russell says there’s no other way. “Unless you get someone who has $10 million who can afford to buy a new car every week, you have to test the ones provided by a manufacturer, not a dealer. And the company is going to make damn sure that all the bits are working properly.”

Contrary to what Russell and most auto journalists think, there is another way to write about cars without taking free trips or testing the special pre-production models. The Automotive Protection Agency, headquartered in Montreal, prides itself on offering objective coverage of cars to Canadian consumers through its annual publication, Lemon-Aid. It does this by not accepting freebies, renting new models instead of borrowing them, and always testing cars in comparison with others, rather than in the glitzy environment of new model launches. By doing this, claims APA president George Iny, it can offer coverage with a level of integrity not seen in the daily papers.

Iny sees many problems with the way the mainstream media approaches car journalism. One of the biggest is the lack of useful criticism. “In most car writing, it’s well known that you can criticize a cupholder but can’t criticize design or safety flaws.” He says that car writers are so dependent on manufacturers that if they are ever critical, they risk getting blacklisted from the launches and other events that are so crucial to the articles they write. Iny suggests that the big newspapers could remedy this problem by giving auto journalists a significant expense account-maybe $200,000-and allowing them to test cars independently. Until they do, he says newspaper car sections will continue as little more than entertainment, which isn’t good if consumers base their buying habits on what’s written in them.

Newspaper car reviewers do admit that their reviews are consistently upbeat, but they say it’s because most cars coming out these days are good. And while that may be true, it’s also true that some cars are better than others. One car that wasn’t so good was the 1995 Chrysler Neon, which suffered from serious reliability problems. Yet the Automotive Journalists Association of Canada collectively named it Car of the Year, which helped the car score impressive sales in Canada. Of course, newspaper car reviewers can’t always predict a car’s future reliability, especially when they often have only a week to drive it and are working under relatively tight deadlines. But it seems clear that when an automaker’s previous models are known to be unreliable, auto journalists should consider the company’s track record before offering strong recommendation. Yet while AJAC’s members are expected to evaluate acceleration, handling, and fit and finish, there is no space on their evaluation forms to factor in reliability of past models.

What results might be described as sins of omission. For example, in a recent review of the 2002 Kia Sedona minivan, David Booth of the Post wholeheartedly praised the vehicle, especially its engine. Booth wrote that “the Sedona is an impressive accomplishment, made even more so by the fact that it’s Kia’s first effort to break into the competitive minivan market.” What he didn’t say in his review, and what Lemon-Aid did, is that the vehicle’s reliability is unknown, and that previous Kia models have rated lower than average. Similarly, Malcolm Gunn, a reviewer whose articles are carried in smaller Canadian newspapers, wrote glowingly of Land Rover’s Freelander mini-SUV. “Based on this junior ute’s impressive amount of all-terrain features, combined with its significant comfort content, even Her Majesty and the rest of the Windsor clan should be content to thrash about their estates in this wee beast.” What he failed to mention is that the Freelander has a pitiable reliability record and was the subject of a large recall in Europe, where it’s been sold for four years.

The sun is casting long shadows over Shannonville. The racetrack is closed and cars are being detailed for tomorrow. Most of the journalists have gone for the day. No one I interviewed agrees that the field of automotive journalism has some basic flaws. One writer said that my article should focus on how objective car writing is.

There are still a few writers at the AJAC tent whom I didn’t get the chance to talk to earlier. One is Michael LaFave, a reporter for the Canadian car magazine World of Wheels. When I ask him for his thoughts on car writing, he’s surprisingly candid. “If car journalists are paid off by car companies, who’s going to care?”

I want to answer “the readers,” but I’m not sure he’d care. So I climb into my rented Contour and head out for the highway.

In the wake of September 11, commentary on the attacks dominated Canadian newspapers. The words varied, but much of the tone was the same. The Globe and Mail‘s Marcus Gee fulminated, “Many religious militants hate [America] because it represents a decadent Western culture that they see as a threat to traditional values.” Robert Fulford of the National Post raged, “Those who rule large populations through their version of religious doctrine and by killing their critics have excellent reasons for this loathing. America threatens every aspect of their existence, because America represents modernity in its most aggressive and developed form.”

And then, on the op-ed page of the September 19 Toronto Star, “It’s the U.S. Foreign Policy, Stupid” appeared: “Either out of ignorance or calculation, the theories on the motives for last week’s attacks avoid the most obvious….[I]t is due to American complicity in injustice, lethal and measurable, on several fronts….Not all the conflicts can be blamed on America but many can be and have been, especially in the last decade, only to draw indifference or, more scandalously, a barrage of propaganda blaming the victims themselves: that Muslim genes must account for all the savagery and suffering around them.”

It was vintage Haroon Siddiqui: forceful and unabashedly contrarian. After sketching his take on the issue, Siddiqui offered a suggestion: “America needs, beyond any tactical strikes or smart bombs it might deploy, a more humane and even-handed approach to the world.” It was a view sharply at odds with that of many of his fellow journalists.

Haroon Siddiqui is at odds with his fellow journalists in several other important ways. He is one of the few journalists in Canada in high-profile positions who are observant Muslims and visible minorities. He is also one of only a handful of print journalists who has been admitted to the Order of Canada while still in the newsroom-the Globe‘s Jeffrey Simpson and The Vancouver Sun‘s Max Wyman being among the few others. Most significant, though, is how Siddiqui regularly uses his twice-a-week space to offer cogent but dissenting positions on immigration, multiculturalism, and international issues.

One admirer, Carol Tator, an academic and co-author of The Colour of Democracy: Racism in Canadian Society, describes his work this way: “He says, I’ll give you some new lenses you can put on to help you see the world perhaps in a different way than you might have.” Fulford, on the other hand, charges that Siddiqui’s columns are laced with an anti-West bias. As he wrote in the June 2001 issue of Toronto Life, “Siddiqui makes the most strenuous effort to bathe Third World countries in a soft light. No matter how outrageous its actions, a non-Western government can usually count on him for a little understanding.” But Fulford’s view is atypical; it’s almost impossible to find anyone who doesn’t admire the 59-year-old Siddiqui as a person and a journalist, even at the notoriously fractious Star, where he has been for more than 20 years.

He joined the Star in 1978 as a copy editor and moved through the foreign affairs analyst, news editor, and national editor slots before serving as editorial page editor from 1990 to 1998. On his retirement from that position, the paper awarded Siddiqui the special designation of editorial page editor emeritus. With his new title came the task of consulting on the paper’s strategy and direction with publisher John Honderich, who says, “Haroon’s got a wonderful ability to take conventional wisdom and turn it on its head and ask, why do you think that?”

During his time at the Star, Siddiqui shared a National Newspaper Award for spot news reporting in 1983, and was shortlisted for an NNA in 1992 for editorial writing and in 1998 for column writing. But many of his honours come from outside the world of journalism: in addition to the Order of Canada, he was awarded the Order of Ontario in 2000, and is the recipient of numerous community awards, such as the Canadian Islamic Congress Award for Media Excellence and the Indo-Canada Chamber of Commerce Professional Man of the Year Award. Last fall he received an honorary degree from York University. The citation read, in part, “His columns are written out of extensive knowledge, regard for facts, acknowledgement of nuance, love of this country and a bedrock conviction of the essential respect necessary for each individual, respect assured by the laws of the land and their observance.”

Siddiqui was born in Hyderabad in south central India on June 1, 1942, the eldest of six children in a Sunni Muslim family. (He continues to practise his religion, but won’t discuss his faith, considering it a private matter. He also won’t discuss his wife, Yasmeen, whom he’s been married to since 1983, and his two teenaged sons, Faisal and Fahad. He says only, “I face the music for what I write. Why should they?”) His father, Mohammed Moosa, owned a construction company, while his mother, Amtul Baseer, who had a passion for poetry, ran the household. “If she wanted to admonish us, she would recite a couplet. And you were then left to translate it and interpret it. The language was mostly poetic, instruction was poetic.” Siddiqui’s childhood was marked by a “middle- to upper-class” life in a home he speaks of warmly today. “I am what I am because of the indulgence of my parents,” he says. “I often think, what did my parents give me and what did they do that was most beneficial? Extraordinary love and affection. Total sense of security. Absolute, 100 percent sense of who we are. I never had any sense of inferiority complex. I could go anywhere, I could walk into any room, I could knock on any door, meet anybody. I was not overawed by anybody. I think that is their greatest legacy.” They also, he says, instilled in him a “Protestant work ethic”-a somewhat odd characterization, given his roots-which taught him “Whatever you’re doing, you must work hard at it. If you have taken on the responsibility, you must fulfill it.”

Taught at home by tutors who schooled him in Arabic, Persian, English, math, and his native Urdu until he was 10 years old, he then attended a boys’ public school before enrolling at Osmania University in Hyderabad. There he flitted from one discipline to another, finally earning a bachelor of science. “One never really thought of what you wanted to do in life. And it was never expected that you decide what you were going to do. You were busy growing up. There were no expectations placed upon us.” It was while a student that he had his first experience with writing for something other than academic purposes, assisting his father by composing business letters. “I was his all-purpose boy. His secretary, in effect.” He considered a second degree in literature, but chose journalism instead, which he also studied at Osmania.

His reasons for this choice are hazy today. “It just seemed a neat profession that gave me a passport to see the world,” he says. He clearly recalls, though, advice his father offered when he chose journalism. “It will be very easy to be popular and very difficult to be respected. I hope it will be the latter for you.”

In 1963, after graduating, Siddiqui went to work for the Press Trust of India news agency in Bombay as a reporter and copy editor. Shortly after that, he had a casual but fateful encounter with Roland Michener, then Canada’s high commissioner to India, at a reception. “A young man like you should go to Canada,” Michener advised. “Why would anyone want to go to Canada?” responded Siddiqui. “It’s so bloody cold there, isn’t it?” Several months later, at another function in Bombay, Siddiqui ran into Michener again. “The old man remembered it, and he said, ‘Didn’t I tell you to go to Canada?'”

But it was not yet time for Siddiqui to leave. When his father suffered a heart attack, as the eldest son, it was his responsibility to head the family, an obligation he says there was a family expectation to fulfill, but which he met with no resistance. He quit his job at the news agency to look after the business, then after his father died in 1965, ran the company until 1967, when it was shut down.

It was at this time Siddiqui decided to emigrate. For India, it was a time of economic and intellectual turmoil. Fighting between India and Pakistan over Kashmir continued, and the first woman prime minister, Indira Gandhi, was trying to cope with food shortages and unemployment throughout the country. As a journalist, he wanted more freedom and opportunity. “You’re young, people are leaving, so you just go,” he says today. Desire for adventure, not desperation, was his motivation.

The 25-year-old Siddiqui considered England, Australia, and the United States, but perhaps Michener’s advice, or news from friends who had visited Canada and reported it was a good country, led to the “lucky accident” of his arriving in Toronto in October of 1967. He was the first in his family to leave India, “a pioneer.”

