Media coverage of the Toronto event came close to saturation level, with local and national television, radio and newspaper outlets out in force. Like most of the coverage, the Toronto Star‘s article focused heavily on the heroics involved. In the page A3 colour picture it ran of Adams climbing the tower, he stares intently at his hands, one gripping the railing, the other gripping a cane to propel him backward and upward. His lips are pursed in determination. The story’s lead begins breathlessly: “When Jeff Adams emerged, flush-faced and still sweating from his climb to the top of the stairwell at the CN Tower, the crowd was already clapping.”

Buried near the end of the piece is the answer to the question why: a few years earlier, Adams had been ejected from a downtown Toronto bar with one flight of stairs – he had been told he was a fire hazard. In response, he decided to climb the tower for charity, donating the money raised to educate schoolchildren about the importance of normalcy for everyone and a barrier-free society. Key information. Yet the why of the story reads tacked on, an afterthought. In the inverted pyramid style of newspaper writing, this was clearly the dispensable part of the article.

Despite the attention Adams garnered, media coverage of disabled issues is paltry at best. When it does appear, misguided emphasis and glorification of the individual are the norm. Maybe that’s not surprising, considering the matter of representation in the media itself. At a time when visible minorities and women have established themselves in the profession, the number of disabled journalists remains very low.

Just how paltry is the coverage? Even with a ready-made news hook it can be virtually non-existent. Last year, in the eight days preceding December 3 – the United Nations International Day of Disabled Persons – there wasn’t a single story in the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail or the National Post that mentioned the event. On November 29, the Star ran a 140-word story about illegal parking in disabled spots. The next day, the regular disabilities column appeared in the Star‘s Saturday Life section; the Post had an A-section 386-word story on the same day about a fatal scalding of a disabled man.

On December 3 itself, the Globe carried a 236-word story about a Special Olympics breakfast and numerous activities to take place the next day. The Star ran a 335-word statistics story entitled “3.4 Million Adult Canadians Report Some Disability,” with the deck “Problems Range from Aching Back to Arthritis.” The Postcarried a 1,250-word, page-one article on an accident that might leave former British Columbia premier Mike Harcourt disabled.

So why is the coverage of issues that directly affect almost 13 per cent of Canadians (more than 3.5 million people) so abysmal? “It’s just not a sexy topic,” sighs David Onley. Onley is best known as an anchor for CablePulse24 and Citytv in Toronto. He also happens to be a survivor of polio and is the only prominent Canadian anchor with a physical disability – he walks with a cane. Onley points out the ongoing problems with transportation, unemployment, discrimination and abuse. “They are serious problems that are completely ignored. Alleged racial profiling at the Toronto Police was a sexy topic. Princess Diana’s butler was a sexy, sexy story. And that’s the way the media works.”

But do all stories have to be sexy? “We are storytellers,” says Ing Wong-Ward, a producer at CBC Radio’sMetro Morning in Toronto, and a wheelchair user. “It can be interesting and provocative without being sexy. The media put limits on themselves and cut out sections of their audience by approaching it that way.” She cites coverage of actor Christopher Reeve as a clear example of how journalists approach disability all wrong. “When he said, ‘I’m going to walk again,’ that was all they paid attention to. Why are we so obsessed with curing? It sets up the false notion that disabled persons have to be fixed and want to be fixed.” Wong-Ward questions why there isn’t more analysis. Why didn’t reporters ask Reeve about accessibility, for instance, or unemployment?

Stereotypes are common. “The hero stereotype is extremely dangerous. It means, as a disabled person, you have to be a super-high achiever to get noticed,” she explains. “Journalists buy into the medical assumption that there is something wrong with disabled persons, and that we need to be fixed. The assumption that journalists are neutral is a crock. We are a reflection of society. In society, there’s a lack of awareness about disability. It’s not tragic to be a disabled person. It’s simply a part of my life.”

Stereotypes of persons with disabilities emerge again and again in the media, and the coverage generally presents it two ways: you’re either a hero – consider Terry Fox – or you deserve pity or charity. While no article would dare make pity a central theme, many stories are flavoured with it.

For instance, when hydro prices in Ontario soared this past fall, the Star ran a story on October 29 about a Hamilton single mother who could not pay the bills. The piece emphasized that she had a disabled child who required a ventilator to breathe. The child’s grandfather was described as sending “a desperate plea” to the Ontario legislature. Language, too, reveals pity: “confined to a wheelchair” is still everyday terminology. As Wong-Ward puts it, “It’s just as easy for the disabled to accept the stereotypes when we are presented with them again and again.”

…………………….

It’s Wednesday afternoon and David Onley is hosting CP24’s weekly hour-long technology show Homepage. He and his guests sit across the table from each other in Citytv’s open-environment set. Within an hour they’ll cover topics as varied as tablet computers and budgeting software. They face a screen that shows the software being discussed.

Like any good anchor, Onley is a skilled interviewer. He asks the important questions and absorbs the answers. With his guests he is relaxed and amiable, as if he’s talking to old friends. Unless you caught him in the ’80s as City’s main weatherman, you might not know he has a disability. Back then, the cameraman would include Onley’s entire body in its frame, showing him holding onto his cane with one hand for balance. Nowadays, the camera frames his face and upper body, focusing not on his disability, but on his abilities to keep viewers tuned in.

……………………

The shortcomings in how disability issues are covered appear closely linked to the dearth of disabled journalists, who would be more likely to handle the subject in a relevant manner. This is where “normalization,” as Jeff Adams called it, enters the media landscape. If it’s not normal to see disabled journalists on TV or to know of them working in radio or print, disabled youths won’t readily view journalism as a viable employment option.

“I know the traditional answer is that there aren’t enough qualified people enrolling in radio and television arts or journalism courses,” says Onley, “but is that an excuse? Or is it that there are not enough people applying to these positions because they don’t see any on TV? I always knew I wanted to be a broadcaster on television since I was 11, but I turned first to radio because I didn’t see anyone with a disability on TV.”

Finding the root of the shortage isn’t easy. Across the nation, on paper, prospects for employment appear to be fair.

Quebecor World is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome and encourage diversity.

Bell Globemedia is dedicated to equity in the workplace.

The Employment Equity Office exists to facilitate recruiting, integration and promotion of women, members of visible minority groups, aboriginal people and people with disabilities, so that the CBC can achieve a workforce which reflects the diversity of Canadian society.

At a dozen different media outlets across the country, the answer is much the same: “We are an equal opportunity employer.”

Ron Nowell, executive editor at the Calgary Herald, says, “We hire consistently with what the universal standards are. We look at every application, and it makes no difference to us whether a person is handicapped or not.” Explaining that the Herald does not currently employ any disabled staff in the newsroom, Nowell says the Herald has not received an application from a person with a disability – as far as he knows.

At the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, one of the few independent papers left in Canada, human resources assistant Gina Gallant says, “An applicant’s disabilities wouldn’t matter. There is a woman here with a walking impairment and another staff member with a heart problem.” Jenny Pruegger at Canadian Living‘s human resources department says that affirmative action is not incorporated into the publisher’s policy, but it is something the magazine practices. “It’s a matter of the best person for the job.” At the National Post, Sharlene Kanhai, recruitment development specialist says, “My hiring practice is to hire the best candidate. We have a couple of people in wheelchairs in editorial.” Roy Wood, executive editor of the Edmonton Journal, says, “It’s not an issue if a person has a disability. The issue is his or her abilities. We don’t have a policy seeking to hire those with disabilities or an affirmative action program, but we don’t dismiss people from consideration because of a disability. We do have a columnist in features who has been with us for 15 years, and he is a wheelchair user.” Cathy Foti, human resources manager at CTV, says that the station actively places job postings with diversity groups as well as with post-secondary institutes and on its website.

At Rogers Media (publisher of Maclean’s, Chatelaine and Canadian Business, among others), an unidentified woman in human resources curtly says, “We are equal opportunity employers.”

…………………….

So from all appearances, Canadian media are more than willing to hire any person with the correct qualifications. There’s just one complicating factor. As Wong-Ward says, “‘The best person for the job’ is a loaded term. It could mean ‘who fits in’ or ‘who doesn’t create problems.’ The playing field should be equal, but unfortunately there are subjective qualities that are brought into the game.” Wong-Ward recalls an experience she had when looking for a job in 2000. She called The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business Television to inquire about a position. The female senior producer that Wong-Ward spoke to was enthused and asked her to come by for a chat. Before the phone conversation was over, Wong-Ward asked casually if the offices were accessible and was told, “Well, no.” Before the job opportunity could ever begin, it ended.

“You’d think a subsidiary of The Globe and Mail would have the funding to be accessible, but apparently not,” Wong-Ward sighs. “When you start pointing this out to the people who hire, you run up against people’s baggage. ‘Yes, I’m an equitable employer. Just because I don’t have a disabled member of staff doesn’t make me a bad person!’ Until we get over that guilt, we’re not going to move on this issue.”

We all know the drill. Entry-level journalism jobs are often grunt work, as Wong-Ward puts it: running upstairs to make copies, filing or chasing ambulances. “I know I’m not an ambulance chaser, but there has to be an equal playing field. Accommodation does not make you special or unique. Everyone needs accommodation. It means so many things. If you’re a single mom who has to go to daycare at five to pick up your kids, that’s an accommodation. If you’re an observant Jew, chances are you’re going to have to leave early on Fridays during the winter for sundown. Compromises are for everyone, and I am no different.”

Overall, unemployment is huge in the disabled community. The rate of unemployment of persons with disabilities was 43.7 per cent in 1991, according to Human Resources Development Canada. HRDC’s December 2002 report shows that disability employment rates slid even further. By 1996, 41 per cent of men with disabilities were employed, compared to 47 per cent in 1991. Thirty-two per cent of women with disabilities were employed in 1996, compared to 35 per cent in 1991. What’s more, the December report states that “the 1996 census found that persons with disabilities are only half as likely to be employed as those without disabilities.” Worse still, they are “at a disadvantage because of their disabilities: even with the same level of education, they are 20% less likely to be employed than those with no disability.”

Catherine Frazee, co-founder of the School of Disability Studies at Ryerson University and former chief commissioner of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, says that in the media, employers blaming school recruitment – and vice versa – is a circular path that has to end. She herself wanted to study journalism at Carleton University in the 1970s; the school’s underground tunnels made getting around ideal, and she had also received a scholarship when she applied. “When I was out seeking advice and direction, I arranged to meet with a member of the journalism faculty. Candidly she said, ‘So much of journalism involves getting to the scene. You’re going to be sent out on assignment to cover something and you’ve got to be there in 45 minutes. For someone with restricted mobility, I think this would be extremely difficult for you. If your primary interest is writing, why don’t you major in English.’ I was completely discouraged, and indeed, I did not pursue a degree in journalism. I did what she suggested.”

While the faculty member had some valid points, mainly they pertain to hard reporting for newspapers. In other areas of the profession, disabilities seem irrelevant, as Talia Maze says. Maze, currently a journalism student at Ryerson, has had a condition called short chain acid deficiency since birth, which results in general muscle weakness. She explains that she chose her field of study largely because of its practicality. “You can be a successful journalist without having to do much heavy-duty physical work. For the most part, it involves the mind more than the body. I have always enjoyed writing and can type as well as anybody else. Interviews can be done by phone when accessibility keeps me from getting to a person. Compared to other professions, journalism does not have many barriers to overcome.” Maze chose Ryerson because it was close to home and all the buildings have been accessible since the early ’90s.

Wong-Ward, who began journalism school at Ryerson in 1990, faced a more difficult situation. During her first two years, the journalism school building was not accessible. She would have to go to Jorgenson Hall, Ryerson’s main building, which had access, and phone her professors to come meet her for a cup of coffee. “How intimidating is that, especially in your first year? It was terrifying.” In her third year, the journalism school became accessible, and finally, in 1992, her final year, the Rogers Communications Centre was completed. “But I had to fight for automatic entry doors,” she adds. “My naïveté must have helped me – I never really contemplated if I couldn’t physically get into school, how was I ever going to get a job?”

…………………….

It’s 10 A.M. and Barbara Turnbull arrives at her desk at the Toronto Star. Her chair, controlled by her head motions, lets her enter the building and take the elevator to the newsroom floor and finally to her desk. As co-workers pass by, she asks one of them to aid her with putting on her telephone headset, hooking up her tape recorder and setting up a glass of water with a straw. Later, after she’s been assigned the stories she will research and write, she calls her sources. She uses a mouth stick that enables her to type, dial the phone, and press record on her modified recorder. Co-workers frequently ask her if she needs a refill of water – or anything at all. “No, it’s not in their job description,” she writes in her autobiography, “but I have never had any indication that anyone minds.”

Turnbull has been a quadriplegic since she was shot in a robbery in 1983. Her biggest career obstacle turned out to be applying to journalism school in the first place. In the ’80s, says Turnbull, there was less of an expectation that a disabled person would find an area of interest to study. “The focus was that if you’ve got anything wrong with you, anything different, whether mental, developmental or physical, you’re going to go into social work. I was pushed that way. I had to appeal to my insurance company to attend journalism school because, according to them, I had not shown an aptitude for it. Well, I hadn’t shown an aptitude for anything! But I guarantee if I had said social work I wouldn’t have had a hesitation, and I wouldn’t have had to appeal.” She won her appeal, and studied journalism at Arizona State University.

The most common concessions disabled students require are alternative tests. For students studying in Ontario, the Ontario Student Assistance Program offers a bursary for students with disabilities for funding of specific items, which could be anything from tutoring to specialized equipment. Similarly, at every major post-secondary school across Canada, accessibility issues are taken seriously and accommodations made.

Still, employment falls way short, and has even deteriorated, according to HRDC. No wonder that there’s little satisfaction with the 2001 Ontarians with Disabilities Act. It has no enforcement mechanism for any part of society, public or private sector, to mandate accommodation. It simply asks organizations to make a plan, but does not make them accountable for implementation. “They might as well have not passed anything,” says Turnbull.

And at the national level, there are no government policies that encompass both the private and public sector. In the United States, the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 enforces a civil rights guarantee for persons with disabilities in both the private and public sector. “If there were any other minority group in our society that had this rate of unemployment, there’d be rioting in the streets,” says David Onley. When he talks to a group, he likes to remind them that they are but one accident away from disability. And that, if for no other reason, is why we should care about these issues.

The common belief among disability advocates is that this is the new civil rights movement. “But it’s a catch-22,” says Wong-Ward. On one hand, it’s hard for the disabled community to be galvanized into organizing without having seen their issues covered properly in the media. On the other hand, the media may not pay attention to the issue because the community is not yelling loudly enough to be heard. Adding to that, Frazee says, “The medical paradigm is so strong, it takes a great deal of time and intellectual and political work to help people give up that idea that my problem is that I can’t walk. People need to understand the idea that my problem is built on the assumption that everybody can walk. The media just buys into that majority bias.”

…………………….

I meet Wong-Ward at her downtown condo, and her husband answers the door. As I take off my shoes, she welcomes me and quickly leads the way, steering her chair into the kitchen. Casually dressed in a black sweater and jeans, her black hair is chin-length, framing her face; dark lipstick accentuates her mouth. She’s forgiving of my tape recorder that won’t work, and she brings me a pad of paper to take notes, ripping out pages for me to use. Only rarely does she take her eyes off my pen or me. She allows time for my hand to catch up with her words. Her hands play with the pieces of ripped notepaper while we talk for three hours. Her frustration makes confetti out of the scraps of paper, and her voice often rises heatedly about the issues that affected her entire life.

While Wong-Ward is glad to be at the CBC, especially if it means that her perspective can add diversity toMetro Morning, she has no illusions that change will come quickly or easily. Her thoughts return to Christopher Reeve. “We all want Superman to walk again. We just don’t want to know about his everyday reality,” she says, looking me straight in the eye. “So how do you move the mindset?”

Saddam Hussein circles Lanny McDonald, preparing to spit venom at the retired hockey player. Twirling his moustache, McDonald stares the dictator down. The Iraqi leader and the hockey legend line up head-to-head in the cipher, preparing to face off in the final round of the battle of the moustaches. They bump mikes, declaring lyrical warfare.

Hussein drops the first verse:

I got you stuck off my moustache, I be the praised

Hussein

You heard the name

Officials certified me insane

Saddam come equipped for chem-warfare, beware

Of gases you can’t see but you’ll damn sure feel

tear

For all those, Iran to Kurdistan

Rock Mac tonight, Iraq ain’t no Playland

I’m all alone in the Mid-East, blastin’

Every tribe’s on its own in my land I be gassin’

Shaken by Hussein’s wounding words, McDonald retaliates with:

Yippy yappin’ ’bout oil politics, dodging the subject

of discussion

And I’m-a beatbox Iraq’s boss like vocal percussion

Fact is, my ‘stache is bigger, better, stronger ?

facial pube perfection

Problem is, this comp’s not rigged, this ain’t some

wacky Iraqi election

Hockey player hater,

You don’t even have the best mustachio for an evil

dictator

Can we say “Heil Hitler?”

Who’s the thickest spitter?

Hands-down whisker victor?

A former teammate of Darryl Sittler

So if you ain’t gonna drop bombs, kindly get off the

shitter!

The aftermath: “Lanny’s verse, the rap equivalent of shaving a man with a chainsaw, decimated Saddam’s hopes of victory. Even with the Devil behind Hussein, there was no denying the weapon of destruction that Mac’s verse represented.”

Who witnessed this war of words? The readers of Pound magazine. Such exchanges, real and imaginary, are what they’ve come to expect from the three-and-a-half-year-old hip-hop title: rhyme and politics rolled into one.

Hip-hop is to “playas” and “thugs,” what rock music was to hippies in the 1960s: the voice of a new generation. Popularized by stars like Eminem, this music has become an extension of pop culture. But for real aficionados, hip-hop goes beyond the beat: It’s a melding of diverse people and cultures that share a common social consciousness, and encompasses storytelling in rap and rhyme, b-boying (also known as break-dancing), deejaying and graffiti. It is these elements that give hip-hop its distinct identity.

It’s an identity that has finally found a stronghold in Canada. After more than a decade of lobbying with the CRTC for a broadcasting licence, Milestone Radio established the country’s first urban-format radio station with FLOW 93.5 FM, which hit Toronto airwaves in February 2001. Similar stations in Vancouver, Ottawa and Calgary soon followed.

“Urban radio has helped to bring hip-hop to the forefront. It’s paved the way for new artists for development. It’s made record labels wake up and say, ‘Hey, this is now,’ turning it into a very viable and profitable business,” says Wayne Williams, music director at FLOW. “Now that it’s getting the exposure on-air, a lot of businesses ? record labels, retail and clothing ? are starting to put money into the whole hip-hop scene. When you talk about hip-hop, you’re talking about an entire culture.”

To represent that culture, Pound was born. Established in 1999, the six-times-a-year magazine ? available for free at record stores, radio stations and other shops around Canada ? has built a loyal following of predominantly young urban males. The saddle-stitched glossy boasts a national circulation of 30,000 and a 100 per cent pick-up rate. While publisher Rodrigo Bascu??n is reluctant to pin down exact profits, he concedes: “Let’s just say that we are doing well.”

