“Cover the riots,” instructed Lisa Gregoire’s editors. Her bosses at the Edmonton Journal had a clear idea of the stories they expected to see from the 2002 G8 Summit in Kananaskis, Alberta. But when there were no riots to cover, Gregoire started producing articles with headlines such as “Calgary March Proves Critics Wrong,” and “G8 Protestors Act in Good Faith: Promoting Peace, Opposing Colonialism.” Having been a reporter for 11 years, Gregoire thought she had earned some credibility in the newsroom, but her articles went missing, got hacked, or were buried in the back pages. A senior editor deemed one story left-wing propaganda. That’s when she first decided to quit. “I was a pariah in the newsroom,” says Gregoire, who left in 2003. “They thought that I had gone over the line by hanging out with activists. Suddenly, I was no longer qualified to cover the issues – I was labelled ‘on the inside, too sympathetic.'”

For reporters, avoiding that label can be a challenge. “Journalists and activists are using each other all the time,” says John Willis, the former chairperson of Greenpeace USA. Willis now works with advocacy groups at Strategic Communications in Toronto, advising social-justice groups using lessons he acquired at Greenpeace in the 1980s. The organization now has 2.8 million members and offices in 40 countries, but it began crusading in 1971, when a few Vancouver activists set sail for a nuclear-testing site in an old fishing boat. The media ate it up and each side has happily fed off each other ever since. In 1990, for example, Greenpeace campaigner Gord Perks interrupted former Ontario premier David Peterson’s election announcement to play a taped message attacking the government’s environmental record. With camera crews all around, Perks and Peterson stood face-to-face – the activist’s scraggly beard and shorts versus the premier’s sweaty face and suit – the media couldn’t ignore the image confrontation or the environmental issues that were being raised. But things have changed. Now, old activist tactics don’t always capture media attention; journalists are reporting on complex issues less, and for both groups, cynicism is on the rise.

Journalists are understandably wary of becoming too sympathetic or being spun by activist groups. “There is the danger that a reporter can go from being a disinterested reporter to a biased participant – that sometimes happens,” says The Globe and Mail’s night editor, Bob Cox. His colleague Doug Saunders, the paper’s U.K. bureau chief, says that getting too close to activist sources is “a form of laziness that tempts every journalist – activist groups are among the easiest to cover since they send out great blasts of press-seeking information.” But activists also get burned when reporters distort or ignore their words and perspectives. Today, activists – particularly less established groups – work harder to get media attention that frequently isn’t fair or favourable, while journalists work in newsrooms with fewer resources than ever before. Still, the two groups rely on each other, engaging in a necessary tug-of-war, but always fearful of being manipulated and ending up down in the dirt. “The two have a symbiotic relationship and yet there is a deep distrust,” says Claude Adams, an instructor of broadcasting at the University of British Columbia. “Each side understands how the game works – and they’re very cynical about it.” Overcoming the profound distrust can be tricky, but some reporters are doing just that. Ultimately, it’s a leap of faith leading both sides to realize that a professional and mutually beneficial relationship is an achievable goal.

 * * *

Although Alanna Mitchell is a winner of the Global Award for Excellence in Environment Reporting, the majority of story ideas she pitches to her editors are not about the environment at all. In fact, the Globe’s provisional science and environment beat reporter writes primarily about science and considers the environment beat science-based, never activist driven. “It’s been very hard to get the science across to my editors,” she says. “They think if you write about the environment, you are left wing and radical and that you’re bought.” Some stories, though, are just too good for even the most skeptical editors to ignore. In 2000, a Calgary environmentalist phoned Mitchell with a great tip. He claimed that an oil and gas company was involved in a tragic scandal and presented enough information for the reporter to want to investigate. She spent two days trying to pin down the story, calling the company and the people involved – but the lead was a sham. “I just felt that I had wasted my time. The Spidey sense goes up now when I talk to people,” says Mitchell, still clearly peeved about the incident. “I’m very picky about the groups I use. Some, I simply don’t believe when they call me.”

Mitchell is particularly cautious because of her beat: “Environment stories are held to a higher standard because there is an appearance of activism that goes along with it,” she says. “I try very hard to strip that out of them.” Of course, there are organizations she does communicate with, notably conservative groups such as Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society, and Ducks Unlimited. They don’t try to spin her and they produce great science-based research that Mitchell says is “done in the spirit of informing rather than inflating emotion.”

When emotionally driven tactics become aggressive tactics – including property damage, assault, and vandalism – activists scare away even sympathetic reporters. “If some social activist group wants to squat in an empty building and seize it in the name of public good,” says the Globe’s Cox, “that group loses credibility because it’s breaking the law.” Before the Quebec City summit in 2001, for example, the Globe ran a special series on the Free Trade Area of the Americas, and CBC aired radio and television features on the issues. But when 6,000 cops with water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets faced off against demonstrators, and small pockets of protestors smashed windows and painted media vehicles with slogans such as “Burn corporate media,” coverage of the issues gave way to coverage of the chaos. And any credibility the movement had gained was lost.

One journalist reporting on the protests was The Gazette’s Sue Montgomery in Montreal. She maintains professional relationships with radical and anarchist groups, a continuing hub of activist activity in Canada – but remains suspicious. “There has to be some credibility,” Montgomery says, “or they might make us look like idiots.” She cites the example of a group called Les Sorcières (The Witches). These pro-choice activists held a press conference in a park across the street from an antiabortion protest outside Henry Morgentaler’s clinic to declare that women’s reproductive rights were being threatened. Montgomery went to the conference, but the group members insisted on remaining anonymous. “It was ridiculous,” Montgomery recalls. “You can’t call a press conference, make a statement, and not give your names.” After enduring such unprofessional stunts, many journalists agree with Mitchell when she says, “When you’re writing about social-activist issues, you have to have your bullshit radar on really high.”

* * *

In August 2004, hundreds of thousands swamped the streets of New York City to protest the Republican Party’s National Convention. But Jaggi Singh, perhaps one of the most recognizable Canadian activists, wasn’t there. Of course, anyone who saw the front page of The New York Daily News a few days earlier wouldn’t have known that. The article reported that Singh was a dangerous anarchist who had received firearms training from a militant Black Panther and would be leading “anarchists hot for mayhem.” All the juicy details were bogus. Meanwhile, the New York Post, a competing paper, published a photo of Singh shooting off a handgun. A friend of his who saw the picture notes: “It is some brown guy with high cheekbones and a Harry Potter haircut, but it’s not Jaggi.”

These were extreme fabrications, but they exemplify why many activists, including Singh, are distrustful of the media. Singh first gained celebrity status after plainclothes cops nabbed him and slapped him with an assault charge, which was later dropped, at the 1997 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation protests in Vancouver. Now, he doesn’t throw himself into the spotlight readily because he doesn’t like how the media develop cults of personality. “I didn’t choose to be covered in the way I have been,” he says. “I’ve said no to interviews far more often than I’ve said yes.” In 2001, CBC’s the fifth estate aired a documentary profile of the social-justice activist, but producers found it difficult to get his cooperation. In fact, they had to work through his girlfriend to convince him to talk. “Often, people clamour to get in front of a microphone,” says Anna Maria Tremonti, the host of the piece. “But Jaggi didn’t clamour.”

Still, Singh tries to use the media strategically. He isn’t always happy with the results, though, as he was reminded in September 2002. He submitted an 800-word op-ed piece to the Globe about a demonstration against the appearance of Benjamin Netanyahu at Concordia University. Although he knew the headline would be changed, Singh proposed the title, “Netanyahu and free speech.” Instead, the headline became “Day of Broken Glass,” and ran with a photo of a protestor smashing a glass window. The Kristallnacht reference – comparing protestors to Nazis – couldn’t be more obvious or damaging. “With the Daily News, it was just blatant misrepresentation,” Singh says. “But the Globe couldn’t have marginalized me more with that headline. It was beyond the pale.”

Furthermore, when journalists make stark generalizations about activists they make it tough to develop good relationships. In June 2002, for example, the National Post sent Rebecca Eckler to follow an activist at the G8 Summit in Kananaskis. Eckler chose a 19-year-old protestor, pierced and tattooed, who drank Nestea, wasn’t well informed, and wasn’t particularly articulate. “I went to the protest on Sunday,” Eckler quoted her, “and immediately afterwards I found myself using my debit card, taking money out of a bank machine in a food court in a mall so I could buy ice cream.” Using one person to point out all the predictable hypocrisies, Eckler mocked the whole movement.

Activists also have difficulty collaborating with journalists because of the media’s incessant focus on confrontation and spectacle. Reporters often overlook complicated issues in favour of a repetitious narrative of violence. Newspapers are working with less money and space, and the issues raised by dissenting groups are often too intricate for journalists writing for daily publications to cover at all. “Activists talk about causes that are complex,” says Gazette reporter Catherine Solyom. “Daily reporting demands that things be portrayed in black and white. You have little space to deal with the complexities.” So, even journalists who do care about the issues activists raise can’t always cover them. This only adds to the deep distrust. “Activists tend to feel that journalists don’t take them seriously, and if they don’t do something violent, they’re not going to get any attention,” says Stephen Kimber, a professor of journalism at King’s College. “It is, unfortunately, probably true.”

At the G8 Summit in Kananaskis, for example, activists made a concerted effort to avoid violence. But many journalists seemed unimpressed with the softer tactics. Council of Canadians chairperson Maude Barlow received a phone call from an Alberta-based Globe reporter after Kananaskis, who said, “I want to congratulate you; you did it really well and all the media noticed. By the way, do that one or two more times and we won’t report on you again.”

“I guess we’re damned if we do,” Barlow responded, “and damned if we don’t.”

When best-selling author Linda McQuaig started working on her latest book, It’s the Crude, Dude, her first stop was Ottawa, not Calgary, or Houston, Texas. And she wasn’t looking to talk to politicians or bureaucrats. Instead, McQuaig wanted to visit Elizabeth May, the Sierra Club of Canada’s national executive director, because she was certain the environmentalist could get her research off to a strong start. “I’m very impressed by how well informed groups like the Sierra Club are,” the writer says. “They not only have genuine concern for the public good, but a real concern for accuracy in reporting – they want the story told right.” McQuaig contacts May and other activists regularly for research. Working for a newspaper can be particularly challenging, she notes, because it’s impossible to have a good understanding of all the issues all the time. That’s where groups like the Sierra Club and Council of Canadians become invaluable. “I don’t want to take a group as a final source, but they can direct you to other experts and lead you in the right direction,” she says. “Most don’t even care if I quote them – they just want to get the information out there.”

While McQuaig is happy to talk about her relationship with May, many journalists and activists are reluctant to reveal the details of their positive encounters – the former afraid of compromising their credibility, and the latter afraid of losing sympathetic contacts. Still, many rely on each other to accomplish a similar objective – to communicate information to a mass audience. “Activists are cozy with journalists because they need each other,” says Saunders. “Much of what you see in any day’s newspaper originates from activists of one sort or another, whether or not they’re acknowledged in the copy.” The Gazette’s Solyom suggests that the relationship can be mutually beneficial. “I have a good relationship with activists,” says the reporter, who has written articles about radical Montreal groups, like the Anti-Capitalist Convergence and refugee-rights groups like the Coalition Against the Deportation of Palestinian Refugees. “They want coverage and I want to write interesting and important stories.” Even Singh acknowledges that not all his dealings with the media have been bad. “There are some journalists who are willing to take time on a story,” says Singh. “That doesn’t mean days, it just means making a couple of calls and getting all the background information so the story is not exploitative.” Yet, while journalists and activists may both live by the old adage of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, a reporter must maintain some objectivity while an activist will always adhere to a clear agenda. “The relationship can be positive,” suggests Strategic Communications’s Willis, “as long as there is a real distinction between what each group does.”

There’s a real distinction at the Journal between reporting on activism and reporting on environmental issues. In contrast to Gregoire’s unhappy experience in 2002, award-winning features writer Ed Struzik produces first-rate environment stories, and Hanneke Brooymans has covered the environment daily for about three years. “It’s a major issue here in Edmonton,” she says, “but the environment is something everyone is interested in, right?” Not everyone – after all, Brooymans is one of only a few environment beat reporters working at newspapers in Canada. Part of her approach to covering the beat is to speak to a variety of organizations on a regular basis. She believes many groups – including the Pembina Institute, a Calgary think tank, and Clean Air Strategic Alliance, which is concerned with air quality in Alberta – help her present balanced stories. Still, she never assumes an organization is reputable right away. “I look at how long it has been around and talk to colleagues about their dealings with the organization. It takes time to establish an opinion.” And, like Mitchell, Brooymans has been duped once before, though she’s unwilling to divulge any details. “But I see no reason to begin distrusting all activists as a result.”

A group she does maintain a close relationship with is the Sierra Club. With 10,000 members and active since 1963, the group is dedicated to protecting our ecosystem from hazards, including toxic chemicals and human over-consumption. “We rely on the media a tremendous amount,” admits Sonja Mihelcic, the prairie chapter director. “But reporters depend on us too, especially if they have a looming deadline.” Some journalists have interviewed Mihelcic at length and then used only the most controversial statement, or omitted her point of view entirely. Brooymans isn’t one of them, though. In fact, she and Mihelcic talk several times a year and the two hold one another in high regard. “The Sierra Club is a group I have come to rely on as being knowledgeable, eloquent, and well-versed,” Brooymans says. In October 2004, for instance, Brooymans covered the release of the Sierra Club’s annual report card. In an article headlined, “Alberta fails environment exam: Sierra Club’s assessment superficial, government says,” Brooymans gives voice to both government sources and the environmental group. Of course, it doesn’t mean the Sierra Club or other groups get all the coverage they want. “The story,” the reporter says, “still has to have a hook and be relatively new.”

It’s difficult to produce fresh and engaging environment stories day after day, but Brooymans knows that including a range of voices gives her pieces depth. “That’s what journalism is about,” says Tremonti, who is now the host of CBC Radio’s The Current. “We’re supposed to go into the corners that might make people uncomfortable, because then, maybe, they’ll start thinking.” Ultimately, getting into those corners requires shedding the contempt that marks the typical activist-journalist relationship, a strengthening of trust, and the abandoning of detrimental labels, like those slapped on Gregoire. “To be an activist is not bad,” says Tremonti. “These are people who devote much time to figuring out what’s wrong with things and how to make them better.” And, for many journalists, that’s a resource too good to pass up.

A red-hot email alerted me: my CBS television news team had to mobilize fast. We left Baghdad in a convoy of SUVs, with the all-important satellite truck, SAT phones, and laptops heading for Tikrit, where Saddam Hussein had been captured. Only a few hours later, our genius satellite truck operator got us on the air – and kept us on the air even in the midst of a wind and rain storm.

It was a massive team effort. Camera and sound operators laid cable and chose the best locations for standups and interviews, while also preparing for the military’s live press conference. Getting it back home meant satellite and Internet contact with the editorial and production desks back in New York.

Meanwhile, I chased sources and set myself up inside the front door of Saddam’s Tikrit palace with my laptop on a crate, trying to pull pieces together into a script. A soft, somewhat gaudily decorated armchair from the main dining room completed my desk, while the computer and phone line stretched dozens of feet to the technical hub – the truck.

We maintained constant contact with the bureau in Baghdad and the main desk in the United States – a steady stream of crucial information across thousands of kilometres, with dozens of people coordinating feeds from several different locations to create a comprehensive whole. It was the crowning moment of an assignment that had started a year earlier.

Covering a war is a challenge for any correspondent, but today some television journalists wear their broadcast tools the way they wear flak jackets. In early winter 2003, a number of my colleagues and I began preparing to cover the expected U.S. invasion of Iraq. Besides being trained to keep our heads down, we learned how to compress field material and send it back to headquarters over the Internet.

The gear: a small handheld video camera common to any consumer with a few thousand dollars to spare. The goal: get the interviews, gather up the video, put together what is most newsworthy and relevant, and then send it by email using a portable satellite dish. That bears repeating: it was sent by email. So I travelled with a laptop in a waist pack, while my cameraman hauled the technical gear in a knapsack. Just like the American soldiers, we had backpacks and duffle bags for the rest – including clothing, toiletries, and a spare chemical suit. But any trip to the front meant moving with only what we needed: helmets, bulletproof vests, chemical masks, a compact TV, and transmission gear.

Ready for action, I found myself assigned to the 4^th Infantry Division for several weeks. Unfortunately, we ended up stalled in Kuwait only a few kilometres from the Iraq border. Turkey had denied the U.S. a base for an attack from the north, so the unit was forced to reposition far south – a task that took so long that most of the 4^th Infantry Division missed the major battles. We weren’t in the middle of the action, but we gathered what we could for broadcast.