He arrived in Canada on a Saturday. Monday morning Siddiqui made his way to The Globe and Mail, where he was interviewed by then managing editor Clark Davey. Davey, who had got his own start in papers at his hometown Chatham News, was concerned that Siddiqui had no Canadian experience. He suggested he try the Brandon Sun in Manitoba, where Davey was acquainted with publisher Lewis Whitehead. Siddiqui’s response was a reprise of his earlier conversation with Roland Michener: “I asked Clark, why would anyone want to go to Brandon? Isn’t it colder in Brandon?” Unwilling to leave Toronto, Siddiqui ended up selling men’s suits at Simpsons.

He learned quickly that starting a life in Canada had challenges other than climate. In Toronto, there was no cricket, which he had played avidly in India. And all the shops were closed on Sunday-what did people do on Sunday? Food in India was a major part of the culture and family life, and Siddiqui pined for the flavours and customs of his homeland. But in the still WASP-dominated Toronto of the late 1960s, he recalls, “The only places to go were these lunch counters where they’d serve you pea soup and hot dogs.” He reports, though, that he faced no other adjustment issues as an immigrant in Toronto, making friends easily and never feeling out of place. In fact, he swears that he has never experienced any racism in his life personally, but says this doesn’t prove that racism doesn’t exist, only that he is lucky.

With time he grew used to the bad food, but selling suits was harder to adapt to, although he says, “It was fun for three reasons. It paid semi-decently, 90 bucks a week. I was good at selling. And you could get clothes for yourself. I got a leather coat, a suede coat, and a dozen suits.” After six months of unsuccessfully seeking work as a reporter, he decided to phone the Brandon Sun and was told to come out: there was a job for a general reporter open.

The first thing the news editor asked was if he knew what frontage foot was. “I said I have no idea, and he said you better find out because you’re covering city council as of Monday night. I said, I’ll go and find out what frontage foot is and cover city council if you promise never to send me to chase an ambulance or a police car. So the deal was struck.” He may not have been chasing police cars, but Siddiqui was still dissatisfied. The 17,000-circulation Sun served a community of 30,000, and like most dailies of moderate size, focused on local issues and events. “As a writer I found it very limiting. I was used to covering things like cricket as a young reporter. You’re travelling with the national team and you have a great hoopla and there are 50,000 people in the stadium. And there are great stars who are playing cricket who are your friends, and fans and girls. And then you go to a boring city council meeting Monday evening in Brandon, Manitoba. That was very tough,” he says.

Surprisingly, given how exotic a figure he was in the small town, he doesn’t recall any negative experiences, which he attributes to the kindness of the residents. “In small towns people are very friendly. There was some degree of curiosity. Where is India? Where is Hyderabad?” But there was no animosity.

Charles Gordon, managing editor at the Sun from 1969 to 1974, remembers Siddiqui as a brave and gutsy reporter who at times had to be reined in. “You wanted somebody who had that kind of courage,” Gordon says, remembering how Siddiqui suggested the paper stop covering the mayor because he had grown so exasperated with him. Andy Moir, today a Nova Scotia bed-and-breakfast owner and editor of the independent newspaper Passages, was a rookie reporter when he joined the paper in 1970. “I was a prairie boy who hadn’t seen much of the world at all. To meet a guy like Haroon Siddiqui who had theories and ideas was a real eyeopener for me,” he says. Siddiqui in turn describes his time at the paper as “a good education, a good learning experience.”

The Sun was the ideal place for Siddiqui to develop his contrarian streak. Although he continued to cover city council, soon after joining the paper Siddiqui also began reporting on provincial politics during what was an exciting time on the prairies. The 1969 Official Languages Act, giving French and English equal status federally, was widely loathed on the prairies. The Sun supported it editorially. A year later, when Pierre Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act in response to the kidnappings of Quebec cabinet minister Pierre Laporte and British diplomat James Cross by the FLQ, Manitobans generally supported the prime minister’s move. The Sun opposed it. “We were really hated then,” Siddiqui recalls matter-of-factly.

Also significant for Siddiqui was the provincial election in Manitoba in 1973. Two parties were headed by Jewish Canadians, the Liberals by Izzy Asper, now executive chairman of CanWest Global Communications, and the Progressive Conservatives by Sidney Spivak. “There was a lot of anti-Semitic murmur in the rural areas, and I was among the first to write against it.” This, he says, “left a mark on me.”

Siddiqui’s chance to make his mark on the Star came in 1978, when he was recruited by Martin Goodman, then the paper’s editor. He became foreign affairs analyst in 1979, then news editor in 1982, and, in 1985, national editor. Carol Goar, now editorial page editor, was national affairs columnist when he edited her section in the mid-’80s. “I remember him asking for unconventional stories. They were refreshing and they were just not standard political thinking,” she says. During this time, Siddiqui began to devote time to projects concerned with diversity, joining, for example, a group at the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association that studied the treatment of minorities in the media. This interest continues for Siddiqui-since 1990 he has sat on an Advertising Standards Canada committee that looks at the portrayal of minorities in ads.

Carol Tator, who has worked with Siddiqui on various panels and forums on diversity in the media, recalls her delight in 1990 when he took over as editorial page editor. “We wanted to light candles we were so happy. There was this collective sense of relief, almost, that finally we would have a voice and an ear that would hear the issues around minorities and racism. We knew that we had an ally on the inside,” she says.

Under Siddiqui, the Star became an opinion leader on many issues. With quiet pride, he says, “We were the first newspaper in Canada, if not the whole Western world, who called for the recognition of Macedonia as a separate state, despite huge opposition from Greek-Canadian readers. We were among the first, if not the first, to call for humanitarian international intervention in Bosnia. We were among the first to write for international intervention in Kosovo. We were among the first to call editorially for humanitarian intervention in Somalia. And all these things came about.”

Goar remembers Siddiqui’s bold leadership when she worked as an editorial writer under his direction for one year. “Haroon would sometimes be deliberately provocative, even to the point of defending points of view that he didn’t altogether believe, just to get a really vigorous debate going.”

In 1998 Siddiqui retired from the position and began writing his own twice-weekly column. After serving as editorial page editor for eight years he felt he had done a “tough and grinding” job for long enough. The idea to try out a column was jointly made by Honderich and Siddiqui. But the title of editorial page editor emeritus was Honderich’s call, Siddiqui says modestly.

His space soon became known as one devoted to unusual topics. “Siddiqui’s column is one of the only columns across Canada that deals with multiculturalism, immigration, and that gives voice to cultures that are nonwhite on a regular basis,” says John Miller, director of the newspaper program at Ryerson University’s journalism school. Siddiqui insists, though, that he hasn’t made multiculturalism his beat. “People have a desire to slot you as ‘guy who likes to write about minority issues,'” he says. “Other people say ‘guy who writes about small-l liberalism.’ Or ‘guy who writes about international issues.’ But I write about everything.”

It’s true that his subjects range from the frustration of dealing with Bell Canada’s automated customer service line to his favourite Indian author, R.K. Narayan. But more often than not, his column is devoted to immigration, racism, and Middle Eastern and South Asian politics. And since last year’s terrorist attacks, he has frequently focused on issues that sprang from the tragedy.

It’s these pieces that have left some fuming. Of “It’s the U.S. Foreign Policy, Stupid,” Marcus Gee, Globe and Mail world columnist, says, “Anti-Americanism of that kind I think is silly at any time, but at a time like that I just thought it was in terrible taste.” Margaret Wente, also a Globe columnist, agrees. She calls the “Stupid” column a classic example of blaming the victim for the crime. “He, of all people, should have been alert to the critical problems posed by Muslim fundamentalism, by failed Muslim states, and by the poisonous public discourse of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism that pervade much of the Arab world.” But his Starcolleague, Nathan Laurie, an editorial writer, defends the article: “When someone named Haroon Siddiqui says it, it seems to carry a different message. Many people read it as America got what it deserved. I don’t think he said that at all. He said, how did we get here? But if your name is Haroon Siddiqui, you’re defending all Muslims, be they terrorists or not.”

Earlier last year also found Siddiqui offering a different take on another high-profile event involving Islam. Much of the Western world was outraged when a young Nigerian woman was sentenced to 100 lashes for committing acts of adultery she said were forced upon her. “The case…tells us as much about ourselves as about the perpetrators of that punishment,” wrote Siddiqui. “They are doing it in the name of Islam. We are reporting, commenting and agonizing over it in the name of humanity. The motives of both sides are suspect….Aren’t these the same editorialists, commentators and human rights activists who have been mute on the ongoing killings of the Palestinians? And the Chechens? And the Kashmiris? And the more than 1 million Iraqi civilians who have died a slow death under the decade-long, Canadian-backed economic sanctions?….They are all entitled to their view, spoken or assumed, that Muslim blood is cheap. But they shouldn’t be surprised that their sympathy for a Muslim teen in a faraway land is seen as hollow, even hypocritical….We must help her, of course. But our plea for her most basic human rights would have carried greater weight if we were more consistent, less arrogant and a lot more understanding of all our fellow human beings.”

In typical Siddiqui style, he asked readers, have you thought of it this way? Response was vigorous and mixed. One reader wrote, “His view stands alone in the Star as the most objective and informed that has thus far been published.” But another reader called Siddiqui’s perspective “a very simple-minded view of the world or an intentional attempt to provide a personal perspective.”

Mixed reactions are common to Siddiqui’s columns. Robert Fulford pins the blame on what he calls Siddiqui’s Third Worldism. “Whatever goes wrong, the West is at fault. If government in Africa doesn’t work, it’s the legacy of colonialism. If people starve in Indonesia, if forests burn in Brazil, if Iraqi children die for lack of medicine, it’s all because the policies of the West are callous, insensitive or selfish,” Fulford said in last June’s Toronto Life. Referring to a Siddiqui column that appeared in March 2001, Fulford wrote, “He found a way to look with a degree of tolerance even on the Taliban’s destruction of ancient Buddhist sculptures in Afghanistan.” Siddiqui calls Fulford’s response rubbish. “I have never defended the Taliban. In fact, I was the first one to criticize them. I called them obscurantist. I called them evil. Right from day one, before anyone knew about the Taliban.” He says the true meaning of his column can be summed up in one sentence from the text: “We would have had greater credibility in trying to save Afghanistan’s historic treasures had we been more helpful in saving its human beings.” He also defends his larger record: “I’ve been a strong critic of many Third World countries. Of autocratic Arab states. Monarchical Muslim nations. Jingoistic India. Narrow, fundamentalist Pakistan. What happens is that people will take only what they want, a little slice, and keep hammering at it.”

But Siddiqui has his fans too. Many minority groups value his perspectives, inviting him to speak at their functions, and writing warm letters to the editor in response to his work. “I, for one, am extremely grateful and appreciative of the fact that there is a voice like that of Haroon Siddiqui who writes a lot of what I feel and go through,” says Jehad Aliweiwi, executive director of the Canadian Arab Federation. On the other hand, Lisa Armony, director of communications for the Ontario region of the Canadian Jewish Congress, says that while her organization appreciates that Siddiqui has encouraged understanding and tolerance, the congress feels at times he exhibits no understanding for Israel’s ordeals. In response, he says, “I don’t write to please various lobbies. I’m not failing to recognize the right of Israel to exist. But at the same time I’m free, like any editor or writer or columnist, to be critical of this or that policy of the government. In the same way that I’m very critical of the government of Pakistan, very critical of the Sri Lankan government, very critical of Milosevic, and Serbia, on and on. The list is endless.”

