Ben Chin hasn’t been near a television studio in months, but the former news anchor still dresses for the lights and cameras. His tailored suit, cuffed shirt and blue-and-yellow striped tie come straight from a men’s fashion magazine. His new office is another story. Papers and files lie in heaps on top of the wooden desk. Three chairs, one for Chin, two for guests, and a credenza complete the utilitarian look. The only personal touch is a collection of black and white photos – white-matted and black-framed – that includes a shot of his father shaking hands with former prime minister Pierre Trudeau. But Chin has more on his mind these days than decorating his office. After sixteen years in journalism, he’s realized “a life-long dream” by going into politics as a senior media advisor for the premier of Ontario, Dalton McGuinty.

“I don’t think there’s a higher calling,” Chin says, getting comfortable in his chair. The son of a South Korean diplomat, Chin grew up in Ottawa and Toronto surrounded by civil servants. He became a journalist, in part, expecting to cover politics. “That’s the stuff I was really juiced about.” His career provided ample opportunity to report on government at all levels. He worked his way from his first job as a reporter with Citytv in Toronto to CTV as an Atlantic correspondent, followed by anchor positions at CBC, where he occasionally filled in for Peter Mansbridge on the flagship newscast, The National. But as he climbed through the ranks, Chin says, stories started to look the same, and eventually he began to feel like he’d done everything he could do as a broadcast journalist.

In 2003, motivated by the desire to do something different, Chin left CBC and signed on as news director and anchor at Toronto1, the first non-specialty channel in the city since 1974. The station, however, was not successful, passing through three owners in two years. By 2005, Chin had seen enough. He left and signed a contract with Global National to become a Toronto correspondent. He was back where he started – working as a reporter on the city beat.

Before he started his new job at Global, however, an Ontario Liberal insider whom Chin met with regularly as a reporter asked him if he’d be interested in coming to work for Premier McGuinty at Queen’s Park. For Chin, the decision was as black and white as the pictures on his wall. “They said, ‘Would you think about it?'” Chin recalls. “I thought, ‘I would think about it for about three seconds.'” And just like that, Chin was on his way to the “dark side.”

Describing the career move from journalism to backroom or electoral politics (Chin just ran in a provincial by-election in March) as joining the dark side may be cynical, but the leap is a controversial one for reporters and editors to make. For many, it calls into question their independence and non-partisanship, which are core values of the profession. Journalists, at least in ideal terms, are supposed to serve the public good by delivering unbiased reports on the issues of the day. They give up that independence and freedom from bias when they become political insiders. Their work becomes tied to political agendas and the interests of individual politicians, making it almost impossible for them to present themselves to the public again as independent, disinterested observers. As a result, they risk exposing themselves to criticism from former colleagues. More importantly, their move becomes one from which it is difficult to return.

Even so, journalists continue to leave their newsrooms for careers in politics. The October 25, 2005 posting on The Toronto Star blog, Political Notebook, lists six former broadcast journalists, including Chin, who have gone to work for McGuinty. It claims that the premier has been “collecting broadcasters like a network executive.” Most of the reporters are veterans with years of experience and solid credentials, so it might seem odd that they left journalism behind. But Susan Delacourt, a Star political writer, says the business is “notoriously bad in creating fulfilling work environments for people in more senior ranks. Unless you want to be in management or are one of the rarefied few to have a column,” she continues, “then political journalism in your forties and fifties requires pretty much the same skills as in your twenties and thirties.”

At 42 years old, Chin certainly fits Delacourt’s description and when opportunity came knocking, he wasn’t going to pass it up. Luckily, the departure from journalism has been relatively smooth. Chin says he hasn’t experienced open animosity from his former colleagues. Still, he’s careful not to evangelize for his political masters. “That will be a really quick way to lose all my friends.” Chin stays low-key about his political affiliations, but he has no doubts about his career change. “When I said I had to think about it for three seconds, what I had to think about was would I ever want to go back. The answer was no.”

For some, the relationship between journalists and politicians is analogous to that of Sam and Ralph, the Looney Tunes duo. Sam, the portly sheepdog with a mop of red hair covering his eyes, protects his sheep from the industrious but always unsuccessful coyote named Ralph. In each episode the two chat amiably before and after work and during lunch. But once they punch in, the two become the bitterest of rivals and it becomes clear that their professional agendas are at odds.

Similarly, journalists and the political players they cover are professional adversaries. The idea of journalistic impartiality depends on it – so much so that media outlets have institutionalized the relationship across the country. The Globe and Mail‘s editorial policy reads as follows: “Reporters and columnists who routinely write on political issues must avoid being identified in their private lives with any party or political tendency. They are barred from most political activity other than voting. The same goes for editors who direct political coverage or take part in news selection and for everyone listed on the masthead.” Political activities such as campaign contributions, party memberships, marches, demonstrations, lapel buttons, lawn signs and campaign work are out.