Much like hip-hop, Pound began underground. “It did start in a basement, but not this one,” says Bascu??n, who runs the publication from his parents’ home in the St. Clair Avenue West area of Toronto. It’s not the kind of “ghetto fabulous” area where you would imagine a hip-hop title would be based. There’s no graffiti on the buildings ? an art form in hip-hop culture. There are no hip-hop heads b-boying in the alleys. There are no ciphers on the street corners, featuring emcees battling in exchanges of rhyme. Instead, the neighbourhood is quiet and conservative.

But there’s nothing conservative about Bascu??n’s sense of mission for his music. The self-proclaimed hip-hop head spent six years working as a deejay at various Toronto nightclubs and on the campus radio station, CHRW, during his time at the University of Western Ontario, where he studied biology. But through those years, Bascu??n and his friends couldn’t find decent media coverage of their music anywhere.

They weren’t alone. “I’ve never found that newspapers spend a lot of time on pop culture,” says Julie Adam, program director at Toronto’s KISS 92.5 FM radio station. “They do a lot of classical music and jazz. They do a lot on the so-called intellectual music.” A search on music articles published in the Toronto Star during 2002 found 94 articles about classical music compared with 12 on hip-hop ? including a letter to the editor complaining about the newspaper’s poor coverage of the genre. Adam points out that newspapers are not hip-hop publications, but says it is surprising that the media are not covering a form of music that has become an important part of pop culture. “It’s the most popular music there is right now,” she says. “It’s huge.”

Matt Galloway, music writer at Now magazine, agrees that hip-hop is “stronger than ever before,” but notes that the media give it little attention. “Unless somebody major comes out, you don’t really get any coverage,” he says .

Phil Vassell, publisher of Word magazine, one of Canada’s 14 hip-hop titles, says the media is behind on popular trends. “The mainstream media in Canada have not kept pace with the U.S. mainstream media as far as hip-hop coverage is concerned. Come to think of it, it has been several years now since Lauryn Hill [the hip-hop artist who earned five Grammy Awards in 1999 ? the most ever by a female artist in one year] made the cover of Time,” says Vassell. “Young readers know their interests aren’t covered or taken seriously, so they go elsewhere.”

Bascu??n hopes that youths will turn to Pound, a name that characterizes the hip-hop lifestyle. “It’s like the salutation, to give someone a Pound,” says Bascu??n, demonstrating the greeting. “It’s also like ‘the musicPounds,'” he says. The “P” in the magazine’s logo holds a double meaning as well. It is the letter “P,” but its design also resembles a fist.

With fist and ambition in ample supply, the Pound group started from scratch. Bascu??n read about publishing, registered in a young entrepreneurs class and put together a pilot issue that he had copied in colour at a printing house. Approximately 500 copies were sent to prospective advertisers and investors. The trial issue generated a lot of interest, but little in the way of funding. Money was, in fact, the group’s biggest roadblock; they had tons of ideas to hustle, but no “bling” to finance their venture. Salvation came with the approval of a $12,500 credit line ? $7,500 in the form of a government loan and $5,000 in overdraft. ThePound staff contributed another $15,000 of their own. “I was just lucky that I went to schools with affluent kids,” says Bascu??n.

The first issue was published in December 1999 ? a 64-page book with only six pages of ads. That unhealthy ratio coupled with an overly ambitious distribution of 40,000 copies instantly thrust Pound into the red, with a $20,000 loss. “That’s a third of our debt for the whole three years we’ve been around,” says Bascu??n. “That put us right against the wall from the get-go.”

But success wasn’t far away. While handing out flyers promoting the Pound launch party, Bascu??n ran into Michael Evans, an acquaintance from Western. Intrigued by Bascu??n’s project, Evans offered to help. He had already started an advertising business with his father, specializing in the sale of new, innovative advertising. His experience served as a natural background for his foray into selling ads for the magazine. ByPound‘s eighth issue, Evans had helped the title turn a modest profit.

But it wasn’t easy. “A lot of people would say, ‘Why don’t you see me after you do three or four issues?'” says Evans. “I felt like saying, ‘Well, I need you now.'” Also tricky was explaining hip-hop to advertisers who knew the magazine fit their demographic, but didn’t understand why.

At one meeting with a panel of ad reps, Bascu??n and Evans watched in disbelief as one woman frowned and made rude gestures as she leafed through their publication. In her view, the magazine’s content was too negative to be associated with her product. “To write about police brutality and how it occurs, when it occurs and how important it is for us to address something like this ? you just can’t sweep something like that under the carpet,” says Evans. “But that’s negative in her eyes. To be honest, she might as well have said that there are too many black people in this magazine. That’s the feeling you got.”

It’s a feeling that’s shared by other members of the hip-hop community. “With the exception of a few writers at the dailies, I’d have to agree that the mainstream media’s coverage of hip-hop continues to be biased and based on sensationalism,” says Errol Nazareth, music writer at eye Weekly, and former music columnist atThe Toronto Sun. “I fought this every step of the way when I worked at the Sun. For every wire story about DMX getting busted for some dumb behaviour, I’d write a story about, say, hip-hop artists protesting police brutality or helping raise awareness about AIDS.”

Harris Rosen, publisher of Peace magazine, says that a lot of the prejudicial attitudes toward hip-hop are the result of mixed messages sent out by the community itself, from sexist images in music videos and in song lyrics. But there is more to the lifestyle, he says, than what is presented to the audience.

Besides contending with hip-hop’s shady reputation, as a music magazine, Pound is perhaps not taken seriously in the industry. “Magazines in the category tend to fall victim to boosterism and not a lot of critical coverage that I can see,” says Bill Shields, editor of Masthead, the magazine industry trade title. Certainly Bascu??n’s own interest in the genre smacks of the smitten and has been the driving force behind the magazine. “I think the main motivation was just caring about the culture and wanting to do it justice in another medium,” says Bascu??n.

That said, his approach is clearly working. After three years in the game, Pound is springboarding off its success into other ventures. In the next year, Bascu??n plans to produce a series of books based on the magazine’s regular political section, Babylon System. “The first book, Babylon System: Weapons, addresses the main weapons ? arms, media, food, education ? that are used to oppress people in the world,” says Bascu??n. “The second book, Babylon System: Tools, will teach readers how to combat these weapons.” The Pound posse also plans to setup an American version of the publication and are in the process of developing a new international general-interest magazine. Bascu??n hopes this new title will allow him to cover issues that don’t quite fit into his hip-hop magazine. Pound for pound, the Pound boys are “pushing weight.”

With the March 2003 issue, 2,000 copies of Pound hit New York City, and another 5,000 ? at $4.95 a piece ? appeared on Canadian newsstands, alongside larger American hip-hop titles like The Source, XXL and Vibe. The bulk of the circulation, however, still comes from shops that continue to offer the magazine for free.

Growth and change are not new to Pound. Shields has noticed the title’s improved production values. “The latest incarnation seems to be quite ritzy compared to what it was looking like two or three years ago,” he says. “They’ve increased the quality of their paper-stock, their trim size is a little larger, and they’re obviously investing more money in production.”

Others are more lavish in their praise. “For my money, Pound is doing the best job of covering hip-hop culture in Canada. The articles are well written, insightful and interesting,” says Nazareth. “The writing in the majority of hip-hop magazines ? here and in the U.S. ? reads like fan mail, and I am being kind when I say that. Either the publishers and writers do not have the courage to ask tough questions or the brains to offer something insightful, or they are scared to piss off their advertisers ? which include record companies ? that pump so much money into their magazines.”

Sitting in his basement office as a fax machine rattles off documents from advertisers, Bascu??n takes all the attention in stride. “Either everyone is full of it and kissing our asses, or they’re being honest,” he says. “I think they’re being honest, though.”

It’s a cold, mid-November night, but inside at Shift‘s annual “State of the Net” party, things are heating up. The scene: the vast open space of the Guvernment, a Toronto nightclub, where the thump, thump, thump of the bass is pounding so forcefully that it feels like a second heartbeat in your chest and where the strobe lights are flashing and fading so quickly that even a second set of eyes wouldn’t help you see the complete bodies of the disjointed dancers. Behind the DJ blasting techno, yellow liquid bubbles are floating up and down a glass wall while bright green laser beams are spiraling across the ceiling. Technology has infiltrated every corner of this event as the publication that until recently had a tagline of “Digital Culture Now”?a reference to the wired and wireless world of computers, VCRs, MP3s, the Internet and other high-tech innovations?celebrates its staff, freelancers, advertisers and readers.

On this evening, following more than 10 years of struggle, upheaval and red ink, Shift‘s latest owners?Toronto-based Multi-Vision Publishing Inc. (MVP)?must have felt they were turning a corner. The September/October 2002 issue, they had announced publicly, was the first under their two-year watch to actually turn a profit. This move toward a firmer financial footing, they added with the hype typical of commercial publishers, would give them the means to make a good editorial product even better. In turn, they suggested, that better product would attract new advertisers to appeal to the legions of smart, young, tech-savvy readers with cash to spend on the latest gadgets and gear from the labs of Silicon Valley and beyond.

Skeptics weren’t so sure. They were fond of pointing out that for much of its history Shift had been reaching out to those same readers and, so far, had never found enough of them to sustain a viable business. The reason? Well, it depended on whom you asked. Critics, such as Robert Fulford, argued that digital culture had no meaning. Nor was it a subject, he believed, that many people wanted to read about. As he wrote inToronto Life back in 1999: “But what do they mean? Is there a metaphorical place called ?digital culture,’ and can we?do we?live there?” What’s more, he also noted that the digital age had done no more to warrant being talked about as a cultural revolution on glossy pages than the automobile revolution had.

Devoted Shift supporters, though, felt Fulford was an old fogy who just didn’t get it. They maintained that a magazine that documented the development of new digital devices and discussed their societal implications would have a significant, stable readership if only Shift hadn’t gone through such ownership chaos. And now, thanks to MVP, the turnaround was beginning to happen. The new issue was flush with lifestyle ads from such corporate giants as Adobe, Players and Nikon. There was a new editorial mix, one that, yes, did cut back on the skepticism and analysis that characterized the previous incarnation of Shift. But if giving a greater emphasis to service, lifestyle, lists and product reviews kept the magazine alive, well then, wasn’t that an acceptable trade-off?

Inside the Guvernment the thump, thump, thump of the driving techno-beat is reverberating so intensely that few people in the crowd of 2,700 or so hip and trendy 20- to 30-somethings are talking to one another?curious behaviour for people associated with a magazine that has always been about communication. Instead, they are bunched shoulder to shoulder, swaying to the music, happy to be hanging out with others who have a bond with this seemingly indefatigable publication, one that two weeks before this celebration would be described by co-founder Mark Hyland this way: “Shift has changed along with the times, which I think any good magazine does. The nature of Shift has this built-in process of renewal?it’s basically looking for new stuff, what’s happening, and changes accordingly.”

But the story of Shift‘s 10-year-and-a-bit existence also included looking for new funding, which the magazine against all odds managed to do time and time again. Or at least it did until, to the shock of Shift loyalists, MVP unexpectedly pulled the plug in mid-February and the only thump, thump, thump on that day was the sound of hearts just before they broke.

The first Shift:

A literary publication with a first print run of 800 at $3.95 a copy

The origins of Shift can be traced to Montreal pubs along Rue St. Laurent, where two young friends, Andrew Heintzman, age 24, and Evan Solomon, age 23, started talking about the creation of a magazine that spoke to their generation. The result? A literary publication?both were McGill University English grads (Solomon also majored in religious studies)?that featured interviews with Canadian authors such as Doug Cooper and Daniel Richler, while the rest of the black-and-white magazine was filled with original fiction written by Heintzman, Solomon and other young, previously unpublished authors. Funded by the $800 the two co-founders had borrowed from their parents, the magazine, says Heintzman, was “for us and the people we know. And fiction was what we were getting at the time, so fiction’s what it became.”

That first issue, all 800 copies of it, was put together in the summer of 1992 in the basement of Heintzman’s parents’ house in Toronto and printed at a commercial printer for around $1,000. “We had no idea how to start a magazine, run a magazine, manage circulation. All we had was the passion to tell a story,” says Solomon. Undaunted, they started knocking on retailers’ doors, looking for ad support. The “are you crazy?” stare and turndown they got at Cantel, a cell-phone service, was a typical reaction.

More encouraging was the media attention the pair got when they announced in Toronto that Shift was going to “kick in the teeth of the literary establishment and not publish anyone over the age of 35.” Immediately afterShift launched, it appeared on the cover of the Globe’s Arts section and the two founders were lauded as bold, young entrepreneurs. Heintzman and Solomon were even interviewed on CBC Radio’s Morningside by Ralph Benmergui.

Helping the co-founders get the fledgling publication off the ground was 25-year-old Hyland, who was a high school friend and band buddy of Heintzman’s and whose mother, Barbara, was publisher of The Financial Times of Canada. He brought much-needed computer skills to the team along with his Mac and access to a laser printer. “The timing was just kind of neat,” says Hyland. “The desktop publishing was at an early- enough stage. You didn’t need an expert.” Hyland had done research and writing for the Globe and had started up his own one-man consulting company. His office at Yonge and King streets would become Shift‘s first commercial home. In fact, it would also help finance their next home after one of the corporate neighbours tried to kick the Shift boys out. They fought the illegal eviction, winning a substantial payment to vacate their office.
It was Hyland, with his knowledge of desktop publishing, databases and graphics, who would bring the digital world into the pages of the magazine. In Shift‘s second issue, along with more short fiction and interviews with Michael Ondaatje and Douglas Copeland, Hyland wrote an opinion piece on censorship in response to a story about University of Toronto computers being used to transmit porn. That piece gave birth to a little section in the magazine called Mediascape.
Solomon freely admits, “We used our ignorance and poverty because we had nothing.” And they didn’t shy away from soliciting the support of people like John Fraser, then the editor of Saturday Night. They put a proposition to him: if they could manage to publish four issues of Shift, then he would agree to take an ad in their magazine for Saturday Night. They did and a pleasantly surprised Fraser was out $500. “They grew on spin more than results, but they had their finger on something,” says Fraser.

Over the next two years, Shift started delving deeper into the effects of the Internet and computers. The founders also started to think seriously about how to profitably fund the venture on a consistent basis. At the time the magazine was operating on a shoestring and surviving on the little money it received from grants, subscriptions, ads and newsstand sales, and through admission at Shift parties, where everyone was given the latest issue.

The second Shift:

Becoming wired?and a bit more business savvy

By 1994, Solomon had returned from freelancing in Hong Kong and Heintzman had left his job as operations manager at Burchell Publishing to work for Shift full time. Cultural, political and technological issues were taking over more pages in the magazine, which was now calling itself the publication of “New Media and Culture.” Typical features of the period included a special swimsuit edition, which featured Canadian writers and artists in beachwear, and witty interviews with such authors as Douglas Copeland and Camille Paglia.

By this point circulation stood at around 3,500, and copies still cost $3.95 for a 56-page magazine that was printed with spot colour. Advertisers were starting to see that Shift could be a good vehicle for reaching a younger audience. Among those that paid for full-page ads were Molson and GM.

It was during this period that Shift launched one of the first magazine Websites in Canada. Before most people had personal e-mail addresses, Hyland was using volunteered server space at York University and had finally found others to e-mail besides his one friend with the technology to reply. At a Macworld conference, Hyland accidentally stumbled upon the launch of Wired magazine, a U.S. publication that attracted plenty of notice for its unconventional art direction and its coverage of high-tech advances and their effect on people and institutions?in effect, an entrepreneurial model for what Shift would strive to become. Since both publications had their own Websites, Hyland conducted an on-line interview with Wired’s founding editor, Louis Rossetto, and both exchanged office tours and beers in subsequent face-time meetings. When Hyland and company saw the advertising banners on hotwired.com, they thought: “That doesn’t look too hard. We have computers, we have scanners, we can do those banners in two seconds.”
But exposing this new medium to advertisers meant that Hyland (by now company president) and Heinzman (the publisher) had to haul their Mac laptop and a monitor to agencies to show them how the Internet worked. “I think most were pretty intrigued by what we were showing them because the Web was very new then. Not everyone got it, but many did,” says Hyland. They had some success, managing to get four advertisers, among them Molson and Nestl?, at $1,000 per month each. However, most advertisers didn’t renew their contracts, calculating that their ad dollars would be more effective where there were more eyeballs than the Internet was attracting. Still, Shift was using new technology to generate revenue from advertising, which helped Hyland and his partners to sell themselves to some still-skeptical agencies as “the next big thing.”
Their efforts worked some of the time. Shift was progressing slowly. “To psyche ourselves up, we had to remind ourselves: owning your own company is a great feeling,” says Hyland. “You’re the captain of your own ship, even if your boat is a leaking rowboat. You can still call yourself the captain, you can still choose where you want your boat to go.”

As they were becoming more sophisticated editorially, the Shift captains were also getting a crash course in how to develop a proper business plan and how to properly sell their product to ad agencies and their clients. Now they were listening to industry insiders like Kerry Mitchell, then vice-president of Where Magazines International at Toronto’s Key Publishers, who acted as a catalyst for the magazine’s principals, doing mock interviews and helping to map out strategies and business plans. “I answered questions they had and offered guidance,” Mitchell recalls of that time “At the end of the process they were talking in a language that media consultants could understand.”

The third Shift:

Even more wired?and with a big-time corporate partner, but only for a short time
The trio learned their lessons well. By September 1995 they had convinced Maclean Hunter Publishing to purchase 10 per cent of Shift for around $100,000, giving the magazine some much needed funding. MH also provided subscription-services support, since part of the plan was to boost circulation. “John Tory at MH was a corporate boss who gave us lots of his time. He never made us feel like interlopers in the culture,” says Solomon. By this time, the literary and fiction content had long been muscled out by ever-increasing amounts of coverage given to media and culture. And when there were literary figures, like Salman Rushdie, they were more likely to be talking about media and the Internet. More common were articles like MuchMusic VJ Sook-Yin Lee on how she would save music TV.

One issue during this period caught the attention of broadcaster Patrick Watson, best known for his role as co-host of the contentious public affairs program This Hour Has Seven Days that aired on CBC-TV in the 1960s. In a letter to Solomon (who took the title editor about a year and a half after Shift‘s inception), Watson started off by saying he admired the magazine before this particular issue. He also stated that he had been looking forward to reading the new issue, which featured a “Media Hit List” and actress Jennifer Aniston on the cover?on a plane ride to Toronto. But when he opened the issue, wrote Watson, he discovered he had misjudged the magazine. The broadcaster then went on to list all the problems with the publication, including that it was shallow, derivative and didn’t contribute anything positive to the public. Solomon was ready to write a poisonous reply to the tune of “screw you,” but realized that Watson was right; he was wrong.