Of his at times dissenting views in general, Siddiqui says it’s not about being critical or deliberately provoking people. It’s about moving people forward. “You try to lead public opinion. If you lead public opinion, you generally try to be ahead of the curve,” he says. “When you are the first in line to say something, you face the wrath of a lot of people.”

Fulford also criticizes Siddiqui’s position as a journalist because of his frequent speeches and involvement with boards and committees. “He’s a figure. He’s a statesman. And this is terribly crippling for a journalist. Whatever he does is a significant statement of something or other. There’s a spotlight on him that isn’t on other people, because he’s spent so much time on this one set of issues.” Siddiqui vehemently disagrees, saying, “I do not represent anybody. I represent myself and my ideas.”

It is this very quality that Fulford criticizes that many praise. John Fraser, master of Massey College at the University of Toronto and National Post arts columnist, believes Siddiqui is one of the most useful journalists in Canada, despite his often disagreeing with Siddiqui’s point of view. “He doesn’t speak with the same voice that the majority media voice is,” says Fraser. “He doesn’t write from the perspective of the old generation of Canadian journalists.”

Star columnist Ian Urquhart agrees: “He performs an important role in journalism in the city because he has links to groups that most journalists don’t even talk to. And he’s willing to take contrary positions on issues both national and international. Without him there would be a vacuum, a void.”

Goar points out another void Siddiqui has vigorously addressed: improving the Star‘s diversity coverage, both in the pages of the paper and in the newsroom. “We try very hard to promote diversity at the Star, in principal, as a concept. For Haroon it was never a concept. These were people he knew,” she says. Honderich credits him with creating “an awareness at a very senior level that we should do much more. He’s been a major force for change and that’s something which I value.”

While Siddiqui may be a force for change at the Star, he’s less certain about how he wants to alter the world. When asked what is the one thing he would make different, he hesitates. Finally, he says, “I want more civility in discussion and debate. I want people not to get personal. People are always looking for motives. Ideas should be weighed for what they’re worth. I present an idea and people should say this is a crappy idea. Here are 10 reasons why this is a crappy idea. They don’t say that. They say, oh, it’s because you’re brown or you came from India or you’re a Muslim. What difference does it make?”

The world is changing, Siddiqui says, especially Canada. And through his columns, his connections with minority groups, his trademark siding with the underdog, Siddiqui is reflecting this. “We have such a simplistic narrative about them and us. Them being there and us being here. But I’ve long made the argument that the ‘them’ are us. The ‘them’ are here. Who are ‘them’? ‘Them’ may be the folks in Rwanda. But the ‘them’ from Rwanda who have migrated to Canada and are my next door neighbours, they are us. It’s a new kind of narrative, you see, and it’s difficult to grasp. I don’t have all the answers. But at least I want to ask the questions.”

Inside the Corriere Canadese‘s Toronto boardroom, co-editor Antonio Nicaso strokes an invisible hair between his hands with exaggerated concentration, waiting for the latest bout of laughter to subside, and for the eight editors present to refocus. The impeccably dressed 37-year-old, who wears a suit to work every day and speaks in a soft, contemplative voice, seems more like a banker than a Mafia fighter, even though he has written 10 books about organized crime. His work has garnered several awards, including one from the RCMP, which hangs on his cubicle wall.

At this meeting, he sits at the head of a long oak table. Everyone is speaking Italian, and every comment ends with a punch line. Most here are young, and a few are relatively new arrivals from Italy; the Corriereprides itself on its strong ties to the homeland and its editorial staff of 15 reflects that.

On this particular day in November 2001, the discussion begins with a story planned for the front page that fits perfectly into the daily’s pro-papal sentiment: This morning, Ontario’s minister of municipal affairs and housing, Chris Hodgson, is presenting a cheque of $1,375,000 to fund the Pope’s 2002 visit to Toronto.

“Anything else?” Nicaso asks.

“Terrorism,” says reporter Pierpaolo Bozzano, a real newcomer who arrived from Italy only a month earlier. He’s been following the story of Amid Farid Rizk, the Canadian of Egyptian origin found in a ship container in the port city of Gioia Tauro, Italy. The Corriere was the first to report the story in North America after learning of it via an Italian newswire. The paper has broken many stories that later make it to the rest of the North American press through these wire services.

“Amid, my friend,” says Bozzano, smiling, “was released from custody because there was no proof against him. In regard to Hussein,” he goes on, referring to Liban Hussein, the Ottawa businessman who turned himself in when he saw his name on the U.S. Treasury list of people suspected of financing terrorism, “the judge said there wasn’t a single motive to hold him in custody, either.” Bozzano plans to write about how police are arresting people without warrants.

“Let’s not forget,” Nicaso begins reproachfully, “that this is in the context of a terrorist act. When one is found travelling in a container with-.” Nicaso is cut off by Bozzano, who, unfazed, replies, “He was a businessman who had a cell phone and-.” Bozzano is now cut off by the interjecting voices of his colleagues, who agree with Nicaso. Later, defending his point of view, Bozzano says, “My fear with terrorism in Italy is that he was the first to be arrested with the new law allowing police to arrest people with the suspicion of terrorism. It leaves a lot of power to the police. What I wanted to say was that in my opinion we shouldn’t have only written the news but to have taken a position, to say that it’s risky.” There is little room in the 16-page paper for editorials, but Bozzano says his sentiment is behind all of his news articles on terrorism.

Although its editorial meetings include sometimes-passionate debates, the Corriere rarely provides analysis of the news it reports. Staff writer Irene Zerbini, 33, who has been in Canada for four years, says what theCorriere lacks most is the space to cover stories with more than one source or from various angles. “Most people get news from the radio but they need someone who has the courage to make an opinion.” Elena Caprile, the Corriere‘s editor-in-chief, has been at the paper since 1972, when she started as managing editor. She says that as the only daily in Canada printed in the Italian language, the “fiercely Canadian, proudly Italian” paper’s mandate is to convey world events in Italian. Caprile says that opinions matter but not as much as covering the news. “We have to be very careful,” she adds, “because we can really influence the people.” Yet the Corriere, when it feels the need, can serve up biting commentary and firebrand criticism. After Mel Lastman shook the hand of a Hells Angel in January, Zerbini wrote that the Toronto mayor, who claimed to be oblivious of the Hells Angels’ murderous track record, ought to pick up a newspaper every once in a while. In a special “Comment” column on January 14, 2002, Nicaso stated: “The mayor’s comment (‘They seemed to me a good group of kids’) turned my stomach and I thought of the innocent victims, and our colleague [Michel Auger] whom they shot five times and the apathy of those who pretend nothing’s wrong if the problem doesn’t affect them.”

But these moments of anger-induced reflection are rare. Sadly undermining its own potential, the Corriereoffers its audience predictable content: a daily sports section, a weekly feature on the Catholic church, and events of regional clubs in the Italian community. Its news briefs, covering world events with a strong focus on Canadian politics and Italian news, are an invaluable service to its older, Italian-speaking audience. But in not providing much else, it misses the opportunity to genuinely reflect-and provoke-its audience. Some even say the 47-year-old Corriere, with a circulation of 27,300, in sticking with a stale agenda, has lost sight of how best to serve an evolving audience whose sense of identity and interests have changed profoundly since the 1950s.

There’s no question that in the beginning, the Corriere Canadese understood its audience and served it well. In 1953, Montreal-born Dan Iannuzzi, 20, came to Toronto and met with Arturo Scotti, a former editor of one of Iannuzzi’s father’s Italian-language papers, La Verita (The Truth), published out of Montreal. Scotti told Iannuzzi he should start up the first post-Second World War Italian newspaper in Toronto, where the Italian immigrant population was steadily growing. Between 1946 and 1963, more than 315,000 Italians arrived in Canada and settled as permanent immigrants, joining the 110,000 plus who had immigrated in waves between the First and Second World Wars. Most settled in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver, or in smaller cities with established Italian communities, like Sault Ste. Marie and Windsor. By the ’60s, most had permanently settled in Toronto, in the College Street area. As that area became congested, Italians migrated to St. Clair Avenue West between Dufferin Street and Lansdowne Avenue. In the ’70s, these Italians were enticed to bigger homes in the suburbs, status symbols earned through backbreaking labour in blue-collar jobs. By this time, Italians had the highest rate of home ownership in Canada.

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

Early in the morning of September 11, 2001, the phone rang in Stan Honda’s 94th Street apartment on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. On the line was the French wire service, Agence France-Presse, telling him a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center. Instantly, the 43-year-old photojournalist picked up his camera, rushed to a southbound subway and, minutes later, started taking pictures that in the days and weeks to come would haunt the world.

You may remember them. One shows a typical New York City businessman in a grey suit covered in soot. He’s trudging through the debris of the towers, almost like a refugee in a war zone, with briefcase still in hand. This photo ran on the cover of Fortune. Then there’s the picture of the New York police officer burying his head in his arms as he slumps over a soot-covered car. It appeared in The Globe and Mail on September 12. Another Honda picture shows an African-American woman taking refuge in an office building. She’s gazing with shock into the camera and her hair and face are covered in white ash. You may remember this photo, too, which also appeared in the Globe. If you do, you’ll likely never forget it.

Honda, a freelancer since 1995, hasn’t tired of talking about his memorable shots. Since the attacks he’s been interviewed by such newspapers as the National Post and The Dallas Morning News and by the TV show Inside Edition. He’s also been asked to speak to students at Columbia University in New York. “I think what we’re seeing is that in an era of 24-hour news channels like CNN, the still image is the most reliable source of information,” he says. “When you see something on TV you’re aware that TV is mostly an entertainment and news media. But by printing an image, people can stare at it and realize that September 11 wasn’t a movie.”

When historians 50 years from now look back on September 11, Honda’s pictures could quite easily turn out to be among the shots chosen to best explain what happened on that dreadful day. Editors at publications around the world-including the Los Angeles Times-realized that Honda’s stark, simply composed close-up shots could help their readers understand the pain and shock caused by a vicious act of terrorism. And so when readers looked at Honda’s photographs, they could stare at the expression on the African-American woman’s face and feel her fear. Or, as they looked at the man in the grey suit, their eyes would likely have focused on that briefcase. Why, they might have asked, would a man fleeing disaster even care about his briefcase?

Both these photographs represent the power and purpose of photojournalism. They add to our knowledge of the effects of a terrible event in a way that the printed word cannot convey. So in a season in which the world mourned the deaths of thousands of innocent lives, you have to forgive photojournalists who, amid the tears, including many of their own, have also let out a few cheers of celebration as the world rediscovered the importance of their craft. In the October 2001 issue of the online magazine Digital Journalist, for instance, the editor and publisher, Dick Halstead, wrote that “Since the late eighties, we have watched-appalled-as American media moved away from hard news and investigative journalism to entertainment and life-style issues. At the top, the big newsmagazines, the life-blood of photojournalism, decided that the public no longer cared about any substantive information coming from the rest of the world….In one day-September 11, 2001-photojournalism was, in a sense, reborn. The horrendous act committed on that day accomplished what none of the dedicated and loyal photographers had been able to during the past decade. A period filled with fighting, not only for the rights to own their pictures, but the very survival of their craft.”