Chin agrees with the stringent rules regulating a journalist’s political concerns. The moment a journalist is approached by a political party, he says, is the moment a journalist must declare the possibility of a conflict to his or her employer. Others would say it is only a conflict once the decision to leave has been made. While it’s blurry just where the conflict begins, clearly it’s not acceptable to do both. “You can’t suck and blow at the same time,” says Steve Paikin, TVO’s Studio 2 co-host and moderator of the English-language debate during the last federal election campaign. “You have to be one or the other.”

The line in the sand hasn’t always been there. In the years leading up to Confederation, the pursuits of politicians and government were inextricably linked with those of journalists. John A. Macdonald and George Brown both founded and subsidized newspapers to spread their political messages. Eventually, however, newspapers cut their ties with political parties, and their journalists became neutral observers of their surroundings. Still, reporters continued to fraternize with the politicians they covered on a regular basis: they played cards together, they ate dinner together and they drank together. It’s even rumoured that some journalists worked for politicians on the side. While hosting a CBC supper-hour show, long-time Star national affairs columnist Richard Gwyn wrote speeches for Eric Kierans, the former postmaster general, during Kierans’s unsuccessful bid to become leader of the Liberal Party of Canada in 1968.

This past summer, former prime minister Brian Mulroney claimed (through spokesperson Luc Lavoie) that Peter C. Newman wrote the speech he delivered to delegates at the 1976 Progressive Conservative leadership convention. Newman, who was editor of Maclean’s at the time, denies the claim. “The fact is I didn’t write it, and if I had, it would have been a lot better speech,” he told the Toronto Sun. “His people were writing the speech, and we [Newman and two other journalists] read the speech but we certainly didn’t write it or suggest how it could be changed.”

By the 1970s, however, relations between politicians and journalists began to cool. South of the border, events such as Watergate and the Vietnam War revealed widespread political malfeasance and reinforced the need for journalists to represent the public as watchdogs. In Canada, journalism became increasingly professionalized as more practitioners were taught a strict code of ethics by journalism schools and professional associations across the country. The friendly culture was slowly replaced with a confrontational one. The new wisdom saw politicians no longer as chums, but as adversaries. Working for a politician wasn’t done on the side anymore, and journalists were required to make a choice.

The rules of engagement changed over three decades ago, and the us-versus-them culture remains. That said, it hasn’t stopped journalists from giving political life a shot, and politicians and political parties are welcoming them with open arms. Success in modern-day politics has become largely a matter of fashioning an effective communications strategy. It’s commonplace for politicians at all levels of government, from policy boards to campaign teams, to employ communication specialists. During a panel discussion at Massey College in late October last year, Robert Hurst, president of CTV News, estimated that when special interest and lobby groups are included with politicians and bureaucrats, there are thousands of people working in Ottawa alone whose sole responsibility is to promote their employer’s message to the press. Who better than journalists – who retain an intimate knowledge of how media work – to do that?

As the political machine creates opportunities for journalists, the industry turns its back on its own. Statistics Canada’s most recent census shows that there were fewer working journalists in 2001 than ten years earlier. The situation has not improved since then. In fact, many journalists will argue the situation has deteriorated even further alongside the growing concentration of media ownership. Reporters who last ten or more years are anxious to move on, but like most market-driven industries, the journalism hierarchy is bottom-heavy and career advancement is competitive. It often leaves its senior practitioners feeling underappreciated.

“What distresses me is that journalism does not value experience in reporters,” says Star national affairs writer Graham Fraser. “The reporters who have crossed over into politics are journalists who have found that their employer does not want to take advantage of their broader understanding of the political and policy world that they’ve been covering. Thus, the idea of moving to a job where their experience will be recognized and valued – and where they will actually learn more about politics and policy – becomes irresistible.”

For Ontario Liberal MPP Jennifer Mossop, the prospect of moving into politics was, at first, far from irresistible. “I didn’t want that life for all the tea in China,” the former CBC Newsworld anchor and columnist with The Hamilton Spectator remembers thinking when she was first approached to run for office in 2002. She was, however, intrigued. Mossop got pregnant shortly after the meeting and, nine months later, delivered a baby girl. After her daughter was born, the Liberals approached Mossop a second time about running for the provincial legislature. This time, she said yes. “Journalism is great because you’re in the front row of all the action,” she says. “It’s like being at a boxing match – you’re so close, you occasionally get a little blood sprayed on your face. But being actively involved in politics is like being in the ring. You risk getting your nose broken and bloodied, but you’re doing it in the context of something you really believe in.”