“Learning was a pleasurable discomfort and we needed that,” says Solomon. “We had to do something that made a difference to the public good?we had to find a point of view and that takes work.” In a grown-up moment, Solomon decided that instead of sassy, ironic and snooty, the magazine was going to try harder to be original and a lot less cynical.
As part of its agreement with MH, print runs were increased from 3,500 to 12,000 to 16,000. Slowly, ad revenues increased from less than $1,500 to $15,000 per issue. Still, they made serious stabs at keeping expenses low. One way they did so was to do their own postal carrier presort. After they had gummed up their only printer with sticky labels, Solomon, Heintzman and Hyland would line the floor of the office with magazines to be mailed?late at night so they had enough room. Their back-breaking work saved them a minimal sum, but every dollar counted.
Efforts like this weren’t enough. Shift was still losing money, though by now it had established itself as a brand name that had some value as a way of reaching a young, prosperous demographic group. So even though Tory was reluctant to give up the publication a year after MH bought in, his corporate bosses felt otherwise when a Montreal-based company came knocking with an offer to buy Shift outright.

The fourth Shift:

Still wired?but one big-time corporate partner is replaced by another

BHVR Communications Inc., part of the Behaviour multimedia company, bought Shift for a rumoured price of $1 million. It had big plans for the magazine. With a hefty budget of $10 million, it planned to launch Shift in the U.S. and compete directly with, among others, Wired. Solomon, Hyland and Heintzman thought they had found their saviour and, with that, Hyland left to become associate publisher of the Canadian edition of TV Guide Magazine.

Montreal businessman Richard Szalwinski, who owned BHVR, had made millions in the computer software industry. Now he wanted to try his luck in media. Although Szalwinski was new to publishing, he knew what he wanted: a North American magazine with its own television and Web components and a name to leverage into retail. Shift appealed to him because it had an established brand name plus a Website, a TV presence (for CBC Newsworld it produced Shift Media Minutes) and plans for a radio station. Freelance writer Felix Vikhman, then a Shift editorial assistant, remembers the excitement: “Evan said there were big changes in the midst and we were about to experience a ShiftShift of Shift-like proportions.”

BHVR’s first move: stopping publication after the August 1996 issue for four months in order to prepare for a relaunch. In that period, the number of staff increased from eight to 15 and, over time, to 25 and more. The office was relocated to more spacious quarters at the corner of Spadina and Adelaide. The numbers of copies published was increased to 90,000 (10,000 for newsstands, 10,000 for subscribers, 55,000 for controlled circulation in urban weeklies such as Vancouver’s Georgia Straight and Toronto’s NOW, and 15,000 for trade shows and postal walks in chosen neighbourhoods).

The first BHVR issue featured Alanis Morrisette on the cover and, for the first time, the bent arrow logo of the “Shift” key appeared. Amidst pop culture references and celebrity covers, Shift was also publishing stories that contemplated the online needs in Third World countries. The Dalai Lama even graced one cover. “Evan’s regular disposition is a 14-year-old boy, excited by the world?excited to be alive and see the world unfold around him. At its best, that’s what Shift was,” says Vikhman.

The fifth Shift:

The old editor leaves, a new one arrives, and the magazine goes south, literally and financially
In the late summer of 1998, with the magazine financially stable for the moment, Solomon left on a book tour for his first novel, Crossing the Distance. But that wasn’t the only reason for his departure. It was very hard to work for Shift, he says, when he no longer owned it. Replacing him was Laas Turnbull, who had worked as a senior editor at Toronto Life and Report on Business Magazine. Turnbull, known in the industry for his packaging skills, gave the magazine its “For Living in Digital Culture” tagline, a measure designed to help focus the editorial and to signal to the reader what the magazine was all about?a culture being redefined by technology.
“I don’t even think anyone had even heard the term ?digital culture’ back then, and now everyone uses that phrase,” says former Shift editor-at-large Clive Thompson.

In anticipation of the November 1999 U.S. launch, the magazine set up Heintzman in an office in midtown Manhattan (most of the staff, however, stayed in Toronto). But even then, signs of what would grow into a huge schism between visions were visible. Both Szalwinski and Heintzman thought Shift would succeed internationally, but made the move for different reasons. Szalwinski was in search of a potentially huge payoff from a hot brand in the richest consumer market in the world, while Shift staff held the idea that digital culture was an international phenomenon and that it had more potential as an international magazine.

With a print run of 210,000, Shift did manage to attract attention. Though placement on newsstands was poor, Shift was able to grab the media’s interest, including four write-ups in the New York Post. Perhaps most encouraging was the jump in traffic to Shift.com?from one to five million users in just four months.

It seemed, for a time, that Shift could compete with the likes of Spin and Wired. After all, the dot.com boom was sweeping the planet. Surely there was a place for several magazines to grow and prosper in a world that had undergone a revolution?

Maybe there was, but Shift wasn’t going to be one of them despite winning design and editorial awards and praise for an editorial product that was “swimming upstream in the hype of a new marketplace, not praising it,” says Thompson. Indeed, it was one of the few publications at the time to question the social impact of technology, giving rise to stories like “Why Your Fabulous Job Sucks” and asking questions like “What Happened to the Future We Imagined?”
On the business side, Szalwinski’s idea was to build not just one, but three strong brands ?Vice (for those aged 16 to 18), Shift (for a demographic aged 18 to 34) and another publication for an older generation. Each brand, of course, would have a magazine, TV, retail outlet and
Web presence.

By 1999, Szalwinski had poured $30 million into his ill-fated venture. And about all he had got in return were lawsuits, losses and loathing from many quarters, including the editorial side of Shift. One internal critic, online producer Barnaby Marshall, was fired for opposing the notion of branding Shift through e-commerce. Clive Thompson cheekily suggested that the entire staff resign and then get rehired by Time Warner, which had been interested in buying
the magazine before talks went sour with Szalwinski. “We were just beginning to make a little headway as an editorial production and, basically, we did not only not have a brand to leverage into retail, but if we went into retail, we’d be undercutting whatever brand we’d already established as being a good editorial voice,” says Vikhman.

“Basically, what got lost over the years was the original notion Andy and Evan had of a literary generational voice. Instead, it became fascinated by product,” says Daniel Richler, who had been interviewed for Shift‘s first issue.

Shift was mired in debt once again and the search began for a new saviour back home in Canada. When asked to comment on the tumultuous period, Turnbull, who is now the editor of ROB Magazine and who was the target of several media attacks for his performance as editor, chose to remain silent. “Unfortunately,” he explained, “I’m not prepared to talk about the past.”

The sixth Shift:

In limbo and searching for another saviour

The magazine went into receivership and the staff, as they were clearing out their personal belongings from their about-to-be-vacated Toronto quarters, were watched over by heavy-set men in suits who were making sure that no one stole anything. Still, the incredible devotion of those who either worked for or supported Shiftin other ways did not dissipate. In fact, many of them worked collectively to buy the magazine back for $1 plus the debt in the summer of 2000, and took a 35 per cent pay cut while publishing without BHVR.

“It was inspiring to see such staff spirit, this group of people banding together and willing to save something they believed in?something I didn’t think people were capable of anymore,” says then-office manager Marijke de Looze.

Heintzman, who had left the magazine to pursue a career at Key Publishers, returned to try to find a buyer while Shift ceased publication for the next few months, but still managed to print a November-December double issue as a volunteer effort from the staff.

Impressed by this kind of commitment of the staff and?probably far more importantly, recognizing that theShift brand still had value?Multi-Vision Publishing bought the publication and helped pay off outstanding debts. With rigorous cost controls, said MVP President Greg MacNeil, “The idea was to breathe financial life back into it, to fight another day.”

The seventh Shift:
Still wired?but a disciplined focus on the bottom line. Still skeptical, too?but not as much as before

Under MVP’s plan, the magazine would only publish six times a year. Circulation would be 70,000?9,000 paid and 61,000 controlled-circulation copies (still through alt-weeklies like NOW, Georgia Straight and Hour). Among the big-name advertisers that had signed up: Subaru and Compaq.

New Shift editor-in-chief Neil Morton described the publication this way: “It is applied to a different world now than it was in the euphoric, hype-driven tech days of ’98, ’99, 2000. The tech bubble has burst (and with it much of the hype), the economy hasn’t been the greatest, 9/11 happened, terrorist threats are a day-to-day reality, the environment continues to take a beating, war is on the horizon, but we still try to have as much fun as possible.”

Morton knew from fun. He used to be editor of Pursuit, the lifestyle cigarette loyalty magazine that MVP also publishes. His new tagline was fun?”Canada’s Technology and Entertainment Magazine.” So were many of his features?such as, in the November 2002 edition, “75 People, Places, Things That Will Make You Happy,” a look at people creating and innovating in new media.

But he had a serious side, too, as seen by such features as “Why Technology Is Failing Us (and How We Can Fix It)” and “Culture Where Art Thou?” Both articles took sober looks at the implications of technology upon society and offered the skepticism that most other tech magazines didn’t. “Shift had recognized the digital culture ripples were affecting a wider outlet and the magazine is edging toward it,” said former Shiftwriter John Turner. But he also added that the magazine was missing the cultural importance it once had.

During MVP’s ownership, there had been successes. There were glossy ads, magazine awards, such as the two Chris Turner’s story “Why Technology Is Failing Us” won in 2002, a kudo from co-founder Heintzman (it’s “not far from where we were when we started”) and a brand that still had value (Shift, said Eric Kuiper of the Media Company, was one of the few good publications that cater to the 18-34 year-old market).

But, as Masthead editor William Shields pointed out: “Neil has taken a much more hard digital focus than general-interest digital culture, but the problem is that if it has room to grow, why isn’t it?”

Last Shift?

Just three months after that November night at the Guvernment, an unexpected thumping took place. On Tuesday, February 18?one day before a splashy party for Saturday Night, another MVP turnaround project, was scheduled?it was announced that the board of directors of St. Joseph Media, which controls MVP, had decided to suspend publication of Shift.

Why? According to MacNeil it was because MVP had lost $750,000 on Shift?not to mention the $10 million the magazine had lost over the previous eight years?and simply could not take any more losses without a turnaround in the technology sector, which seems to be nowhere in sight. “We knew the technology sector was soft and it hasn’t come back, and it’s hard to do a niche magazine without the driver of the niche being present,” says MacNeil.

With only so much to invest, funds that would have been put toward Shift will be used for three new projects, including the growth of Fashion18 magazine. MacNeil also pointed out that his company had come on board to keep the publication alive two years and two months longer than anyone else in the country had been prepared to.

It was a sad day for Shift‘s eight staffers when Morton called them into his office for what they thought was to be a production meeting. But rather than a rundown of what was happening with various stories, they realized something was wrong when Morton grabbed de Looze’s papers out of her hands, and associate publisher Kevin Siu broke the news.

Morton was one of the many devoted Shifters who hadn’t seen the blow coming. He’d already had his budget for the next year approved and had mapped out future issues when he was told, the night before the official announcement, that his magazine would be shut down, taking his job with it. “We’d met our revenue ad budget in the first issue this year, which was great, but based on the past couple of years and based on the market right now, we still stood to lose more this year. Even if we had a reasonably good year, we’d still lose a couple hundred grand,” says Morton, who admits to feeling sick to his stomach when he first heard the news and, later that night, to throwing up.

The day after they got the word, the staff looked out over their candy-coloured Mac lap-tops and into their uncharacteristically quiet office. They all had sad eyes and shocked faces. De Looze, who marked the occasion by dressing all in black, remembered that she had felt the same pain following the BHVR debacle. “We were really starting to emerge as a strong cultural voice and now our vocal cords have been severed,” she said.

But maybe not forever. With the Shift Website still in existence, the magazine is still breathing. “I’m surprised, but not totally shocked, by MVP’s decision,” said co-founder Heintzman on the day after the announcement. “Though it wouldn’t surprise me if Shift continued in another shape or form.”

Robert Reid has seen the advertorial battle from the front lines of his own newsroom. As a reporter and union chair for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Reid remembers when the advertising department tried to introduce advertorial production into the newsroom back in 1989, just as staff were about to ratify their first union contract. At other newspapers, advertorials were increasingly common, but not at The Record. “There was consensus in this newsroom that we were getting into murky waters,” Reid remembers. “If you’re covering the news and find yourself writing paid advertisements, the line between news and paid advertising is blurred. Reporters, editors and photographers-we all thought that it compromised our ability to cover news and deal with the contacts on our given beats.”

The newsroom was afraid of losing reader trust. “If you see a reporter’s byline on copy that is not generated on its news merit, but is assigned as an advertising initiative, readers could believe, because they recognize the byline, that this is news,” Reid says. If forced to produce advertorials, Record staffers wanted bylines and photo credits pulled from the pieces, along with those attached to any legitimate editorial work published on the same day. In the end, Record brass solved the problem as many other Canadian papers did, by assigning advertorial duties to the advertising department, not the newsroom. Advertising and editorial stayed separate, but it took a union contract to keep the wall intact.

These days, reporters are generally exempt from having to write advertorial copy, but that hasn’t stopped the ad format from steadily encroaching on the pages of Canadian dailies.

Newspapers depend on advertising dollars to help cover the cost of delivering the news-subscriptions amount to just 24 per cent of any newspaper’s revenue. But papers must do better than break even-more advertising means more profit, and more profit keeps fickle shareholders happy. To win coveted advertising dollars, papers provide all manner of ways to promote a client’s message. Old standbys are display advertisements or run-of-paper (ROP), classifieds, inserts and flyers; more recent marketing innovations include belly bands, sticky notes and printed poly bags.

But there is another species of niche advertising that stealthily inhabits the pages of the paper. Though they’ve always been around in one form or another, advertorials have been appearing in increasing numbers of Canadian newspapers since the beginning of the 1980s. Disguised in the skin of an editorial article, advertorials are “added-value advertising,” encouraging the reader to take a closer look at the product or cause promoted by the advertiser by providing something extra to read.

When advertorials look so much like the real news, it can be tough to tell the ad from the Ed. Marketing reps rejoice, but reporters fret about integrity. The supplements can mean big money for newspapers, but at what cost to credibility?

Advertorial finds its way into the paper in many guises-as a single ad, a full-fledged article or a stand-alone section. Sometimes a single advertiser will sponsor a section, then sell ad space within to other advertisers with a common interest. The unifying factor is a soft tone and a layout designed to look just like the regular news. Content may come from editorial staff, from freelancers hired by a paper’s marketing department or from an outside source hired by the advertiser to design and write inserts. Fall and spring are the busiest seasons, with trade expos and nonprofit funding campaigns in full swing for typical advertorial clients like drug companies, hospitals and charities, various levels of government and business interest groups.

Newspapers print advertorials not to inform the public or carry out a democratic duty, but to make money, plain and simple. Though ROP advertising is more profitable than advertorials, the lousy economic climate of the last two years has forced the dailies to scrounge for new advertising clients. Comparatively cheap advertorial rates allow papers like the National Post to court unusual advertisers and reap the profits. At thePost, a six-page advertorial supplement like “Weld Expo Canada,” sponsored by the Canadian Welding Association, brings in about $96,000-a paltry sum compared to the $315,858 six ROP ad pages would have earned-but the CWA isn’t a likely ROP client. Newspapers risk the ire of their newsrooms because even small advertorial contracts are worth the effort.

The price of newspaper advertorials differs from paper to paper, depending on certain variables, such as the number of pages in the section and the use of colour. Saturdays are often the most expensive day to run an advertorial and the wider the circulation area (from local to multimarket or national distribution), the higher the price, and the higher the paper’s profits.

Toronto Star‘s special section administrator, Mary Tezak, estimates that a 24-page, full-colour multimarket advertorial would garner about $340,000. Advertorials alone bring in millions of dollars annually to the Star‘s advertising department. “We’re using more and more Mass Impacts (see sidebar) these days,” Tezak says.

Many advertorials run as stand-alone sections, although Globe and Mail advertisers have the added option of buying feature pages in the interior of most editorial sections. The average advertorial feature earns theGlobe between $18,000 and $145,000. For stand-alone sections like Special Interest or Partnership Marketing Supplements, the Globe charges between $74,000 (for a six-page Metro edition) and $253,000 (for a 20-page National edition).

The sections are definitely profitable, and most reporters don’t fault the dailies for trying to make money to support their untainted reporting. What reporters do mind is the often-lax labeling of advertorial sections designed to look like editorial product. While most papers have policies about differentiating advertising, including rules about layouts and fonts, an informal survey of several month’s worth of advertorials showed that there was little consistency in the application of those rules.

As the special reports editor at the National Post, Dean Cummer is the only editor in his newsroom, and one of few in the country, to deal with advertising directly. Cummer’s department produces 40 to 50 Joint Venture sections each year, designing the sections in-house and farming the writing out to freelancers, but it wasn’t always so. Post advertorials were once the sole domain of the advertising department, but when a copyediting slip-up plastered an 80-point headline about Canada’s “Navel” forces across the top of Joint Venture supplement, advertorials were handed off to Post staffers with real editing experience. Post strategy, Cummer says, goes like this: “Client X, you want to be in the newspaper. You want some type of advertorial-type stuff written. We can do a fantastic job for you, and do it in a professional way so it doesn’t look like the dog’s breakfast. You’ll be proud of it. We’ll be proud of it.”

The Post tries to produce advertorial copy that “is both credible and stylistically consistent with the rest of the newspaper.” Guidelines stipulate that the advertising client gets to see the section before it is published for fact-checking and proofreading purposes. Even so, Cummer says that it can be tough to keep advertorial clients from meddling with the piece. “Everyone wants to be an editor, everyone wants to be a publisher, everyone wants to be a photographer.”

While the Post harbours them in the newsroom, the Star keeps advertorials out of the building altogether, contracting the work out to a former Star employee who finds freelancers, edits the copy, lays the section out and sends it to press. The Globe and Mail is somewhere in the middle. There, the ad department designs the advertorials and contracts out the writing to freelancers.

Advertorial writing is usually assigned on a freelance basis. For many writers, it can be a plush gig in an industry that has paid about $1 per word for journalism content for more than 20 years.

Toronto writer Leslie Smith, who is also the president of the Toronto chapter of the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), is one reporter lured by the promise of relatively easy money. “I have no shame. I call myself a media slut ? I will write anything for money,” she jokes. “It’s not the most prestigious job in the world, but it pays bills, and that’s important when you’re a freelancer.” For the past 20 years, the former Globe columnist has ghostwritten a 450-word advertorial column for a Toronto men’s clothier. “Korry’s Comments” appears twice-monthly in the National Post. Smith relies on a kind of personal shorthand with her client, plus two decades of experience writing about men’s fashion, to make the work go faster. “I’ve been doing it for so long, I can just toss ’em off in about an hour,” she says. “I’m getting very good pay for an hour’s work.”

PWAC’s general rate guidelines for freelance advertorial writers recommend 40 cents to $2 per word. While an editorial newspaper feature earns only 35 to 50 cents per word (about $1,000 per feature), the Post pays between $2,000 and $2,500 for a feature-length advertorial piece. “Magazine writing pays a buck a word,” Cummer says. “But magazine articles take a heck of a lot more work to do. It could take weeks, even months, to write. When you’re calculating how much you’re making per hour, it’s peanuts. With an advertorial, you’ve been given the contacts, you’ve been told what to write about-everything is laid out for you. A good freelancer can finish in two days. Twenty-five hundred dollars for two days work -it’s pretty damn good.”