Halstead’s point, although meant for American readers, has universal truth. Photojournalism only gets the respect it deserves when major tragedies occur. The irony about this tragedy is that as the World Trade Center towers fell on September 11, so did North America’s already slumping economy. And in the tougher financial environment that followed, the very same Canadian publications that had decided photojournalism could help them fight a newspaper war suddenly had to make do with fewer pictures.

“When the National Post came on there was a real renaissance in photojournalism,” says Hans Deryk, former photo director at The Toronto Star. “It was the flavour of the month again. But now everyone who works in the industry is a little concerned”-and perhaps wondering just how long this renewed interest in photojournalism can possibly last.

When National Post photo editor Denis Paquin was recruited to help launch the paper in 1998, he wondered why so many Canadian dailies simply ran typical head shots of, say, politicians or businessmen beside big news stories. “This country needed shaking up,” says Paquin as he leans back in his chair and rests his black cowboy boots on his desk. “The problem with this country is there’s an amazing amount of talent, but people who put the papers together have this idea that papers have to look the way they did 50 years ago-that photographers need to shoot pictures of people smiling into a camera.”

Paquin has earned the right to sound arrogant. Even photo editors at The Globe and Mail and Toronto Starcredit the Post with revolutionizing photojournalism in Canada. In a very short period, the paper developed a reputation for using pictures in a creative way. Instead of slavishly illustrating news stories, photographs at the Post were often thought-provoking, creatively composed, boldly displayed. For example, when Israel attacked Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat’s home in December, the Post ran a huge shot of a soldier driving a tank through Ramallah. The photographer zoomed in so closely on the soldier’s face readers could see he was clenching his teeth and getting ready to kill anything that got in his way. The image vividly displayed the intensity of the hate that’s tormenting the Middle East. “When there’s a good image,” Paquin says, “people are going to study that image and learn as much from it as they probably will from the text.”

It’s hardly surprising that the Post has a photo editor who speaks so passionately about his craft. After all, Paquin was hired by two men who had come from publications with strong visual reputations: Kenneth Whyte, a former editor of Saturday Night, and Martin Newland, a former senior editor of the London Daily Telegraph, both of whom interviewed Paquin in May 1998, when he was the photo editor for the Tokyo-based Asia bureau of the Associated Press. Whyte and Newland spoke about their vision of a picture-heavy newspaper modelled after publications such as The Independent in London, England. Paquin explained that to achieve that goal, editors must recognize that photographers had untapped expertise in coming up with visual ideas. “That’s what was different here at the Post,” says Paquin. “It was photo people who chose the images that go in the newspaper-and not a copy editor or political editor.”

On the morning of November 27, 2001, National Post subscribers awoke to this front-page image: two American soldiers in Afghanistan looking eerily into the dark grey sky while kneeling by a bunker located close to the site of a bloody prison riot between Northern Alliance and Taliban fighters. The article that ran below the picture, taken by a photographer from Getty Images, said U.S. troops had finally landed in Afghanistan. The picture, though, provided something the story could not: because the photographer crept up close to the subjects, readers could see the fear on the faces of these two young soldiers. It was a photograph that followed in the tradition of legendary war photojournalist Robert Capa, who once said: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

When Picture Post published Capa’s shots from the Spanish Civil War in 1938, the photography magazine called him “the greatest war photographer in the world.” It was a title earned not just because Capa risked his life to get photos (his most famous picture shows a Spanish loyalist being gunned down just metres away from the camera), but also because he so successfully captured what photographers call “the decisive moment”-the image or facial expression that best reflects the emotion of the time, whether it be violence, joy, or horror.

Capa, however, wasn’t the only celebrated photographer of that era, a period often referred to as the golden age of photojournalism because of the popularity of such picture-laden magazines as Life, Look, andCollier‘s. All these publications filled a need: they showed the rest of the world to their readers in a time before television and satellite transmission. Back then, World War II was the big story and the hunger to see what was happening at, say, the frontlines was huge.

Life was founded in 1936 and it set the standard for photojournalism in the U.S. Among those published regularly: Capa, George Rodger (best known for documenting Africa during World War II), and W. Eugene Smith (who covered the war from eastern Asia). By the early 50’s, 5.2 million issues of Life were being sold weekly. Then came TV, which could show even more of the world and do so more excitingly. Over time, it would steal both audiences and advertisers from the glossies. By 1956, Collier‘s had gone. In the early ’70s, both Look and the original Life folded.

In Canada, magazines such as Star Weekly (1910 to 1973), Maclean’s, The Canadian (1965 to 1979) andWeekend (1951 to 1979) would often publish photojournalism. None of their photographers, however, made big names for themselves, though a few Canadians, such as Sam Tata (best known for shooting Mao’s China) and Richard Harrington (who documented Inuit life) developed followings.

“Canada has never had a photography culture,” says Larry Towell, the first and only Canadian member of the internationally renowned photo agency, Magnum. Although Towell resides near Bothwell, Ontario, and had a September 11 photo essay published in the Globe (he was in New York attending a Magnum meeting that day), most of his work is sold to European magazines, such as the German publication Stern. “In Europe, there’s a whole history of telling stories through pictures. Here we’ve never had that.” Readers of Canadian Geographic, Toronto Life, the now-dead Saturday Night, and Equinox-magazines that have published photo essays-may disagree, but Towell is really talking about a lack of money to foster a great tradition. Canadian magazines have far smaller budgets than their American counterparts so it’s cheaper for them to fulfill most of their photographic needs in the studio. “A photographer is paid by day, while a writer is paid by word,” says Margaret Williamson, photo editor of Canadian Geographic. “But since photography has to be done on the spot it could take 10 days to complete an assignment. The time factor can make it expensive.”

When asked how he’d like to see photojournalism evolve in Canada, Denis Paquin says he hopes more newspapers will follow the Post‘s policies on choosing visuals. “You have to believe in the people you put in place in your photo department and that’s been the difference here,” he says. “We don’t win every battle. There are days when it wasn’t my decision to go on the front page. But at least we have a voice.”

The Post, however, isn’t the only Canadian publication dedicated to improving photojournalism. Since 1998, there have been visual shake-ups at both The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Star. “Certainly the newspaper war has led me to have a greater appreciation of photojournalism and creative shots,” says Starpublisher John Honderich. “It has been a critical part of the newspaper war and I think it has sharpened all our edges.”

That sharpening began in summer 1998 when the Globe published colour photography for the first time. When Erin Elder, then a 30-year-old photographer from Aurora, Ontario, was hired in August 1998, theGlobe‘s photo department consisted of six members, including the former photo editor and an art director. Today, Elder is the photo editor, in charge of four staff photographers, four assistant photo editors who oversee different sections, and a separate photo production department that scans materials and corrects images’ tones and colours. And while Elder says she doesn’t know if the rumour that the Globe made the changes to prepare for competition with the Post is true, she admits the paper was in need of a change. “When I was hired, the reputation for the Globe was that it was a great grey lady,” she says. “But the world was becoming more of a visual place.”

With two national newspapers putting a heavy emphasis on pictures, other publications followed. Neil Reynolds was hired as editor of The Vancouver Sun in April 2000 with a mandate to improve visuals, as was Anthony Wilson-Smith at Maclean’s in April 2001. But it’s The Toronto Star that had the greatest photojournalistic overhaul.

Around the time the Star hired Post photographer Hans Deryk as its photo director in summer 1999, a U.S. design specialist named Bill Ostendorf had already been retained to analyze the paper. “He didn’t pull any punches,” says Honderich. “He had a lot of critical things to say about our use of photos, size, cropping, and selection. His visit had a real impact, and it led to a series of decisions and perhaps a rethink of our use of photos.”

At Ostendorf’s seminars, according to what Deryk was told, “He held the Post up as a parameter and said, ‘Hey, look at what they’re doing. This is what you should be doing.'” During Deryk’s two and a half years on the job (he demoted himself to a regular photographer in February), he says he worked to get a paper that traditionally used pictures of people smiling into cameras to practise photojournalism. “I’d much rather have pictures where the subject is doing something,” he says.

As proof of the Star‘s new emphasis, he starts talking about a photo essay that will cover two and a half pages of the tiny Greater Toronto section. It’s a slice-of-life journalism piece done simply to glorify an 88-year-old hunchbacked woman who’s a neighbourhood legend. And the main photo running over the centre spread will cover seven of eight columns. As Deryk holds the proof pages, he calls it one of the biggest photos and nicest layouts he’s used since joining the Star. “I think there’s much more acceptance of visuals today than there was a while ago,” he says. “Two years ago, it was a pretty tough sell, getting a six-column picture in a paper, whereas now big pictures mean big visual impact.” But even though photographers and photo editors have recently earned more recognition, says Deryk, they’re still the underdogs when fighting with section editors for space that’s traditionally used for text. “We’re always battling for the same territory,” he explains. “Times have changed since three years ago, when the Post came on board. Everybody’s news hole is getting smaller and smaller and traditionally the first thing that goes is space for pictures.”

While September 11 reminded the world of the importance of photojournalism, September 17 reminded Canadian photojournalists of the craft’s vulnerability to a lack of advertising. On that day, the Post axed 120 employees to compensate for some of the $170 million it had reportedly lost since 1998. The photo department was slimmed from five photographers and seven editors working under Paquin to four and five, respectively. In addition, some of the paper’s visual showcases were cut. Gone were the Toronto, Avenue, Arts and Life, Weekend Post, and Review sections. Although Arts and Life and Review returned on December 6, some of the photographers’ lifeblood hasn’t. Particularly missed are Avenue, a two-page miscellaneous section that could be used for photo essays, and Saturday Night.

When Paquin is asked how the reductions in space will affect his paper, he denies they’ll have much of an impact on photojournalism. Photographers can still strive for journalistic shots, even if the pictures have to run smaller.

The Post‘s cuts, however, are just an example of a nationwide problem. A study based on information from 91 of the Canadian Newspaper Association’s 103 members found that the number of pages newspapers printed in 2001 was down 5.1 percent from 2000. The reduction was blamed on an ad-sales slump that dipped deepest in September. “Both words and photos are feeling a little pinch with the space available,” says Elder.

That pinch is making it harder for freelance photojournalists, who already struggle to make a living in such a small-market country. The opportunities for photojournalists here are so limited that when students at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary ask instructor Frank Shufletoski about their employment prospects, he answers frankly: “I’m going to tell you the truth and it hurts,” he says. “There are no jobs out there.”

Twenty-eight-year-old freelance photographer Donald Weber can relate to the poor job market. The recent photojournalism graduate from Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, wakes up each day hoping he’ll get a call from one of his clients, which have included the Globe and The Toronto Sun. “You have to be lucky to be one of a number of people a newspaper uses.” In the aftermath of September 11, Weber said, “It all depends on what’s going on in the market. Right now it’s not good.”