Still, I won’t easily forget the strangest “stakeout” of my career. My camera operator and I found two chairs – this was a base camp, after all – and planted them outside the 4^th Infantry Division’s command centre, set up the camera using the position of the sun to create the proper lighting, and waited in the desert. I paced most of the time – my gas mask constantly thumping against my left leg – ready to pounce on the commanding general as soon as he emerged. When he finally did, he answered my questions. My camera operator and I then scrambled quickly to our tent, where we edited the material on his computer. He established a satellite link and transmitted the general’s video comments by email. It took a couple of hours, but the clips made it there in time to be included in another correspondent’s piece.

Today, TV journalists can gather and send information using reasonably lightweight equipment. But while we may be agile and fast, we still have to get the story. No matter how good the technology, we must still live with the editorial bottom line: everything in context.

Coincidentally, our news-gathering process was parallel in many ways to the military’s maneuvers. The tank battalion of the all-male 4^th Infantry Division was the U.S. Army’s most sophisticated, digitized and highly mechanized unit. Onboard computers linked one tank to the other as well as to the regional commander and central command. Again, we sent the information by email. Individual tank crews could pinpoint allied and enemy positions, helping make the battle decisions, which went up the e-line. This information contributed to the comprehensive outline of the war map – which also included air and sea components – at central command in Qatar.

It was ironic that one of the war’s biggest stories, the capture of Saddam, was reported live from the despot’s former palace. The 4^th Infantry Division – “my guys,” the ones who spearheaded it – set up operations, including a full communications system, in his Tikrit palace. They then used it as a launching site for almost daily raids in their search for him. To report on the capture, low-flying Black Hawk helicopters transported a group of journalists, including me, to Saddam’s hiding place, and flew us back out in time to get our video and interviews on air.

With all the new technological tricks of the trade, there’s a danger that we too often take the story for granted. We shouldn’t. We must remember that the journalist’s job hasn’t changed: it’s to get the story and do it well. That’s the challenge and that’s as exciting as ever.

Just before last June’s federal election, Canadian blogger Andrew Coyne asked his readers to show their cards. “Your predictions, please, for the number of seats each party will win,” he posted. “I’ll take the average of everyone’s predictions and we’ll test the ‘wisdom of crowds’ hypothesis.” Coyne, a political columnist for the National Post, was referring to The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations by James Surowiecki, a business columnist for The New Yorker. “Remember,” Coyne wrote, “it’s what you think will happen not what you want to happen.”

Over the next three days, 279 readers posted, the majority predicting a Conservative victory. Coyne’s forecast was: Liberals 95, Conservatives 132, NDP 21, Bloc 60, and Independents zero, which he then revised to: “Crooks 102, Fascists 124, Commies 26, Traitors 55 and Freaks 1.” Only 74 expected a Liberal victory, with one adding, “Coyne is right – polls are indeed crack, and the brain-damaging effects of an addiction to it are obvious judging from the delusional seat tallies I have read on this website.” When all was said and done, roughly 75 per cent, or 208 readers, predicted a Conservative win. The final average was: Conservatives 122, Liberals 106, NDP 22, Bloc 57, and Independents one.

As it turned out, the Liberals beat the Conservatives 135 to 99. Why did the crowd get it wrong? They disregarded Coyne’s only rule. “If they wanted one party to win, they’d say they thought it would win but wouldn’t bet money on it,” Coyne later told me. A crowd can become a mob when two things happen: “The first is that people start taking their cues from each other, so that they assume that if many people are doing something, they should, too,” Surowiecki told Forbes.com, the business magazine’s online edition. “The second thing that happens is that diversity – of opinion and information – vanishes, and the crowd starts to act almost as if it’s of one mind.”

Political preference, wishful thinking, and maybe even a mob mentality skewed the results of Coyne’s experiment. “We weren’t bang on, but then nobody else was either,” he said. “I don’t see why I wouldn’t do it again.” While his readers may have failed to predict the election results correctly, the wisdom-of-crowds experiment showed how the blog can transform the letter to the editor into a real conversation. Blogs strengthen the reader-writer bond, allowing journalists to hear from readers firsthand, while giving readers a stronger sense of the journalist’s personality and point of view. Although some critics see blogs as echo chambers for the arrogant and others dismiss them as a fad, defenders argue that the medium offers significant advantages for creators and consumers alike.

To see if I could benefit from these advantages, I did what anyone in my position would do – I started a blog about blogs. I named it Blog on Blog, playing on Bob Dylan’s 1966 album Blonde on Blonde, and used it to track and explore what I saw in the blogosphere. Each week my site attracted reader comments, some from big-shot journalists, and I quickly realized that my blog could indeed be a valuable journalistic tool.

In some ways, the first blog was the first website. It was created by Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the World Wide Web. In 1992, he started keeping track of all new sites, linking to them as they came online. The first known news weblog – soon shortened to blog – was Dispatches From the Coast, which reported on North Carolina’s Hurricane Bonnie in 1998. While most blogs are personal diaries, Cyberjournalist.net, a resource devoted to online journalism, lists about 450 news blogs, most run by U.S. journalists. Political bloggers secured press credentials at the 2004 Democratic and Republican conventions, and Ana Marie Cox, a self-proclaimed unsuccessful freelance writer who left journalism to edit Wonkette (her politics and culture blog), made the cover of The New York Times Magazine in September. Meanwhile, BlogsCanada lists more than 100 blogs under the News and Media category. Canadian mainstream media bloggers, essentially an all-male fraternity, includes music writers Aaron Wherry of the Post and Carl Wilson of The Globe and Mail, technology writer Mark Evans of the Post, and business writer Mathew Ingram of the Globe. Columnists such as Coyne and Paul Wells of Maclean’s also joined in, as well as the Post’s Colby Cosh, who started blogging in July 2002 after realizing it was the perfect format for someone with a short attention span: “I was hooked on the junk soon enough.”

For David Akin, a former national business and technology correspondent and current parliamentary reporter for CTV’s Ottawa bureau, the decision to start a blog in 2002 was a natural progression. He was the first to open an email account at the Orillia Packet and Times in 1992, and now gets up to 300 emails a day. He also uses instant messenger. “Blogs help me develop and maintain a relationship with the community I’m writing on,” says Akin, who expresses himself with his hands, uses finger quotes, imitates voices, and scrunches his face in deep thought. “Readers are suspicious of mainstream media. If I know how to use the newest technology, I gain credibility with my readers.” Reader rapport aside, Akin says one of his blog’s practical advantages is that it helps him find sources. In June 2004, while doing a CTV story on content in preteen magazines, he posted an entry headlined, “Help! Looking for parents of teenagers.” It worked like a charm.

Akin is hardly the only journalist to discover these charms. Cosh’s readers often help him with stories. “When I write about the U2 Spy Plane, the one the band’s named after, I immediately receive letters from people who have worked with the plane,” he says, “I get instant feedback from experts without calling anyone.” Meanwhile, in the weeks leading up to last year’s Canadian and U.S. elections, Toronto Star columnist David Olive started a campaign diary called The Pulse. He’d do it again in a heartbeat because “the feedback it generates helps give a reporter like me a sense of the electorate.”

A blog is also perfect for brainstorming; Wherry runs ideas by his online readers first. “Otherwise,” he says, “they’d just be bouncing around in my head.” And I found my readers often pointed me in the right direction. One visitor, a friend, let me know that eye Weekly, a Toronto alternative paper, had started a blog, and another alerted me to Merriam-Webster’s decision to name “blog” the No. 1 word of 2004. Many directed me to related articles, and one reader forwarded a Cyberjournalist.net link about a proposal to establish ethical guidelines for blogging.

Even without such guidelines, blogs already play the watchdog, helping build and defend a healthy relationship between journalists and their readers. The Montreal-based Regret the Error has assumed this role since October 2004. Editor Craig Silverman reports corrections, retractions, and clarifications from North American and international media. After viewing it on NewsDesigner.com, he informed readers when the Calgary Herald published a photo of people fleeing a massive wave. The front-page headline read, “Tsunami death toll could pass 100,000,” but the wave in the photograph had actually hit China’s Qiantangjiang River in 2002. He posts erroneous death rumours – the Ottawa Citizen knocking off Jennifer Aniston’s father, for example – and tracks sackings of journalists. To be fair, he corrects his own blunders every Friday under the heading, “We Crunked – Regret Corrections,” but most of his errors are typos, spelling and grammatical mistakes, and misuses of terms such as “beg the question.”

South of the border, news blogs, such as Power Line, Little Green Footballs, and Free Republic, are even more aggressive watchdogs. They questioned the authenticity of the memos 60 Minutes cited in an effort to show that George W. Bush shirked his National Guard duties. By the next morning, the sites pointed out that the documents featured kerning and typesetting techniques that proved the memos could not have been produced on a typewriter from 1972. After a week of scrutiny from blogs – and mainstream-media slowpokes – host Dan Rather admitted defeat and CBS launched an investigation that concluded with the network asking four key executives to resign.

Back home, Tart Cider began an investigation that led to a journalist losing her column. The site exposed the fact that Post columnist Elizabeth Nickson lifted passages for her July 2003 column headlined, “It’s time the left stop sheltering evil.” When the site’s creator Chris Selley read the column, he realized he’d read parts of it before. An online search turned up a similar portion in “Duranty’s Deception,” by U.S. journalist John Berlau in the online edition of Insight on the News. Although the Post didn’t reply to Selley’s emails, Nickson indicated that her failure to attribute the passage was inadvertent. The paper started an investigation that uncovered, “Beneath the glamour, you find film scum,” a 2002 column by Nickson, which contained five sentences that were almost a word-for-word reproduction of a piece by National Review Online editor-at-large Jonah Goldberg. The Post discontinued Nickson’s weekly column in November 2004.

The good news is other journalists take such measures as a warning. “Every time I think of plagiarizing, I only don’t because of other bloggers,” jokes Post theatre critic J. Kelly Nestruck. He maintains a blog called On the Fence about politics, journalism, and theatre. “It’s not like my editors would catch it, but bloggers would.”

The irony is that many journalists are wary of blogs because they lack accountability and professional editing. “Weblogs are what they are,” says Cosh, who says the Post hired him because of his site. “Why attack them for being what they’re not?” According to Coyne, blogs benefit from a different form of editing – one he calls horizontal editing. If an entry is wrong, readers and other bloggers react immediately. “It’s a collective process of correcting mistakes,” Coyne says, adding that it’s a level of interactivity mainstream publications can’t compete with. “People say that no one edits blogs, but Jayson Blair proved that no one’s editingThe New York Times either,” he told me. Although the Times editors screwed that one up large, it’s silly to say the paper isn’t edited. Though Coyne said the same thing on CBC’sInside Media in October, it didn’t sound as ludicrous on TV as it looks in print.

Coyne’s jab at the world’s most respected newspaper may have been mostly in jest, but not everyone is amused by his defence of horizontal editing. “People who dismiss editors are wrong for doing so,” says Dan Gillmor, the author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People. “Editing is more than just fact checking. Although readers check facts, it’s very rare that people will correct typos or do more than basic fact checks. The conversation can be interesting, but it’s a mistake to assume it’s editing.” Gillmor’s right. I’ve been corrected by a reader only once: an anonymous technology manager informed me that “Internet” is spelled with a capital “I.” “Down-caps style is incorrect no matter what they may be teaching at J-school these days,” he commented. Sor-ry.

While style glitches can be embarrassing, some errors are more serious. Steve Outing of the Florida-basedPoynter Institute makes another case for editing: an extra pair of eyes, he says, helps when it comes to legal liability. “A libellous statement left online for even a day puts a blogger at tremendous risk,” he wrote in aPoynter Institute article. Tony Walsh, a Canadian blogger and freelance journalist, says that as blog writers start to get sued, they’ll begin to understand terms like “libel” and “slander,” and blogging will become more like “serious business.”

Even as blogs become serious business, few media outlets have established any policies to govern the practice. Akin suggests his editors care about his site as much as they care if he had peas for dinner, to which Globeandmail.com editor Angus Frame replies, “I’m excited to hear David had peas for dinner – it’s important to have a balanced diet.” Frame says the Globe’s only rule is that when its journalists are on the clock, they cannot be working for another organization. Financial Post managing editor Charles Lewis says the paper’s writers can’t write stories for other publications if they haven’t pitched it to the Post first. So breaking a story on a blog is “a big no-no here.”

One place blogs get a big yes-yes is in the classroom. Belleville, Ontario’s Loyalist College is in the fifth year of its e-journalism program, so I took a road trip. At 9 A.M., instructor Robert Washburn takes off an oversized blazer, rolls up his sleeves, and, smelling of Froot Loops, he’s raring to go. For his 12 students – all of whom maintain their own news blogs – Washburn’s enthusiasm is infectious. Later, in his office – a small space crammed with two 12-packs of Diet Coke, a Ziploc container of jelly beans, a gigantic bottle of Listerine, and mounds of disks, VHS tapes, and folders on the floor – he talks about the blog community. “It’s about a relationship with an audience that works with you. The press is disconnected from their audience and now we’re connected. What a dynamic and beautiful way to deliver the news! It’s humanizing.”

While some believe that blogs are humanizing, others say they’re a cheap form of exhibitionism. Bill Doskoch, a CTV.ca writer, started his blog, Media, Politics, Film and Minutiae, in August 2004, and was nominated for Best New Blog at the 2004 Canadian Blog Awards. So it’s no surprise that his site generates about 15,000 visitors a month, compared to my measly 1,000 tops. I called to interview him at 11 A.M. one January morning. He’d been posting to his site until after 4 A.M. the night before and I’m pretty sure I woke him up. Doskoch believes his blog makes him a better journalist, and being a journalist makes him a better blogger, but calls the echo-chamber effect their biggest weakness. “Blogs are mostly read by your virtual friends. It’s a like-minded club and doesn’t offer as much honest debate as it could,” he says, adding he’s never received one critique. “You need debate to test and strengthen ideas, but most of the people who leave comments on my blog tend to like what I have to say.” Other journalists I spoke with take this even further, speaking of bloggers as egomaniacs who like the sound of their own voices. “Blogging strikes me as an arrogant thing to do,” says Wells, “and arrogance is not a particular stumbling block for me.”

More than arrogant, some old-time reporters think bloggers are plain old lazy. Former CBS news correspondent Eric Engberg made himself clear in his “Blogging as typing, not journalism” article onCBSNews.com last November. “Given their lack of expertise, standards and, yes, humility,” he wrote, “the chances of the bloggers replacing mainstream journalism are about as good as the parasite replacing the dog it fastens on.” The dog certainly bit back when it revealed that Markos Moulitsas Zúniga, who averages more than 350,000 visitors a day to his Daily Kos political blog, was paid US$12,000 to promote Howard Dean’s campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Meanwhile, legend has it that columnists used to wear out shoe leather getting material for stories, whereas today’s pajama-clad columnists sit at their computers, communicating with self-selected readers, skipping the pavement-pounding research that, theoretically, great journalism is based on. I figured my favourite old-school journalist, Post columnist George Jonas, would take a hard line on this matter, but he surprised me. When it comes to research, he says, there’s no right or wrong method. “Some writers feel research involves talking to people, making going places essential to the process; and some feel that reading books and other materials is enough to formulate an opinion. It depends on what works for the piece and what works for the writer.”

Some level of research will always be in, but critics say blogs may ultimately be out. It’s impressive that blogs went from 0 to 100 km/h in two years, says American University journalism professor W. Joseph Campbell, but “burnout or blogger fatigue is likely to set in soon.” It already has for Nestruck, who expects to shut down On the Fence soon, but isn’t sure when. “It sometimes feels like a weight around my neck,” he wrote on my blog. And I know where he’s coming from. I often feel like Maud Newton, a blogger who wrote in an October/November Maisonneuve article, “I’m paralyzed with guilt if I take a day off.” At Toronto hot spot Bar Italia, a dimple-chinned Nestruck expanded on the subject. “I don’t know why I’m writing it anymore. Rather than half formulating an idea, I’d rather spend some real time on it. It seems half-assed to me – I wish I could do it all out or not at all.”

But if that’s how writers feel, what are the readers thinking? A few days after the American election, I posted an excerpt from Andrew Sullivan’s U.S.-based blog. A well-known gay conservative, Sullivan averages about 30,000 visits a day to his political blog. His post, thanking the 330,000 readers who dropped by on election day, made me wonder if blog readership would die down with the election over.

“People have a dangerous tendency to treat new trends with an evangelical vibe,” says Wells, the man behind Inkless Wells, one of the best political blogs in the country. “I don’t like to get cosmic about blogs because I think it’s a fad. Blogging is the CB radio of the 21^st Century.” Harsh words from a Canadian blogger. But then, wasn’t it Bill Gates who said the Internet was a passing fad?