That a journalist, after years as a neutral observer, wants to get off the sidelines and participate is a common refrain. For some, the evolution is natural. For the two decades Mossop was a journalist, she believed her value was to “sensitize” the public about an issue and arm it with a sense of empowerment they could use to do something about it. But the years passed, and stories like the tainted water scandal in Walkerton, Ontario and the shooting death of native protester Dudley George at Ipperwash Provincial Park in southwestern Ontario still happened. She says, “I didn’t feel it was enough anymore.”

Journalists may often think about leaving the profession, but leaving it to work in politics makes it hard to come back. Take Giles Gherson, editor-in-chief of the Star, Canada’s largest newspaper. He’s one of the lucky ones who left but managed to find his way back without damaging his career. In 1994, Gherson accepted an offer to become principal secretary to Lloyd Axworthy, the Minister of Human Resources Development in the Jean Chrétien government. Gherson’s main task was to coordinate the government’s transformation of the social security system, which included the design and implementation of a revamped employment insurance system.

Before taking the job, Gherson had been writing a political column in the Globe, one he had taken over from Jeffrey Simpson, who was at Stanford University in California on a Knight Fellowship for a year. When Simpson returned, Gherson found himself the odd man out. “I didn’t see anything that was challenging,” he says, “and the job in Axworthy’s office seemed like a really interesting way to test my assumptions about government.”

After two years of working for the Liberal government, Gherson was ready to resume his journalism career. His former employer, the Globe, was willing to take him back. But, even before Gherson left for Axworthy’s office, the paper’s editors told him he wouldn’t be able to go back to the Ottawa bureau once he finished working on the inside. They suggested that instead, he could write about sports or some other topic unrelated to politics. That didn’t sit well with Gherson – he respected the viewpoint that journalists, first and foremost, should be non-partisan observers – but rather, it’s a faulty assumption, he claims, that returning journalists will automatically shill for their former political employer. He worked for a Liberal member of Parliament, but he says he never considered himself a partisan. He was committed to a policy, not a political party. Besides, Gherson adds, “To work in government is not to love it.” Witnessing a dysfunctional government up close gave his writing a hit of realism. “I don’t think anybody said I was a huge friend of the Liberals after I came out.”

But if the Globe didn’t want him writing about politics, Gherson still landed on his feet. He was hired by the former Southam News Service to write a national economics column. In fact, he was offered the job because Gordon Fisher, Southam’s vicepresident of editorial at the time, considered his experience in government an asset.

Gherson was later promoted to Southam’s editor-in-chief, and eventually he made his was back to the Globeas editor of Report on Business, where he stayed until August 2004 when he made the jump to the top job at the Star.

Gherson’s success is the exception that proves the rule. For the most part, journalists who come back rarely get the chance to cover politics again. When partisanship is openly displayed, it’s a more difficult transition – something Michael Valpy knows well. The former Globe political columnist ran for the NDP in the 2000 federal election. He recalls being the subject of harsh criticism from colleagues from the outset. “Michael Bate, the editor of Frank, went around giving speeches about my betrayal of journalistic values and journalistic morality in having run.”

Valpy lost the election and came back to the Globe. He was offered the same deal as Gherson: anything but politics. But unlike Gherson, Valpy accepted and started writing a column on religion. Six months later, a position as a Queen’s Park columnist was posted and Valpy applied. “I was told there was no way.”

Valpy has written hundreds of articles since then, but only a few have been about politics. They include a feature profile on a youth voter named Chandler and a retrospective on the 1972 federal election – general interest pieces that Valpy agrees have little hard news currency. So, even though the “laundering” period seems to be over – recently he’s been filing more substantive political coverage – he also knows he may never be able to “sanitize” his political past. Asked whether he’d be hired to a political bureau in the future, he replies, “I’d be inclined to say I don’t think so. Once you’ve declared a party affiliation, that’s not forgotten.” While he misses writing a political column, he believes he doesn’t have much to offer. “What would I be bringing to the Globe other than somebody identifiably left, writing a left column? I couldn’t be the same political columnist as before because I’d be seen as someone who is making the left pronunciation of the day. I mean, I still carry my NDP card.”

As TVO’s Steve Paikin describes it, the divide between journalists and politicians is one that will never be bridged to anyone’s lasting satisfaction. “This is going to sound presumptious,” he says, “but journalists think of themselves as working for Team Public – not Team Liberal, not Team Conservative. And once you leave to play on another team you – fairly or unfairly – have ceased being a member of Team Public.”

It seems like an awfully hard line. CBC’s Keith Boag believes knowledge mined on the political side of the fence brings tremendous value to the public debate. “We have almost none of that in Canada,” says Boag, who would like to see more. “In the U.S., it’s quite common and with considerable benefit to the craft and the political dialogue.”

Many others including the Star‘s Chantal H?bert agree, as long as the welcome back is reserved for point-of-view positions like columnists. The idea of a reporter with partisan ties is, for most journalists, a bad one. If you used to read the six o’clock news and left to work in politics, Paikin says, you can’t expect to get your old job back.