If Weber’s handed an assignment and lands a black and white picture inside the Globe, he’ll earn $200. A front-page shot earns $750. (the Star, with 20 staff photographers, rarely hires freelancers.) But Weber may only land an assignment three times a week, which prompts a big question: Why would anyone want a career in photojournalism anyway?

Larry Towell didn’t plan to work in photography. Photography, he says, “discovered me” when he became an activist interested in human rights issues. In the early ’80s he travelled to Nicaragua with a Christian human rights delegation, armed only with a camera, tape recorder, and a hope of drawing the world’s attention to a nasty war in which a guerrilla army was massacring rural civilians. “I realized that when you meet someone whose legs have been blown off by a land mine, you don’t want to be an artist,” Towell says. “You want to tell people’s stories straightforward.” Now, in his late 40s, he’s documented everything from the crisis in the Middle East to family life on his farm. Since being invited to join Magnum in 1988 he has won 26 international or Canadian photography awards. He is proof that Canadian photographers can make it big if they have an immense passion for their craft and the subjects they explore. But to do that in the absence of a huge photojournalism market, he recommends photographers work with publishers to create their own books. “In photography now, not just in Canada but internationally, there are so many photographers that if someone throws a brick out a window, there’s going to be six people at the bottom with a camera. You have to be very good. You have to develop your voice.” He sees more Canadian photographers doing that, pointing out Ethan Eisenberg, who spent two years documenting the Gaza Strip after the 1993 Israel-Palestine Liberation Organization peace accord. The rise of Toronto-based photo organizations such as Contrast and PhotoSensitive has also helped. Both groups employ documentary photographers and find places to expose their work. “I see a photographic culture developing,” says Towell.

Early in January, Stan Honda got another morning phone call, only this time the voice on the other end didn’t ask him to cover a breaking story. Rather, he was asked to give a talk about the state of photojournalism. In the weeks following the terrorist attacks in New York and elsewhere, he was excited to see publications, for once, realize the importance of photojournalism and choose to run pictures that capture a subject’s emotion rather than typical press-conference shots. But now, as the public’s interest in the war on terrorism fades, he sees newspapers resorting to old tendencies. “Here in New York we take a lot of pictures of people shaking hands. Those pictures are taking the place of something that could be more meaningful. No one’s pushing for the journalistic shots that photographers, editors, and advocates want to do anymore.”

Honda, in fact, would not recommend freelancing to budding photojournalists because they would have to compete for assignments from a limited number of publications, even in New York. Fortunately, photojournalism’s fading fortunes haven’t meant less work for him. He has enough experience to collect work frequently from Agence France-Presse and some of his other clients, which include the Post and the Globe. He’s also banking on the fame his pictures have brought him. On April 6 he’ll speak to members of the Asian American Journalists Association at a meeting in New York.

He’s also been asked to talk about his shots at an AAJA convention in Dallas and at a separate conference in San Diego this summer. His images aren’t fading from memory. Great photographs have staying power-even if photojournalism’s popularity doesn’t.

On an overcast Friday morning last April, Toronto Sun readers discovered something curious on page three of their newspaper-news. Gone was the scantily clad Sunshine Girl, a fixture of the tabloid since it was founded over 30 years ago. Instead, dominating page three that day was an earnest feature report examining a disturbing pattern of disappearing elderly citizens in Huntsville, a quiet cottage community north of Toronto. While “4 Seniors Vanish Up North” was not likely to brighten up the average reader’s morning, to incoming publisher Les Pyette it represented a new bid by Canada’s largest English-language tabloid to regain what he candidly describes as credibility.

Pyette, a 28-year veteran of Sun Media, was pronounced publisher at the chain’s Toronto flagship paper on April 27, 2001, the same day the Sunshine Girl was relegated to the second-last page. He was wasting no time in making some fundamental changes at the tab. Pyette felt that the Sun‘s response to the newspaper war-ignited by the 1998 arrival of the National Post-had been misguided. In a bid to rev up circulation, Pyette says previous regimes chose to “add more sex-bigger boobs and bigger pecs and all that sort of stuff. That’s not the way to grow a newspaper in the new millennium.”

At present, the 56-year-old Pyette is convinced he has the right formula to boost circulation, and thinks theSun may ultimately have a shot at drawing even with its longtime nemesis, The Toronto Star. It’s an audacious goal, given that the Sun has lost 128,000 readers, or 16 percent of its total circulation, since 1997. What’s more, in the latest Audit Bureau of Circulations figures, released in early January 2002, the Sun‘s weekday circulation had fallen by 10,500 copies to 223,426, or 4.5 percent since last year. The weekend numbers were even less encouraging, with sales of the Sun‘s Saturday edition down 5.5 percent and its Sunday paper down three percent.

In the midst of this downward spiral, Pyette has set out to transform the traditionally blue-collar Toronto Suninto a more white-collar, female-friendly, and suburbanized product. His hope is that this strategy will succeed in winning back old readers and gaining new converts.

While such an overhaul would prove to be a formidable achievement for the new Sun management, attempting to grow the paper during a severe advertising drought is a considerable challenge, especially in light of the fresh demands on the Sun for revenue and profit growth from its new owners, Montreal-based Quebecor Media Inc. As early as the first quarter of 2001, revenue at parent company Sun Media had dropped by 0.6 percent-or $1.2 million-while newsprint costs jumped $5 million from the previous year.

Doing battle with Canada’s biggest daily is also a brave ambition, considering the Star‘s three-to-one advantage over the Sun in editorial staff. In addition, Pyette is presiding over a newsroom that is still shell-shocked from two debilitating rounds of layoffs over the last year. “It’s like being at a funeral,” says one formerSun writer. “People go in, punch their time card, do their job, leave, and pray tomorrow that they’ll have a job. It’s the most negative work environment I’ve ever seen.”

Furthermore, in pursuing new readers, the Sun risks alienating its existing readership and undermining its natural monopoly in Toronto’s media theatre. Nevertheless, given the sharp decline in the paper’s fortunes, Pyette feels he must take radical steps. “I think that you have to grow up,” he says. “I came in here to turn the paper around; to get it readable, saleable again.”

But a 30-year-old reputation can be pretty hard to shake. As the proverbial phoenix that rose from the ashes of the venerable Telegram on November 1, 1971, The Toronto Sun has long been both celebrated and maligned for its feisty, irreverent, in-your-face approach to covering Toronto. The Sun‘s proven formula coupled neoconservative editorials with a strong focus on local news; comprehensive sports with glitzy entertainment, all spiced with a generous helping of sexual innuendo and crime reportage.

The debut of the newly redesigned product last April marked the culmination of months of consultation within Sun Media and among readers. When the Sunshine Girl moved away, she left behind an empty slot of prime, up-front space. The Sun filled the void with six more news pages to join the recently introduced 905 Plus page aimed at suburban readers and a Capital Watch section of Ottawa coverage. The move demonstrated the new management’s desire to expand both the Sun‘s focus and its audience outside metro Toronto. Other notable alterations included an enhanced Weekend Living pullout for the Saturday edition and an augmented Showcase entertainment section in the Sunday paper.

These substantive changes were further enhanced by a cosmetic makeover, with a spruced-up front-page flag accompanied by lighter-toned headline and body copy. Sun Media believes the revamp will provide the edge it needs to grow the Sun‘s market. “A new look can provide some excitement in the market; it gets you noticed again,” says Lou Clancy, vice-president of corporate editorial at Sun Media. “The Sun‘s profile went up as a result of the revamp because people talked about it. The idea was to open the door to more readers. It was an issue of improving the credibility of the paper, giving it more depth.”

To that end, management began a campaign to change its image within Toronto’s corporate community in an effort to appeal to advertisers beyond its traditional base. In its pitch package, the Sun points to recent NADbank research findings to prove to prospective clients that its audience is unexpectedly upmarket. TheSun claims that more than 300,000 of its Sunday Sun readers have been to college; one-third of its readers have a household income of $75,000-plus; and that 65 percent of female Sunday readers work full- or part-time.

But whatever objectives management had with the revamp changed on September 11. Seizing the opportunity to boost circulation, the Sun cast aside its renewed commitment to local news-including its expanded 905 and Ottawa focus-and dedicated the vacated up-front news hole to blanket coverage of the “war on terrorism.”

Sun editors and its old-guard columnists showed themselves to be big fans of the American-led campaign that resulted in a sizable spike in circulation at the Sun and competing papers. But whereas the Sunappeared hamstrung by the shift, its better-endowed competitors-the Star in particular-managed to adequately accommodate both local and foreign beats.

Oddly, the Sun would alter its approach yet again when the war tapered off in January. In this variation, the front section of the paper abounded with old school Sun coverage of gruesome car crashes, deadly holdups, sexual malfeasance, and, not surprisingly, overt endorsements of embattled Toronto police chief Julian Fantino. Stranger still, scantily clad girls were now regularly being plastered across the Sun‘s front page on slower news days.

This reversion to gossipy, sensational local coverage-however typical of the former Sun-seemed more like an ad hoc throwback, especially for a paper aiming to increase its readership. “It’s all piecemeal, Velcro-whatever sticks today,” says a former employee. “Revamp is a word that implies strategy. They have no discernible strategy; it seems week to week.” Despite all appearances of a major identity crisis for the Sunlately, Les Pyette seems to have somewhat of an underlying rough plan: to focus the 30-year-old tabloid on its future objectives by restoring it to its former glory.

Pyette arrived at the Sun through the revolving door of the publisher’s office, his appointment being only the latest in a series of executive position shifts over the past five years. Within this relatively short period, theSun has shuffled through five publishers, three editors-in-chief, and a host of other top-level directors.

In December 1998, Quebecor bought Sun Media for $983 million. The purchase thwarted a $900-million hostile takeover bid by arch enemy Torstar Corp., owner of The Toronto Star. Initially, Quebecor was seen as a white knight for the Sun. But in February 2000, Doug Knight resigned as publisher after two and a half years, believing the Sun executives were delusional to think they were still running the operation under the new administration.

Three months later, Sun Media president and CEO Paul Godfrey resigned, explaining that with the new ownership, he was no longer needed for long-term strategic planning at the company. Godfrey’s departure was followed in August by the resignation of John Paton as president of Sun Media’s online property, Canoe Inc. Back at the Sun, Doug Knight was replaced by general manager Mark Stevens, who himself would only hold the position for 13 months, before leaving in April 2001, citing personal reasons. Pierre Francoeur, then Sun Media’s executive vice-president and COO, served as interim publisher until Les Pyette arrived on May 1, aiming to bring stability and new direction to the ailing flagship.

Soon after Pyette took over the publisher’s chair, editor-in-chief Mike Strobel stepped down and became a columnist. In keeping with Sun Media’s favoured method of family succession, Pyette scouted farm teams for replacement candidates before calling on Ottawa Sun editor-in-chief Mike Therien to serve as newsroom boss, effective October 1.