Still, those who say blogs are a fad are in the minority. Even William Safire of the Times wrote: “The ‘platform’ – print, TV, Internet, telepathy, whatever – will change, but the public hunger for reliable information will grow.” Washburn is even more optimistic. “When I’m in an old folks’ home eating porridge,” he says, “this is what you’ll be doing.” And he may be right. I won’t be leaving the blogosphere any time soon. Now officially an Internet geek, I’m quite attached to my virtual friends and use other blogs, as well as reader comments, as daily resources. Although Blog on Blog will end with this article, I know I’ll start another one soon.

They had fire in their eyes and torches in their hands. They were young and furious. They wanted the world to know the depth of their anger toward Ariel Sharon, the Israeli Prime Minister who planned to withdraw troops from the Gaza Strip and close down the settlements he had once so actively encouraged. While such protests are hardly newsworthy anymore, there was something about this picture of right-wing Israeli teenagers that caught the eye of Mordechai Ben-Dat, the editor of The Canadian Jewish News (CJN). It wasn’t just the raw emotion on the protestors’ faces that would grab readers’ attention, thought Ben-Dat as he sat in his east-end Toronto office searching for a front-page photograph; there was also the sky above them – a gorgeous, crimson-rich Israeli sunset, a vivid contrast to the greyness of Canada in November.

After 10 years as editor of Canada’s largest Jewish newspaper, Ben-Dat has learned, painfully at times, that he can never be too careful when choosing a cover photo – or anything else – for the publication. The weekly’s editorial guidelines state that, above all, a community paper should support the community it serves. As a result, the conservative Ben-Dat does his best to balance criticism with praise, good news with bad, bitter with sweet. Did the protestors’ at sunset strike this balance? Ben-Dat wasn’t sure yet, so he started to look at other possibilities for the cover of a November 2004 issue. Perhaps a peaceful picture of Israelis assisting Arab women during olive picking season? Or maybe a bloody shot from the latest suicide bombing? Or maybe a photograph of Tel Aviv’s blue skies and High Holiday lights?

A key part of Ben-Dat’s job is to deliver news about Israel as objectively as possible to a community that is anything but objective. For most of its 45-year history, the CJN has reflected what most Jewish people here think and feel about the Middle East. But no longer. In the past four years, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become more complicated, and this country’s Jewish community more polarized. As a consequence, thanks in part to a recent wave of Israeli immigrants to Canada – many holding more radical political opinions than those in the established Jewish community – the CJN is now seen by critics as too timid, too bland. They argue that the paper is in need of in-depth investigations and debates about both Israeli policies and Canadian policies toward the Middle East at a time of major change in the region.

To his credit, Ben-Dat has been making some effort to present more analysis and to publish a greater diversity of opinions. But what dominates the CJN are pages of history, social news, and soft community features geared to its mostly 50-plus readership. It’s a focus that has prompted Lewis Levendel, the author of A Century of the Canadian Jewish Press: 1880s-1980s and a former CJN associate editor, to call the paper a “tranquilizer.” The challenge for Ben-Dat is to liven up the publication to attract new readers without alienating too many of the old ones. To do so means Ben-Dat may have to go further than he or the ownership group want. After all, this is a publication with a history of censorship and handcuffing writers with strict editorial guidelines. But it’s also a paper that, during its early years, was more than happy to criticize the Israeli government of the day, just as those Jewish teenagers were doing under that slowly setting sun.

He expounds briefly on how he views the paper: “We are a tabloid news format, but not a tabloid news mentality.” Ben-Dat then adds that the publication upholds “Jewish values” – values such as justice, sympathy, and respect. He likes to quote from a Tolstoy story, “The Death of Ivan Ilych,” about a man who worked hard all his life only to realize, on his deathbed, that he never had time to do anything of value – spiritual or meaningful. “Happiness is the feeling of fulfillment,” continues Ben-Dat. “Fulfilled was how I felt on my first day on the job.”

Ben-Dat is not only the paper’s editor, he represents its typical reader. He is 54, born and raised in Toronto, back when Yiddish was the language heard in his Jewish-immigrant neighbourhood, especially on Shabbes (Saturday), around the shul (synagogue). The neighbourhood kids were the children of recent immigrants and Holocaust refugees. For those youngsters, preserving the Jewish culture was a privilege their parents paid for in blood.

It was for this generation that the CJN was founded in 1960: the older, more conservative Jews who see Israel, according to S. M. Selchen, the former editor of a Jewish community paper in Winnipeg, as “the realization of a dream we bore with us for 2,000 years, and which was our hope and our comfort in the painful years of exile.”

The first owner was Meyer J. Nurenberger, a journalist who was born in Poland and later moved with his family to France and Belgium. He ran the paper as a private business. He insisted the CJN be independent and not a part of any Jewish umbrella organization, such as B’nai Brith. Under Nurenberger, the paper held controversial, right-wing views. He was a supporter of an Israeli party that opposed the 1947 United Nations resolution to create a separate Palestinian state. In addition, he attacked fundraising bodies and community institutions, including the United Jewish Appeal (especially for its secrecy in how it distributed its money), as well as the liberal Israeli government of the day. Following the death of his wife in 1970, Nurenberger sold the paper.

Today, in contrast, the CJN shies away from such confrontation. Ben-Dat prefers to highlight the kinds of dynamics the Israeli government must face, such as painful stories of the people, like that of Chezi Goldberg.

Goldberg grew up in the Bathurst Street and Finch Avenue area of Toronto, home to a significant Jewish community. Born in the early 1960s, he went to Jewish day schools; later, he served in the Canadian Armed Forces and studied at Columbia University in New York. Ten years ago, he moved to Israel. In Jerusalem, he ran a walk-in clinic for the homeless, the addicts, and the depressed. Living in a small town in the West Bank with his wife and their seven children, he arranged a special bus service for the community to get to Jerusalem. Goldberg missed it one morning and had to find an alternate route to get into the city and meet a family in crisis. That route led him to the No. 19 bus, on which he was killed in a suicide bombing.

Stories like this one, adds Ben-Dat, bring back a feeling of togetherness within the community as readers sympathize with the victims, know their names, and recognize their faces.

Carr believes the CJN, now a not-for-profit organization, still has an important role to play in the community. “There was a need [when it started], as there is now, for a paper that is independent, but has the welfare of the Jewish community in mind,” he says. The people in charge were to be motivated by public interests. The goal, according to Carr, is the “betterment of the Jewish community,” which he defines as giving information and knowledge to the Jewish community about the Jewish world.

“An informed community is a better community,” continues Carr. And to accomplish that, according to the CJN writers’ guidelines, which he helped compose, “It is not in specific language what constitutes ‘the community’s interest.’ The definitions may be as varied as the community itself, and the editor’s sensitivity and awareness will play a very important part in the maintenance of the necessary balance.”

This was written in 1979, eight years after the CJN was purchased for, according to Levendel, $30,000 by a group of community leaders. Among them: Ray Wolfe, the head of several food distributing and supermarket chains (including IGA); Murray Koffler, the founder of Shoppers Drug Mart; and Albert Latner, a Toronto developer. Today, the weekly averages 60 pages in Toronto and 44 in Montreal – more if you count special sections like Food and Education. Revenue generation is not a big worry, but attracting younger readers is.

Lewis Levendel was an assistant editor at the CJN in the 1970s. He says many of the staff he worked with, such as Gary Laforet, the paper’s general manager, and Janice Arnold, one of the Montreal reporters, are still with the paper. “You get comfortable after 30 years,” he points out. “You’re not going to make waves.” To avoid their fate, Levendel left the paper in 1978 so he could travel.

“Mordechai has a certain style about him,” says Carr, explaining why Ben-Dat was made editor even though he had little journalism experience. “He was used to writing and was heavily involved in communal matters,” which, to the search committee, suggested commitment. “Sometimes you reach out, outside the industry, for somebody to be a leader.” Outside the industry is a reference to the fact that Ben-Dat practised law before taking over as editor. He graduated from the University of British Columbia and earned his law degree from the University of Western Ontario. He also worked at Queen’s Park as a justice and policy research analyst. While there, he wrote the occasional CJN editorial, on a freelance basis. “I would be making more money as a lawyer,” he says, “but this – this is love.”

And a challenge, particularly when it comes to targeting a younger audience. To try to get them, Ben-Dat has chosen to appeal to their interest in Jewish culture and entertainment – and to offer features about or by them. One example: Toronto-based filmmaker Igal Hecht, who produced a documentary titled Kassam about life in Sderot, a small Israeli town where in the past year residents had to deal with a daily barrage of missiles hitting them from a northern town in the Gaza Strip. In the CJN, Hecht wrote about some of the scenes in his film. One of them features a woman named Coty Malka and her daughter, Taeer, almost one year after a Kassam missile hit Taeer’s kindergarten.

As Hecht describes it, Malka remembers getting to the school all hysterical, passing little chairs and tables, and little finger paintings hanging on the wall until she finally found her daughter crying. Taeer wasn’t scared of the missile. She couldn’t find her best friend, Afik. Malka rushed to the backyard. She saw a huge hole in the ground. And she saw Afik.

Three-year-old Afik was still alive. He even lifted his head and looked around, recognizing people, wondering what was going on. His lips were swollen, and he was covered in blood. Half of his right leg lay there on the ground not far from the rest of his body. It looked so small.

Afik is dead now and Taeer has been sleeping in her mother’s bed ever since. She needs to calm her mom down every time there’s a loud boom outside the window. She tells her mom, “Mommy, it’s a rock, not a Kassam.” She still dreams of Afik. Only in her dreams “his back is all in one piece again.” When Taeer said that, Hecht admits that he “got emotional.”

“I’ve been to refugee camps,” continues Hecht. “I’ve been to suicide bombing locations right after the explosion, but when I talked to Taeer – that was the first time I’ve started crying during an interview.”

It’s a strong and compelling article, but in his quest for young readers, Ben-Dat is competing against Internet sites and publications such as the right-wing Jewish Tribune, put out by B’nai Brith Canada, and an independent Toronto paper called Afterword. Both of these competitors speak more directly to the interests of youth – most of whom are like me, one of approximately 50,000 people who have emigrated from Israel to Canada since 1980. We have strong bonds with the Jewish state and have had life-altering experiences there. I, for instance, served in the Israeli army for a year. I was also at the demonstration for peace, in 1995, at which Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing extremist. I was 14.

Right now, there are two publications that are aggressively courting my generation of expatriates, who are looking for links to and discussion about the country we left. The first is Shalom Toronto, a new weekly, written in Hebrew, which offers a crossword and news and gossip from the homeland. Each issue is 32 pages and has a circulation of 10,000 copies.

The other publication, The Jewish Magazine, is actually a decade-old monthly, but one with a fresh new attitude. Two brothers, Ori and Edan Sher, took over their father’s magazine early last year and revamped it. The layout is glossy and colourful; the content is both in Hebrew and English. It has a circulation of 16,000 with an average of 56 pages per issue.

Edan says their dream is to become bigger than the CJN, and to help him and his brother achieve that goal, he’s stressing their Israeli coverage. They know the country better than the CJN editors do, explains Edan. The brothers are former Israelis, and they had front-row seats at bombings. They had to deal with destruction and had to fight for their lives. They feel like they’ve earned the right to criticize, and so they’re happy to publish a spectrum of views from regular columnists writing from Israel. The goal, says Edan, is to encourage controversy – to spark a debate on issues ranging from Palestinian rights to Sharon’s security fence.

Contrast this with the CJN’s perspective on covering the Jewish state: “The security of Israel is Israel’s business,” states the paper’s editorial guidelines. “We do not live there.” As a result, the CJN will not judge or criticize the Israeli government’s stance on security. Ben-Dat is more at home exploring “rich Jewish history” in his editorials. As well, his columns are often dedicated to the great rabbis and their words of wisdom, to adventures and journeys of famous Jewish figures, and to Jewish literature. They are never personal. If he’s telling a true story, he will refer to himself in the third person.

It’s an approach that does resonate with some Jewish youth. “I grew up on the CJN,” explains Dave Silverberg of Afterword. “And I still read it front to back every week.” He says the CJN inspires him, makes him feel a part of a community, and he gets to see his friends in the snapshots of the back pages that are dedicated to birthdays and weddings.

To other 20-something Jews, however, community events are not enough. Sharon Furman, a columnist for the Jewish Magazine, feels that the CJN, while doing a great job for its core Jewish community, could be so much more. “They should bring in more controversial pieces,” he says. “I, for one, would love to be provoked.”

Kirshner has been with the paper for more than 30 years. For a guy who started in Oakville, Ontario, as a technical writer with no journalistic training, he’s seen a lot. He’s been called an Israeli spy in Syria. He’s toured Southern Lebanon in 1983, when Israel occupied it. He’s walked along the train tracks that took Europe’s Jews to Auschwitz. He’s interviewed Arafat in Gaza during the Oslo period. When he first started writing for the CJN, the liberal Kirshner regularly had his copy changed. Even a decade ago, his columns and analyses were censored, says Levendel. Why? Because the CJN’s writer’s guidelines “limit editorial freedom.” They were created after the 1977 elections in Israel; following that vote, won by the right-wing Likud party, the paper was bombarded with letters from both individuals and organizations when it criticized the new Israeli government. Just as today, there was great concern about the settlement movement. One CJN editorial, titled “Compromises Required: True Nature of Peace,” even called for the dismantling of settlements and for Palestinian self-determination – exactly the kind of critical perspective that those dissatisfied with the CJN would like to see more of.

As a newspaper supported by community funds, states the CJN guidelines, the publication “cannot maintain that degree of freedom that is the stated goal of commercial general newspapers. Freedom of the press has to be balanced by the recognition that the paper must make every effort not to damage the community’s interest.” In other words, it means celebrating Israel, not criticizing it. Though, says Kirshner, writers have far more liberty now than they once did. “[We are] more free, there is more room than ever to write one’s opinion. Having said that, however, the paper will never accept a column where I would say, ‘Israel is a binational state.’ There are certain parameters everyone lives according to.”

Ever since the second intifada started, he’s heard the voices speaking out against the Israeli government, whether for being too tough on the Palestinians, or not tough enough. He claims there is room for most of these voices in the CJN.

“It’s like a Passover fable,” he says, referring to a story about four sons getting together for the holiday dinner. The name of one is the Wise, who knows all the rules and follows them; one is the Naïve, who is not yet experienced with all Jewish laws; the third is the Immature, who is too embarrassed to ask about the rules and obligations and, therefore, cannot commit to them correctly; the last one is the Evil, since he refuses to understand what all these rules mean to the other Jews. The lesson, concludes Ben-Dat, is that “there is room for all of the different types at the dinner table.” Except, perhaps, for the one known as Dissent.

“We write for an opinionated, well-read, not-reluctant-to-express-themselves community,” continues Ben-Dat.

And in his opinion, this community is a mirror image of the one in Israel. When dealing with this type of audience, he adds, it’s impossible to satisfy everybody.

But that doesn’t mean he won’t keep trying. Later in the production day he finds another possible cover picture. He’s not yet sure whether this is the one, but it is a testament to striking the right balance: it’s a photograph of two billboards, standing side by side on a Tel Aviv highway.

One of the billboards is white and blue, the colours of the Israeli flag. It reads: “The people have decided to get out of Gaza.” The other is in blood red and pitch black. A tear is painted in its middle and the text reads,”Sharon is tearing the people apart.”

Inside the Toronto offices of Arab2000, one of Canada’s leading Arab-language newspapers, discussions of current events are always taking place. Last fall, far from the Middle East’s most volatile zones, I spent several days speaking to the people responsible for directing the five-year-old community paper. Not surprisingly, suicide bombing was a dominant topic – it was around the time when Amar al-Far, a 16-year-old Palestinian from the Askar refugee camp (near the city of Nablus in the West Bank), detonated his explosives at the bustling Carmel market in Tel Aviv, killing himself and three Israelis. Equally unsurprising was that the paper’s three principals had different perspectives on the subject.

Kuwaiti-born Palestinian publisher Montaser Abdo held this view: “We’re all opposed to civilian casualties. Anyone who would kill a civilian, we don’t endorse it. Yet there’s an occupation, so resistance is a natural result.”

Iraqi-born editor May Elias was more sympathetic: “People can’t distinguish anymore between justified resistance, such as with Hamas and Hezbollah. They’re resistance groups – they’re not terrorist groups – and they’re defending their countries. Politics is forced upon you when you live in the Middle East. You don’t choose whether you’d like to think about suicide bombings if you’re living in Palestine, or about war if you’re living in Iraq. It’s all part of your daily reality. You wake up on it and you sleep on it.”