And even better, no one will know who wrote the piece because most advertorial articles don’t run with bylines. “We’ve got some very good freelancers,” Cummer says. “We respect that they don’t want to have their byline on there. This isn’t Pulitzer Prize-winning material. Really, I don’t think readers care about by-lines; it’s more for the integrity of the writer.”

Smith knows that some journalists look down on advertorial writers. “It’s not a prestige thing because it’s sales as opposed to journalism,” she says. “You can hold your nose at it, but a lot of journalists do it on the sly.” Smith says that no matter what the project, all writers are selling a story. “When you write a story, you are saying to the reader, You want to read this. This is going to make a difference to you.’ And that’s what good advertorial does.”

Ellen Cohen loves advertorials. After 30 years in the newspaper advertising business, the Globe‘s director of advertising sales is not the least bit defensive about the sections. She says she often saves advertorials that interest her, like “Women’s Health,” stashing it on the coffee table in her den so she can read it thoroughly when she gets home from work. Cohen believes that the editorial department loves advertorials, too. “I believe it lets them focus on what they need to focus on. The rules are laid out, keeping church and state-editorial and advertising-very clear. It’s healthy and it adds content,” she says.

Cohen is wrong about the editorial attitude to her department’s special sections, but she can be forgiven for misreading her colleagues’ feelings on the touchy subject. Though many editors and reporters willingly admit that they hate the sections-“They cheapen us all,” one editor grouses-they were reluctant to go on the record for this article. “I would rather not be associated with any negative comments about them, because I don’t want to lose my job,” another editor warned.

Jennifer Wells, a former Globe reporter, now a business columnist for the Star, sees advertorials as a credibility issue. “At the Globe, we had to fight to ensure that ‘advertorial’ be stamped on every page,” she says. “There is a line between what is paid for and what is editorially pure.”

The Toronto Star recognized that line long ago, but it didn’t make advertorials more popular around the newsroom. Even before the paper began contracting out advertorial production, Star reporters weren’t expected to write advertorials. There was a special group in the advertising department who wrote nothing but. Advertorial writers were shunned by the editorial team, recalls Star ad staffer Mary Tezak. “It was like, ‘Those are the people that have no editorial integrity. They just go on lunches with those clients that advertising sets up.'”

At many papers, union contracts clearly outline policies about newsroom participation in advertorial production. Reporters who don’t want to write are often protected by newsroom collective agreements. At theGlobe, the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada contract says that the writing and editing of advertising copy is not the duty of the editorial team. The Halifax Chronicle-Herald forbids any editorial employee to write, take photographs or edit/lay out advertising product. Other papers allow editorial staff to do advertorial work, but only on a voluntary basis and at freelance rates.

In 1989, the Star staff worried that advertorials would confuse readers and damage the paper’s integrity. While they managed to negotiate a contract that protected the newsroom from advertorial encroachment, their worries reverberate still in newsrooms across the country. Readers depend on newspapers for all kinds of information: on advertisements for consumer information so they know where to buy a car or when to see a movie and on a paper’s editorial content for news and information critical to their democratic rights. So what happens when advertising looks like the news?

Some readers get confused, that’s what happens. The Star‘s Mary Tezak says public responses to advertorials are often addressed to the newsroom instead of the ad department. “I think it’s perception that the Star wrote it,” she says. “But we didn’t write anything. It’s advertising.”

“We’re not trying to fool anybody,” says Dean Cummer. “The only thing we’ve got from the National Post is the little tiny logo in the corner. But even though we’ve made this look different from the paper, it’s still remarkable how readers mix it up.”

In the past six years, Advertising Standards Canada has received fewer than five complaints about advertorial deception. What does that say about readers? That they don’t notice the difference? Or they don’t care?

Don Sellar, the Star‘s ombudsman, thinks that readers care. After reader complaints and a few nudges from newsroom staff, Sellar took his own paper to task over an energy deregulation supplement funded by the provincial government. His editorial essay deemed the supplement “cheery, feel-good stuff” dreamed up by “government publicity factories.” But Sellar’s main objection was the section’s label, not the content. “I don’t have a problem with blatant propaganda if it’s properly labelled,” he says. “I just want it made clear who is responsible for the message. The Star gives you the name of the publisher on the editorial page-who is the publisher of this insert? When something is not labelled clearly, readers can be confused.” When advertorials fool readers, he says, “It’s bad for credibility. Readers might think that’s the Star‘s position on deregulation and privatization, and it’s not.” Still, Sellar thinks the Star can ethically continue to run advertorials. “You are leasing the presses to somebody, but something has to pay for the journalism.”

Toronto newspaper marketing consultant Len Kubas doesn’t see advertorials going away anytime soon. “Many editors and reporters believe that anything that smacks of commercialism is the work of the devil and should never be seen in newspapers in the guise of editorial,” he says. “I’m more tolerant of it than editors. I think that newspapers are going to have to start expanding the definition of what constitutes news. I’m leery of blatant puff pieces written at the request of an advertiser, but stories about merchants are not necessarily bad journalism. It would be terrible to have a “New Homes” section with no editorial in it. It’s just a trade-off that is made in a newspaper, where the editorial people don’t have the resources or the inclination to write about new home development, so they leave it to the advertising. They close their eyes and say, we didn’t write that.”

It’s near midnight in October on Bloor west near Keele in Toronto’s west end. All is quiet except for whirring winds and the thunder of late-night transports, but the neighbourhood coffee shop-reminiscent of a garage-turned-game show set-is still open for business. Under the pulsating glow of the flashing bulbs bordering the Galaxy Donuts sign, a man sits alone at a pressure-treated picnic table, hunched over in a green windbreaker and faded jeans. Gaunt and pale, he writes, longhand, on yellow foolscap, pausing only to draw on a cigarette or sip coffee. “Writing is isolating,” the man says. Which is why David Olive, regarded by many as Canada’s foremost business journalist, writes mostly in public.

Olive’s daily work route begins at Golden Embers restaurant, just up the street, where he chews on six morning papers (The Globe and Mail, National Post, Toronto Star, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and Financial Times of London). He heads home to file newspaper clippings, arrange and conduct phone interviews and then he shifts to either Galaxy Donuts or the nearby Coffee Time to scratch on yellow pads late into the night. He eventually returns home to shape the story on his personal computer. And then Olive sleeps.

Since October 2001, the fruits of these long days have been appearing in the Toronto Star, where Olive, 45, is a business columnist. He writes feature-length stories, usually about what he wants, when he wants. But the daily 18-hour effort goes back to his days writing for Canadian Business, Toronto Life, the Financial Postand the National Post. His first book of 10, Just Rewards: The Case for Ethical Reform in Business, became a bible for business in the 1980s (during which time he co-founded the Canadian Centre for Ethics and Corporate Policy). At times, he’s swapped his picnic table for a desk as the editor of Report on Business Magazine or a seat on The Globe and Mail‘s editorial board. Since the late ’80s Olive has picked up 12 national magazine and book awards and honourable mentions. Writing is not what David Olive does for a living; it is his life’s work. “I’m wholly consumed,” he says, “with writing.”

So, for that matter, is the old Victorian house he’s lived in for the last decade and a half. The walls of the front room, which Olive calls his “office-library,” are lined with hundreds of books, alphabetized and categorized: classic and contemporary literature, politics, media, Bibles, biographies and, of course, business. Sliding Peter C. Newman’s The Flame of Power from one bookcase, Olive motions toward English literature on the opposite wall and says: “The elements of Shakespeare can be found in business.”

Indeed, drama is everywhere in this age of Enron and Nortel (insert preferred corporate catastrophe of late), but business writing is more than accounting scandals, share-price manipulation and stock market collapses. Olive says there are three kinds of business stories: triumph, tragedy and turnaround-stories of ambitious goals achieved, setbacks suffered and redemption revealed. He says the beauty of business is that a product can be conceived and implemented, acclaimed or killed with astonishing speed. “I love business,” Olive says. “I love what business can do by bringing together resources and driving ambitions, and matching that with an idea that may fly-or not.”

A five-metre beeline from the office-library, just off the kitchen, Olive has fitted the space above the basement stairs with shelves that hold six white binders, five inches wide each. These thick volumes contain hundreds of alphabetized profiles of every national and international company that has made news since Olive began this collection with an eight-page Duo-Tang in Grade 12. Showing off the corporate profiles he’s researched, written and updated, Olive flips open the second binder and runs his finger down the pages-Canadian Tire-Canon…CanWest Global-a sounds off highlights. On the top right-hand corner of the first page of each profile, Olive has electronically copied the company logo in red. “It’s just for me,” Olive says of the collection. “It’s one of the joys in life.”

It’s also raw material for the production line of Olive Inc. His newspaper and magazine stories have spotlighted convergence (BCE), corruption (Nortel), nepotism (Quebecor) and patriarchy (Rogers). He’s written about politicians as businessmen (Paul Martin, Jack Layton), businessmen as celebrities (Garth Drabinsky, Paul Reichman, Edgar Bronfman Jr.) and one litigious journalist-businessman (Conrad Black). He’s also covered housing shortages and evictions.

His books survey business leadership (No Guts, No Glory: How Canada’s Greatest CEOs Built Their Empires, 2000), business ethics (Just Rewards, 1987), business terminology (White Knights and Poison Pills: A Cynic’s Dictionary of Business Jargon, 1998, and A Devil’s Dictionary of Business Jargon, 2001) and Canadian identity (Canada Inside Out: How We See Ourselves, How Others See Us, 1996). He has also authored quirky quote collections including Genderbabble: The Dumbest Things Men Ever Said About Women, 1993, three volumes of political babble quotes and his 2002 release, The Quotable Tycoon: A Treasury of Business Quotations.

Last summer, he wrote a five-part series in the Toronto Star about the death of the new economy that described high-tech pipe dreams, overpaid CEOs, misinformed investors and merger madness. The series showcased Olive’s ability to synthesize information and provide historical context. “The corporate landscape today looks like a gigantic yard sale,” he wrote. “Buy high, sell low, sack the CEO. That is how the new economy ended, not with a bang but with a severance package. And a reminder that we’ve seen this before, from the damage wreaked by takeover sprees in electronics in the 1960s, oil, mining and forest companies in the 1970s and PC makers and real estate in the 1980s.”

“He seems to know everything that’s going on,” says Don Obe, Olive’s friend and first editor at Toronto Life. Fellow journalists say that when they stumble on a story written by Olive that has to do with a topic that they are researching, they experience simultaneous exaltation and panic: the article is an invaluable resource but it makes them realize how much they don’t know. “He just helps you get a grasp of what’s going on in the world,” says Rick Salutin, the lefty Globe and Mail writer known for his anti-business sense. “He helps you feel as if you’re not quite as much at the mercy of distortions and delusions and self-promotion.”

Just talking to Olive is like entering a keyword into a search engine. Ken Kidd, a long-time colleague and Olive’s editor at the Star‘s business section, calls it a “data download”: ask Olive a question and he spews every related micro-byte of info stored in memory. Why is business more interesting to write about than politics? “Because business people get things done really quickly,” Olive responds, and proceeds to cite the success of Imperial Oil, Starbucks, Home Depot, McDonald’s, Kentucky Fried Chicken, Holiday Inn and WalMart compared to the logistics of passport offices and the labour laws of Tennessee.

His speech is speckled with historical references:

History is important to Olive, which is why his favourite part of annual reports is the 10-year summary. He says the best businesses have staying power. They create loyalty and maintain integrity for generations. Olive says: “They manage for the long term.”

slipping the white binder back on the shelf, Olive springs up the basement stairs and pauses in his kitchen. There’s no food or culinary equipment in sight. There are, however, four large black filing cabinets in the corner opposite the stove. Inside, hundreds of file folders contain clippings collected over three decades. “I cut them and then I label them and then I file them according to topic,” Olive explains. The three-drawer cabinet nearest the wall is for Canadian companies like Algoma Steel. The next two cabinets, four drawers high each, are for internationals-General Motors, IBM. The last, also a four-drawer, is for subjects, places or people that interest him-Buffalo, diamonds, Frank Lloyd Wright. Olive’s system: if, say, Home Depot acquired Canadian Tire today, he would combine the folders on both companies and the corporate profiles in the white binders to see how history had brought matters to this point.

Olive’s own history begins in a white, middle-class Toronto Star door-to-door. His interest in business began in a high school economics class, where he discovered that a small group of people could have great control over immense financial, natural and human resources. Reading the daily newspapers became a habit and he subscribed to magazines like Forbes and Fortune.

His parents, both children of the Depression, were keen to see their only child get a good job that offered benefits and long-term prospects. Olive studied journalism at Ryerson in the 1970s and remembers once expressing concern to his father about the scarcity of writing jobs. Harold Olive suggested he go into insurance sales, because, of course, the insurance man who showed up at their house selling mutual funds or car insurance always seemed prosperous. “That’s when I became even more resolved to succeed in journalism, because I didn’t want to go into insurance,” Olive says, expelling first a gust of air, then three chuckles and a sigh of satisfaction.

So when Olive landed his first journalism job, as editorial assistant at Toronto Life in 1980, he was determined to make an impression. One of his first nights there, he stayed at the office until after midnight organizing the shelves of back issues. And his filing system was already in progress. Joann Webb, then managing editor of the magazine, remembers Olive’s arcane catalogues, in which he would record on index cards, for future reference, all the business news of the day. “He had a startling fascination with Canadian business,” Webb says.

Several months later, Olive moved to Canadian Business magazine to work under editor Margaret Wente as editorial assistant. Jennifer Wells, Olive’s current colleague at the Star, was copy editing at CB then. She recalls the sounds of papers rustling and three-ring binders clicking in Olive’s cubicle every morning as he organized his indexes. Around a year later, Olive moved up to senior writer.

Olive left Canadian Business in 1984, at the age of 27, to help strengthen the recently launched Report on Business Magazine as staff writer. The release of Just Rewards in 1987 cemented Olive’s authority; awards were bestowed and his reputation established as one of the country’s top business journalists.

But for all the success of those years, Olive’s voice softens and his eyes lower when he remembers 1983. It was his third year as working journalist, his second as husband. Olive was writing his first cover story forCanadian Business, a 40,000-word, two-part feature on the 10 largest private companies in Canada. He’d often sleep at his desk at the office; other nights, he’d come home at 10 and write for two or three more hours in the second bedroom, which he’d commandeered as his private workspace. Sometimes, Olive says, he’d come home early enough to cook dinner for his wife. They’d eat in front of the television and barely speak until he retreated to the second bedroom and shut the door to write for the night.

“This has been a problem in all my relationships,” Olive says. “I’ve always put the work first. But I don’t really know how it could be any other way.” Wente, former editor of the daily ROB section of The Globe and Mailand now one of the paper’s most prominent columnists, says, “He was so focused on what he was doing that he did it 99 hours a day.”

In 1986, the marriage dissolved. “I knew I was this sort of person,” Olive says. “It was more important to prove that I could write than to prove that I could make a marriage work.”

Proving himself has been a theme in Olive’s life. He remembers being in Grade 6 and starring in a school production of The Pirates of Penzance. Minutes before the curtain rose on opening night, the stage fright that hadn’t occurred to Olive during six weeks of rehearsals finally befell him. Sick and sweating, he made for the nearest washroom. The teacher/director saw him and demanded, “Where are you going? We’re on.” Near tears, Olive sputtered, “I can’t ? I can’t do this.” The apathetic response: “That’s fine, David. We’ll just get John Raymer to do it.” John Raymer was the coolest kid in class, with a Kennedy smile and all the girls’ affections. With that, Olive spun on his heel and pronounced, “No, I’ll do it.” And he did, nausea and all. “One of the motivators for me has always been that if I don’t do it, somebody else will, will do a fine job of it, and hell, I’ll have missed my chance,” Olive admits.

In the late ’80s, Olive left business writing for a brief stint at Toronto Life to see if he could write about unfamiliar territories like homelessness, urban decay and municipal politics. (He could, winning a gold National Magazine Award for a story on the homeless.) In 1991, a 33-year old Olive became editor of Report on Business Magazine, succeeding Wente. At a time when the recession was killing publications like the Globe’s other magazines (West, , , Destinations and Domino), he wanted to see if he could spend prudently yet produce quality.

Prerecession RoB Magazine had enjoyed popularity for its irreverent zeal, typified by the famous cover shot of Harry Rosen, naked save a strategically placed necktie. But as the economy slumped, Olive sobered the magazine with more managerial and how-to-cope content, hiring Ken Kidd and Jennifer Wells as senior writers. The focus was on cost-cutting, so Olive slimmed the book in order to maintain its profit margin. As editor, Olive thought of himself as a businessman with a $1.3-million budget. He’s kept profit-and-loss statements from his tenure showing the magazine’s performance relative to the entire Globe company. “I really prided myself on spending that money wisely,” he says. “We were the only profitable part of The Globe and Mail for part of that time.”

Always the nighthawk, Olive would often arrive at the office after the others had left for the evening. Kidd remembers coming into work in the morning and finding a memo from Olive, sent at 3 a.m. “I’ve been accused of being a workaholic and I hate that because it sounds like a disease,” Olive says. “But I guess I do live for my work. It’s the one thing that will cheer me up. And it’s the one thing that will drag me down.”

Bolting down the stairwell housing the white binders, Olive stands just outside his bathroom. Adorning the door is a copy of the Globe‘s front page of February 17, 1919, the day that Wilfrid Laurier died. Framed speeches by Martin Luther King and Pierre Trudeau flank the mirrored medicine cabinet-“Just something to look at while I’m brushing my teeth,” Olive laughs. He’s hung a picture of Roosevelt and a sketch of Churchill upstairs. And there’s a Clinton/Gore campaign sign in his Flag Room, a den-cum-storage space at the back of the house where the flags of locations he’s visited drape the walls and ceiling.

The first three words of Olive’s first book, Just Rewards, read: “I like business.” He believes that the capitalist system works better than any other that’s been experimented with over the last 300 years but that it’s in constant need of reform. Fifteen years after that first book, Olive says he is more wary of the free-market system and the “cupidity” that accompanies economic booms. He expects more of business than mere profit. “I will never embrace the excitement of closing a big underwriting deal or selling shares of companies to the investing public,” he says. “What’s important to me is what businesses do with the money.”

Accordingly, Olive criticizes and commends Canada’s business elite case-by-case. Air Canada’s Robert Milton? An unfit leader who’s squandered public goodwill to his company’s cost. Paul Tellier, CEO of Bombardier and formerly of CN Rail? A smart businessman with the experience and personality to nourish an ailing company. Olive describes himself as a Red Tory, but says that left and right are subjective terms. “I’ve been accused of both, so that’s how I know things are probably going well,” he explains. “I like to think of myself as a radical moderate. If I criticize big drug companies, I’m a left-wing pseudo-communist. If I make the case Frank Stronach is a good businessman, I’m a right-wing zealot.”