The 35-year-old Ottawa native was recruited to serve as point man and to help implement the new mandate. He seems to have been a kindred spirit for Pyette, sharing his boss’s goals for The Toronto Sun. Therien and Pyette envisioned a refreshed paper that would lead opinion in Toronto but be more tempered than its racier incarnations, with an expanded emphasis on the local beat. “We talked about the type of newspaper I would like to help build here in Toronto,” says Therien, “and Les was in agreement with that type and that’s what we’re going to do. I would agree with Les that maybe it had lost its focus on local news and that’s always something I’ve been a champion of.”

While it has grown difficult to accurately gauge the success of management’s new approach since September 11, the war has been but one of many unanticipated trials over which Pyette has stood in past months. TheSun has remained entrenched in a heated competition against two longtime adversaries in the Star and The Globe and Mail, and an aggressive newcomer, the National Post. Years earlier, the three dailies had begun this battle of attrition, vowing to maintain their respective positions despite a substantial initial onslaught from Conrad Black’s battering ram.

The Post‘s 1998 arrival galvanized a lethargic Toronto newspaper market and ushered in a period of reforms and revamps among competing operations. Nationally, the grizzled Globe was spurred on to liven up its conservative-looking pages with full-colour photos and graphics while struggling to convey a more youthful and hip tone in its coverage.

Following the October 27 debut of the Post, articles cropped up in the Globe about late Nirvana singer Kurt Cobain; the importance of finding a perfect-fitting bra; and home recording techniques for “indie” artists. TheGlobe‘s headlines also strove to be livelier, including, “We’re Gonna Party Like It’s 1799” for a feature on an 18th-century ceramic art exhibit, or a profile of young Russian baritone singer Dmitri Hvorostovsky, whom theGlobe declared was “More Than Just a Barihunk.”

In its bid to take on the Star, the Post was launched with an extensive section on Toronto news. It was an ace in the hole for the Post, but an unwelcome intrusion as far as the incumbents were concerned. Though theGlobe stood to lose less, it nonetheless continued to bolster its business and sports sections and expanded megacity coverage. The Star took measures to protect its turf by modifying its Business and Life pages and launching a new Greater Toronto section months earlier. And while the Sun was not the direct target, it got caught in the crossfire. “The arrival of the Post hugely improved the quality of the other papers,” claimsNational Post managing editor Hugo Gurdon. “We brought innovation to a basically complacent market and forced others to become more imaginative themselves.”

The Post cut out its local Toronto coverage as a cost-saving measure following its acquisition by Winnipeg-based broadcaster CanWest Global Communications Corp. in August 2001. This provided some breathing room for its battle-weary rivals, particularly the Sun. But the relief would be short-lived-by the new year, thePost had begun to reinstate parts of the Toronto section along with a streamlined arts and entertainment section.

Though the Sun credited itself for not being obsessed with the giveaway gambit as other papers were, it indulged in bulk sales of free or heavily discounted copies to boost circulation. However, when Swedish publisher Metro International S.A. announced it was planning to introduce a free transit tabloid in June 2000, the Star responded with a subway paper of its own. Now the Sun could no longer afford to sit back, and Sun Media launched its FYI Toronto tab as a defensive strategy to maintain market share, and by doing so, upped the total number of daily newspapers on Toronto streets to seven.

Ultimately, FYI was unable to gather momentum and was hobbled further when Metro and Torstar’s GTA Today merged into MetroToday last July. In October 2001, FYI Toronto was pulled off the market with relative indifference from Sun Media. “If there had not been a transit paper launched in this city, I doubt The Toronto Sun would have launched one,” says Clancy. “The demise of FYI will not have a great positive effect on theSun nor did its existence have a great negative effect.”

But the faltering economy was taking its toll. Last May, the Sun announced the termination of 86 people, part of the 302 total positions eliminated across the entire chain of Sun tabloids in Calgary, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Ottawa, and the company’s broadsheet London Free Press. This represented the second such cost-cutting operation to hit Sun Media since it was bought by Quebecor in 1999. The layoffs at the Sun followed Quebecor’s posting of a $25.7-million loss in the first quarter of 2001 attributable to the consortium’s $7.3-billion debt that had stemmed from its $5.4-billion purchase of Montreal cable company le Groupe Videotron Ltee. in October 2000.

The axe would keep falling at an already weakened Sun. Just when the downsizing storm seemed to have cleared, post-September 11 uncertainty exacerbated an already slowing economy. Sun Media announced more cuts on October 17, 2001, sacking another 40 employees in Toronto and a total of 125 staff throughout the corporation. Most puzzling was the October 24 firing of longtime foreign correspondent Matthew Fisher, who was covering the war from Islamabad, Pakistan. Considering the Sun‘s infatuation with the campaign on terrorism, the substitution of generic wire copy in lieu of first-hand, Sun-tailored reporting appeared both arbitrary and ill advised.

In December 2001, Quebecor reported a third-quarter loss of $26.9 million and faced a combined debt of $8.5 billion, as media and telecom stocks plunged further and the subsequent financial fallout continued to hurt its already exhausted subsidiaries. Quebecor sold the installation division of Videotron to Entourage Technical Solutions in March 2002, a deal which analysts have predicted will result in a loss of over 650 jobs.

“There’s no doubt that when you get into that kind of high finance with a heavy debt load, you get down to the point where you are suffering from bottom-lineness,” says Arnold Amber, director of the Newspaper Guild of Canada, a national labour union that represents over 8,500 media workers. “It’s like a disease where every division must not only make a profit, but must kick back to the central office in Montreal a certain percentage because that is what’s needed by the company to pay down debt.” Lou Clancy acknowledges that with a loss in revenue, which is “needed to run the company and service debt,” there isn’t “as much room to manoeuvre.”

Among rank-and-file Sun employees, there’s no great affection for Quebecor, a corporation that attempted aSun buyout in 1972 and again in 1996 under the late Pierre Péladeau Sr. Many feel that the Sun is in the hands of the wrong owners, and that Quebecor-now run by Péladeau’s volatile 40-year-old son Pierre Karl-has little interest in what happens at the paper, as long as it yields enough money. “Quebecor is a Quebec corporation; they know very little about journalism in English-speaking Canada,” says Peter Desbarats, former dean of journalism at the University of Western Ontario and one-time columnist for The London Free Press. “All they’re interested in is having an acceptable level of profit coming in from the Sun. And as long as Pyette provides that to them, I don’t think they particularly care how he does it.”

With profit and revenue as Quebecor’s overarching imperatives, there is concern the company pays less attention to the integrity of the newspaper or the dangers of cost-cutting drives. “They don’t really give a shit about the English-language papers,” says one current Sun writer. “Quebecor is a money maker, they don’t care one iota about people. They could get monkeys to do this as far as they’re concerned, as long as they could type and get the paper out and meet their bottom line.”

But Les Pyette believes the Sun is doing more than meeting a bottom line. He has taken certain steps-including proposing weekday home delivery-to turn the paper around, rebuild circulation, and give it the edge needed to move up in the Toronto market and eventually into enemy territory. “The Star has a lot more people than we have,” says Pyette. “They have a much larger staff than us. But I think that if we hold on to the wheel, one day the Sun will pass the Star; 15 years from now; 20 years from now.”

Not surprisingly, the Star thinks its smaller rival will fail to siphon off its massive readership anytime in the near future. “All I can say is I don’t think the gap between the Star and the Sun editorially has ever been greater than it is today,” says John Honderich, publisher of The Toronto Star. “Whereas at one point in the ’80s I think the crossover between the Star and the Sun was much more, today it’s nowhere similar. With the advent of Quebecor, the emphasis has been much more on a down-market audience, and despite any changes recently, that remains the fundamental drive of the paper.”

In addition, by looking to expand its market outside of its downtown stronghold, the Sun could slowly lose its loyal readership and soon find itself wading into the deeper waters of the competition, operations that are far better equipped with human and financial resources to serve the Greater Toronto market. This is a reality that stings even more in light of the crippling layoffs at the Sun in recent months.

It is worth noting that the Star has yet to lay off a single staff member in response to the downturn in the economy. The Star has an editorial staff of 435 people, with roughly 140 focused on the GTA alone, while theSun has a total of 150 full-time editorial staff. Frankly, it might be myopic of Sun management to believe it can grow the paper at a time when they’re cutting back on resources and whittling away its budget. “There’s an expression they use in New York to describe a tabloid that has pretensions to be more than a tabloid,” says Joe Hall, deputy managing editor at the Star. “They call it a tabloid in a tutu. To some extent the Sun has that problem.”

Lofty aspiration is only a small part of the Sun‘s problem. The morale of the post-layoff survivors is another concern. “Everybody [at the Sun] is in shell shock,” says one employee. “I was there on the day of the layoffs and everybody is demoralized. This last one took everyone by surprise.”

Whether the brass is willing to acknowledge it or not, a new climate of fear and anger brought on by job cuts stands to hurt the Sun. In this regard, it is becoming a shadow of its former self, a paper that was once renowned for the symbiotic relationship among upper management and the newsroom, which precluded the need for any formal organization of staff. “I was publisher for 21 years and during that time we managed to not lay off anybody,” says Sun co-founder J. Douglas Creighton. “I think layoffs are wrong and I think the way they’re carried out is wrong. If I were a union looking to expand my membership in Toronto, I certainly wouldn’t have looked to the Sun first a few years ago. Now I think they’d be at the top of the list.”

Les Pyette, who feels that the Sun was “overstaffed” to begin with, rejects the notion that layoffs could alter his ability to put out a better paper. “The way the business world is today, you have to have a new pair of running shoes almost every week,” says Pyette. “Staffers have to go twice as hard. You take on more responsibility, you take on more work.”

In many ways, Pyette and crew can’t afford not to take steps to increase readership at a time like this. If the newspaper war has achieved anything, it has exposed the weaknesses of all the incumbent papers, particularly in their coverage of Toronto. It was a direct challenge for The Toronto Sun, which had always regarded itself as Toronto’s other voice, its finger on the pulse of the local beat.

Sometimes there is virtue in sticking to what works, but after 30 years, it could be foolish of the Sun to allow the opportunity for growth to pass it by. While expansion could alienate its readership, the Sun risks losing its audience to rival papers that are more broad-based in their local coverage. “We’re living in changing times,” says Mike Therien. “You can’t stand still. So the evolution of course will continue. We already lead the way and we’re going to extend our gap.”

Stressing the difference between evolution and revolution, the Sun‘s new editor believes the growth of the paper’s readership doesn’t have to result from an entirely new game plan. “I don’t think that we want to change fundamental paths,” says Therien. “If we get to where the Star is, it will be because we’ve done what we like to do well. I don’t want to turn us into a paper of record for Toronto. I want to do what we do well, do more of it, do it better, and if more readers come, then of course we’re targeting them.”

Fortunately, Therien’s ideas mesh nicely with those of his boss. Les Pyette too has a strong desire to refocus the tab he helped to build in its formative years, armed with a first-hand knowledge of what propelled the paper to its great early success.

Pyette, who has never sat still for too long within the Sun corporation, has travelled a winding road back to its flagship. Born in Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario, Pyette began his career in journalism as a sportswriter for his hometown Sault Star without finishing high school. The next decade would see him take positions at both the Belvedere Daily Republican in Illinois and then at The Windsor Star, where he worked as page one editor. Pyette originally joined The Toronto Sun in 1974 as city editor.