Syrian-born art director Mohamad Machlah was not: “Suicide bombings are a national tragedy for the Palestinians; they do nothing to advance the cause, and I just think there are other ways to resist.”

Such perspectives reminded me of the impassioned debates I would hear when I last visited the Gaza Strip 10 years ago. They would take place fil shawareh (in the streets), at the souks (markets), and, most notoriously, in coffeehouses, where men would smoke the argilah (water pipe), drink Arabic coffee, and discuss the latest political developments.

The difference in opinion among the Arab2000 trio is indicative of the diverging points of view about Israeli-Palestinian issues that Abdo, Elias, and Machlah want to showcase in their biweekly newspaper, which has a circulation of 8,000, with primarily Arab Canadian readers in Toronto, Hamilton, and London, Ontario. Publishing a diversity of opinions is a laudable goal among Canadians of Arab descent because there is so much dissatisfaction with how the mainstream media here cover the conflicts in the Middle East, and the Palestinian perspective in particular. As Abdo points out, “When [the mainstream media] show information about suicide bombings, they don’t present the causes and why people carry them out. These people are kids. A lot of them are 15, 16, and 17 years old. When you have people thinking about blowing themselves up, it’s totally wrong. I don’t endorse it, yet the Canadian media don’t give us the causes – the context. They just show that these people are extremists and terrorists.”

But if the people who run Arab2000 ever want to achieve their goal of being seen as a credible voice for Arab Canadians and gain some influence on the public discussion over Canadian policy toward the Middle East, they’ll have to put some boundaries on the debates they so badly want to encourage. The reason: to avoid a repeat of inflammatory diatribes such as those by California-based psychologist Elias Akleh, a regular commentator on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for Arab2000. In an April 13, 2004 article titled “What’s Our Fault?” he refers to Israel as a “cancerous” and “parasitic” state. He also went on to ask, “Why do [Arab] governments change our curriculums to instill defeat into the national psyche of our youths under the disguise of peaceful coexistence, democracy, and acceptance of others – even our enemies? Our Islamic and Christian religions, unlike Judaism, have never rejected peaceful coexistence.”

Such intolerant remarks are antithetical to what Arab2000 wants to be. They’re also bad for corporate and government images. Throughout each edition of the paper are ads for such high-profile companies and government agencies as Re/Max, Sutton Real Estate, Western Union, Century 21 Real Estate, Toyota, Bally Total Fitness, the Job Track Centre (which is partly funded by the federal government), TD Canada Trust, Royal LePage, Petro-Canada, BMO Bank of Montreal, Ottawa’s Employment Insurance program, Maytag, Citizenship and Immigration Canada, and Omni.2 television.

But being in the same publication that has made the decision to publish anti-Semitic remarks is surely not the exposure they were looking for.

The day after my father’s family was expelled from their village in 1948, he travelled the 30 kilometres between Gaza and Hamama on foot to try to salvage any belongings left in his burnt village. The street names were still discernable, and he found his old house, along with some corn, wheat, and flour, which he took back with him in the still of the night. He travelled with much trepidation, as the roads were lined with land mines, and many family and friends had lost their lives to them.

He would go on to make 13 such night journeys, where he wandered around his village, unwilling to part with the loss of his land. On his eighth journey, the night was pitch black, and a group of people fired shots at him, narrowly missing. As well, they stole the donkey he had loaded goods on, so he ran back toward Gaza empty-handed.

Two days into the Six Day War of 1967, my mother and her six siblings decided to escape to her grandmother’s house, where they could take cover in her cellar. They stayed there for the remaining four days of the war and for three weeks afterwards, with little food and drink. They emerged from hiding to face a new reality: Israel had occupied the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, and Israeli soldiers were now fully visible in the streets, setting up command posts.

Even today, my extended family members’ stories haunt me. One I heard during my second trip to Gaza City, at age 15, in 1995. I was with my 13-year-old cousin, Hazem, and late one night, he told me he wished he were a bird so he could fly away and escape his life of confinement and restriction under military occupation. He said he longed to soar high into the sky and not be at anyone’s mercy to stop, as he is on the ground where Israeli soldiers restrict the free movement of Palestinians.

So it’s only natural that the majority of Arab Canadians have been politicized by what they’ve experienced and what they see happening in their homelands – where the Palestinians are still stateless; where a substantial number of countries have repressive regimes; where political debate is often stifled and the illusion of democracy persists with the name of only one candidate (usually the incumbent) appearing on ballots and where the populace marks a Na’am (yes) or La’a (no) on election day.

With all this background, it becomes clear why encouraging meaningful debate in the pages of Arab2000 has become a touchstone for Abdo and his colleagues. With such events as the second intifada, the Iraqi invasion, the death of Arafat, plus elections in both Iraq and in the Palestinian territories, the readers of Arab2000 have a deep hunger for informed commentary, which most feel they’re getting woefully little of from Canada’s established media outlets.

One reason why: few Canadian journalists know enough about the historical context of the region’s most volatile zones, the Arab people, and especially what many of us call the Palestinian narrative – the story of how my parents, along with approximately 750,000 others, lost their homeland. As the celebrated (and often controversial) Palestinian writer Edward Said wrote in 1979: “The fact of the matter is that today Palestine does not exist, except as a memory, or more importantly, as an idea, a political and human experience, and an act of sustained popular will.”

Another reason why: few Arab Canadian journalists are on the staffs of major media entities. The most high profile is Nahlah Ayed of the CBC. Her reportage is always engaging and thought-provoking. In April 2004, for instance, she succeeded in gaining access to Iraqi Shiite leader Muqtada al-Sadr before the United States issued an arrest warrant for him. What emerged was a candid exchange in which she asked Sadr to elaborate on his perception of American interests in the Middle East, as well as his thoughts on how Americans view freedom, which he likens to “moral destitution.”

Based in Beirut, Ayed, a Canadian of Palestinian descent, feels coverage of the Arab Middle East from this country’s major media outlets lacks depth and content. She’s hopeful she can challenge conventional wisdom and offer a unique perspective. “I am not on a personal crusade – far from that,” she says. “I just believe that perhaps, with my background, I may be able to have better access to Arab society here, and perhaps impart a little better knowledge and explanation of the complexities of the Middle East, and Arabs in particular.”

What she’s doing, adds Ayed, is “a little like a science graduate who decides to enter the media business to better explain scientific concepts and contribute to elevating scientific knowledge among ordinary people.”

Unlike Ayed, one Arab Canadian journalist with whom I spoke agreed to talk to me on the condition he remain anonymous. He works at a Canadian daily. His view on Middle Eastern coverage is that journalists in the mainstream media need to challenge themselves to unravel the complexities that Ayed refers to. “There’s this self-censorship that takes place with information coming from the region,” he says. “Journalists need to be proactive – to search for unconventional sources, such as information from research centres, and not rely on wire copy from CP or AP. It’s about treating such issues with a less presumptuous attitude. There’s this constant reference to ‘the Arab street,’ yet the Middle East is so diverse.”

The final reason why Arab Canadians aren’t getting informed commentary from mainstream media, suggests Ryerson University economics professor Ibrahim Hayani, is that media owners like the Aspers, who operate Canada’s largest chain of newspapers and one of Canada’s biggest broadcasters are perceived to allow “no room for criticism of Israel. They are very hostile towards Arabs and Muslims in that one can suspect they’re assuming that the Arabs are inherently prone to violence and inherently anti-democratic.” (Geoffrey Elliot, the vice president of corporate affairs of the Aspers’ CanWest Global Communications Corp., is quick to refute the claim: “It’s no secret the Asper family supports Israel, yet the reporting of the news is the news – we have no overt political agenda. Our editorial policy is one of accuracy and truthfulness. CanWest strives for a balance through the inclusion of opinion pieces that express a spectrum of opinions. If there’s a specific concern, it should be directed at the particular outlet.”)

Amir Hassanpour, an associate professor of Near and Middle Eastern civilizations at the University of Toronto, acknowledges why the Arab community gravitates toward community publications such as Arab2000. “News from the mainstream media is very concentrated and selective,” he says, “whereas community newspapers are very targeted.” In an October 2003 Toronto Star article titled, “A Chance to Lift the Veil of Ignorance About Arabs,” Omar Alghabra, the president of the Canadian Arab Federation wrote, “In a [January/February 2002] survey conducted by the CAF, 86 per cent of Canadian Arabs feel the Canadian media do not understand the Arab perspective. Discussions of Arabs, the Middle East and the Muslim world are rarely of cultural, historical or intellectual nature. They are almost always an occasion for controversy and condemnation.”

Asked this February if he sees any improvements, he responded: “On some levels, I do see improvements [in which] some media corporations [are] trying to be more sensitive and informed, but on many other levels I see the challenges becoming bigger.”

Such dissatisfaction, though, is good for Arab2000, just one of a number of alternative news sources that Arab Canadians are turning to. It’s a trend Mostafa Henaway, the projects coordinator of Al-Awda, the advocacy-oriented Palestine Right to Return Group, understands. “Often times, issues of importance, such as the Palestinian right to return to their homeland, are glossed over in the mainstream media,” he says. “There’s this assumption that Israel’s always existed. I spent six months in the Jenin refugee camp [in 2003], and I learned a lot about what life is like in a refugee camp, such as the widespread poverty and the desperation people feel. The media plays a big role with what and how issues are publicized. It’s no surprise that Arab Canadians are turning to other sources for a sense of affirmation.”

Henry Lowi, a Toronto lawyer and Jewish peace activist, agrees with this view. Seated in the boardroom of his spacious office, he recognizes what’s conspicuously absent in the mainstream media, despite the occasional background information that does show up. “There’s totally no context whatsoever. There’s never history. There’s never ‘what brought us to where we are now.’ All there is, is the bombs, the explosions, and the killings of today or yesterday. The newspapers are always referring to the refugee camps, they’re always referring to ‘the suicide bomber who went to the Carmel market, and came from Askar refugee camp.'”

“But what’s a refugee? Why is there a refugee? What’s life like in a camp? What kinds of lives do these people have? You never get any of that.”

 * * *

Abdo chose the name Arab2000 because he wanted to encapsulate all the hype surrounding the millennium. As well, he felt the millennium was closely associated with all things progressive, and he felt it could mark a turning point for Arab Canadians in their struggles to integrate themselves in Canadian society, while reconnecting with their heritage. “I wanted to create a quality newspaper that was new and exciting, and where a balanced point of view is presented,” explains Abdo. “Although our lives are now in Canada, many of us remain extremely affected by what happens in the Middle East. Yet, admittedly, some have lost their sense of politics completely, and it’s my hope that this newspaper can reconnect them.”

For Abdo, creating Arab2000 has been the fulfillment of a dream. “I always wanted to get involved in the journalism profession. I wasn’t always sure in what capacity, yet I was determined.” However, Abdo admits it wasn’t always easy. “Initially, I had a hard time recruiting writers because I was unknown in the news media, yet the fact that I had established a name for my organization five years [earlier] really helped. I had a good base of clients and I started to approach them about advertising in the newspaper.”

Abdo is referring to his first publishing venture, the Arabic Business Pages, which he started to develop after completing a bachelor’s degree in economics and business at York University in 1993. A publication similar to the Yellow Pages, it’s currently a 200-page marketplace full of listings and ads for lawyers, real estate agents, restaurants, bakeries, community services, and much more.

With the business pages as a financial base, Abdo launched Arab2000. Today, the weekly competes against similarly sized community papers, like The Arab Star (7,000 to 8,000 copies biweekly) and Arab News (6,000 copies biweekly). To set itself apart, Arab2000 offers coverage of Canadian affairs (a series on the plight of Toronto’s homeless population, for instance) and emphasizes its unique international outlook.

“It’s about pushing boundaries on [Middle East] issues,” says editor Elias, “but we try to stay as neutral as possible. We don’t necessary agree with everything that’s written, but we expect readers to make up their own minds in reaching a conclusion with the perspectives we present.”

For example, in an article that appeared in the November 23, 2004 edition, Tariq Al-Maeena, a Saudi Arabia-based writer, painted a glowing portrait of Arafat’s legacy and likened the late Palestinian leader to two iconic Arab figures: Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt and King Faisal of Saudi Arabia. “This man embodied the spirit of collective resistance for almost 50 years,” stated Al-Maeena. However, he also criticized Arafat: “[He] was no saint. And neither was he a coward. And while he made mistakes, as any human would, he did not waver from the cause of his people.”

To cite another example of Arab2000’s efforts to combine pushing the envelope with neutrality: in the September 28, 2004 issue, Toronto-based Najwa Kewar Farah wrote about the desperate conditions experienced by Palestinian prisoners who had just completed a hunger strike protesting mistreatment by their Israeli captors. But she also wrote about how Israel had agreed to release 120 prisoners whose terms were almost complete. In addition, Kewar Farah also lambasted the Arab world for its lack of action toward Israel regarding the plight of Palestinian prisoners.

In that same issue was an exclusive interview with Khaled Mashal, a Hamas leader, by Egypt-based reporter Abdel Nasser Al-Daway. In the interview, Mashal implored the Arab world to involve itself in the Palestinian cause beyond symbolic gestures of support. He acknowledged the difference in approach to the conflict between Hamas, which doesn’t recognize Israel’s existence, and the Fatah faction, which is secular in its ideology and advocates the creation of an independent Palestinian state, with East Jerusalem as its capital, in the occupied territories.

Arab2000 also attempts to represent the lives of all Arabs, despite its emphasis on the region’s most volatile conflict zones. Machlah, the art director, is especially conscious of this when he’s laying out the pages. For example, as he was designing the October 12, 2004 edition, Machlah noticed a lack of coverage allotted to issues other than those pertaining to Palestine and Iraq. As a result, he pressed for the inclusion of a story on Saudi Arabia’s municipal elections. In addition, the paper updates international news three times a day on its website.

In his diatribe, Akleh lambastes the Arab world for its incompetence and utter indifference to the plight of the Palestinians, then expresses his resentment at Israel’s existence in the midst of Arab land, and proceeds to say that the God of the Jews is prejudiced. The latter part of this statement is not the only example of intolerant depictions of the Jewish people in Arab2000. In an October 4, 2004 article, which appeared on the website, titled, Continued on page 87/ Terror,” Akleh details his criticism of one aspect of the Jewish faith: “This racist religious ideology of ‘God’s chosen people’ was engraved into the Jewish psyche and had mutilated Jewish faith for almost two thousand years.”

By printing such poison, Arab2000 casts itself in an unfavourable light, which is unfortunate because it has the potential to be at the forefront of change. In noting what’s absent from the mainstream media, it can create and possibly sustain a forum of debate on how the Israeli Palestinian conflict is covered. Yet to succeed in this venture, the contents of Arab2000 will have to be scrutinized more carefully, particularly if the paper follows through on an expressed desire to expand its small English-language section, a move Tarek Fatah, the host of the television program The Muslim Chronicle and a founding member of the Muslim Canadian Congress, insists is essential if Arab2000 is to have a serious impact on journalism in Canada. “Al-Jazeera only came out in Arabic at one point,” he says. “A great interest developed in its content, and now it’s accessible in English via the Internet. Its coverage has certainly gained momentum, and now its impact has penetrated all parts of the globe. This,” he adds, pointing to a copy of Arab2000 with a dismissive glance, “is useless unless it comes out in English.”

Ultimately, a journalistically respectable Arab community paper should have some influence in the shaping of Canadian foreign policy in the Middle East, which according to John Ibbitson in The Globe and Mail last December, is now, thanks to “intense pressure” on Prime Minister Paul Martin, “more overtly pro-Israel.”

Four months after he uttered those words, I interview Abdo again. I ask him why he would publish such hatred from Akleh. His response: “I actually had a talk with him about his writing. I’m aware that some of the things he’s written in the past are over the limit, so he’s been made aware of the issue.”

Then I ask him if he’s ever thought of what might happen to the paper’s prosperity if companies like Re/Max and Clarica, both of which promote cultural diversity, pulled out because they were concerned about appearing in the same pages as hateful, intolerant representations of the Jewish people.

His response: “It’s never been an issue. A lot of the feedback we receive is positive, even about Akleh. We strive for balance, and I think we’ve made progress since my talk with him. Yet it’s an ongoing struggle, and we still need to work hard on it.”

If there were a People’s Choice Award for Canadian newspapers, the ed magazine office would have a shelf lined with trophies. Currently, though, the only way to win awards in the print industry is to produce articles that are accurate, analytical, well-researched, and timely. With headlines and teasers such as “Whaddya call the gym bunny?” and “You’ll laugh all the way to the Buddha bank,” ed doesn’t exactly fit the bill. Falling out of the Edmonton Journal every Saturday, ed’s a little goofy, often funny, and always ageist. But given its goal – to convince 18- to 34-year-olds that newspapers ought to be a part of their daily lives – it should be.