In the late 1980s, Olive and a group of business executives, accountants and academics started the Canadian Centre for Corporate Ethics and Policy, an organization that tracks and promotes business ethics. For over a decade now, Olive has been a columnist for the Corporate Ethics Monitor, a bimonthly subscriber-based business publication that analyzes and rates companies in various industries from a responsibility perspective.

“Olive’s forte is in having the courage to say what he thinks about situations, and particularly individuals, who have performed badly or well in the corporate world,” says Len Brooks, editor of the Monitor. Adds Ed Waitzer, former chair of the Ontario Securities Commission, a senior partner at the law firm of Stikeman Elliott and one of the ethics centre’s founders: “I can’t think of any other journalist who’s consistently focused on corporate responsibility issues as thoughtfully as he has in Canada.”

Money could have coaxed Olive out of journalism for a lucrative career doling out corporate advice. A brief hiatus from business writing in 1989 led him to paid speaking engagements at Alcan and trade associations and he helped update the ethics manual for Imperial Oil employees. During the referendum-obsessed mid-’90s, he spoke to the Conference Board of Canada about separatism being the by-product of an eroding social safety net. And Olive still works the corporate lecture circuit addressing issues ranging from corporate governance to branding. Last fall, he spoke to executive MBA students at the University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Business about the need for enhanced accountability in the capital markets.

But writing has always called Olive back, as demonstrated during his last year as editor of RoB Magazine. Olive was getting stale, both he and colleagues say. He’d never been at a job for more than a few years and he missed writing full time. The magazine wasn’t reflecting the excitement of the high-tech times. Olive began suffering severe intestinal cramps, though he said little about it to anyone. The staff was forced to compensate for his frequent absences. In 1997, Patricia Best took over as editor and Olive moved down masthead as senior writer for a short time. Trish Wilson, a senior editor at the magazine during his tenure, now says of Olive: “Writer mode liberates him.”

at galaxy donuts, late night is becoming early morning. Olive’s coffee is cold, but the du Maurier perched between the yellowed fingers of his left hand glows warmly. Black pen and yellow paper shoved aside, Olive watches a white car drive out of the doughnut shop’s parking lot, looking but not seeing; he’s thinking, maybe trying to find the right word.

Major criticism of Olive’s work is scarce, but last October an article in Frank magazine accused him of plagiarizing John Cassidy’s book, Dot.Con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. Most people who get “Franked” dismiss the criticism as cheap charges from a disreputable source. Instead, Olive ended his next Star column with a mea culpa: “Although I didn’t copy Cassidy’s prose, I relied too heavily on his superb book, which I had praised March 8 and should have cited in this piece. My apologies.”

But it’s criticism of his first published work, in the early 1970s, that Olive remembers with pathos. On page 14 of the Sir Wilfrid Laurier high school yearbook appeared Olive’s poem about his first crush. It began, “Skies of azure blue-” With a fresh-off-the-press copy, Olive approached his English teacher, who began reading silently, looked up at a beaming Olive, then down at the page, and proceeded to read the first line aloud. Now Olive mimics the teacher’s Brit-snob scoff: “Skies of azure blue…azure…ajour…asher…” The teacher slammed the book shut and continued, “Could you have started the poem with a more clich?d sentence? You have committed this to print with the idea that people are going to pay attention to what you have to say. You want to call attention to yourself. And you have. With this azure. And it’s terrible.” Olive says he tried to defend his work but soon realized that the man might be right. Some 30 years later, he shakes his head and says, “I’m never satisfied with what I write.”

The Globe‘s Wente noticed Olive’s harsh self-judgement at Canadian Business. “He’s one of these people who’s very competitive with himself,” she says. “You had the sense that the standards he set for himself were impossibly high, that he was, in his own mind, never quite living up to them.”

But opinions of Olive have always been high; editors have sought him out. Charles Davies, a colleague from the Financial Post, remembers the scramble to recruit Olive in 1997 when he was on his way out of RoBMagazine. “It was a one-time opportunity. It was like van Gogh was passing through town.”

By 1998, Olive was back writing full time at the Financial Post (eventually swallowed by the National Post), his cramps and discontent having subsided. He stayed as senior writer until 2001, when Ken Kidd lured him to the Star to build the business section of Canada’s largest daily. Olive, who’d wanted to write for the Star since his days as a paperboy in the 1960s, says he likes the freedom to pen stories with a dramatic narrative. “You’re looking for companies that have ambitious goals, which seem impossible to achieve,” he says, “or that were in terrible trouble but have managed to turn around.”

And so he sits at his picnic table, writing and rewriting, striking out redundant words, searching for the right verb, comparing history with present day. He sometimes ruminates over stories for days or weeks before he figures out what he wants to write. But Olive is certain about what business writing, at its best, is about. “It’s the story of passion and ambition and one lonely company,” he says, “one lonely person up against the world of competitors and droughts and floods and other acts of God that we don’t have control over.”

They still wanted to expand, but how? Where? “Instead of business we know, weekly papers, in a place we don’t, Vancouver, let’s try a business we don’t know, glossy lifestyle mags, in a place we do,” is how Shaw sums up their decision. “Once the idea came up, we stayed up late going through the stacks and stacks of mags that Christine and I have, looking at the world of magazine publishing with new, fresh eyes,” he remembers nostalgically.

The result was Coastlife, a 54-page full-colour magazine with a print run of 25,000. With strong graphics, historical features about the Black Loyalist Heritage Society and Chester’s 150 years as a haven for prominent international residents, and pieces celebrating life in the Maritimes like “40 Reasons We Love Atlantic Canada” (number 13: The Chickenburger restaurant in Bedford, Nova Scotia), the magazine was an enthusiastic exploration of the region without being too smug. One memorable cover featured Rick Mercer of This Hour Has 22 Minutes fame. Which was about as long as the book lasted: it appeared just six times, before dying in October 2001, joining general-interest East Coast titles Axiom (1974-1978), Atlantic Insight(1979-1989) and Cities (1987-1989).

It is perhaps no coincidence that just months before Coastlife‘s demise, yet another general-interest magazine had been launched in the region. But Saltscapes was no late-night brainwave. It was the result of 18 months and $150,000 of research by Linda Gourlay, who holds an MBA. She and her husband, Jim, spent a further $500,000 on a subscription drive that netted them 11,000 subscribers by the time the first issue appeared in May 2000. Those readers received a full-colour, oversize glossy with a $3.95 cover price and 96 pages featuring stories about Frenchy’s, a chain of popular second-hand clothing stores; Mike Duffy; the P.E.I.-born newscaster, and the eastern cougar.

On the cover was a lovely image of two Adirondack chairs on a deck overlooking the sea, but, though there was some beautiful photography, the inside layouts resembled ads. Much editorial space was devoted to inoffensive items like gardening, birdwatching, and recipes columns, although there was a feature on Newfoundland’s shrinking coastal communities.

Jim Gourlay looks like Santa Claus sans the stocking cap but the resemblance ends there – he’s much more worldly than the jolly old fellow. He is unapologetic about his magazine’s romanticized view of Atlantic Canada. “I come from a hard news background and it’s really frustrating for me not to get into that stuff, issues, controversies, but the market said we want a feel-good magazine and that’s what we’re giving them.”

As a displaced East Coaster who loves Atlantic Canada and magazines, I wonder whether sweet but shallowSaltscapes is the best Atlantic readers can hope for. Some of Canada’s best music comes out of the Maritimes, but it seems the region’s magazines are destined to suffer from a lack of capital and vision. Still, I do cheer the indomitable Maritime spirit that prompts people to keep trying to publish magazines in a historically hostile territory.

The brainchild of Bill Belliveau, an advertising guy from New Brunswick, Atlantic Insight hit a peak circulation of 65,000 but never achieved profitability during its decade-long existence. “The first year and a half was wonderful,” Harry Bruce says wistfully as he reminisces about the beginning of Atlantic Insight. Bruce, the celebrated writer and editor who now writes the “Back Porch” column for Saltscapes, was the inaugural editor, stepping down after 18 months when financial problems arose. He remembers how, when Atlantic Insight was first launched, Charlie Lynch, a New Brunswicker and a political columnist for Southam Press at the time, paid it the back-handed compliment of describing it as “too slick for Maritimers.”

In a January 1983 piece for Canadian Business, Kimber wrote that Belliveau had had a good idea but not enough money. Some bad business decisions, a devastating six-week postal strike in 1981, and a downturn in the economy forced Belliveau, in 1982, to hand over Insight to ad salesman Jack Daley, who in turn peddled it to book publisher James Lorimer in 1985. As the money woes mounted, circulation slipped, and the magazine’s once creative and comprehensive coverage of the Atlantic became a jumble of civic boosterism articles with a few recipes thrown in. Still, Kimber remembers that readers felt almost a proprietary interest in the magazine. “It filled a hole. Frankly, there hasn’t been anything like it since.”

Not that Shaw and his partners didn’t try. “Coastlife was offering something different. It was more literary, visionary, with less rug-hooking,” says Catherine Salisbury. She and her partners even briefly considered using the name Atlantic Insight for their magazine because they wanted to recapture its essence and its readership. As Shaw recalls, “We were romantic, passionate and intuitive, and business-wise we knew the loss we could handle. We were willing to run at a loss.” Shaw’s magazine publishing philosophy definitely is along the lines of print what you believe in and the readers and advertisers will come. “We had a quality magazine with a long-term business strategy, attracting people to quality,” says Shaw.

To Gourlay, though, romantic ideals have no place in publishing “This leap of faith that says, ‘I’m a journalism graduate, therefore I can run a business called magazine publishing’ is bullshit,” he told a King’s journalism school reporter in 2000. To be fair, Shaw had been successfully publishing The Coast for five years before launching Coastlife, but it seems his passion and intuition weren’t enough to keep the magazine from being sunk by Saltscapes.

But Shaw is pretty passionate in expressing his opinion of Saltscapes. “What does Saltscapes mean anyway?” he asks as he agitatedly rolls around on his office stool. “Self-congratulation isn’t interesting.Saltscapes has all the bad traditions, old and not challenging and not interesting, even for their demographic. I guess their demographic doesn’t want to be challenged.” Shaw and the staff at The Coast often derisively refer to Saltscapes as ” S-scapes,” replacing “salt” with numerous words beginning with “s.” Shaw feels that Atlantic Canadians settle for less when it comes to their local magazines. “The market isn’t educated enough to diversify itself. No one knows about magazines here,” says Shaw.

Gilfoy is very pulled together in a dark grey suit, a very light grey dress shirt and a medium grey silk tie. His grey curly hair, parted in the centre, springs off his head, but the rest of him personifies what his publications are all about: wealth creation. But before the Lexus (leased, he confides) and the elegant clothes, Gilfoy spent some hard-scrabble years as co-owner, with Jim Gourlay, of a decidedly more downscale title.Eastern Woods & Waters, launched 18 years ago as an Atlantic Insight spinoff, is what the trade calls a “hook and bullet” book.

Gilfoy and Gourlay started the magazine in 1985, amicably ending their partnership in 1993. Gourlay stayed with Eastern Woods & Waters and Gilfoy left to start upAtlantic Progress (now just Progress).

“TOP 101” is the licence plate on Gilfoy’s black 2002 Lexus ES 300. He throws over a copy ofProgress‘s 2002 Top 101 special issue, which ranks Atlantic Canada’s most successful companies. “That’s the biggest issue of a business magazine in the past four years in Canada,” he says curtly. “Page count, 210, 60 per cent ads.”

Advertising is what keeps most commercial magazines afloat, and it’s particularly critical for controlled-circulation titles. Out east, Saltscapes is the only larger magazine that has a substantial subscriber base: 33,000 of its 40,000 circulation.The 10-times-a-yearProgress, with its 27,000 controlled circulation, is more typical of magazines in the region.To Gourlay, that means a larger investment than other publishers.”With all due respect to my associates in the industry, we’re the only paid circulation company, so we’re doing the hard work,” he says.

Stephen Kimber knows hard work. He produced Cities magazine, aToronto Life for Halifax published 10 times a year, out of his home from 1987 to 1989. As he leans back in his office chair at King’s he’s counting up how much money he lost when the magazine went under. Even though the second to last issue of Citieshad the most advertising ever, he and his remaining investors were in so much debt that the banks came in and said enough. “I think I was personally on the hook for $30,000 for the magazine itself, the printer didn’t get paid in the end, altogether around $70,000 in total. It doesn’t seem as much now, but it was when you had a mortgage and kids,” he says with a hint of pain.

And Kimber is also pained by how magazine publishing on the east coast has been affected by advertising, or the lack thereof. “Atlantic Insight made a lot of sense editorially but commercially it never did,” he says. One of the main problems is that the region’s population is too geographically dispersed. Its 2.2 million residents are spread through four provinces with only three Cities having a population over 100,000.

To survive, regional magazines need both retail and national advertisers, but retail operators don’t want to advertise too far away from home: why pitch your Halifax clothing store to readers in St. John? And national advertisers? “For them this is always a discretionary buy. In good times they will put money into down here to increase the penetration in this region, but as soon as the advertising market contracts, they pull back,” observes Kimber. So is Atlantic Canada’s population just too small to support more than a few magazines? “I think there’s some truth to that,” says Kimber, “although you look at magazines like Saltscapes and it seems to be doing reasonably well right now.”

Gilfoy also acknowledges that Atlantic Canada is a tough place to find advertising. “The regional advertising community here is not mature enough to be at a stage where they are consistently supporting a vibrant and growing magazine publishing sector, and Atlantic Canada is not sufficiently attractive to the national advertiser. The perception is it’s not big enough. It’s frustrating,” says Gilfoy with a resigned shrug. However, he concludes, “We can’t be worried about what people in Toronto or Ottawa think.”

Shrewdly, the Gourlays did worry about the Upper Canadians. “Linda did something very smart,” says Gourlay. “In the work up to Saltscapes she went to Toronto and pleaded naïveté and engaged some of the movers and shakers in the advertising community in Toronto. She asked for their help in putting her marketing plan together and gave them ownership. When we were ready to go, they were there.”

The East Coast diaspora also represents another advertising problem. Kendra Thompson and her husband, Dan, grew up in Rothesay, New Brunswick, just outside of Saint John. They’ve come to the Big Smoke to make some money with the intention of moving home to raise their yet-to-be children. Kendra, a private school teacher, is sitting in her newly painted taupe living room. On the low coffee table in front of her are pieces of Maritime pottery and piles of magazines, including Saltscapes. “Saltscapes is great. It’s a piece of home,” says Thompson, who receives the magazine as a gift from her in-laws.

Gourlay says people regularly buy eight to 10 gift subscriptions of his magazine, many of them for friends and family living away. “It’s an interesting problem to have,” he observes. “We’re having to work quite hard to keep the in-region subscription levels in line. Advertisers are buying Atlantic Canada from us. They don’t want to buy Ontario. There’s a tolerance level but we’re pushing it.” The most recent circulation figures for the magazine indicate that 16 per cent of the readers are out-of-region, a level that may indeed test advertisers’ tolerance.

the highlands links golf course in cape bre-ton has been ranked the best golf course in the country. Or, according to Neville Gilfoy, “The most spectacular on the planet.” He and a friend played there this past September with a man they’d just met from southern Ontario. There were foxes, eagles, and two moose out on the course that day. “Along about the 10th or 11th hole he said, ‘I’m going to tell you guys something,'” relates Gilfoy. “‘You have no idea how good you guys have it here. The people in Upper Canada have no idea what goes on here.’ And I said, ‘John, I’m going to tell you something. We know exactly how good we have it here. We just don’t tell anybody because we don’t want fuckers like you coming here all the time.’ We had a great laugh after he asked me if I was dead serious or not.”

Gilfoy is certainly dead serious about his business. Atlantic Progress became just Progress this past January so that he can begin to expand to other markets, including New England, which is also a region that Gourlay is looking at. Both Gourlay and Gilfoy have long-term business plans for their publications and are willing to wait to branch out at the right time.

This should be good news for Kimber and his students, but he still wishes that Atlantic Canada could produce more magazines with less formulaic content. “We have students atProgress, graduates atWhere, the associate editor at Saltscapes is from here,” he says. “I don’t think they are doing what they are capable of or what would be really interesting.” Kimber shares Shaw’s sentiments about Saltscapes. “You’ll get tourists who buy it, people who are from here and are away who will buy it, but there isn’t much in it to excite anybody.” Still, Catherine Salisbury, one of Coastlife‘s creators, admires the Gourlay’s financial commitment to Atlantic Canada. “You can shit on their content but it’s pretty commendable what they’ve done. We didn’t do it,” says Salisbury. And Shaw admits, “Saltscapes had a business plan, they rented mailing lists, did direct mail. We didn’t go for any of that.”

Though Shaw and his partners tried to raise the bar on Atlantic Canadian magazine publishing they didn’t have the money. Shaw might try again some day, but as he remembers his grief and relief at Coastlife‘s demise, the chances look slim: “I learned everything there is to know about magazines. Reading them is fun. Writing for them is mostly fun. Producing one’s a big pain in the ass.”

It’s 4:30 a.m. Bob Hunter turns off his alarm clock, steps into his slippers and selects a robe from one of nearly a dozen in his closet. In the bathroom, he gathers his long, thin, greying hair and ties it back into a ponytail, splashes cold water on his face and hooks his dark-rimmed glasses over his ears. At his front door, he grabs the papers to prepare for this morning’s “Papercuts,” a popular weekday segment on Citytv’sBreakfast Television. In the kitchen, highlighter in hand, he begins to mark stories. A note above the stove reads: “Normalcy is the enemy.”

By 5:30 a.m., he sits at a small desk in the corner of his basement, arranging the papers in front of him. “Whenever you’re ready,” says cameraman Giancarlo Desantis. After a few false starts, Hunter breezes through his commentary in one mad-paced take, cramming in as much news as he can. “Good morning. Well, human rights groups are probably dancing in the streets. The headline in The Globe and Mail says it all: ‘Talisman to Pull Out of Sudan.'” He reads the first few paragraphs from the story about the Calgary oil company agreeing to sell its controversial share in a Sudanese oil project. He cites it as “one for the good guys.” Rolling along, he says, “Over here in the National Post, though, there’s one for the bad guys-‘Hezbollah Uses Canada as a Base: CSIS.'” Good guys and bad guys. For Hunter, journalism is often that simple. His main question: “Whose side are you on?”

When Citytv viewers tune in to “Papercuts” just before 7 a.m., they will see a long-haired, goateed, bathrobed man and hear him dish the morning news in an affable, off-the-cuff, satirical manner. And while they might glimpse the bookcase behind Hunter, they won’t notice what lies on its shelves. They won’t see the seven books he has written, or the five he co-authored, including Occupied Canada, winner of the 1991 Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction. They won’t see the dusty paper model of a freighter named Greenpeace (a memento from the organization he co-founded). Nor will they see the long row of videotapes from his various adventures as ecology specialist for Citytv.