In 1978 he was promoted to assistant managing editor, a position he held until 1980, when he was sent to Alberta-as part of Douglas Creighton’s “A -team”-to launch and run The Calgary Sun as editor-in-chief. Pyette would return to Toronto in 1984 to serve as executive editor, and when Creighton was driven from the Sun in 1992, Pyette became executive assistant to corporate president and new CEO Paul Godfrey. In 1994, he moved back out west when he was named publisher of The Calgary Sun.

Pyette was on the road yet again in January 2000, this time to London, Ontario, where he was publisher at the Sun Media-owned Free Press. Despite his joking assertion that he “can’t keep a job,” Pyette at long last reached the top of the Sun mountain by May 2001.

During his years at the Sun, Pyette developed a reputation almost as colourful and feisty as the paper he now runs. Known by some as the “dude from the Sault,” Pyette was regarded by turns as a cowboy and wild man, equipped with the vim and vigour that the Sun‘s founding fathers felt was needed to build the burgeoning tab. Legend has it, Douglas Creighton was fond of using Pyette’s irascible and aggressive nature to his advantage, playing the young firebrand as a foil in meetings in order to foster the exchange of ideas.

In 1974, Pyette attracted attention for “The Amazing Randi” incident in which escape artist Randi Zwinge was locked in the Sun‘s Chubb-Mosler safe, vowing to escape with his hands tied behind him. In the end, Randi failed to free himself, almost ran out of oxygen, and after several desperate pleas, was rescued by a Sunstaffer. Pyette was overjoyed, having just secured the next day’s front page with a story of near tragedy at theSun.

Always pushing the envelope, Pyette would later clash with Paul Godfrey over his headline “What a Boob!”-a reaction to a key 1992 television address made by former Ontario NDP Premier Bob Rae. Godfrey publicly criticized the headline as tasteless and inappropriate, leading to unrest and a sense of betrayal in the newsroom. Pyette expressed concerns that the paper was moving away from its blue-collar roots in an attempt to attract a more affluent clientele. Pyette-who gained further notoriety for his three previous marriages and four kids-perfectly embodied the spirit of the early Sun with his scrappy, restless style.

Pyette drew further outrage in September 2000 when the London Free Press sponsored a local convention of Promise Keepers, a Christian men’s group that advocates “moral, ethical, and sexual purity” as well as the restoration of the father’s role within the family and society. Free Press staffers had great difficulty seeing how a newspaper that aspires to appeal to all segments of the community could publicly ally itself with the organization.

That was then. Now Pyette is once again back in Toronto, married again and with four more children. He appears to have mellowed a bit, but not much else has changed. Pyette is still known as a hands-on leader who takes a strong interest in the functioning of the newsroom, and-perhaps taking a page out of Godfrey’s book-is also adept at public relations and the art of the schmooze.

Some believe, however, that Pyette has found it difficult to escape his roots, and in his attempt to micromanage the Sun, has become more of a threat to the viability of the paper than a saviour. Most notably, Pyette has recently served as a headline craftsman at the Sun, his signature skill from the days of old. His September 12 front-page proclamation, “Bastards”-in reference to the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks on the U.S.-received kudos from colleagues and competitors alike. Most lauded it as a fitting reaction to the tragedy that had taken place the day before.

All the same, it is very unusual for a publisher to play a day-to-day role in editorial decisions, even if it is a rich tradition at the Sun. It might simply be that Pyette finds more comfort on the newsroom floor than in the manager’s lair four storeys above. “He’s basically an editor who made it to the sixth floor and he just can’t stop meddling,” says one former employee. “He’s a whirling dervish and you never know what’s going to happen. People had high hopes when he came in, that he would pull things together. But he can’t keep his hands off and let anybody do what they should be doing.”

At a Thursday morning news meeting, the Sun‘s crew assembles around the boardroom table, prepared to share scoops and negotiate page allotments for tomorrow’s edition with their new chief of staff, Mike Therien. It’s only 10:30, but already there’s much to discuss: the city of Mazar-e-Sharif looks set to fall to the Northern Alliance troops in Afghanistan; charter airline Canada 3000 is done for; and the Leafs are poised for a two-game grudge match with the Devils.

Before the meeting begins, Les Pyette drops in to say a quick word to the news crew. Pyette, in his Clintonesque style of management, clearly understands the importance of interaction and good humour. He is tactile and charming, playfully placing his hands on the shoulders of a female staffer while deflecting with an easy smile the ribbing from his colleagues about his new peppery goatee. However casual, his appearance confirms the notion that despite being the top dog, Pyette still enjoys dirtying his hands in the trenches of the daily news.

It has been a meandering journey back to 333 King Street East, but Pyette looks surprisingly invigorated for all the wear and tear and has now come full circle, again. The Toronto Sun once helped him to prosper and he is determined to reciprocate the favour this time around.

Sitting at the head of the boardroom table, Therien calls the meeting to order and focuses the group on the day’s news objectives. Pyette slips back out to cruise the newsroom and guide his paper through present challenges and onto a new trajectory. But as the parade of recent former publishers indicates, this course is neither simple nor certain anymore for a man in his position. Despite his past successes, the brightness of Pyette’s future hinges solely on his ability to see the Sun through its darkest hour.

On a clear Thursday morning in mid-January, Young People’s Press acting executive director Michael Hoechsmann carries a box of old newspapers across his office in midtown Toronto. Despite limping with his left leg, from which a cast has just been removed, he wants to show me some previously published YPP articles.

“In many cases, people have a different perspective when they read articles written by young people,” says Hoechsmann proudly as he digs out several issues of The Toronto Star‘s Young Street section and passes them to me. The scruffy cardboard box is like a treasure chest, yielding up features such as one examining how young Goths were treated after the Columbine High School massacre in April 1999, and another one on Vince Carter’s efforts to help youth on and off the basketball court. The contents prove how YPP, a youth news service, was able to reach a wide audience with stories that combined news with pop culture.

Young Street was a Star section to which YPP writers regularly contributed, from the section’s creation in September 1997 until its demise in January 2000. It represented a defining moment for YPP-an organization that was founded in late 1995 with the laudable aim of engaging young people in social and political issues.

During Young Street’s 27-month existence, more than 500 articles by YPP contributors appeared in its pages. Admittedly, they were not all on par with the Goths or Vince Carter pieces, but Young Street was an impressive array nonetheless of advice columns, personal experience pieces, and music reviews. As former YPP editor Brian McDonald says about that time, “Our youth had a lack of cynicism and a desire to change the world.”

And then in January 2000, Young Street was replaced with a renamed, revamped section that drastically scaled back YPP contributions. Despite its best intentions, this nonprofit news youth organization, constricted by stretched funding and resources, has since had a hard time growing up.

Gould and Don Curry, a former city editor at the Peterborough Examiner who became YPP’s first editor-in-chief, connected early on with Robert Clampitt, who founded the U.S.-based Children’s Express news service in 1975. First gaining attention in 1976, when it broke the story that Walter Mondale was Jimmy Carter’s running mate in the U.S. presidential election, Children’s Express had gone on to win a Peabody and an Emmy for its coverage of the 1988 U.S. presidential race.

As Curry recalls, “Children’s Express sent nine- to 12-year-olds with tape recorders to do the reporting, while high school students edited and wrote the stories.” Curry had a slightly different vision for YPP: its writers, who were predominantly in their teens, would both report and write their pieces. (Gould says that 90 percent of YPP’s earlier material was opinion pieces written by youth, so little reporting was needed. The rest were stories reported by teens, but written by YPP staff.)

While Curry remained in North Bay, he and Gould set up an office in Toronto with three editors. (By comparison, as reported on National Public Radio in June 2001, Children’s Express had roughly 30 paid staff.)

“It was a very small office,” remembers Iain Wilson, who was one of YPP’s original editors. “We were sharing the office with another group, and we shared equipment, fax machines, and the photocopier. I had to use my own laptop because YPP didn’t have enough computers yet.”

To find writers, YPP promoted itself through school and community visits, word of mouth, and Usenet groups on the Internet. YPP’s first story was an interview with then Toronto Raptors rookie Damon Stoudamire, which was published in late 1995.

Even after having that first piece published, YPP staff had a hard time getting teachers to take them seriously when they began to visit schools in December 1995. It made sense for YPP staff to visit schools since SchoolNet, a computer network, had just begun distributing their work to its subscribers, which were about a third of Canadian schools. Still, it was one thing for SchoolNet to distribute YPP material but another for the schools to actually use the copy.

“In three months, I visited eight schools in Toronto,” says Wilson. “It was difficult to get teachers excited because no one knew who we were. Some just rejected us out of hand and never presented our idea to their students. I had one teacher who kept asking us where we were going to get funding. He asked us if it was another government program wasting taxpayers’ money.”

In fact, the funding for the CCSJ-close to $400,000 in 1995 and a modest $300,000 in 1996-came mostly from the Ontario and federal governments. Still, by September 1997, YPP had managed to get 60 articles published.

The editing process was primitive. Brian McDonald, who joined the staff in 1997, recalls, “Everything was done by fax. We would receive the articles by fax, and the articles would be retyped by the editors and faxed to the papers. Our computers were outdated. When Levi’s donated three newer laptops, they were a godsend because they weren’t always crashing.” The staff would then send the finished articles to 220 daily and weekly papers.

One of the papers on YPP’s mailing list was The Toronto Star. In December 1994, the Star began running a column called Under 20 every second Tuesday in its Life section.

“Before then, and during Under 20’s duration, we had one reporter who covered youth,” says Carola Vyhnak, then the Star‘s Life editor. The same reporter also looked after the submissions for Under 20 and served as a liaison between the Star and young people. “It was after late January in 1996 when we started using YPP material on a fairly regular basis,” says Vyhnak.

On the basis of this relationship, in 1997 Gould and McDonald approached the Star‘s then-acting Life editor, Vivian Macdonald, about creating a weekly youth section in the Star that would be filled mostly with YPP material. (Macdonald would become the permanent Life editor that summer.) She agreed, and Young Street was launched on September 30, 1997, as a two-and-a-half- to four-page section containing an advice column, a trends column, entertainment reviews, and stories about how young people were either making a difference or being affected by current issues.

Soon, the Canadian Press started distributing Young Street copy to its members. YPP also struck a deal with the Kitchener-Waterloo Record to supply material for a weekly youth page, and another with the HalifaxChronicle-Herald for a biweekly page.

Spurred by this success, YPP held six annual writing contests with such high-profile judges as Avi Lewis, Naomi Klein, Rachel Giese, and Irshad Manji. Also in 1997, Ontario’s then Lieutenant Governor Hilary Weston agreed to be its honorary patron. Young Street also won an award from the Youth Editors Association of America in 1999. (In March 2001 YPP would win an Award of Distinction from the Canadian Race Relations Foundation.)

Funding from governments, corporations, and foundations for the CCSJ-which funded YPP-remained steady at $400,000 in 1999 and $420,000 in 2000. This included the Levi Strauss Foundation, which handed YPP US$31,030 each year from 1997 to 1999, and US$150,000 in 2000.