It’s Thursday afternoon and editorial assistant Lily Nguyen and photographer Shaughn Butts are on a typical edassignment – they’re prowling the University of Alberta campus, searching for students with creative T-shirts. Their task is trickier than it sounds; it’s another crisp, snowy day in the provincial capital, and most students are in long sleeves and winter coats. Finally, Nguyen spots someone, a student with “SICK” written in bold white letters across his chest. While the student relates his tale about buying the shirt in Australia and how he gets a kick out of the fact that so few people clue in to its message – he says “sick” is snowboarder-speak for “cool” – I talk to his friend, Tory Lalonde, a 20-year-old English major and, as it turns out, an avid reader of ed. “I like that it’s aimed at my age and has funny things to read,” she says. But she’s quick to point out its flaws. “It could have more articles about politics and less pop culture.”

Pop culture is a staple of the ed mix. So are tips on fashion, websites, and profiles of young Edmontonians. While ed’s columnists touch on domestic politics, and, even less frequently, on business or world affairs, most of its coverage falls on the soft side. It’s not what you’d think of as “great journalism,” but in the world of youth sections, that’s okay. In fact, it’s essential. ed and its kind aren’t out there to bust open stories and win awards; they’re there to serve as entry points into the rest of the papers in which they’re found, where the stories are more in-depth.

News junkies may scoff, but youth sections are meant for a slice of society that sees newspapers as irrelevant and dull – people who grew up with fast and flashy media options, from playing Xbox, to reading and writing blogs. The newspaper industry’s long-term survival stands or falls on capturing that techno-savvy generation. “Readership habits are established early in life,” says Mary Nesbitt, the managing director of the Readership Institute at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois. In short, if you don’t hook them now, you may lose them forever.

Papers have been losing readers since the 1970s. But readership, explains Nesbitt, “is most in decline for younger adults.” In 1994, 64 per cent of 18- to 24-year-olds surveyed had read a paper the day before, according to the Newspaper Audience Databank Inc. (NADbank), a Toronto-based industry-tracking association. By 2003, that proportion had slipped to 45 per cent. And south of the border, the Newspaper Association of America reports that the average weekday readership for the same age group dipped from 53 to 39 per cent between 1990 and 2004.

The explosion of new media shoulders some responsibility. While many point a finger at the Internet, the Journal’s research indicates the biggest competitor is the good old TV set. Still, to blame technology is to ignore more complex cultural issues at play. There’s a “growing cynicism” among today’s young adults, says Shari Graydon, an author and former president of Media Watch. They’re less likely than previous generations to trust politicians and the news media – one reason, perhaps, that a 2004 survey by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that a growing number of those under 30 turn to satirical programming like The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and Saturday Night Live for news.

Then there’s the question of relevancy: “Young people don’t feel newspapers speak to them,” says Bruce Wark, an associate professor of journalism at the University of King’s College in Halifax. “They think they’re aimed at and cater to baby boomers and their political needs and interests.” Young people may have a point. When Giles Gherson took over as the Journal’s editor-in-chief in the fall of 2000, the paper, he says, “struck me as rather old, as mature and silver-minded. If you were in your 20s, it would feel like it was worthy, but not very interesting.”

Deciding a re-branding was in order, Gherson, who is now The Toronto Star’s editor-in-chief, pushed to scrap the successful Saturday Living section in the Journal for a risky venture into a younger demographic. “When we started looking at this idea,” says ed’s first editor Kerry Powell, “we couldn’t find a model for what we were trying to do.” On December 8, 2001, the first issue of ed hit the stands. Today, along with it, there are dozens of youth-oriented sections across North America and Europe.

ed’s debut was low-key and free of any marketing or publicity. But as with any change made to a newspaper, reader reactions were anything but quiet. “We were getting dozens of angry, pissed-off emails, voicemails, etc.,” says Powell. Many of the responses targeted her personally. “What an immoral person you must be to have created this,” wrote one reader. While some directed their rage at the weak attempt at a sex column, others took exception to ed’s tabloid format and the fact that when you pick up the Journal, it literally falls out. Despite the fury, which resulted in a handful of cancelled subscriptions, Gherson and the rest of management stood behind ed. “You could view the angry letters as a testament to our success,” he says. “They proved we were doing something different.”

Three years and one dropped sex column later, readers have grown accustomed to ed. “Initially, people responded to the concept largely in a negative way. But then they began to respond to the content,” explains Powell. “To me, that says readers have accepted this as part of their newspaper.”

Powell left ed in March 2004, turning the role over to her editorial assistant, Therese Kehler. A former night-desk editor, Kehler says she was drawn to the magazine because of its entertaining and lighthearted approach. A quick look around ed’s office space, separated from the newsroom by two glass walls and a hallway, confirms this. For one thing, it’s the only place in the building that you’ll find a leopard-print thong pinned to the wall.

But a youth section shouldn’t just be a fun and fast read, a trap into which many American efforts have fallen. Jack Shafer, New York-based media critic for the online magazine Slate, has kept a close eye on the growing U.S. trend. A number of major dailies, such as the Chicago Tribune, have launched commuter tabloids, papers mainly consumed by young adults. Shafer has little respect for the abbreviated content of these pop culture and sports-heavy papers. “There’s nothing in them that speaks to excellence or imagination or newspaper enterprise,” he says. “They’re supposed to be good enough to read for 15 minutes, but never good enough to replace the mother ship.”

Youth sections perform a delicate balancing act. Even Gherson acknowledges ed didn’t always get it right. Originally, he pictured a product that was entertaining, yet also able to explore weighty issues with depth and analysis. However, he now says, “I felt we were never quite successful at getting a 25-year-old’s perspective on serious issues.” He’s right – ed is hardly a source of youth intellectualism. Still, Gherson’s not losing a lot of sleep over that. After all, he points out, ed isn’t supposed to be the front section redesigned for the under-35 set; it’s simply out to prove that a newspaper can be relevant to young people’s lives.

ed pumps out soft, entertaining coverage because that’s what its target audience demands. The most popular items are a weekly profile of someone doing something original or outlandish, a what’s-happening-around-town column, and the Style and Shopping page – all content that makes news junkies and those who favour the tradition of “great journalism” wince. When ed does take on newsier issues, it often uses unorthodox methods. In late 2003, driving while under the influence of drugs was a hot provincial topic. ed explored the issue with an experiment involving a computer-based driving program and two stoned volunteers. It was clearly a stunt, but it was also a fresh and, most significantly, an engaging look at a major topic.

ed’s political coverage tends to rely on humour, typically at the expense of Ralph Klein’s Progressive Conservative government. For example, a Christmas piece on what’s available at the Alberta legislature gift shop includes the “Miracle of the Ralph Wall Calendar,” a takeoff on the Anne Geddes and Céline Dion “Miracle” calendar celebrating birth and renewal. The cover image is manipulated so that Klein’s chubby-cheeked face is superimposed on the face of the baby resting in Dion’s arms. Not exactly deep and probing stuff, but its message should prompt readers to think about Klein’s lengthy tenure as head of their province.

Whatever its limitations, the ed formula seems to be working. NADbank numbers show that Saturday readership of the Journal among 18- to 34-year-olds rose six points between 2001 and 2002. “We can’t say absolutely that ed is the reason for the increase, but we didn’t do anything else that would increase those numbers,” says Barb Wilkinson, the paper’s deputy editor of readership and features. According to a 2003 survey conducted by the Journal on Edmonton’s three campuses, nearly 60 per cent of respondents read at least one copy of ed per month, while 95 per cent of readers flip through or read other sections as well.

Not all editors believe relevant youth content needs to be split off from the rest of the paper. Kirk LaPointe, the former editor of The Hamilton Spectator, is also a former advocate of youth sections. In 1999, the Spectator launched alt.spec, a weekly supplement aimed at those in their teens and 20s. The initiative failed to take flight. “We were never terribly clear exactly what age group we were looking at,” admits current Spectator editor Dana Robbins, “and the content tended to reflect that lack of clarity.” Management gave alt.spec just over three years to develop a readership before scrapping it for a single weekly page written by and for local high school students.

LaPointe is currently the managing editor of the Vancouver Sun, which uses frequent coverage of gaming, the Internet, high school sports, and music to attract young readers. He now thinks youth sections risk ghettoizing the issues. “You’re trying to show that the experience of youth is credible,” he says. “The best way to do it is to commingle copy that would be of greater interest to young people all over the paper.”

But there’s no reason why a paper can’t have it both ways. The Star’s weekly youth section, I.D., appeals to readers in their early 20s by focusing on personal journalism and stories of self-discovery. At the same time, more analytical articles relevant to young people – about urban violence or up-and-coming indie bands – can be found throughout the paper. I.D., says Mo Gannon, the Star’s Life section editor, is just one of several entry points for youth. It’s a mix that works; the Star is the No. 1 paper among Toronto’s under-35s.

Papers are courting the youth market because advertisers have stepped up the pressure to bring in a younger audience. In response, explains Shafer, some U.S. dailies have launched commuter tabloids, papers meant to impress advertisers with their high number of young readers. But they aren’t journalistic enterprises, he adds. “They’re basically designed to corral a set of eyes for the advertisers,” says Shafer. The Chicago Tribune’s decision to launch RedEye in the fall of 2002 is a prime example: the impetus was simply to preserve market share in the face of rumours that the commuter-paper chain Metro was expanding into Chicago.

In Canada, the bottom line matters less in the youth section business. But King’s College’s Wark points to at least one news outlet where short-term financial motivations may be trumping quality journalism: Halifax’sHFX, The Daily News’s weekly youth insert. “The things I see in there aren’t apt to make their readers the kind of interested and thoughtful people a newspaper needs,” he says. HFX, he explains, is too receptive to marketing campaigns by companies and industries wanting promotion, and many articles read like rehashed press releases. Wark also faults the section for pushing the conservative values of its parent paper.

As for ed and I.D., the focus is firmly on readership, not ad dollars. Falling under the Life section umbrella, I.D. doesn’t need to worry about paying for itself. Similarly, ed doesn’t pay for itself and is under no pressure to do so. “It would be safe to say that the cost is of no concern, given that the focus is on potential gains in readership and circulation,” says ed editor Kehler.

As for delivering new subscribers and long-term readers, there is no definitive research available that supplies proof. It’s a big jump from laughing over a Ralph Klein parody once a week to reading analytical pieces day after day on the Klein government’s decision to privatize electricity.

Wark, while not impressed by HFX, can see how a youth section could serve as a bridge in developing a new generation of lifelong readers. “If it really tried to have younger people writing for it and deal with political issues that effect them in a hard-hitting way, it would have more chance at success.”

What’s needed is something more along the lines of the Daily Show – a mix of humour, timely information, and insight. While ed is usually funny, it sometimes stumbles when it comes to the latter qualities. With one or two harder stories per issue, it could be held up as an industry model, a non-profit driven publication that combines featherweight items with strong, analytical journalism. Still, there’s enough substance in its current mix that it should create committed readers. Perhaps they won’t develop a thirst for “great journalism,” but they may get used to the feel of newsprint between their fingers, and reach for a morning paper before they flick on their computer or TV.

Back at the University of Alberta, Nguyen and Butts find enough creative T-shirts to complete the assignment, while I learn that ed really is reaching its target audience. Almost all the students I approach not only read ed, but have something good to say about it. They don’t care that edhasn’t won any journalism awards – they’re happy to have a piece of the paper for, and about, themselves.

A model leans on the kitchen counter of photographer Lindsay Lozon’s studio waiting to be shot for fab. He wears only hot-pink briefs with black polka dots from Seduction Erotic Boutique, a thick white belt, a slim tie, a wristband, Kangol sneakers, and a straight face. The muscles on his lean, hairless body are accentuated by glistening body makeup.

“Are we supposed to be like dolls, literally?” he asks.

That’s exactly what he’s supposed to look like on the cover of the gay magazine’s holiday gift-guide issue. He has been styled to look like a Barbie doll, complete with black lines that trace his kneecaps and the joints where his arms and legs meet his torso. The theme of the issue is “Boy Toys,” and the name of his shot is “Warhol Willy.” The model is tied to a background with images of Andy Warhol’s yellow bananas. His bondage has the effect of a squeaky-clean Barbie in her packaging. The model wears thick black-rimmed glasses, and his hair is sculpted like Warhol’s in his 1986 Self-Portrait.

fab and other major gay magazines in Canada are known for their in-your-face use of sex. While the sex is most explicit in the ads, it’s also found in the stories. Editors of Canada’s three most-read gay publications – Xtra, fab, and fugues (all of which target mainly gay men) – dress up their articles with titillating pull-quotes, sexually suggestive headlines, and racy photos. While little of the actual content is about sex, a casual flip-through makes them appear almost pornographic. Unfortunately, the oversexed veneer compensates for the lack of great writing in gay publications – something they don’t have the industry-standard budget to consistently achieve. But what is most troubling about the sex-heavy nature of gay media is how it reinforces the idea of gay culture as hyper-sexualized. It doesn’t do much for the publications’ journalistic credibility either. Readers can hardly be expected to take an article about same-sex marriage seriously when it’s positioned under a suggestive headline and next to an ad featuring a half-naked man. And that’s too bad, particularly at a time when gay rights are being debated more than ever before and the gay press could – should – be spearheading the coverage.

I became aware of how obsessed gay media are with sex when a salacious headline was tacked on to a profile I wrote for Xtra this past October. The story was about an Aboriginal woman and the challenges she had overcome in her life. The headline was “I’m a slut.” And while my subject did say that and I included it in my story, her sluttiness was not the focus of the piece. Managing editor Paul Gallant says he used that quote because it was a “strong and empowered sexual statement.” Moreover, he thought it would entice people to read the piece. Maybe, but it set the wrong tone from the get-go, shamelessly cashing in on the one mention of the profile subject’s sex life in the whole piece. Unfortunately, my experience is not an isolated incident – all too often, gay media sex up their stories with steamy images and display copy in order to grab readers’ attention, which is a big change from 30 years ago, when the gay press got its start in Canada, and sex took a backseat to politics.

The gay press today serves a different role than the groundbreaking, politics-driven gay media of the 1970s. Richard Burnett, the author of the gay column “Three Dollar Bill” in Montreal’s Hour and a columnist for fugues, says that nowadays, many gays and lesbians take their rights for granted, and that is reflected in today’s lifestyle-oriented gay press. “It’s not about what bars were raided, but when Will [from Will & Grace] will kiss the other guy,” he says. “It was more about radical politics back then.” Burnett says gay publications now do for gay people in a given region what weekly newspapers do for their communities – they provide a smattering of local news and event listings, but, more than that, a feeling of connectedness to their neighbours. In contrast, The Body Politic, the gay liberationist paper published from 1971 to 1987, not only reported on topics of interest to gay people, but was part of the gay movement. An example of how this played out happened in the spring of 1973. When The Toronto Star bought the company that printed the Body Politic and then refused to print its eighth issue, the paper found another printer and wrote a story about what had happened. The story, “Why 8’s late,” ran with shots of a demonstration by the members of the Body Politic collective outside the Star’s office. That episode with the printer, in conjunction with homophobic responses from the newspaper’s management, prompted members of the collective to picket the home of the Star’s publisher. It would be shocking to see this type of activist response from the staff of the gay papers today. But, as Burnett says, times have changed.

In 1984, Pink Triangle Press launched Xtra, a free semimonthly tabloid to help bolster lagging sales of the Body Politic. The politics in Xtra were meant to be the same as in the Body Politic, except in “more edible bits,” says Rick Bébout, a former member of the collective that created Xtra. With an audited circulation of 45,000, it is now the country’s most-read English gay publication. “The politics have been reduced,” says Bébout, comparing Xtra to the Body Politic. “The piece that is missing is liberation. The sex radicalism of the paper is still a good thing, but it’s the only thing left.” In explaining the abundance of sex in his paper, Gallant refers to part of Pink Triangle Press’s mission statement, which reads “[to] honour lust and seek a world where sex is valued as a human trait, no more no less than any other.” But by picking up your local Xtra, you’d think sex was more the be-all and end-all of gay culture than something simply valued.