Named one of the environmental heroes of the century by Time magazine in 2000, Hunter has been, for most of his career, a journalist with a cause, or what is known in Europe as a journaliste engagé. He is convinced that “an eco-shitstorm is coming down before our eyes. And overwhelmingly, we’re just watching.” At 61, with the vigour and passion of a teenager, and the knowledge and experience of a guru, he fights his battle mainly at Toronto’s independent Citytv. He is an activist first and a journalist second-a controversial stance in a profession where some pretence of objectivity is prerequisite. But Hunter is making no apologies.

Hunter was born in St. Boniface, Manitoba, in 1941. After his father left and his mother went temporarily blind due to cancer treatment, a five-year-old Hunter read her the paper every morning. By age 10, he wanted to be a science-fiction writer. At 16, he dropped out of school, burned an art school bursary and worked a variety of jobs: warehouse worker, lathe operator, welder’s assistant, wheelbarrow pusher, encyclopedia salesman and slaughterhouse clerk. After a friend suggested he write for The Winnipeg Tribune, he marched into the newsroom, plunked a box full of manuscripts in front of managing editor Eric Wells and said, “At the risk of contaminating my style, I’m willing to come work for you guys.” Wells flipped through the stack of writing and said, “You’re hired.”

Hunter quickly worked his way from copyboy to general reporter and his “style” soon adapted to the conventions of straight objective journalism. Occasionally, however, he would wield what he called “the power of the pen.” When Mr. Wyatt, Hunter’s hand-strapping high school principal, ran for the school board, Hunter covered the election. “When I wrote the story, instead of an objective piece, I made everybody look really good and Mr. Wyatt like a piece of shit,” he recalls. Wyatt lost and Hunter likes to think his story helped sway a few voters.

He left the paper in 1962 at age 21, hopped a bus to Quebec City and boarded a Yugoslavian freighter bound for Havana. But, because of the Cuban missile crisis, the ship ended up in Genoa, Italy. He hitchhiked across Europe and made his way to London, where he worked in a library; met his first wife, Zoe, a member of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament; and wrote his first novel. After Zoe became pregnant, the couple moved to Winnipeg, where Hunter worked at the Tribune again before joining The Vancouver Sun in 1966. He slogged away on the desk for two years until the Sun wanted someone to be a voice for the counterculture psychedelic youth movement forming on the West Coast. The 27-year-old Hunter was perfect for the job.

He packed up his typewriter, left the newsroom and shed his shirt and tie. In his head shots over the next few years, readers saw his hair grow long, his sideburns creep down his face and his goatee come to full bloom. Occasionally, he would waft into the newsroom clad in paisley flared jeans, a headband in his hair and a peace pendant dangling from his neck. “The establishment columnists tolerated him in a good-humoured way, as one does an engaging, tail-wagging young pup,” recalls then-business columnist, now-senator Pat Carney. Compared to the Sun’s more conservative scribes, Carney says, “Hunter was like an ocean breeze – fresh, salty and invigorating.” Allan Fotheringham remembers, “We all thought he was a screwball, but he was a lovable screwball.”

In 1970, Hunter spent three days investigating conditions in a psychiatric institution and wrote a 12-part series uncovering the inhumane treatment of patients. The columns generated huge public debate and lead to the formation of the Mental Patients’ Association in B.C., of which Hunter is a founding member. Despite covering many protests and lending a sympathetic notebook to rabble-rousers, he had until then maintained a certain distance as a journalist. “No goddamn way you were going to get me carrying a picket sign making a fool of myself.”

But the following year, he did carry a picket sign at a nuclear weapons protest outside the American consulate in Vancouver. Worried that nuclear tests planned for the coast of Amchitka Island, in Alaska, would create a massive tidal wave, Hunter grabbed a marker and a blank sign and wrote: “Don’t Make a Wave.”

Then, in September 1971, he joined 11 other brave, committed and slightly crazy men as they set sail from Vancouver on an old fishing boat. It was the maiden mission of the Don’t Make a Wave Committee. “Now, I wasn’t just covering the event,” says Hunter, who had been taking a strong anti-Amchitka stance in his column. “I was participating. I got quite a rush from it.”

When Hunter returned to the Sun, he had more readers than ever. He covered everything from pesticides to forestry, tankers to whales. The environmental movement was just gaining momentum, so Hunter’s timing was perfect. “He rode the crest of awareness,” recalls Carney. He also spent his spare time in church basements and people’s living rooms trying to keep Don’t Make a Wave afloat.

In 1975, after persuading the group to change its name to the Greenpeace Foundation, Hunter became chairman of the organization, which had made the transition from nukes to whales. He ran the meetings, organized and raised funds-and continued to write his column. “Of course at this point I’m in an ethical swamp,” he says. “Except to me it wasn’t an ethical swamp because I was there to save the whales. If I could use access to the media as a tool, then good enough.”

Before he and a Greenpeace crew went after the Japanese whalers that same year, Hunter asked Sun management to make him a reporter, instead of a columnist, so he could submit stories that might be picked up by the wires. “I was in a unique position of being the guy saying, ‘Go here and do this and do that,’ and being the guy reporting on what we were doing. For a while, I couldn’t understand how I was going to maintain this façade of being the objective reporter.”

Soon after that mission, he quit the Sun and for the next four years poured his soul into Greenpeace. He drew the world’s attention to whaling by standing in the path of harpoons and icebreakers (early antiwhaling efforts that contributed to the International Whaling Commission’s 1982 decision to ban whaling). In 1979, after a long political battle, he helped set up Greenpeace International, but declined the executive director position.

Instead, he retreated to a farm in Anmore, B.C., where, for seven years, Hunter assumed the role of farmer, father and freelance writer. He wrote magazine stories (winning five Western Magazine Awards), books and a column for the North Shore News. Yet this period was a low point for Hunter. “He is a crusader and he wasn’t on a crusade,” recalls his second wife, Bobbi. “Greenpeace was sailing on. And he didn’t have a job with mainstream media because he had come out of the closet, so he couldn’t be classified as someone who wasn’t partisan any longer.” From these depths, Hunter entertained the formerly repugnant notion of moving to Toronto. Urged by Bobbi, who was soggy from life on the West Coast, the Hunters ended their farming phase.

Initially, the move to Toronto was a trial run. Hunter got into what is now the Canadian Film Centre on the strength of 10 episodes of The Beachcombers he had written and a recommendation from Moses Znaimer, president and executive producer of Citytv. His short film, Dead Meat (about a drug deal gone wrong), appeared in the Toronto International Film Festival. But, after nine months of studies, he had also accumulated a mountain of debt. He suspects that this was all part of Znaimer’s master plan. In 1988, after discovering that life in Toronto wasn’t so bad, a future in film was bleak and his pockets were empty, Hunter joined Citytv as ecology specialist.

Although the idea of a journalist being openly engaged with a cause is controversial, it was Hunter’s background as an activist that landed him the job. “What we like to do is find people who are deeply committed and involved in particular disciplines,” says Stephen Hurlbut, vice-president of news programming at Citytv. ”And Bob had the intelligence and the character and the persona to bring weight to something that really needed mainstream attention.” Just as Citytv had hired former Toronto Maple Leaf Jim McKenny to cover sports, and onetime city councillor Colin Vaughan to cover politics, the station wanted an activist to cover ecology. “It was irrelevant to him that I had a journalistic background,” says Hunter. Citytv’s hiring policy perfectly matched Hunter’s philosophy: “You know things by getting involved in them.”

More than 16 hours since taping “Papercuts,” Hunter now sits at a table in the Citytv newsroom, hosting the Halloween edition of Hunter’s Gatherings, his weekly talk show that debuted in September. Two jack-o’-lanterns perch near the edge of the table. The ceiling above is a cobweb of wires, beams and lights. TV screens dot the studio, emitting an eerie bluish glow. Hunter’s hair drapes over the lapels of his black jacket and rests just above a scarlet felt poppy pinned there. His face is weather worn. Crow’s feet claw the corners of his eyes, creases of skin frame his goatee and lines ripple over his expressive brow.

“Here’s a woman who loves nature so much, she’s out there risking her life to save it,” he says, introducing his second guest. “My old friend and colleague Dinah Elissat.” Hunter explains that Elissat was a Citytv cameraperson until he took her on a trip to save the whales with his old Greenpeace buddy, Paul Watson. After the life-changing experience, she quit her job and became a volunteer with Watson’s Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. “Dinah, in your experience being out there now, instead of being one of these people who sits back and watches,” Hunter says, punching that final word, “you’ve crossed over the line from one side of the camera to the other.”

As the interview comes to a close, Elissat makes a final plea for donations to the Sea Shepherds. “It’s not an easy life,” she says. “It’s hard. And we do this with such a sense of purpose because we need to save…” Swelling tears cut off her sentence. Hunter reaches across the table to touch her hand and says, “Listen, Dinah, you’re one of my heroes. You really are.”

Elissat laughs. “Yeah, but you started this for me.”

“Well, yeah, but if you weren’t doing it now, God knows I’d have to be out there doing it.”

Hunter may no longer be involved in the day-to-day operations of any activist group (though he is a new member of the eastern chapter of Canada’s Sierra Club). But he’s still an activist at heart. And when environmentalist interests conflict with business bottom lines, Hunter says, “It’s self-evident to me who’s right and who’s wrong.” So when he has to meet the criteria of the six o’clock news, he makes only a halfhearted attempt to get the other side. “My stories are morality plays of the good guy, who is usually the handsome or beautiful young ecologist, versus the bad guy, who is usually some CEO of some multinational vastly polluting corporation that is trying to kill our children in their sleep. But if I’m going to say he’s a bad guy, I have to at least phone him. And if he hangs up on me? Oh well, he didn’t want to talk to me. As long as I’ve got that clip of me on my phone saying, ‘Well, they just told me to fuck off.’ Then it’s okay.”

Taking advantage of his experience as an activist, Hunter often taps creativity and cunning to tell media-unfriendly stories. In the early ’90s, when the continued depletion of the ozone layer still needed public attention, Hunter initially struggled to cover the story because TV news depends so heavily on pictures. “If I write a script with facts in it but I have no viz to back it up,” he says, “I might as well try to make a living as a full-time novelist.” So he enlisted the help of the graphics department. Together, they created an image of the earth with a bubble around it. Over dramatic music, CFCs attacked the bubble, which disintegrated, then collapsed. “Not scientific in the least,” Hunter recalls. “But really good.” His producers loved it and, as a result, he got ozone stories on air for about five months.

Because long-term environment stories can be forgotten by a media focused on the short-term, Hunter often orchestrates more elaborate stunts. In fall 2000, with Greenpeace activists, he sped along the California coast in a Zodiac, a Citytv video camera strapped around his neck, charging toward an oil supertanker. To draw attention to the link between petroleum and global warming, he planned to tape the activists hitting the tanker, clambering up its side, then hanging a giant banner with a Hunter-written slogan: “Oil Fuels Climate Chaos.” Though Hunter’s plan was foiled by the Coast Guard, it was clear that his commitment to the environment still dictated his actions as a journalist.

Furthermore, his continued involvement with environmental organizations like Greenpeace has placed him on the front lines, bringing both international and national stories to Citytv’s local Toronto newscast. With Watson’s Sea Shepherd Society, Hunter has rammed drift net boats in the middle of the Pacific; hunted Faroese whalers in the Norwegian Sea; chased Spanish and Portuguese trawlers along the Grand Banks; and witnessed the seal hunt on the ice floes of Newfoundland. “We make them local stories,” says Hurlbut. “Because we have Bob Hunter on staff, we go after them. That’s Bob’s great strength and great value to us.”

In his role as ecology specialist at Citytv and “Enviro” columnist at Toronto’s alternative eye Weekly, Hunter has also been a great value to the environmental movement. As a watchdog, he keeps constant surveillance of the issues, which have ebbed and flowed in the mainstream media over the years. Global warming, for example, has concerned many scientists and environmentalists for decades, even if it didn’t receive prominent coverage in the establishment press until recently. Hunter has followed the issue all along. “I’ve talked to journalists who have to do four or five hours worth of cramming to understand complex environmental issues enough to write a piece that has some credibility,” says Peter Tabuns, executive director of Greenpeace Canada. “Bob isn’t someone you have to educate from the ground up. And that is very useful.”

More than knowledge, Hunter has given Toronto environmental groups a steady voice in the media over the years. “Lots of ecology people want air time for their cause,” he says. “And I figure my job is to stickhandle it through the six o’clock producer.” So it’s no wonder Hunter has near-legendary status within the environmental community. “Generally, he’s a very well-known, well-respected and well-liked figure,” says Gord Perks, senior campaigner for the Toronto Environmental Alliance. “He’s provided the best and most thoughtful coverage of any journalist in the city on the work we do.”

For Hunter, the end justifies the means. And for his conviction, many admire him. “Bob Hunter is a man of remarkable courage and significant insight, a man who really does what he believes,” says Tom Adams, executive director of Energy Probe Research Foundation. “He’s a journalist with an agenda.” And, according to Adams, it is Hunter’s agenda that makes his style of journalism interesting. “The people who are the most exciting to watch and the most exciting to read are the ones who are really caught up in their subject.” John Willis, chairman of Greenpeace U.S.A. and senior consultant at Strategic Communications, says, “Guys like Bob continue to be the wave of the future to me. They have a political engagement and they’re quite willing to say it.” This engagement, however, makes Hunter’s style of journalism contentious. Even Adams, one of Hunter’s many admirers, admits that “on bad days, Bob’s a bit predictable.”

But some reporters who also cover environmental issues don’t think predictability is the only problem. Distrust-according to Alanna Mitchell, earth sciences reporter at the Globe-can be another by-product of advocacy journalism. For this reason, she often avoids quoting activists, preferring to focus instead on the science of a particular issue. “It’s happened where I talk to some advocacy group, and they tell me about some terrible thing that a corporation is doing, and I spend a day and look into it, and it turns out to be completely different than what they said. So I have a lack of trust sometimes.”

Eve Savory, a Vancouver-based reporter who covers science and the environment for CBC-TV, is also skeptical of combining activism with journalism. “It’s a risky thing because some scientists will close their doors to activists,” she says. “And journalists also tend to disdain people who wear their activist heart on their sleeve. I build an index of suspicion because I know that their feelings are so strong on an issue that they may not give me the other side. Perhaps there is a danger for an activist-journalist being discounted by the people he most needs to reach.”

While Stephen Ward, associate professor at the UBC School of Journalism, agrees that passion and commitment are essential traits in a journalist-“You can’t be a good reporter and not care about the things you report about,” he says – he cautions against going to extremes. “You can’t be so anxious to rant on about your own special causes that you don’t even give a wink of an eye to the other point of view and you prejudge the whole issue.”

If anything, though, Hunter’s passion and commitment are only getting stronger. After writing his latest book,2030: Confronting Thermageddon in Our Lifetime, he was utterly depressed by the planetary outlook and impatient with the impotence of his column. So in a move that shocked many who knew him, Hunter, traditionally a lefty, accepted the Liberals’ invitation to run against the NDP’s Michael Prue in a 2001 provincial by-election. The political battle was quick and dirty. Someone faxed an excerpt from Hunter’s 1988 satirical travel fiction book, On The Sky, to media outlets. The passage contained sexual descriptions that, pulled out of context, painted Hunter as a pervert. Amid smear allegations, Prue won handily.

Despite losing the election, Hunter retained a degree of political influence. The Liberals invited him to help formulate their green-energy policy and his book did reach some people. In early September of 2002, Dorothy Cutting, a 70-something grandmother from the B.C. Gulf Island of Salt Spring, drove (in a low-emission gas-electric car) from Victoria to Ottawa to deliver a copy of 2030 to every MP.

Although the end is all too near for Hunter, a self-proclaimed ”apocalypticist,” he has much to be happy about these days. The government ratified the Kyoto Accord last December; a U.S. publisher will release 2030 this spring; and at Citytv, he continues to dish his morning media criticism on Breakfast Television. Hunter’s Gatherings has freed him from what he calls “the tyranny of the six o’clock news.” Now he has the time and the forum to bring attention to stories he feels are being ignored by the establishment press. Ironically, as a host often mediating opposing points of view, he is doing some of the most balanced work of his career – in one show even Len Crispino, president and COO of the Ontario Chamber of Commerce, joined the Kyoto debate. Meanwhile, he rants on in his columns for eye and the U.S. men’s magazine Razor. And a Hollywood movie featuring the harpoon-dodging, boat-ramming adventures of Paul Watson and Hunter is in the works. Hunter is full of energy, despite the testosterone blocking treatment he is undergoing for prostate cancer. Retirement has never crossed his mind.

In his career as an environmental activist and journalist, Hunter has always taken a stand, making him a rare figure in the Canadian media. “There are darn few journalists in the mainstream who will categorically say they are environmentalists,” says Dan McDermott, director of the eastern chapter of Canada’s Sierra Club. “Even though they are.” For his part, Hunter is unapologetic about his strong positions. “The thought of doing an objective piece makes me cringe,” he says. He has felt this way since he was a hippie columnist at theSun. “If my column could be used to stop nuclear testing then that’s what it should be used for. I didn’t see any need to stand there and say, ‘On the one hand, the people who do not want to see Armageddon say this. But the military and business leaders insist that it must be done this way.’ I don’t want to do that shit.” That approach may make journalistic purists shudder, but for Hunter it’s a small price to pay to be one of the good guys.

The press club door had a buzzer in those days. You had to ring the buzzer and then wait for the door to open. On this night, someone is leaning on the buzzer. Inside, as the door opens, turned heads watch with surprise-and no surprise-as Duncan Macpherson falls through to the floor. He’s drunk, with a cop hanging onto one leg. The six-foot-three Toronto Star cartoonist struggles. His shoe pops off in the cop’s hands. The door slams shut between them. The cop is left on the other side, the enormous shoe still in his grip. By now, backup is on the way.

Heads turn again as Macpherson runs through the club. He bursts out the back door into the lobby of the Prince George. Drunken logic tells him the cops-probably lots of them at this point-are looking for a guy with one shoe. He ditches the other shoe and keeps moving. At the hotel bar, they see him coming. They tell him to keep going. He hits York Street and staggers shoeless toward a favourite hideout, the old Barkley Hotel. He sits down and does as he always does on a night like this: orders a plate of spaghetti, and falls asleep in it.

The story is just one of the many press club legends still told in the club today by elders like Bob Johnstone, 73, of CBC Radio. But as Johnstone recites the tale in his deep radio voice between sips of Irish whiskey, no one is fighting or causing a scene or on the verge of arrest. Ironically, this club, which for six decades has been known, both infamously and affectionately, as a “den of iniquity,” is now confined to the civilized hardwood, polish and formality of the Ontario Club in the city’s financial district.

Members of the old school gather here for lunch on the first Wednesday of every month. Johnstone is today’s guest speaker and he tells the story of when war came to Toronto in 1837. William Lyon Mackenzie ran a paper called the Colonial Advocate in his early years, he tells us. “Mackenzie,” says Johnstone, “had the same problem all publishers do. He couldn’t keep the staff sober.”