“We got letters and phone calls from teachers and some great feedback,” Gould recalls. “We also got 20,000 entries from the national writing contests and from essay writing contests that we had in schools in Ontario and British Columbia.”

The contests also enabled YPP to make a different kind of impact. “Michael made me get up on stage and read my story in front of 100 people at the Word on the Street [book and magazine festival] in Toronto,” says Anuj Anand of his story, “Colour of My Skin Was My Only Crime,” which won second place in a YPP writing contest in September 1997. “It’s not easy to read a story so humiliating and upsetting in front of total strangers. But when I was finished, people converged upon me and told me how sorry they were. One lady said that my story made her cry.”

Not everyone was happy with YPP’s success. “The Star didn’t consult with us before launching Young Street,” says Dan Smith, who is now chief steward for editorial for the Southern Ontario Newspaper Guild at the Star. The issue revolved around the freelancer clause in the union contract, which stipulates that freelancers can only do stories that can’t be done by Star staff, or which freelancers had greater experience in dealing with.

Freelance concerns weren’t the only problems, according to Smith, who was the deputy editorial steward at that time. There was also a concern about the potential for bias in the preponderance of first-person pieces. “There was a quality concern,” he says. “I think the Star tried to do it on the cheap.”

The union may have played a role in preventing the publication of stories with more reportage. As former YPP editor and current YPP freelance columnist Ezra Houser says, “It was hard to get the Star to print anything youth tackled that wasn’t specifically in the first person because it didn’t want to undermine its unionized staff reporters by giving some young person space in their paper to explore issues and ideas.”

In addition, as a project of a registered charity-the CCSJ-YPP could not promote any political parties or views. As a result, many contributors were stuck mostly having to do first-person stories that often veered from voicing political opinion.

YPP writers did occasionally tackle political subject matters, though. There was an interview with former Ontario premier Bob Rae that YPP distributed to Usenet groups in February 1996, an October 1997 piece about an Ontario teachers’ strike, and a November 1998 story on Quebec sovereignty. Most contributors also wrote from their hearts and minds on issues from AIDS to aboriginal rights with “remarkable insight and maturity,” as Vyhnak puts it. Many YPP pieces, however, sounded like diary entries or read like feel-good stories about youth.

Gould is unapologetic about this aspect of YPP, saying, “We’re not about hard-hitting news. We were never meant to be a journalism school. Our primary goal is to give youth a voice, and to get them involved in social issues through participating in the media.”

But Iain Wilson saw it differently. While YPP’s motto is “By youth, for youth,” Wilson says there was some uncertainty about what students were supposed to be contributing or how they would distribute the material.

“I found it frustrating how YPP didn’t know what it wanted from its students,” he says. “We mostly got personal diaries, opinion pieces, and CD reviews. I thought it was about journalism, about teaching youth how to be editors and reporters.”

That was Odelia Bay’s experience. Now a student in Ryerson’s journalism program, YPP was her first paid indoor summer job. “I worked as an editor 30 hours a week, but they were flexible, as I could also work at home. I was given my own small desk and my own computer. In my last year working for YPP, I worked from home as a syndicated columnist.”

Despite YPP’s shortcomings, it did serve an unintended purpose: many of its one-time contributors are now professional journalists. Former YPP columnist Graeme Smith is a reporter at The Globe and Mail. Deborah Gardner works at Global News as an editor, and Dayo Kefentse is a reporter and editor for CBC Radio in Toronto. And after leaving YPP, Iain Wilson worked for Knight Ridder Financial News in Tokyo before working in the same city for Bloomberg, where he is a technology editor, managing a team of editors and reporters throughout Asia.

Most former staffers agree that YPP was a good place to work, saying that staff treated them very nicely and gave them lots of professional advice and encouragement. As well, YPP’s interns and co-op students were given more editorial responsibility than most interns. “Former staff and writers came back to visit, and they gave us gifts,” says Bay. “It was like a student-teacher relationship.”

Though they may stand to eventually gain a career, YPP staffers past and present haven’t been richly rewarded. While the CCSJ’s annual income tax returns say that it has received $330,000 to $420,000 in revenue annually between 1997 and 2000, YPP is just one of the CCSJ’s 27 projects.

Gould says the information in the tax returns does not completely reflect the CCSJ’s finances, as many of its projects were run with other organizations that helped pay the expenses. But even during Young Street’s heyday from 1997 to 2000, the CCSJ was involved in an average of 20 to 30 projects, including YPP, each year.

Today, YPP has five full-time staffers and one part-timer. Some former and current staffers were hired with government grants, and many who work there do it for the experience rather than for the money.

The Star did not pay YPP to use its material for Young Street until its final year, when the paper started giving YPP $3,000 every six months until January 2000. Neither CP nor its members paid for their YPP material because it was picked up from the Star.

Other YPP newspaper clients pay YPP $15 to $35 per article, or $150 for a feature story. While Gould says that YPP has different agreements with different papers, and that the rates depend on a paper’s circulation, one editor at a major daily newspaper says that those rates are expensive compared to most wire services.

Even with these fees, the organization is run on a tight budget. “YPP was financed largely on a grant-by-grant, project-by-project basis, so the luxury of organizing overview-type systems wasn’t there,” says Houser, who first joined YPP in late 1999. “With the need to complete this issue of this e-zine, or to get a certain number of articles on this topic published, such immediate needs always prevailed, and there was no staff manager who could keep the big picture in mind and help us become more efficient toward our mission. Sometimes we even lost track of our mission because we were too busy fulfilling our obligations to our sponsors. It sounds damning but it’s very true of almost all nonprofits to some degree.”

Many former contributors were just grateful for the opportunity to be published. However, several writers weren’t happy about not getting paid. This happened in spite of a YPP policy in its writers’ guide that if a publication pays for a story that YPP produced, the money should go to the writer.

“I wasn’t compensated for my work except for one advertorial piece that I can’t even remember,” says Barbi Green, a Toronto writer (who then wrote under her maiden name, Barbi Price). “By then, they started paying token amounts for articles. Their rationale was, ‘We’re giving you national exposure.’ As a new journalist, I couldn’t argue with that-even if it meant free pages of copy for the Star.”

Sometimes YPP did compensate students, such as the time McDonald hired two Toronto students to create YPP’s first website.

“We set up the site in late 1996, and then we put up between 40 to 50 articles on that site for about a year and a half,” says Suresh Sriskandarajah, who was a Grade 10 student at Westview Centennial Secondary School in north Toronto and ran his own Web design company. “It wasn’t part of any school project, but YPP paid us $1,000 to create the site, then paid us $50 for each article we posted.” But the relationship ended when funds ran out. YPP also stopped sponsoring a girls e-zine in June 2001 because a crucial grant didn’t come in.

In July 1999, Lesley Ciarula Taylor became the Star‘s new Life editor, and she studied her new section to see what could be improved.

“I found that there wasn’t a lot of recognition among youth,” says Taylor of Young Street. “Some of them confused it with the business section, and we were concerned about that. It was also becoming difficult for YPP to provide copy every week because many of its writers were high school students, and it was becoming a burden for them. I also found that the stories were of a similar genre, of a similar idea, and were all starting to sound the same.”

In January 2000, Young Street was replaced with Boom!, which is mostly written by Star staff, non-YPP freelancers, and reporters and columnists whose work is picked up from other wire services.

The YPP items that do appear in Boom! are mostly CD and entertainment reviews, but occasionally the Starwill publish harder YPP stories in the revamped section. The most prominent recent examples are YPP’s September 11 special, and its coverage of the United Nations anti-racism conference in Durban, South Africa, last fall.

YPP material is still being distributed nationally by Torstar News Service and Southam News, but with Young Street’s demise YPP lost a major outlet and CP has only distributed a handful of YPP articles since.

The Kitchener-Waterloo Record and the Halifax Chronicle-Herald still receive YPP material. However, theRecord now only publishes the YPP trends report because it can only use locally produced material in the rest of the features section, and the Chronicle-Herald wishes that YPP could distribute more copy from Halifax or east coast writers.

YPP is now negotiating with Southam newspapers and the Osprey Media Group to publish syndicated youth pages in their papers. YPP also occasionally organizes Writer’s Circles-a series of five journalism classes in 10 weeks that includes writing for YPP-with 15 students in each circle. These have been held in Victoria, Vancouver, Edmonton, Toronto, and Halifax, and include an all-aboriginal circle.

Since April 2000, YPP has been syndicated by Scripps Howard News Service in the U.S., and by online syndicator ScreamingMedia Inc., which has about 850 clients. SHNS has a good relationship with YPP, but its resources are limited by personnel and time. As a result, it has opted to distribute only the youth advice column and the trends report.

“We have 400 clients,” says Walter Veazey, the assistant managing editor for features at SHNS. “We can only give each of them 110 stories per day, and YPP is just one of 100 contributors to our service. We don’t know whether our clients actually publish the YPP material we send them, but these papers have only so much space.”

Most of ScreamingMedia’s clients who use YPP material are other websites. They pay between eight cents to “a couple of dollars” per article, depending on how many hits a site is getting. Since July 2001, YPP has gotten approximately $14,000 from all its syndication deals, and Gould thinks that will go up to $17,000 by this June.

YPP is sending more of its material to its syndicators rather than posting it on its e-zines, but this doesn’t mean that its deals in the United States are attracting and sustaining a wide audience. Several U.S. youth media experts and editors interviewed for this story say they were unaware of YPP, including LynNell Hancock of the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, Jennifer Moore of the Casey Journalism Center on Children and Families at the University of Maryland, and several officers of the Youth Editors Association of America.

When told of what YPP does, Moore and Marina Hendricks-who is editor of The Charleston Gazette‘s teen section in Charleston, West Virginia, and was YEAA’s president in 1999-said it reminds them of Children’s Express. Since founder Robert Clampitt’s death in 1996, over-expansion resulted in a US$2.4 million debt, and the news service shut down last summer.

As for the future, at press time YPP’s structure and financial security were being renegotiated. The CCSJ, which was renamed Communitas Canada last June, received about $584,000 in revenue last year, but Gould says that Communitas is thinking of spinning off YPP into its own nonprofit organization.

At press time, YPP also had a new U.S. syndication agreement in principle, but it hadn’t been signed yet. Gould wouldn’t say who it’s with or how much YPP expects to get from it, but noted that “it will hopefully give us a significantly higher amount of revenue.”

The new syndication deal sounds promising, but if YPP’s experiences with SHNS and ScreamingMedia are any indication, it may take more than that to keep YPP thriving.

Then again, being a nonprofit youth news organization is never easy. Funding from the Ontario government ended recently, the Levi Strauss Foundation ended its commitment last July, and the federal government’s just ended in March 2002. As acting executive director Hoechsmann says, “Our sponsors only want to provide one to three years of funding.”

In Hoechsmann’s office, there’s a poster of the late rapper Tupac Shakur hanging on the wall. The words “Only God Can Judge Me” are splashed over it. With a history of success but also of strained finances, perhaps only God can judge-or know-what the future will hold for YPP.