Ken Popert, a member of the Body Politic collective and the current president and executive director of Pink Triangle Press, says sex is used in Xtra for specific reasons, such as challenging readers to think about why something, like a photo, irritates or upsets them. He gives the example of how Xtra once got into a fight with its printer over a safer-sex ad that showed one man kneeling in front of another, apparently giving him a blow job. Xtra printed a story about the printer’s refusal to print the ad, in an apparent stand against the “rising tide of filth.” (It reproduced the ad after Popert reminded the printer that refusing to do so contradicted the Charter of Rights and Freedoms.) The purpose of running the photo, says Popert, was to invite readers to compare their reactions to that of the printer’s, and to think about why it was a good image to use to educate gay men about safer sex. Popert calls this use of sex “purposeful and constructive provocation.” That may be so, but another reason for all the sex in Xtra appears to be to bait people into picking up the paper because the writing isn’t incentive enough.

Gerald Hannon, an early member of the Body Politic collective and a current director of Pink Triangle Press, reads Xtra and fab, but says his real pleasure comes from magazines such as The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and This Magazine. “I like good writing better than I like stuff about matters gay,” he says. “And there’s not a lot of great writing in gay media.” When asked about the writing in his paper, Gallant says Xtra works on a tight budget. “Any editor would rather offer a writer $1,000 for a story than a hundred,” he says, but that isn’t an option for him. Regardless, he says writers are lured to Xtra because they want to feel a connection to gay people in their city, and Xtra is one of the few gay publications out there. “Sometimes well-known writers will write for us and not even expect to get paid,” he says.

Over at fab, Xtra’s biggest competitor, editor-in-chief Mitchel Raphael has done a decent job of obtaining occasional pieces by major writers such as Christie Blatchford, Jeanne Beker, and John Bentley Mays. Since taking over as editor in April 2002, Raphael, a former reporter at the National Post and the Star, says he offers competitive rates and has no problem finding big-name writers. However, fab doesn’t pay the established $1 per word for its articles, an economic benchmark of today’s magazine industry. The majority of the magazine consists of columns that report on Toronto’s gay scene, the magazine’s raison d’être. A glossy-covered magazine with newsprint on the inside, fab began publishing 10 years ago. Today, the semimonthly has an audited circulation of 30,000 in Ontario. Under Raphael’s direction, circulation is up by almost one-third, and ad sales are also rising. But whether that’s due to the magazine’s sexy outside or the writing inside is hard to discern.

Publisher Michael Schwarz credits Raphael for giving fab a sexier look, producing many memorable covers, such as Toronto mayor David Miller in a leather biker jacket or former Toronto police Chief Julian Fantino surrounded by male models impersonating the Village People. For his own reading pleasure, Raphael says he doesn’t need a sexy cover to get him to open a magazine. But he knows if he doesn’t dress up an article in the right way, he’ll have a limited audience, so he uses sex to grab his readers, 61 per cent of whom are between the ages of 25 and 34. He says his goal is to attract readers to meaty issues they otherwise wouldn’t engage in, such as the prejudices gay seniors face. He gives the example of the article, “Did club culture kill the gay dinner party?” by Alex Rowlson, a piece on the rise and fall of the gay dinner party. The cover photo is of a man at a dinner table wearing an open blazer that exposes his muscular chest, and one of the images inside is of the model lying across the dinner table, naked, but for a bunch of grapes covering his genitals. “You need to sell that story,” says Raphael. “I’m not going to have Alex write [more than 6,000] words and then have a photo of a beautiful turkey. People aren’t going to wonder, ‘How did they make that cranberry sauce?'”

In fab, the images are not the only things that scream sex; the display copy is often sexually suggestive. You wouldn’t guess it by leafing through a current issue, but the display copy has been gradually sanitized, according to fab’s associate and literary editor Andrea Németh. “Now we only sometimes have the dirtiest thing possible in the pull quotes,” says Németh. Raphael says that unlike Maxim, which uses sex to sell sex, fab uses sex to sell ideas. “I’m not going to say that every article is poetry or intellectual thought,” he says, “but there’s enough in there that it is.” Schwarz stresses that fab is not just about sex and says it runs some “really intellectual” articles.

Perhaps “really intellectual” doesn’t quite characterize the majority of the articles in fab, but some are. For example, in the holiday gift-guide issue, there’s an essay by Rinaldo Walcott about how “the culture of fag shopping” has become so central to many gay men. Even though the essay is not about sex, its two pull quotes – “A proud part of queer history has been servicing others” and “Buying is the orgasm of shopping” – are full of sexual innuendo. And while the sensational packaging often misleads readers as to what the stories are about, since few of the stories are actually about sex, Raphael says if it gets people to read about a prominent gay writer or the police chief’s views on the gay community, then misrepresentation is justified.

The portrayal of sex in gay publications works well for pick-up rates, but good journalism should be able to stand on its own, something fugues editor Yves Lafontaine has tried to put into practice. With an audited circulation of 50,000, fugues, which is about the size of an Archie comic, is the most-read French gay news publication in Canada. Surprisingly, it is a lot less sexual than it used to be. It started 21 years ago as a publicity vehicle for bathhouses, bars, and nude dancers. Since Lafontaine took over 11 years ago, he set out to concentrate less on sex and more on better writing. He also toned down the sexual imagery in the ads and the editorial content, mainly to attract more mainstream advertisers. Many fugues readers also asked for less explicit imagery in the ads and stories. “Readers said, ‘We don’t need to have naked men in all the advertisements and all the articles. We’re not sex-driven because we’re gay’,” says Lafontaine. Slowly, the magazine began to open its pages to other subjects. “We cover topics from pension plans to gardening to the new saunas that are opening. [Quebecers often refer to bathhouses as saunas.] But we talk about saunas as news,” he explains. “Not as an erotic thing.”

That’s encouraging to critics like Now Magazine‘s books and entertainment editor Susan G. Cole, who is troubled by the hyper-sexualized portrayal of gay culture in gay media. “Either the stuff is important to read and it’s good on its face, or it’s crap and the only way they can draw people into the magazine is to put across this other kind of image.” Cole doesn’t think it’s necessary to dress up articles to catch people’s interest, because gay people want to read about themselves. A lesbian mother of a 16-year-old, Cole says the public’s perception – influenced by the gay press – that the gay culture is pornographic has become problematic for people like her, who try to promote alternative families. “The biggest resistance to the idea of queer families comes from people who think that our kids are going to grow up in these households where everybody is running around just having sex and humping everything in sight,” she says. “They cannot see us outside the sexual frame.”

Raphael disagrees, arguing that if not for the sex in gay publications, nothing would make them uniquely publications for gay people. “How many places are there where you can discuss sex and sexuality for queer people other than in gay publications?” Not many, but just because you can do something, it doesn’t mean you should. No one’s arguing against the importance of discussing sex and sexuality, but doing so in excess furthers the stereotype of hyper-sexualized gays and lesbians and doesn’t say much for the writing in the publications.

For those gay people who do crave great writing, they don’t rely on gay publications to provide it. Sadly, the quality of the journalism in gay news publications isn’t destined to improve, and no one seems too concerned, because readers don’t pick up gay media for great journalism; they pick them up to read about themselves and for the club and event listings.

It seems that even if the writing were better, its credibility would still be questionable – especially to mainstream audiences – because of all the sex surrounding it. This means it will take a long time before anyone takes gay journalism seriously.

Back at the photo shoot in Lozon’s studio, the straight-faced model keeps sticking his hand in his hot-pink underwear and adjusting his genitals, while taking hauls from his cigarette.

“Are you supposed to be smoking in here?” asks Maha, the stylist hired to make the shoot look fabulous. He’s sporting a shirt that reads, “TRANSFORM BOYS INTO TOYS.”

“May I smoke?” asks the model.

“Yes. You may,” says Maha, who lights up his own cigarette a few minutes later.

Another few minutes pass before Maha asks the model, “Ready to be tied up?”

“I guess,” he answers.

“Perfect,” says Maha. “Come on, let’s do this.”

Maha then turns to me and says, “We can tie you up later so you’ll have a pic for your article.”

On the red carpet, tattoo-touting Bif Naked makes it past the assembly line of photographers, videographers, and entertainment reporters. The Canadian rocker, in a vintage black cocktail dress, Manolo Blahnik shoes, and Paul Frank boys’ underwear, heads toward the hostess. Lisa Tant stands in front of an archway that leads to Flare‘s 25^th anniversary party at the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) in Toronto. She is wearing a crimson, low-cut, floor-length gown by Canadian designer Lida Baday, and Birks diamond jewellery. She welcomes Naked with a cheek-to-cheek kiss and chitchat. As the new head of Canada’s No. 1 fashion magazine, Tant greets over 800 fashionistas and Canadian celebrities. This is a marquee night for Flare.

There was buzz even before media invitations were sent out. Everyone wanted to see what Tant, just seven months into her prestigious new job, was about. She appears to be a southern belle, but beneath the blond locks, bling-bling, and gown, is an ambitious editor who won’t let any obstacles stand in her way. The 40-year-old fashion veteran had already weathered a public bitch session in the National Post, when Scene columnist Shinan Govani compared her to Marcia Brady’s jealous younger sister, Jan, after the ROM event. But no less tough a critic than Rona Maynard,Chatelaine‘s former editor, has been her champion over the years. “She’s firm and clear,” says Maynard, “and doesn’t tolerate attitude or slipshod work.”

At Flare, Tant will have to put all these traits to work. With over 1.8 million readers, Flare sets the pace in the fashion industry. Tant’s challenge is to maintain the pole position. Twenty-five years ago, the magazine had no Canadian rivals, but now there are five major consumer fashion titles in the country, along with the recently arrived gaggle of shopping magazines. This level of competition tempts demanding advertisers to try to buy their way onto editorial pages.

Another pressure is the constant comparison of Tant to her “legendary” predecessor, Suzanne Boyd. Fashion is a personality-driven business. Great fashion editors create buzz, hot designers and photographers follow, readers flock, and advertising jumps – at least that’s the theory. “Tant has her work cut out for her in replacing Suzanne Boyd,” wrote The Globe and Mail‘s Rebecca Caldwell. “The native of Vancouver fills the stilettos of Suzanne Boyd,” CanWest News Service reported. “Trying to compare Suzanne to Lisa is like comparing a pineapple to a mango,” says Govani. “Lots of people are making the comparison.”

Since its launch in 1979 as a total transformation of the dated Miss Chatelaine, Flare has had its share of characters running the fashion show. Five editors, from trendsetters to trend-watchers, have evolved the publication from a fashion magazine for the working woman to Canada’s magazine for anyone who loves fashion. The most legendary editor of them all, Bonnie Fuller (now editorial director of American Media Inc., publisher of the tabloid Star and others), strutted her editorial legs at Flare from 1983 to 1989, covering ready-to-wear collections and injecting provocative headlines like “Incredible Hunks” and “Risqué Business.” Later on, in 1996, Boyd was appointed editor-in-chief, bringing with her even more glamour and sizzle. Last year, Boyd moved to New York to launch Suede, a title for “multi-culti urbanistas,” according to its website. But after only four issues and with the April 2005 issue at the printers, Boyd’s “cutting-edge fashion glossy” was put on hiatus because advertisers showed little interest in the magazine. During Boyd’s sometimes-controversial reign at Flare, she fought off stiff new competition from Fashion – formerly Toronto Life Fashion – which set out to capture urban readers, and a newly launched Canadian version of Elle. “The category is healthier and livelier than ever before,” says Jessica Johnson, the Globe‘s fashion editor.

At the ROM party, the dim lights give off a purplish hue. Flare publisher David Hamilton invites Tant to the podium. The surrounding crowd holds flutes of champagne to toast 25 fashionable years. “Everyone keeps asking how I’m going to change Flare,” says Tant. “It’s a great magazine – I don’t want to change it.” In public, Tant has steadily reiterated some version of the mantra – “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” – yet since her appointment she’s made six staff changes. Tant calls it “cleaning house”; others, like Govani, call it a “mass exodus.” Tant also renovated the décor department and launched two new columns. Globe columnist Lynn Crosbie’s “Love Life” offering, says Tant, “replaces another column, also called ‘Love Life,’ that was a bit junior, about dating and boys, and I thought it was too young.” The other new column, “Male Room,” features various male voices, including CBC Radio film reviewer Don Irvine.

In design, Tant and longtime art director Tanya Watt freshened Flare‘s pages by playing with white space, new colours, and new photographers. Her instinct for what readers want visually paid instant dividends. She scored Flare‘s biggest-selling cover of 2004 in August by featuring the 30-something-popstar-mom Sarah McLachlan, who was dressed comfortably in a pair of blue jeans, crimson top, and silver Betsey Johnson heels. The photographer captured her cascading loose curls in mid-flow, and captivating smile in mid-laugh. Originally, the cover was slated to feature a serious looking McLachlan in an uncomfortable gown. When Tant saw the more relaxed photo, she went with it immediately. Hamilton credits the success of the issue to Tant’s choice of celebrity and photo, as well as a special 16-page beauty pullout.

Shortly after the ROM event, Tant spoke at a magazine luncheon about her experiences since arriving at the helm. Masthead editor Bill Shields, who covered the luncheon, was amazed by her frankness. She spoke of conflicts that had arisen because some staffers weren’t welcoming to her and her changes. “From an ad point of view, to walk into the No. 1 book in the category and announce you are going to change every single page is gutsy,” says Shields. “I was impressed by how badly she wanted the job.”

So badly that when she heard Boyd was leaving for New York, Tant hired an art director to design her vision of the magazine, inspired by British Elle and BritishVogue, to impress Hamilton. She faced resistance, partly because of her association with the more-homespun Chatelaine. Maynard appointed Tant beauty editor seven years ago, then to beauty and fashion editor, and before long, started encouraging her into management. Eventually Tant was elevated to executive editor of the services department, the position she held prior to her arrival at the top of the Flare masthead. In the end, she won over publisher Hamilton with her plan: expand the franchise, deepen readership, place less emphasis on celebrity, and make it more popular so that anyone interested in style can read the magazine. Tant is up against formidable competitors, but she loves it. “We may look like Barbie,” she says, “but we’re GI Joe underneath.”

And Tant will have to deploy her forces, because her competition isn’t sleeping. Last May, Fashion modeled its first redesigned issue. The new look positions it as a national publication with city editions in Toronto, Montreal, and Vancouver. Of the structure of the magazine, editor-in-chief Ceri Marsh says, “The new architecture goes from international to national to local.” Her magazine is aimed at Canada’s urban fashionistas, the kind of consumers who want to know what women in cities like Paris and Milan are wearing. Marsh also expanded the beauty section. An expert on urban decorum, Marsh cowrote two bestselling books on the subject, and has been a guest on Oprah. Marsh encourages members of her team to think of themselves as readers. “Ceri is the reader,” says Giorgina Bigioni, Fashion’s publisher. “She has the same interests that readers have about looking and feeling their best.”

Elle Canada, the 33^rd international edition of the Elle brand, is the most eclectic magazine in the category. In addition to beauty and fashion coverage, it offers its readers a living section with décor, gourmet, and travel features. The magazine tries to cover women’s issues in Canada and abroad, with stories such as October 2004’s piece on the Mixtec women of Pinotepa de Don Luis, who fear losing their art of weaving with a rare purple dye called purpura. The Globe‘s Johnson thinks the magazine gives great relationship advice, too. “It’s like talking to a sister or an old friend through the pages.”

Women spend thousands on fashion magazines and advertisers spend millions on advertising space. WhenElle Canada launched, some wondered if it would cut into the advertising revenue pie that Flare and Fashionshare. Instead, the pie expanded. According to LNA FasTrack, in 2001 (when Elle Canada launched) the combined advertising revenue of Flare, Fashion, and Elle Canada was at least $36 million. In 2004, that number grew to at least $52 million.

Quarterly magazines FQ and The Look, formerly Elm Street the Look, focus on fashion as a part of culture.FQ is a canvas for Canadian icon Jeanne Beker’s view from inside the fashion world. Beker, who knows designers like Karl Lagerfeld personally, has access to insider parties, couture fashions, and an international pool of photographers and writers, including the Village Voice‘s Michael Musto. FQ doesn’t tell readers what boots to wear with what skirt – the magazine avoids the term “must-have” – but readers do want Beker’s authority, so the Global Spin department spotlights top style picks from around the world, listing best spas to best restaurants.

The Look appeals to a broad range of readers – not necessarily just readers of fashion magazines, explains editor-in-chief David Livingstone, but those interested in looking for a less conventional approach. Literary writers Derek McCormack and Sheila Heti, for example, contributed to the winter 2005 issue. “It’s a thinking woman’s fashion magazine,” says Johnson, who reads it because she’s always interested in what Livingstone, in particular, has to say about fashion. “David knows more about fashion than anyone,” she enthuses.

Livingstone clearly wants to give The Look a broader perspective than simple service journalism. Even The Fashion Look, a front-of-book department, describes the latest fashion trends thoughtfully rather than covetously. Livingstone notes the emphasis on where to get things in today’s fashion titles, but scoffs, “How uninteresting is that? That’s what store windows are for.”