Since 1944, the press club set the scene for what became the lore of the newspaper journalist: drinking, fighting, womanizing, swearing and gambling – and Macpherson was one of the most notorious. Over the years, he was barred from the club three times – twice for life. Legendary columnist Paul Rimstead, whose name is typically followed by the phrase “literally drank himself to death,” was his pickled equal. And there was the CBC’s gruff and rumpled Norman DePoe, who in 1967 went live to air, fabulously drunk, his head sinking lower and lower as he slurred his way through the broadcast. In his memoirs, Knowlton Nash wrote DePoe “had a mad love affair with the gin bottle, yet he was the brightest, sharpest, most knowledgeable and best communicator among us.” The journalism way was Hemingway.

But things are different now. While a newspaper in those days could run a blank column space with the simple explanation We can’t find Rimstead, and among his delirious readers it would come to be known as “his best column ever,” the modern corporate, computerized business has ended its romance with drunken scoundrels. Old-school journalism is dying out, and with it, the press club. Good riddance, say most. But something’s been lost.

o read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
 It can be purchased online here. 

It’s about an hour before show time. Manny, the floor director, places them strategically around two elevated white couches. Soft blue clouds hang from the ceiling. The walls are decorated with boards painted in rich shades of orange with tiny white lights. Two tall lamps?looking like giant pipe cleaners glimmering with blue light?cast a faint glow on the walls. Technicians run around setting up camera angles and pulling blue electrical cables. A giant boom camera weightlessly floats through the air. The crowd listens to Manny yell out instructions.

“No frowning! No crossing your arms! Look like you want to be here!” he says, moving an excited couple closer to the stage. “When we come back from commercials, we need long, thorough clapping!” He takes the crowd through six practice entrances. A short blond stands in for the star. Manny directs the crowd, pulling a girl here, shifting a couple here. He demonstrates the art of utilizing small spaces by teaching the crowd to stay to the sides first as the stand-in walks toward the platform, then engulf the absent space. It’s an old trick to make small spaces seem larger. The music is cued up, and the crowd is ordered to yell, scream and clap until the stand-in sits down. Throughout the practice entrances, host Karina Huber goes over her lines and speaks toward the boom mike above. Her words can’t be heard over the applause and catcalls; the mikes are kept low to avoid feedback. Finally, it’s time for the real thing.

The crowd grows quiet as the star waits for her signal to enter. She is dressed in black, and her slender legs resemble twin licorice sticks. Black makeup is smeared around her brown eyes and long blond hair cascades past her shoulders. She stands relatively alone, with only a large man?her assistant, or maybe a bodyguard?nearby. The dark, empty hallway behind her will never be seen in the “building that shoots itself.” Suddenly, it’s 8 o’clock?showtime. The crowd that’s waited for hours in the cold will now participate in an Intimate & Interactive program. Some will stand an arm’s length away from the guest, Faith Hill. It’s probably their first chance to see a star close up.

MuchMusic, or Much, as most call it, features live shows like Intimate & Interactive on a regular basis. Usually it showcases a live artist every month, whether it’s for Live@Much, I&I or a MuchOnDemand appearance. With 10 human VJs and a sock puppet called “Ed,” Much creates about 42 hours of original programming a week. You will see endless variations of the MuchMusic Countdown: MuchTopHookUps,MuchTopAssVideos, MuchTopRocks, as well as Becoming,Gonna Meet a Rock Star, Spotlight and Power Shift, yet another video countdown. All Much programming runs dependably on a nine-hour loop.

Much has no real competition and can legitimately claim to be the Canadian television source for breaking music. Record companies provide a steady stream of video content, and VJs keep the message light and lively. The problem is, although many on-air staff have backgrounds in journalism or broadcasting, Much rarely indulges in the actual production of journalism. Other than The NewMusic, a more serious show that has been reduced to one half-hour per week (Mondays at 9 p.m.), the station rarely ventures into critical territory.

Much may act as if it’s doing music journalism? onducting live interviews, reporting live from various locations, doing research?but almost
everyone agrees the station provides little journalistic content. It is assumed that if teenagers think at all, what they think about is having fun. Much is popular and makes money for its owner, CHUM Ltd., but is it underestimating the intelligence and shortchanging the very audience to which it slavishly caters?

***
MuchMusic has set its sights on a fairly young demographic, which is reflected in its shows. Employees will tell you the target audience ranges from 18 to 24 years of age, which, depending on the programming, can stretch more widely from 12 to 34. “If your main target is people between the ages of 16 and 20,” says Alan Cross, director of radio station Y108 FM in Hamilton and writer/host of The Ongoing History of NewMusic, “they don’t want ultra hard-hitting journalism.” There is TreeToss, a bizarre annual stunt that has been airing since 1986. “Celebrity Tosser” Rick Campanelli hosts a show where he throws a used Christmas tree?usually in flames?off the CHUMCity building rooftop and tries to land it in a dumpster in the parking lot below. “When you take into account the audience that MuchMusic is going after,” says Cross, “all they really care about is when Britney’s new CD is out and whether Eminem did something naughty again.” Kieran Grant, former Toronto Sun music columnist and current listings editor at eye Weekly, a Toronto news and entertainment tabloid, concurs, saying, “They have obviously tapped the youth market. They’ve got it and they’ve gone after it increasingly.”

Generally, Much programming emphasizes fun, not information. MuchOnDemand, a zany live spectacle that tapes from 5 to 6 p.m. Monday to Thursday, tests video games on-air while guest musicians drop by. Hosted by Jennifer Hollett and Rick Campanelli, MOD represents a trend at MuchMusic to do away with any pretence of practising journalism. Other teen programming includes Becoming, an American show where fans reenact their favourite musicians’ videos, and Gonna Meet a Rock Star, where the rabid faithful compete to see who’s enough of a fan to meet his or her preferred idol. Both shows focus on an immature level of music appreciation. “It defines a lack of direction for MuchMusic in the amount of American programming that they buy,” says Grant. “It’s part of a worrying trend that they should lower themselves to that kind of programming.” But it’s the kind of programming that makes money.

A lot of what Much does is centred on making money?which is what any successful television station must do?but its innocuous programming in no way challenges the viewer. Alan Cross says, “If you offend an artist or label, what do you think your chances of getting access to artists in the future are going to be like?” Much has to answer to the record companies that provide the videos and the artist appearances. It’s a mutual arrangement?Much needs celebrity musicians to appear on its shows, and record companies need Much for the publicity that sells CDs.

Exactly if and how much content is determined by advertising isn’t known. No one at Much would comment on the numbers. Cross says management must “walk that fine line between art and commerce,” but even Much employees?past and present?agree that the true nature of music television is advertising, not journalism.

George Stroumboulopoulos is a popular, nose-pierced VJ at Much. He and I sit down for a chat in the greenroom at Much headquarters. He slips his leg up onto the arm of the soft blue leather couch, slouches back and smiles. He is very comfortable in chatting about his work. He talks a mile a minute and I’m thankful for the tape recorder. “The purpose of music television is to sell soap and to sell records,” he says. “We got 50 channels and all you ever see is entertainment on television?there’s so many different ways to promote this shit.”

Jian Ghomeshi, host of CBC’s Play, has viewed Much from two sides of the music business. As front man for the band Moxy Fr?vous he experienced Much’s handling of Canadian artists and arts entertainment first-hand. “I don’t think Much does music journalism,” he says. “MuchMusic operates to a certain extent as a profit-making arm of the marketing department of major record companies,” he says. “Do I think programming over there might be based on what Clearasil wants because they buy the ads? Yeah.”

***
I’m inside the office of vice-president and general manager of MuchMusic and MuchMoreMusic David Kines, at the CHUMCity building. Much’s top gun is surrounded by the tools of his trade. A giant 36-inch television blares host Richard Cazeau wrapping up a session of MuchMoreMusic’s news show, The Loop. An oversized, red double-M logo sits on top of the TV, a reminder of the station’s past. Two smaller televisions feature other CHUM music channels. An entire wall is crammed with framed pictures of music celebrities. To Kines’s left is a massive print of pop superstar Britney Spears wrapping her arms around Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry. “If someone’s selling two million CDs but they’ve got a shitty video, it can be tough,” observes Kines, reinforcing the relationship between the companies that supply the videos and Much, which broadcasts them. “We want the record music industry to be healthy.”

Kines, who started at Much in 1983 as an editor and worked his way up, looks anxious, almost fidgety. He’s swift to defend Much from the accusation that it doesn’t produce any worthwhile journalism. “We don’t just go off and cover anything just ’cause it’s news,” he says, shifting back and forth in his chair, crossing his legs. “We try to pick issues that are relevant to our audience.” He cups his shoe with his hand as he talks. His eyes dart around the room. His tiny dog, Mitzy, a white bichon frise, lies sleeping in the corner. Kines confesses that Mitzy might ruin his reputation as a hard businessman, but when asked whether he’s concerned about the large amount of teen-oriented fare in rotation, he fires back, “We have MuchLOUD and MuchVibe for people who don’t want pop.” He scratches his short salt-and-pepper hair and looks away?the interview seems to be at an impasse.

Since going on air in ’84, Much has been appealing to a set demographic, respecting its advertisers and turning a profit. “It’s essentially been a licence to print money, and it’s done really well,” says former Much VJ Tony Young, a.k.a. Master T. “Advertisers realize that it’s one of the few stations that really caters to a particular market of youth.” Young left the station in late 2001?his contract expired and he was asked to search elsewhere. He was encouraged to look for work at other CHUM properties, specifically MuchMoreMusic, but says he “didn’t want to be shuffled and placed somewhere else.”

MuchMoreMusic was started in 1998 with the intent to provide an outlet for more serious programming?that, in theory, current Much viewers would gravitate toward after outgrowing the teen product. With its limited VJs, MMM relies heavily on musician biographies and purchased foreign content, usually from MTV or VH1. Shows like Behind the Music and The Story Of? focus on a predictable rise-fall-rise narrative of success, setback, then return to glory. They are designed to delve deeper?but not too deeply?into the careers of popular musicians and recycle old interview snippets.

MMM’s demographic stretches from 24 to 49, but it’s left many viewers wanting, well, much more. Daniel Richler, who worked at Much in the 1980s, hosting and producing The NewMusic, says, “I don’t know what it is, but when people turn 30 they’re suddenly supposed to be listening to easy rock.” When asked whether he watches MMM, Richler says, “That is truly a bland channel. There are no opinions offered?just wallpaper. Rock should not be background, it should be foreground.”

Much used to do music journalism. J.D. Roberts (who went on to news broadcasting fame in the United States), Laurie Brown (who later moved to the CBC) and Richler, who is now editor-in-chief and supervising producer of BookTelevision (also launched by CHUM Ltd.), all broke ground working on The NewMusic. Before the birth of MTV, it was the only music television show on air. “The purpose now,” says current host Stroumboulopoulos, “is to examine not just music and musicians but also what musicians feel about other things going on in the world and the environment that they deal with.”

When The NewMusic was one hour long, “You didn’t just slavishly follow whatever some advertising campaign told you to do,” says Richler. “A lot of times people used to yell at me out of pickup trucks on Yonge Street, ‘You asshole!’ because I had asked a critical question of M?tley Cr?e. The fact is, most of the bands enjoyed it because it was so boring for them to answer the same questions over and over again.”

Richler began as a reporter on The NewMusic in 1982. He was immediately assigned grunt jobs. “I was brought on to do the stinky bands in the cockroach-infested hotels,” he says, laughing. In 1984, he took over as host and producer and began to try what he calls “rockumentary” style programming?combining rock music with in-depth journalism. “Record companies were always piling us up with media releases, videos, records and T-shirts, so the real job was to sort out the hype from the groove.”

Richler pushed the limits of rock journalism by purposely asking difficult questions, which often made his subjects uncomfortable. “I never minded conflict. A lot of interviewers tend to shy away from conflict because they won’t be invited back,” says Richler. During an interview with Bryan Adams in 1984, Richler pressed the Vancouver rocker with a line of questioning about Adams’s financial involvement with an antisealing operation. Richler asked Adams if his fans appreciated his political stand on sealing and Adams immediately said, “Oh yeah, everywhere, from coast to coast.” When pressed further as to how fans in the Maritimes felt about Adams’s public boycott of an industry that represents almost half of their economy, Adams tried to back away from his comment. Richler pushed harder, suggesting that the singer hadn’t thought the issue through enough. Adams’s manager, the tempestuous Bruce Allen, stormed into the studio and demanded the tape. The beleaguered host asked, “What is this?the Soviet Union?” but he didn’t give up the tape or his line of questioning. “I wasn’t being belligerent,” he remarks. “I wanted to give musicians respect by asking them honest questions. I didn’t want to just be a handmaiden to the record companies.”

Much has tried to do something other than what Richler calls “press release journalism” on The NewMusic by injecting world affairs into the show. Stroumboulopoulos hosted one program about World AIDS Day, December 1, 2002, in Zambia, Africa. On another, Hollett was sent to Afghanistan, where she did a story on Afghani women and the newfound freedoms they have. But Stuart Berman, music editor at eye Weekly, is critical of Much’s real journalism. “It’s a weird juxtaposition between interesting stories about people who had been tortured for listening to music and this weird section where they take these Afghanistan teenagers around and show them Avril Lavigne videos and are, like, ‘What do you think of that?’ Deep down they know they’re catering to a bunch of teenagers who just want to see an ‘NSync video.”

Today, hardly anyone thinks Much engages in journalism. Certainly not Kines’s predecessor, Denise Donlon, now president of Sony Music Canada. “Much’s mission is to speak to the widest possible audience that it can,” she says. “The Backstreet Boys are selling millions of records around the world and that’s not something they can avoid. Music television is designed to sell advertising. It’s a commercial endeavour designed to capture ratings.”

I talk to the amiable Bill Welychka, host and producer of MuchMoreMusic’s The Story Of?, about it, and he’s troubled by the question of whether he does music journalism. He says, “Just by the mere virtue of the word ‘music,’ it is entertainment. Maybe it’s the connotation that the word ‘journalism’ brings, but I’d be uncomfortable answering that question. Yeah, we can be journalistic, but it’s still entertaining, whereas CNN is journalistic but it’s not entertaining.”

Music journalism “should educate the people as to what the music’s all about,” says the Calgary Herald‘s music critic Heath McCoy. Music journalism should delve past record company PR and inform the audience. If everything Much is programming is in the service of the record companies and advertisers, it’s missing the point of music and music journalism. Even Stroumboulopoulos might agree with that. As he observes, “Music is important because it keeps people company. This is a world filled with lonely people and for a lot of them music is their solace.”

The problem with maintaining a narrow view of what kind of programming young adults want?that kids don’t want to think; they’re only interested in infomercials and fluffy game shows?is that it doesn’t expose them to a critical analysis of music. By pandering to the baser instincts of fandom, Much reduces music coverage to an all-or-nothing approach?either say something nice or don’t say anything at all. Mom’s old adage becomes Much’s motto and its video suppliers’ dream slogan.

Of course, the business view is different. Whether the broadcast is about tossing a burning tree from a roof or attempting an educational program about AIDS, MuchMusic’s ratings are solid and, if we take the company at its word, profits steady. So why challenge the audience by shaking up the status quo? Apparently, failing to ask musicians the tough questions doesn’t seem to matter anymore.

Sitting in the boardroom of the cramped, paper-strewn Geist offices, tucked in the middle of the trendy art galleries, upscale glassware shops and condo developments of Homer Street, Osborne shifts uncomfortably in his chair. He’s in no mood to talk. He declines to have his voice committed to audiotape during our interview, and won’t even allow the door to be closed due to his claustrophobia. “There are no secrets here,” he says, a trace of paranoia in his voice.

Despite his tics, Osborne is something of a local celebrity, a charismatic bon vivant in the B.C. literary community, inspiring awe and devotion in what could (and have been) described as “groupies.” The 55-year-old Osborne is also a computer genius, a devoted grandfather and a man whose shyness led him to begin publishing his photography in the pages of Geist under the enigmatic pseudonym Mandelbrot (after the inventor of chaos theory).

Adamant that Geist is unparalleled among Canadian magazines, Osborne clearly loves to talk about his baby. “I think we have the highest editorial control in the country,” he boasts, his voice veritably purring. “We edit word by word. We fact check the fiction.” Not exactly the kind of casual congeniality you’d expect from a magazine with a steaming mug of coffee for a logo. Osborne has been called business-savvy, ambitious, philanthropic, irreverent and an opinionated idea man. Above all, he is viewed in the insular world of Canadian magazine publishing as having what former Saturday Night editor Paul Tough calls an “outsider personality.” And being an outsider suits Osborne just fine. After all, it usually takes one to lead a revolution, cultural or otherwise.

Okay, it may be a tad hyperbolic to equate a literary magazine with a revolution, but if any Canadian magazine out there is working to shake up a stagnant publishing industry, it’s Geist. People who know Osborne are quick to point out that father and brainchild are indistinguishable, one and the same in tone and worldview. While the quarterly Geist is currently the largest literary magazine in Canada, its circulation still hovers around 7,000 an issue, and it operates on a shoestring $180,000 annual budget. Compare that with the two biggest moneymakers in Canadian magazine publishing, the Rogers-owned Chatelaine and Maclean’s, with a combined total revenue for 2002 of over $80 million.

According to a 2000 study Osborne completed for the Canada Council, the average total circulation for a Canadian English-language literary, visual arts or performing arts magazine is a mere 1,817. Most pin their financial prospects on government money, but since Canada Council grants only account for an average of 23 per cent of total revenue, and provincial grants 13 per cent, these magazines rely heavily on advertising and subscribers to make up the difference. With a dusty back-shelf presence and less than one-tenth of the marketing budget of a magazine with a circulation of 100,000, it can be almost impossible for a small-circulation magazine to find an audience. What’s a self-respecting independent publisher to do? Fill the void.

While most Canadian cultural magazines are (or are perceived as) stuffy, eggheaded publications content to stay on those back shelves and blend in with magazines that read like university dissertations and have the visual panache to match, a handful have come up with fresh approaches to documenting Canadian cultural life. Magazines like HighGrader, a northern Ontario public affairs magazine, and Lola, a Toronto-based arts journal, are doing their parts to subvert readers’ negative expectations. On top of this list of innovators isGeist. Osborne not only wants to “document the Canadian imagination,” his goal for Geist is to become the definitive Canadian magazine. If its burgeoning reputation in the national literary community is any indication, he just might get his wish.

…………………….

“Politics is open and discussed in Canada. Unlike in the U.S., there are alternative venues of thought,” Osborne says. “What’s hidden in Canada is culture.” For over a decade, he had seriously entertained the idea of creating a magazine modelled after the venerable U.S. publication Harper’s?and to a lesser extent The New Yorker and The Atlantic Monthly?and adapting it to suit a Canadian audience. With $7,500 and encouragement from his long-time life partner and senior editor Mary Schendlinger, Osborne created the first issue in his living room in the fall of 1990.

Today, Geist (German for “ghost” or “spirit”) is published by the Geist Foundation, a nonprofit board with Osborne acting as sovereign lord and master. The magazine shares office space with Vancouver Desktop Publishing (founded by Osborne in the 1980s and currently run by his sister Patty), Arsenal Pulp Press (an alternative book publishing firm Osborne started in the 1970s) and an arts management agency (he had nothing to do with this one).