But many readers do value the service aspect. “If you can tell me where to find the perfect white blouse or the perfect pair of jeans, then you have just saved me three hours and that is incredibly valuable to me,” says Elizabeth Renzetti, the U.K. correspondent for the Globe and a social trends feature writer for Flare. She thinks to disparage service is shortsighted. “All consumer magazines should offer service, or else people will think the magazine is a waste of time,” she says. Though, she adds, “they can’t be just service, like shopping magazines.”

When a new editor takes over, the first question is usually whether there will be sweeping changes or a desire to maintain the status quo. The next question is whether readers will be offered hard-hitting stories alongside the beauty tips and fashion news. “There are many ways to write for women’s magazines,” says Renzetti, “ranging from research-heavy, deeply reported pieces where you quote a lot of experts, to the kind of anecdotal and chatty pieces that you find in a basement-level magazine like Cosmopolitan.”

Tant does run serious pieces, like “I Overcame This,” about a young breast cancer survivor, which are relevant to readers. But generally, she’s pragmatic and sticks to advice, like how to achieve the runway look. It’s service all the way. “I don’t care what the insiders think, I care what the readers think,” she says. “If you don’t have your readers, you’re screwed.” Flare doesn’t “look down on readers,” says beauty editor Juliette Lie. “‘Go get Botox because it’s in, and go do it now because it’s good’ – we don’t want to do that.” Instead the content says this: here are your options, both pro and con; you decide if it’s right for you.

Interaction with readers is an essential strategy at Flare, and Tant inherited the Flare Advisory Council. For two years, this monthly web panel of several hundred readers has been a “valuable” tool in measuring the magazine’s successes and faux pas. The council gives feedback on covers and new elements in the magazine, rates which features generate the most enjoyment, and comments on how Flare compares to other publications. For the most part, Tant’s readers want short and entertaining pieces, and that’s what she intends to offer.

Tant’s approach is supported in Fashion: A Canadian Perspective, a collection of essays. Deborah Fulsang, the Globe‘s fashion editor (currently on maternity leave), explains how the advent of fashion television in the mid-1980s affected fashion journalism: “It has fostered a form of ‘lite’-journalism reporting, where information is crafted into tight sound bites, bullet-form lists, and snappy, provocative headlines.”

In the early 1980s, before the advent of fashion television, both Flare and Toronto Life Fashion featured lengthy articles of about 2,500 words or more. Fulsang argues that the emergence of fashion television has further encouraged “more thought-provoking fashion writing.” Today, in the pages of Flare, that’s not the case. The features run at about 1,000 words, and Tant takes issue when people think that a smart magazine has to have long articles. “I want us to be Flare,” she snaps tartly, “not Time.”

Back at the party, my attempts to interview a certain statuesque ex-editor have been futile. Encircled by people, Boyd is standing steps away from the portrait Bryan Adams snapped of her for the 25^th anniversary book. The DJ starts playing “California Love” by the late rapper Tupac Shakur. Shimmering in a Valentino cocktail dress, Boyd starts bobbing. When this rap number put Tupac at the top of the charts in 1996, Boyd had just been appointed Flare‘s editor-in-chief. She was a striking presence; she pushed boundaries and brought a lot of attention to Flare.

Not all of the attention has been positive, though. For the February 2003 issue of Flare, Boyd decided to put a picture of a car on the cover to announce a giveaway. A month later, Flare‘s auto fashion cover becameMasthead‘s cover story on crossing the line between editorial and advertising. In a hard-hitting column, Shields criticized Boyd’s decision. He wrote, “Not only did she allow Mazda to buy its way onto her cover, she even managed to get the logo in there, and in the most conspicuous of regions – right between the model’s legs. The visual pun is almost too blatant to express – magazine spreads legs for advertiser.” Shield’s wrote that Boyd justified her decision to run with the photo by explaining it was one of the few in which the model was smiling and relaxed. At the time, other editors, like former Fashion editor-in-chief Leanne Delap and Elle Canada’s Silvan, told Masthead they were uncomfortable with Boyd’s decision.

Fast forward a few months to June 2003. Speculation is rife that Delap resigned her position as editor of Fashion because her publisher, Bigioni, pressured her to run pieces advertisers might consider a little friendlier. In a Globe article, Bigioni denies the accusation, insisting that Delap left because she had been at the helm for three and a half years. Delap still won’t comment on the details of her sudden departure, except to say that the market had become more competitive with the arrival of Elle Canada, and with this new level of intensity came increased demands from advertisers. “My attempt to keep church and state separate was my own line, and it comes from the Globe‘s policy,” says Delap. She worked there for three years as a fashion reporter and then editor before taking the editor’s job at Fashion. “Over time,” she continues, designers “start sending you handbags. It gets harder and harder to resist.”

But the connection between advertising and editorial is always made to sound “more sinister and immoral than it really is,” says The Look’s Livingstone. In fact, he says, the connection is rational and obvious because advertisers indicate what’s available in the marketplace. Fashion’s Marsh agrees. “You’re a journalist and you cover your beat,” she says. Editors need to report what’s new and trendy, and who the people and personalities behind the products are, regardless of advertising.

Hamilton, Tant’s publisher, thinks it’s inappropriate for advertisers to buy their way onto editorial pages, but admits that all things being equal, he’ll suggest that Flare‘s editorial team feature an advertiser’s as opposed to a non-advertiser’s products. He says they don’t have to listen to his suggestions.

The swarm around Boyd and her $500,000 Lorraine Schwartz gems has dispersed, and finally, she looks available. I dart over. “Suzanne,” I say. “Excuse me, Suzanne.” I’m looking up at her. My black press pass is in plain view against the backdrop of my gold top. Standing in a pair of green Gucci, mink-trimmed satin heels, Boyd looks down at me. “My name is Anna-Christina Di Liberto. I’m writing for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. Could I….”

She turns her back to me and starts talking to Noel, a curly haired man whose head only reaches her shoulders. She tells Noel to find out what I want. Noel becomes the middleman, and asks what I want. This time I finish my sentence. “Could I ask Suzanne a couple of questions?”

“Hold on,” Noel says. Noel turns around to face Boyd. He relays my request. Finally, Boyd talks to me herself. The last question I pose to her is, “What advice would you give to Lisa Tant?”

Boyd answers in her sultry, deep voice: “I think she can figure things out on her own.”

When Adam Sol finished his speech, a hum of sympathetic noises rose from the crowd at Trampoline Hall. He had just spent 10 minutes talking about being an owner in a fantasy basketball league. It’s a pastime in which men pick their favourite players, create fake teams, and then track the actual individual statistics to determine whose team is best. Sol wondered why it is that only men tend to play in these leagues, and why they get so passionate about it. He speculated that the leagues are a way for men to connect with friends and briefly forget the worries in their lives. One of the men in Sol’s league has a baby suffering from cancer, but when he is with the guys, he escapes his problems, if only for a few hours.

Paul Wilson, a respected author and the former editor of The Walrus magazine, was in the audience at Sneaky Dee’s in Toronto early last December. It was his first time at the monthly event, where attendees give speeches on subjects outside their usual areas of expertise. He remembers looking around at the engrossed crowd and sensing the shared commiseration. “That,” he would say later in the week, “would make a great magazine piece.” It was engaging and emotional, it had narrative drive, and if you read it, you would learn something you didn’t know you wanted to know. Wilson figured it would take a long article to convey the idea fully. But like Sol’s team, Wilson’s idea may well remain a fantasy. These days it is difficult – if not impossible – to find a vehicle to run this feature at the length he believed it needed.

Long-form magazine articles have become scarce in Canadian magazines. Eight thousand words used to be a common length for a feature. Ten thousand words or more was once considered long; now anything over 5,000 is a rare find. All the players – publishers, editors, writers, and readers – say they want longer articles, but, hampered by financial limitations and a lack of ambition, long form is shrinking away. The few titles struggling to produce long form are either ground down by limited financial means or hoping the federal government will rescue them by changing the charitable donation status of magazines.

Many writers cannot avoid romanticized notions when talking about long-form articles. They regard it as the heart and soul of journalism. It’s about taking risks and discovery. Through exhaustive research, narrative drive, and the use of fictional techniques like scenes, dialogue, and character development, a long-form piece provides the context and analysis that a short piece cannot. It pulls readers in and gets them engaged. A long article, done well, teaches and encourages readers to learn more. “The writing matters because it is a form of communication and an articulation of meaning,” says Wilson. “We can’t live in a world without contemplating and understanding it.”

This love affair with long form, particularly those with strong narrative elements, was most recently sparked in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, in a movement called the New Journalism. Michael Shapiro, a magazine journalism professor at Columbia University, wrote in 2002, “Journalism had seized the great ferment of the 1960s and defined what writing and storytelling should be.” But this approach was in practice well before it was popularized by the likes of Tom Wolfe, Gay Talese, Joan Didion, and Norman Mailer. Here are just two examples: in 1955, Walter Lord used the techniques that would define New Journalism when he reconstructed the sinking of the Titanic in A Night to Remember. And in The Longest Day: June 6, 1944, British journalist Cornelius Ryan told the story of D-Day through the eyes of the participants.

Besides the changes in cultural attitudes and the journalists’ desire to experiment, the boom in long form was a result of the new economics of the magazine business. “Experimenting with narrative arose, in part, as a business move,” says Stephen Kimber, a journalism professor at the University of King’s College in Halifax. Hurt by the ascendance of television as the most popular form of mass media, magazines embraced long form in hopes of survival.

In Canada, a preponderance of long articles ensued in a number of places, including the weekly newspaper inserts, Weekend Magazine and The Canadian, the men’s magazine Quest, and Saturday Night. One of the most celebrated pieces from the earlier Saturday Night was Peter Gzowski’s 9,000-word profile of 19-year-old Wayne Gretzky from November 1980, which won a National Magazine Award. With its vivid scenes, revealing anecdotes, and sharp dialogue, Gzowski’s story revealed the life and mind of a prodigy. The hefty word count allowed ample space for the accumulation of detail and context. The piece successfully captured Gretzky’s essence and his importance to hockey.

For many, this was the golden age of magazine writing in Canada. Rosy nostalgia can be detected in the recollections of some writers who worked in the era. Others, like freelancer Don Gillmor, admit the work from the period did not consistently amaze. “For every long piece that worked, there were two or three that didn’t,” he says. Still, back then, there were a variety of titles with money to spend on editorial. At its high point, Weekend reached two million readers. This made for happy advertisers, at least for a while. The comfort created by financial stability allowed editors to push limits. Writers were free to experiment and the $1-per-word standard was sufficient payment.

Twenty-five years later, those healthy weekly inserts are nothing but faded memories, and many publishers and editors have concluded that readers no longer have the attention spans for long form. While still around,Saturday Night‘s recent history has been stormy. Former editor Matthew Church spent December 2001 to August 2004 trying to reestablish the magazine after it had ceased publication briefly. In his format, there were two or three features per issue that ranged from 3,000 to 5,000 words each. The remaining pieces rarely pushed 1,500 words. Back in 1980, Saturday Night ran two major features that were at least 7,000 words long every month. One story on influential Liberal backbencher Jim Coutts ran at 12,000 words. Church says a certain mix had to be achieved in a finite number of pages, which limited the length of the articles. “Many readers aren’t up for longer pieces,” he says. What’s more, longer articles are too expensive to produce. “Ideally, you pay the writer a lot more money,” he says. “You have to find the right writer and that’s hard. Any writer can go long.” Over the past 10 years, Church has observed an unhappy trend. “Writers spend less time editing themselves,” which has weakened the writer-editor relationship. “Mostly,” he concedes, “it’s because writers aren’t being paid enough.”

Any freelancer can tell you that. The standard fee hasn’t changed in a generation. Writer Andrew Nikiforuk says he works much differently now than he did 10 years ago. A lot of shorter articles and supplementary work enable him to pay the bills. “I have to produce more than one story a week for it to be economic,” he says dryly. David Hayes, another full-time writer, agrees that almost every freelancer does such work. “Writers don’t make all their cash in articles, he says. “There is not enough work and not enough money.”

In August 2004, Gary Ross replaced Church at Saturday Night. In the late ’70s, Ross was a senior editor atWeekend. He then held the same spot at Saturday Night from 1980 to 1987. Since 1993, he has been a part-time senior editor at Toronto Life. When Ross took over, he began canvassing writers. He quickly ran into the low-fees issue. During one conversation, a prospective freelancer asked Ross what the money was like. “A dollar a word is the best I can do,” he said. Her reply: Do you realize we had this same conversation in 1985? And do you realize gas and rent don’t cost what they did in 1985? “Yes,” he said to her, “but I’m sure you’re a much more efficient writer than you were in 1985.”

That response irks freelancers, who are quick to point out that salaries of magazine editors have not stayed the same for two decades. Chris Turner, another journalist and author, knows the frustration of negotiating. “I’ve had to haggle and cajole for every penny I’ve ever spent on research and every dime I’ve ever made on writing,” he says. “The business side of this job is – to be blunt – horrible.” A writer has to be realistic when determining how many hours of work will go into a story, and Ross acknowledges this truth. “You can ask so much of a writer for $4,000,” he says. “You can ask for two months hard work, but you can’t ask for six months.” As the cost of living rises and word rates don’t, the quality of the writing deteriorates and the integrity of long form is compromised.

There are expectations that the number of long articles in the pages of Saturday Night will increase now that Ross is there. He is deliberately vague about his plans, except to send signals that he won’t be a hero by trying to save long form in Canada. The magazine needs to be a balance of short and longer pieces, he argues, believing most people are too pressed for time to read many long articles. Instead of blaming the younger generation and the Internet, as many do, he says the problem lies with how his generation, the baby boomers, prioritize their time. “There is a big bulge in the population,” he says, “and they’re not going to read a lousy 8,000-word piece. But if it’s a brilliant 8,000-word piece, I think they will.”

Ross has to grab their attention somehow. He knows Saturday Night has fallen off the radar screens of most Canadians. His first job is to get the magazine back into the hands of the magazine’s natural constituency, so he can spar with the new general-interest kid on the block, the Walrus. In early 2006, a distribution contract with the National Post, into which Saturday Night is tucked as an insert, ends. The speculation is that Ross would like to take the magazine back to paid circulation and rebuild its subscriber base, but he says ifSaturday Night is not sufficiently healthy by then, its owner St. Joseph Media Inc. will kill it.

The offices of Saturday Night and The Walrus (the latter being the one magazine in Canada that makes a point of doing what Saturday Night used to do – go long), are studies in contrast. Saturday Night takes up four cubicles in the large, red-brick, open-concept, loft-style offices of St. Joseph Media on Queen Street East in downtown Toronto. From all around, the clacking of shoes on hardwood echoes in the brightly lit office. Staff members stride back and forth, seemingly indifferent to those around them. On the west side of downtown,The Walrus is tucked away up a set of stairs on the first floor of its Duncan Street home. Staff members have offices off the main room, where the interns work. A large painting of a walrus hangs on one wall. The shelves of the bookcases that line the boardroom sag noticeably. A plush walrus toy sits on the top of one. The desks and floor are cluttered with paper and boxes. The staff nods or smiles when someone enters the office.

Even before launching The Walrus, publisher Ken Alexander and founding editor David Berlin rejected excuses about short attention spans and raised hopes for the long-form cause. So far, the public has been supportive. The magazine has a subscription base of 50,000 and newsstand sales of 15,000 a month. It aims to encourage public discourse in Canada and become as revered as The Atlantic Monthly. Commitment to long form is a strategic aspect of this undertaking. Its inaugural issue, October 2003, led with a 9,000-word investigative cover story by Marci McDonald on the then prime-minister-in-waiting Paul Martin. Each month, there are three to four articles over 4,000 words long, and smaller articles often exceed 2,000. “We provide readers with what they need,” claims Alexander, “and provide writers with a vehicle.”

The launch of The Walrus provoked considerable response in the industry. D. B. Scott, a magazine consultant involved in the early stages of the magazine, believed that some people ultimately got more “sizzle than steak.” Indeed, the first months of the Walrus’s life were not without problems. It struggled with an unclear editorial vision, revolving-door editorial staff, and untimely, irrelevant articles. But some think the Walrus is slowly establishing itself. The magazine has attracted many prominent writers in Canada and editorial content expresses a stronger, more confident vision than in early issues. Alexander, who is now both publisher and editorial director, has been working to make the articles timelier. He says, “I am only interested in one thing: content.”

All the talk about commitment to depth and quality is supported by a willingness to pay writers higher than standard rates – depending on the story and the writer – but Alexander has to face reality sometime. The Walrus does not bring in enough money from advertising and subscriptions to keep itself afloat. If revenues don’t improve, other solutions must be found. Under current tax laws it is not as easy to give financial support to magazines in Canada as it is in the United States, which is why The Atlantic can lose money and still thrive through generous philanthropic support. The Chawkers Foundation grant of $5 million, which, in effect, was to be seed money for the Walrus, will not be available to the magazine unless it is granted foundation status as a non-profit. That status, for which Alexander has applied, would require the magazine to become one project of many under an umbrella organization dedicated to a charitable cause (in this case, encouraging public discourse). With Revenue Canada approval, The Walrus organization could canvass for donations, like the Chawkers Foundation grant, thereby creating an additional revenue stream. Alexander says the magazine, which is currently funded by a private source he won’t divulge, will continue to find investors if the charitable status is not granted and the magazine cannot become self-sufficient. Ultimately, championing long form may be a lost cause in this country, but he remains defiant: “If you don’t have high aspirations,” says Alexander, “then go home.”

Canada may be unable to support a magazine that fully embraces the cause, but readers’ appetites for lengthy reads are partially sated by work in city and niche magazines, though such titles provide a less amenable environment. For advertisers, publications that cater to a precisely defined audience make sense, says publishing consultant and former Saturday Night and Toronto Life publisher Marina Glogovac. They can appeal to retail and local advertisers instead of only companies with national reach. City magazines such asToronto Life or Vancouver, and niche magazines like explore, have been able to take advantage of the dependable ad base to exercise some editorial muscle. In 2001, Toronto Life published an 11,000-word piece by John Lorinc about suburban sprawl. While not the norm, the magazine does regularly find space for articles ranging from 3,000 to 5,000 words long. “I do it because I can,” says editor John Macfarlane. Lorinc, who expresses an unusually optimistic attitude about the industry, believes long form is a distinctive type and should be used sparingly. “But,” he concedes, “it would be better if more editors felt they had the option to run long once in a while.”

The editor best known for his dedication to long form is James Little. Outside the explore magazine editor’s office, a Globe and Mail article dated July 6, 2002 is tacked onto a wall. Penned by feature writer Ian Brown, “Length Matters” laments the downsizing of magazine articles. Little has underlined one particular phrase – “intellectual miniaturization” – in black pen.

Al Zikovitz, explore’s publisher, says it is relatively easy to run 3,000- to 7,000-word pieces because of exciting subject areas – like giant squids in Australia and civil unrest in Sudan. Lately, Little has started occasionally making long features his cover stories instead of always going with service packages. He’s been more confident that they’ll sell, and in February he learned he was right. The newsstand numbers for the September/October 2004 issue – with “The Big Melt,” a 4,000-word piece about shrinking glaciers written by Nikiforuk, on its cover – were the highest of the year, so far.

However, explore’s freelancers are paid less than a $1 per word, which means the quality can be inconsistent. Zikovitz would like to run longer, more thorough articles, if the magazine had more editorial space. It struggles with finding a balance between long articles and shorter informative pieces. “We need to make sure we are addressing most of the needs of all the readers,” he says. That means getting more advertisers onboard and growing the magazine becomes the crucial problem for all niche and regional publications.

Finding more readers and attracting more advertising dollars are less of a worry at large newspapers. Lately, there has been more experimentation with long form in weekend sections of major dailies. But this does not mean long form has found the home it needs. In January of this year, The Toronto Star launched its new Sunday section with magazine-style headlines and layouts. In the first two editions, there were four articles close to 5,000 words, but the majority were of a more typical newspaper length. In the Globe‘s weekend Focus section, series articles are a regular part of the mix – a November three-part narrative called “Shades of Grey,” about Canada’s aging population, ran over 10,000 words.

If that sounds long for a newspaper article, 160,000 probably seems outrageous. In January 2003, The Hamilton Spectator ran 31 consecutive installments of Jon Wells’s investigative piece “Poison,” about Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon, a local man who murdered his wife and three others. Besides winning a National Newspaper Award, the serial boosted sales five per cent for the month, another testament to readers’ hunger for long, engaging articles. Editor Dana Robbins has since run three major pieces over 100,000 words, part of an overall strategy to attract new readers to the Spectator.

This new development isn’t all positive. An article in multiple parts is not the same as one large article, since the overall narrative flow is interrupted. To date, only a handful of newspapers have attempted this type of serialization, but if long articles were to become more common, freelancers would have to contend with the paltrier rates newspapers traditionally pay.

The low rates are not so low that writers are deterred entirely from going long. The desire is strong enough that many work for small fees or honoraria. Otherwise, smaller general interest magazines of a certain level of quality – such as Toronto’s This, Vancouver’s Geist, and Montreal’s Maisonneuve – would not exist.

While publishers and editors remain focused on balancing the need to maximize advertising revenues with providing content satisfactory to their readers, magazine writers struggle to find a place for lengthy narrative – not to mention make a living. The system is ailing and long form’s needs are many: timely stories, talented writers, an interested audience, experienced editors, supportive publishers, and, above all else, money. It’s a Herculean struggle to pull all these elements together. “If Canada does any long journalism at all,” says Scott, “it’s a goddamned miracle.”

I step into the MacDonalds’s eerie living room, where frilly pink tchotchkes and glowing Christmas lights dress every inch of the wall. I’m attempting to find out, firsthand, the challenges of reporting on mental illness. Seven years ago, Donovan Vincent interviewed the family’s oldest son, Todd MacDonald, for his Toronto Star “Madness” series. At that time, Todd, a certified mechanic who suffers from delusions and paranoia (hallmarks of severe schizophrenia), had told Vincent that a pacemaker had been implanted in his chest and a receiver lodged in his mouth.

As MacDonald gives me his history, my heart beats so fast I wonder if it might take flight. He sits across the room – 40 years old, but with the creamy complexion of a much younger man – calmly explaining his fictional career with the police. His parents and I, like a coalition of sanity, nervously wait for him to finish.

“I’m sorry about this,” his father interrupts, wearily rubbing his deeply creased face. “He must have stopped taking his medication. You made such a long trip for nothing.”

Yet, in exposing the flaws of Ontario’s mental health system, Vincent and Boyle also revealed the challenges involved in mental health reporting. Despite the fact that one in five Canadians experience mental illness in his or her lifetime, and that mental illness cost Canadians 1.5 million days in general hospitals in 1999, Boyle and Vincent’s “Madness” series still inadvertently portrayed the mentally ill as “other” and the illness as “otherworldly.” Why? Journalists often start with a loose definition of mental illness and a vague understanding of the science behind mental disorders, which increases the already steep challenges of interviewing mentally ill subjects. The result is too often the same: readers are ill-served by the current state of reporting.

In 2001, the Canadian Mental Health Association reviewed the representation of mental illness in the media and found disturbing trends. Only seven per cent of news stories on the subject included the viewpoints of mental health consumers. While Vincent took up the challenge of interviewing MacDonald, most journalists defer to medical professionals for a one-sided and jargon-based portrayal of mental illness. Such stories neglect the voices of the mentally ill and inadvertently portray them as incapable of speaking for themselves. The CMHA also reports that newspapers provide 58 per cent of the public’s knowledge about mental illness, yet readers rarely glean more than a vague understanding of mental disorders from the dailies. While doctors are particularly careful when defining mental illness (they rarely use this general term, instead defining specific disorders, such as schizophrenia), print reporters offer less specific meanings. Vincent, for example, defines mental illness as a “serious long-term chronic emotional, or psychological impairment that, without medication, can affect an individual’s ability to function in society.” Such significantly looser definitions can contribute to a general miscomprehension of mental illness.

The boy was about 19, good looking, with dark hair and vacant eyes. He said he was from out of town – St. Thomas or London, Ontario – and was slightly shorter than Vincent, who stands a solid six-foot-one. Staff were nearby, yet Vincent felt uncomfortable and slightly fearful, his mind flooding with decades of Hollywood imagery about psychosis. “Do I even want to do this series?” he asked himself. “No matter how progressive you try to be, that fear sort of nags at you a little at first,” Vincent tells me years later, between sips of tea at a sports bar across from the Star building. “I wasn’t thinking, ‘Oh God, this guy’s going to jump me with a knife.’ But there was that subconscious level of emotion that ensures those things are conjuring and spinning around.”

For decades, medical professionals have debated the connection reporters assume exists between mental illness and violence. But results remain inconclusive. Dr. Julio Arboleda-Flórez, the head of the psychiatric department at Queen’s University and a specialist in forensics, says that removing all mental patients from a population will only result in marginal savings in violent behaviour. He says alcohol abuse among the mentally ill is what determines violence, the same way drunken people act out in the general population.

But Dr. John Bradford, a forensic psychiatrist at the Royal Ottawa Hospital, and former colleague of Arboleda-Flórez, disagrees. “There is a connection,” he says firmly. “To pretend there isn’t, now that’s crazy.” He says minimizing the connection between violence and mental illness can cause policy makers to underfund mental health research. “It’s important to acknowledge [the connection] because violence can be controlled and reduced,” Bradford explains. “If the connection is not acknowledged, research is underfunded.”

Still, Bradford does agree that the media overemphasize violence in the mentally ill. As an example, he says that while subway pushing is tremendously rare, 90 per cent of the incidents are committed by schizophrenics. Yet newspapers often leave out that context, resulting in the misconception that all schizophrenics in subways are lethal. The CMHA review supports his view. It reports that nearly two-thirds of news stories involving psychiatric disorders could be classified as crime news. But crime only comprises 10 per cent of daily news coverage – rather than crime dominating the media, mental illness dominates crime news. Mental health activist Pat Capponi puts it bluntly: “These days, the media are slightly more sympathetic [toward mental illness], but they lose that at the drop of a body.”

The fortuitous timing of events “gelled and created an opportunity to do the piece,” says Mandal. It didn’t hurt that the handsomely brooding image of Russell Crowe as a mathematical genius with schizophrenia suddenly rendered mental illness attractive and trendy.

“In the early ’90s, schizophrenia was not a sexy topic,” Mandal says. The Star‘s Vincent concurs that celebrity cachet makes mental illness more palatable. “With geniuses like Glenn Gould or John Nash, mental illness becomes a quirk of their character rather than a flaw.”

But where does this leave the mentally ill who are not prodigious musicians or mathematicians? If sufferers are middle class, they fare better; the CMHA review reports that news stories are more likely to focus on their social standing, rather than detailing the symptoms they suffer (only 14 per cent of these stories do). But, if subjects are lower class, 89 per cent of the stories focus on their symptoms.

Consider the disparate coverage of Yu’s shooting versus the murder-suicide by Dr. Suzanne Killinger-Johnson: Police shot Yu on a Toronto streetcar in 1997. Two days after the shooting, Star crime reporter Jim Wilkes revealed that Yu was homeless and suffered from schizophrenia and presented him as “a paranoid schizophrenic whose violent behaviour got him barred from a downtown homeless shelter.” His story included anecdotes by shelter staff describing Yu as “engaging in repeated chanting and obsessive behaviour” and that he was “obsessed with collecting things.” The theme running through Wilkes’s article suggests there is a discrepancy between mental illness and affability or intelligence. A Scott Mission counsellor was quoted as saying, “even in the madness, there was a very likable person,” and that Yu displayed “an impressive intellect.”

Conversely, the theme of the articles following the murder-suicide perpetrated by Killinger-Johnson in August 2000 focused entirely on creating a contrast between the doctor’s wealth and her mental illness. The beautiful “psychotherapist” and “mother” from “Forest Hill” suffered from postpartum depression, which reportedly led her to jump in front of a subway car with her baby. The headline over Michael Valpy and Krista Foss’s Globe and Mail story, “When Looks Deceive,” perpetuated the societal misconception that mental illness rarely affects the affluent.

Star reporters Michelle Shephard and Hamida Ghafour also wrote of the late psychotherapist: “She was a woman who seemed to have the picture perfect life.” In the stories about Killinger-Johnson, her upper-class status became her defining characteristic, in contrast to the mental illness and homelessness that defined Yu. The Killinger-Johnson stories primarily mention general symptoms of depression, rather than particular symptoms (one said that on the day she died, she was “acting strangely”).

“In the case of Suzy Killinger, there was an enormous appetite for any information because she was a young rich doctor, and good looking,” says Valpy. “It’s far more difficult to perform public education if the person is some homeless guy on the street.”

Because of the complex science underpinning many medical stories, health reporters typically simplify the topic. The problem is twofold: Boyle says journalists get a small amount of space for their stories and, because of this, technical information doesn’t always make the cut.

The CMHA’s Lurie adds that contextualizing data doesn’t always make the cut either: “Only one-twentieth of those with mental illness will be chronic sufferers. But rather than breaking it down [quantitatively], papers go for the grand story.” For example, in the “Madness” series, Boyle and Vincent mention that one in five Ontarians will experience a mental illness in their lifetime without qualifying this (until later in the series when the damage has already been done) by adding that only two per cent of the population are chronic sufferers. Lurie says that advocacy groups who want to convey urgency and “move the body politic” to fund mental health research encourage reporters to focus on the negative aspects of mental illness rather than reporting on the whole story.

It may also be difficult for neophyte science journalists to avoid being manipulated by sources as newspapers do little to prepare them for the beat. Boyle, who worked the health beat for several years, says the Star dives into major mental health stories every few years. Yet the topic is approached anew each time, without a continuously growing knowledge base. “The tragedy is that despite their experience, Donovan and Theresa aren’t mental health resource people for the Star,” says Lurie. He thinks editors should develop editorial advisory groups comprised of journalists who have done mental health reporting, so that they can help those new to the beat. “So you start fact checking and you start perception checking,” Lurie says. “Otherwise, what a waste. They spent months researching that series and it may have changed their attitudes, but that knowledge is now archival.”

Ontario’s new privacy laws do not make gathering information any easier for reporters. The latest legislation, which traces its roots back to former Supreme Court Justice Horace Krever’s 1980 Royal Commission Report on the Confidentiality of Health Information, prevents journalists from obtaining medical information without the patient’s permission. And although people have a right to their privacy, confidentiality does make researching more difficult for journalists. The Windsor Star‘s Mandal says that it sometimes took her anywhere from two to over a dozen sources to get the documentation she needed for her “Schizophrenia” series. For less tenacious journalists, stories on mental health can be riddled with gaps.

 * * *

Mid-February 2002, Herrick remembers opening her newspaper to an unsettling headline: “Slobodan Milosevic, is he a psychopath, schizoid, or just plain evil?” She noted the byline and phoned the offending paper’s office. The journalist, she says, met her for coffee and, during their long conversation, Herrick – sounding more like a kindly grandmother than an angry activist – gently chastised him for his insen- sitive comparison. who had been diagnosed with mental illnesses to assert that it was unfair to compare them to evildoers. The next time Herrick opened the paper to find the journalist’s byline, his words had been miraculously transformed from glib to empathetic.

Such tales are common from the Calgary chapter of the SSA, where a team of several dozen people – who either suffer from the disorder or have family members who do – use their personal experiences with mental illness to offer the public more inclusive portrayals of their disoders. In 10 years, the program has educated over 50,000 people in high schools, hospitals, and newsrooms.

In 1995, the World Psychiatric Association chose Calgary to pilot an anti-stigma campaign called Open the Doors, to be run by local psychiatrists and anti-stigma researchers, Dr. Heather Stuart and Arboleda-Flórez. The campaign involved surveying the Calgary Herald’s coverage of mental illness for a duration of 18 months. They provided journalists with in-depth information on mental illness (in the form of brochures and databases) and exposure to patients, then recorded how coverage changed.

“Our view was that media weren’t going to change unless they got feedback,” says Robert Bragg, former editorial writer at the Herald and an Open the Doors participant. “A way to do that is on a case-by-case basis over time, responding to the negative and positive.”

Results showed news stories – accurate descriptions of diagnoses, profiles of people with mental illnesses, and human-interest pieces – increased in number, and the quality of reporting also improved. Then a series of highly charged cases – a shooting on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, subway-pushing cases in Toronto and New York, and the prime minister being attacked by a man with schizophrenia – hit the headlines, and the Herald’s coverage regressed to its previously stigmatizing form.

The author of Media Madness: Public Images of Mental Illness, Dr. Otto Wahl, tracks media portrayals of the mentally ill, and says that reporters tend to lean more toward presentations of violence and omit positive news.

“The most that you get in stories is some notion that people have gotten better, that symptoms have diminished, or they are out of hospital,” Wahl says. “You rarely get the accomplishments – awards they have may won or jobs they have landed.”

He believes that citing these accomplishments is key to helping readers connect with the mentally ill. The Star’s Vincent agrees: “After all,” he says, “a lot of us are just one breakdown away from being where these people are.”