Over the last 12 years, Osborne has managed to transform Geist from a roughly designed magazine?published on what looked like that pulp paper fourth-grade teachers hand out with the fat pencils?to an elegant publication full of luxurious white space, thick-stocked, silky pages, clean lines and stunning black-and-white photography.

But the spirit of the content has changed little. Each issue is devoted to intensely personal, nostalgic and evocative nonfiction and fiction. The front section of the magazine, Notes and Dispatches, always includes a brief essay by Osborne. (In last fall’s “The Lost Art of Waving,” he wondered, “Who today is willing to be diagnosed as nostalgic? Who confesses to that once noble affliction, now reduced to a mere attribute of sentimentalism, a component of kitsch?”) Schendlinger contributes regular cartoons under the pseudonym Eve Corbel. (“Hi, I’m Eve Corbel?and I am Intermittently Unnoticeable. No, really.”) Recently, Geist has received national media attention for its campaign to induct folk legend Stan Rogers into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. The magazine is often funny and irreverent, but are its ideology and outlook a little too, well, West Coast (read “flaky”) to appeal to a national audience?

“They say ideology is like halitosis, everyone else has it, right?” jokes Melissa Edwards, Geist‘s assistant editor. Her responsibilities include editing the magazine’s back page, “Caught Mapping.” (Each issue features a different theme map of Canada, like summer 2000’s “Menstrual Map,” which included the real locations Bloody River, Gush Cove and Bitch Lake.) She also does the day-to-day “monkey work” of the operation. “You don’t see your own ideology,” she says. “To me Geist is not a western magazine.” Edwards comparesGeist‘s situation to The Globe and Mail. “People from Toronto say that it’s not a Toronto newspaper, it’s national. I read it and it’s like, ‘It’s a Toronto newspaper.’ You can’t help be focused on where you’re from.”

…………………….

“Please cancel all future editions of Geist magazine. I dislike the writings printed?Mad to me, and they have a ridiculous, non-sensible, no-talent style. I’ve reread the magazine (or tried to), attempted to understand the prose, poetry (no rhyme), and articles that fill up (with small print) this unique, non-talent (so it seems to me), rambling in the clouds, magazine.”

Like this anonymous former subscriber (sounds as if he or she needs new reading glasses), many readers in the West don’t have any love for a “rambling in the clouds” literary journal either. “A lot of people find it really boring,” says Edwards, who was so enraptured by Geist she started out as a volunteer. A project manager with the B.C. Association of Magazine Publishers, Edwards started marketing campaigns in little British Columbia towns, only to discover that many of those remote outlets not stocking Geist were downright confused by it.

“A lot of them said, ‘This is a magazine? It doesn’t look like a magazine,'” she recalls. Apparently, light and glossy plays as well in Dawson Creek as it does in Stoney Creek. While Edwards thinks a Toronto-based magazine will eventually come along to try to take the place the faltering Saturday Night used to occupy in the cultural lexicon, she still thinks Geist is on “the cusp of being something really big.” Osborne certainly has no plans to relocate, especially since he considers Toronto such an “intellectual wasteland.” He says his obligation is to the Canadian Small Town?whether or not it’s receptive to him?and mourns its loss as an idea both in the Canadian media and in the collective Canadian imagination.

“If you hit a neutron bomb south of Bloor Street, you’d take out 95 per cent of Canada’s media,” HighGradereditor Charlie Angus says, echoing Osborne’s refrain. “They all come from the same gene pool, and they all end up basically telling the same views.” Like Geist, Angus’s magazine seeks to document the small-town Canadian imagination, but in a more self-consciously regional sense. Since 1995, HighGrader has provided a cultural voice for northern Canadians, written from a northern perspective. “Rural Canada is an internal Third World,” Angus says. “People’s stories are just written off, or they’re from an urban perspective, which diminishes the northern voice.”

Published bimonthly from the small mining town of Cobalt, Ontario, HighGrader bills itself as “a magazine with dirt on its fingernails.” Neither Angus nor his wife, publisher Brit Griffin, has any formal journalistic training, but both share a deep commitment to fighting social injustice, and their magazine generally reflects their pro-labour and anti-Tory views.

HighGrader straddles the line between serious political reportage and a folksy voice that articulates the culture of the north. The Fall 2002 issue, for instance, includes pieces on diverse topics like “The Kam Kotia Mine Disaster” (“Ontario’s most notorious mine waste problem”), to Jim Moodie’s nostalgic pilgrimage to Bob Dylan’s boyhood hometown, Hibbing, Minnesota, which would be right at home in the pages of Geist.HighGrader‘s scope is not limited entirely by geography, either. “We try to put an international perspective on rural hinterland issues,” Angus insists. He says his magazine doesn’t reflect a particular party line; Angus himself is almost as suspicious of urban warriors like Earthroots as he is of the Tory government.

…………………….

“Our magazine is being kept alive by old people,” Angus says with a chuckle. Some faithful subscribers are even in their 90s. While the magazine’s circulation is only about 2,000, a recent reader profile estimated its actual readership as high as 12,000. Angus claims the real boon is HighGrader‘s unusually high subscription renewal rates (although he has no firm numbers). With an almost nonexistent newsstand profile and frustrating experiences with past distributors?including one that never paid and refused to reveal where the magazine was stocked?HighGrader relies on its subscribers to keep it alive, a unique situation, considering subscription sales account for only 17 per cent of the average small-circulation magazine’s revenue.

Still, it’s not an unusual phenomenon for a small Canadian title to have such a rabidly loyal following. According to John Degen of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association, Canadian magazines have become world leaders in per-capita subscription sales. “Canadian consumers are wily,” Degen says. “When they don’t see themselves reflected at the supermarket checkouts or newsstands, they make sure their perspective gets delivered to their door instead.”

Like Osborne and Schendlinger, Angus and Griffin pride themselves on their high level of editorial control. Unlike Geist, however, HighGrader has stayed away from grant funding. About two-thirds of Geist‘s budget comes from public funding, mainly from the Canada Council and the Canada Magazine Fund, which was launched in 2000 by Canadian Heritage.

For the 2000-02 funding period, the Geist Foundation received $40,000 from CMF for a direct mail campaign. But the CMF is by no means exclusively funding struggling independents. The program also gave the French and English versions of Chatelaine, the richest title in the country, over $500,000 combined for 2001-02. Sibling Maclean’s received over $1 million.

While the HighGrader team has discussed starting a foundation in the past, generally when money is tight, they make a plea to their readers. HighGrader subscribers have saved the magazine with their donations many times. For the past two years, Angus hasn’t had to make that plea, although subscription rates are going up at the request of many readers. “They think it’s way too low,” Angus says. “Twenty bucks a year, you just can’t make it.” He recently had to take a full-time job with the Algonquin Nation to support the magazine and his family (Angus has three daughters, aged 14, 12 and 5. The two eldest are already writers and activists).

Since HighGrader is such an eccentric magazine, Angus has basically given up on advertising revenue as a major source of income. “I can’t stand having to phone people time and time again for chintzy little ads,” he grumbles. Clearly, Angus is happier muckraking than marketing. But some fledgling cultural magazines are toying with the potential of big publicity, bigger circulation and (just maybe) big-time profits.

…………………….

“Who the fuck is Sharon Salson?” the press release demands. Salson sits cross-legged in a space-age desk chair in a downtown Toronto office building with a rather tony King Street address, wearing a casual uniform of jeans and a black cardigan, her blond-streaked hair stylishly tousled. Tucked in a small, bright corner of the cavernous, loft-style offices of Inside Entertainment publishers Kontent?an industrial space laden with wood blonder than she is and an assortment of candy-coloured iMacs and fuzzy-topped pens?Salson (who became Salson-Gregg after marrying pollster and former Conservative Party strategist Allan Gregg last August) is beaming with an air of enthusiasm that only someone with a marketing background can possess. She is, in fact, none other than the brand spanking new publisher of the country’s cheekiest, scrappiest and most irreverent art magazine, Lola, and she couldn’t be happier about it.

In February 2002, when Lola announced via brassy press release that it had acquired its first-ever publisher, the magazine was already a comparatively big success on the Toronto indie scene. But Salson-Gregg knew when she took the position it might be a struggle to transform Lola from underground darling to heavyweight commercial success. “It was an entrepreneurial challenge, a creative challenge,” she says. “It was a magazine that I had been following. I do believe strongly that it’s got tremendous potential in this market to really break through.”

Salson-Gregg came to Lola after marketing stints at Toronto Life and Telemedia and as marketing director at the Art Gallery of Ontario. (She still runs her own consulting business on the side.) After joining Lola last winter (and throwing a high-profile party in honour of her new gig), Salson-Gregg set out to build a growth strategy for the magazine. She is looking to expand Lola’s readership beyond its current niche of art insiders to readers who are interested in learning more about the art world but might be too intimidated to pick up a conventional art journal.
Founded in 1997 by editor and arts writer Catherine Osborne (no relation to Geist‘s Stephen), artist Sally McKay and curator John Massier, Lola quickly separated itself from the milky quagmire of stuffy academic journals like so much creamy goodness. From an initial print-run of 1,300 freebies distributed to art galleries and bookstores in downtown Toronto, Lola has grown to a circulation of 10,000.

The ladies of Lola were frustrated with the lack of freshness and innovation in the world of arts and culture coverage. “We were tired of reading the same bylines,” says Osborne, an impossibly petite brunette sporting groovy cat’s-eye glasses. “We were tired of the same artists getting coverage.” Osborne was also bored with the sterilized approach most art magazines took to rough and ready exhibits, robbing them of their vitality and “street cred.” Equally frustrated that she couldn’t score much freelance work in a stagnant Toronto arts journalism scene, Osborne met with McKay and mutual friend Massier, and decided to start a magazine (Massier left after two issues because of work obligations).

“When we started it was very much with that kind of do-it-yourself, “we’re-just-gonna-make-this-thing’ attitude,” says McKay, sitting in the front room of her tiny second-floor apartment in west end Toronto. “It quickly became clear that there was a place for a serious endeavour.” With a background in fine art, McKay is entirely self-taught when it comes to magazine layout, her principal job as Lola’s art director. (Despite the separation of tasks, McKay and Osborne share editorial control.)

Lola’s success on the Toronto arts scene has as much to do with its style as its substance. A cross between the cut-and-paste homemade quality of zines and the glossiness of consumer magazines, Lola treats visual arts with the appropriate attention to the visual. Although until recently most of the magazine’s distribution base has been art galleries, Lola shows no signs of the elitist sensibility that might imply. The magazine includes ongoing columns like Ask Lola’s Lawyer, featuring legal advice for artists from attorney Adam Bobker. (Last winter’s issue featured a letter from the “co-editors of a Toronto art magazine” about copyright infringement suspiciously signed “C.O. and S.M.”) There’s also a gossip column, sex column and the most popular department, the “shotgun review” section, featuring a slew of art exhibit mini-reviews. Contributors are cheekily identified at the back in “Who the Fuck Is Lola?” (Sample: “R.M. Vaughan is easily swayed by his emotions.”)

This is culture for the populace, albeit a progressive populace, and Lola has never been afraid to offend. So, were McKay and Osborne worried that “taking it to the next level” would jeopardize their obvious nose-thumbing tendencies?

For Osborne, bringing Salson-Gregg into the fold was a matter of practicality. “In the morning I’d be calling galleries to advertise and then in the afternoon call them to ask editorial questions. You can’t do that,” she says, laughing. Unlike Geist and HighGrader, Lola has relied heavily on advertising from the very beginning. Osborne and McKay were also able to secure a $50,000 line of low-interest credit after putting together an initial business plan. Lola only started receiving grant funding from the Canada Council this year, but the $20,000 it got didn’t go very far. (It also received an $80,000 multiyear grant from the CMF for its “growth spurt.”) Even though the magazine is still barely breaking even?it costs as much as $25,000 to print each issue?it’s clear the potential pool of advertisers eager to court Lola’s tragically hip readership is enormous.

Salson-Gregg has been busying herself landing advertising accounts like Absolut Vodka based on the statistics from Lola’s most recent readers’ survey. “We know our readers spend money going out,” she says. “They’re not stay-at-home types. So it’s about buying CDs, books, clothes, feeding into a lifestyle that’s about socializing and accessing the culture and entertainment that’s available.”

Last November, Lola finally went completely “newsstand,” ceasing to be a free publication in Toronto. While it had always cost $5 for magazines distributed outside the GTA, Lola’s price is now $3.95 almost everywhere. “It’s not unusual for a free magazine to go newsstand,” assures Osborne. “That’s a good thing.”

And even more radical changes are in the works. “We have to be more inclusive around what defines art and culture,” says Salson-Gregg, who this past winter became a Lola co-owner along with McKay and Osborne. “Moving beyond visual art into other forms, but staying true to the magazine, being smart without being turgid, funny without being silly, accessible without kowtowing to the lowest common denominator.” She would also like to see the magazine grow from a quarterly to a bimonthly. Still furiously brainstorming redesign ideas, the ladies are aiming for an early fall rebirth of Lola.

“My personal goal is that it survive,” McKay says when asked if she would like to see her magazine become as successful as the granddaddy of Toronto publications, Toronto Life. But she’s wary about courting the same affluent audience at the expense of Lola’s current activist core. “I’m interested in a more alternative readership. To me, Toronto Life is the most boring magazine in the world. As far as making that much money? Sure. Whether it’s possible? I don’t know.”

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The successful rearing of a small-market magazine takes as much careful nurturing as it does steely tenacity, and tends to consume every facet of a struggling publisher’s life. Geist senior editor Mary Schendlinger insists it’s the nature of the business. “People talk about Stephen and me retiring and we just kind of look at them,” she says. “We know we’ll be doing this forever. We don’t strive to separate those things.”

Schendlinger, Geist‘s kind-hearted “ambassador,” worked on the magazine without pay for 10 years; Osborne has yet to take a salary. (Both teach at Simon Fraser University and work on outside writing and editing projects.) “Mary keeps on an even keel and tends to temper things when they need tempering,” says managing editor Barbara Zatyko, Geist‘s lone full-time, paid employee.

Zatyko and Edwards both say the day-to-day operations of Geist have received a welcome streamlining as the magazine has grown. “Steve always had the business savvy,” Zatyko says, “but there was no time to incorporate it because printers were calling and screaming at us for not paying bills and we were always on the brink of going under. We now have more time to devote to strategic planning.” Adds Edwards, “We can actually put our efforts toward boosting circulation, selling the ads, getting involved in the community. Branding, if you want to use that word.”

When launching the first direct marketing campaign, Geist‘s natural audience was immediately evident to Osborne. Before publishing an issue, he spent U.S. $1,000 to buy Harper’s list of Canadian subscribers, mailing the first issue to half the list, the second issue to the other half. He got a five per cent response on both mailings?an unusually high return from a direct marketing campaign. According to current CMPA director Judith Parker, a former This Magazine publisher, the average subscription rate for a campaign is between 1.5 and 2.5 per cent. Unfortunately, reaching readers through “DM” campaigns can be a costly gamble for small magazines. Osborne estimates it currently costs $20 to court one potential Geist subscriber directly. As a rule, magazines that aren’t driven by advertising should spend no more than twice their annual subscription rate on direct marketing. “That way, you will make the money back in three or four years?if your cash flow lets you live that long!” Parker says.

Through its own readers’ surveys, Osborne found that Geist‘s readers are 52 per cent female, have one or more university degrees per household, and make between $40,000 to $80,000 a year. Most are white collar “cultural workers” who listen to a lot of CBC Radio. (“We didn’t even ask about TV.”) They also read seven times as many Canadian books as typical Canadian university graduates. Geist (which has a newsstand price of $4.95) recently started distributing on the B.C. ferry system, where it has been outselling many large consumer titles, although a minor outcry from more conservative ferry passengers erupted over the cover photo of the fall 2002 issue, a group shot of pink-bummed nudists frolicking by the ocean.

While Charlie Angus is relying mainly on loyal subscribers to keep HighGrader afloat (“I guess we’re not as efficient as we should be,” he says), Geist, like Lola, is aggressively looking to expand its readership. Osborne is itching to crack into the untapped market of Canadians living in the U.S. “The readers I show it to down here are always enthusiastic,” says Geist contributor and New York Times Magazine story editor Paul Tough. “More than other Canadian magazines, Geist has a confidence, a sense of place in the world.”

“These magazines will always struggle to increase audience share above a certain number, and I don’t think this is a particularly Canadian phenomenon,” says the CMPA’s John Degen. He points to the relatively low circulation of Harper’s magazine (a little over 200,000?modest for an American publication). That’s not to say he thinks it’s fair. “I personally love Geist. I read every issue cover to cover.”

Is it probable that one of the big three magazine publishing entities?Transcontinental, Rogers Publishing or St. Joseph Media, which published the recently folded Shift under its Multi-Vision arm?will ever champion a general-interest cultural publication like Geist? Don Sedgwick, the co-ordinator of Centennial College’s Book and Magazine Publishing program in Toronto and a 25-year publishing veteran, believes it’s probably wishful thinking. “It would be hard to justify to any corporate board or publicly traded operation,” he says. “They’re not in the business of philanthropy. It would have to be someone with very deep pockets and enormous concerns for those kinds of issues.”

Osborne has no interest in relinquishing autonomy to the corporate world anyway, yet his editorial goals remain ambitious. Thanks to a recent $120,000 grant from the privately operated Tula Foundation, Osborne plans to expand the spring 2003 issue to 80 pages and, as part of his goal of becoming the “definitive Canadian magazine,” to resurrect the long-form essay that Saturday Night has all but dropped, and the photo essay that used to be the hallmark of Life magazine. Osborne and Schendlinger might share studio space on Vancouver’s Commercial Drive, but the Grand Poobah of the West Coast literary world is realistic aboutGeist‘s overall commercial reach.

“We are not a consumer magazine, and we never will be,” he says.

After being grilled in his boardroom for over an hour, Osborne grows noticeably antsy. As I flip through my notes to ensure I haven’t missed anything, those steely eyes of his bore into mine once again. “You’ve got enough,” King Geist decrees as I quake in my red wedge-heeled boots. He’s probably right. I get the feeling that Stephen Osborne is seldom wrong, and that he knows it. He hands me mounds of back issues (there’s that Osborne generosity) and is off in a flash. Maybe he has an important meeting, or he has to prepare for his master of ceremonies gig at the annual Writers Fest’s poetry night. Or maybe he just wants to grab a bite at the local greasy spoon, where he will work on a chapter in the nonfiction novel about Vancouver he is writing, or sneak a few snapshots of the diners. (Robert Fulford once wrote “the perfect Geist story would take place in a donut shop,” but he’s probably never seen the Homer Caf?.) Whatever he’s up to, he’ll most likely be thinking about his magazine while he is doing it.

“He’s the one who lies awake at night with his fists clenched if there’s any struggle,” says Schendlinger. “It’s his magazine.” Still, it’s nice of him to share it with the rest of us.