Gherson, however, says his time in government gave him an understanding of the “flavour and texture” of the political and policy processes that you can’t get anywhere else. “My view was, now that I really know about government, you don’t want me writing about it. When I didn’t know about it, it was fine. I mean, we’re in the business of communicating to people, and we’re really saying, ‘You know what? You know too much. Oh, we don’t want our readers to know the reality.'”

Wherever the line is drawn, the debate isn’t going away soon. Reporters continue to leave newsrooms for politics, and political parties continue to hire them. For those who attempt to come back, the opportunity to cover politics again is unlikely – but not impossible. On February 1, 2006, Valpy’s byline (albeit, shared with two others) showed up on page one of the Globe beneath a report speculating on a same-sex marriage vote expected in the House of Commons. It’s just one in a growing list of political news stories to which Valpy’s name has been attached over the last several months.

As for Chin, he was busy making political news of his own in February. He resigned his position in the premier’s office and accepted the Liberal nomination for the March 30 by-election in the riding of Toronto-Danforth. If he wins this NDP stronghold, he’ll have proved his political worth, at least until the next provincial election. If he loses, Chin won’t return to journalism. He vows his reporting days are over. “The only way I could go back into journalism is as a Liberal commentator,” he says. “Not that that’s what I want to do.”

The transcendent example of this practice is the muchmaligned “Letter from the Editor” column by The Globe and Mail‘s editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon. Edward – who used to be Ed and is known among his courtiers with a certain contemptuous intimacy as Eddie – is the sort who responds to scathing criticism of his twice-monthly wank by updating his photograph. Edward used to sport an I-just-flew-in-from-Kabul threeday growth (more Ed than Edward), indicating that he was something more than just another managerial hack willing to shovel the shit for somewhat less money than his predecessor.

But that didn’t “work,” and so arrived a new Edward, beardless with just a hint of the forthcoming wise old jowl (somewhere between Eddie and Edward). Surely this would keep Robert Fulford (keeper of the jowl) from saying mean things such as: “Self-importance, the sin that tempts all journalists, severely afflicts Greenspon.” (When you take it in the teeth on that score from a guy Margaret Atwood compared to Mr. Weatherbee, you, sir, stand upon the Mount Olympus of self-regard – an onanistic Zeus.) Sad to say, however, the new Edward writes an awful lot like the old Ed.

In the midst of the federal election campaign, Edward proclaimed that a “powerful sense of torpor has seized our public life.” Canadians, no doubt awed by his magical command of English, which allowed him to render torpor powerful, went on to read the great man’s espousal of the Globe as an avatar of democracy and defender of the faith. He even suggested the Globe sacrifices its own self-interest (heaven forfend) in the pursuit of the common good, sermonizing that the political parties “gouged” the media to the tune of $8,500 per week per reporter, to put their representatives on campaign buses and planes. Oh, woe is the Globe, owned by among the richest men in the world and turning a healthy profit year in and year out. Imagine having to pay for an airplane ticket to write stories that sell newspapers. Edward, thy name is hypocrisy – spare us your pain.

Of course, Eddie isn’t alone. Newsworld‘s Evan Solomon inserts so many reaction shots into his CBC “interviews” you’re left wondering who’s interviewing whom. Some years ago, Ken Finkleman claimed he was so annoyed at Solomon for hijacking his airtime that he found the edit suite and recut the the tape himself. I know, I know: pot, kettle, black. Still, Finkleman’s instinct was a worthy one.

Ken Alexander’s Walrusian musings from the editor’s/publisher’s/ proprietor’s suite, while often more engaging and erudite than his critics suggest, are soaked in just the sort of High- Church self-regard you’d expect from something emanating from an office that speaks for the Holy Trinity. In a column reflecting on the implications of last summer’s CBC lockout, His Ken-ness wrote: “This past summer and fall, locked-out workers held round-the-clock vigils circling Lego-land headquarters on Front Street in Toronto and other CBC ports of call across the country, and when the opportunity arose, I joined them…the grand and enormous atrium at the CBC…is one of Canada’s most generous public squares. I have taken my son there, and told him ‘part of being Canadian means owning this place.'” Spoken like a guy with enough money to own, publish and edit his own national magazine. And while he’s quite happy to be among the people, like any good bishop leading his flock, he’s certainly not of them.

But for sheer chutzpah, nobody beats the musings of the Globe‘s former editor, the irrepressible Bill (“Call me William”) Thorsell. From his sinecure at the Royal Ontario Museum, William continues to bathe us in his wisdom and light. And of late, he’s hit high notes his fellow divas could only dream of. For instance, in remarking on Peter C. Newman’s (is there anything that gives away auto-absorption more than the middle initial?) disemboweling of Thorsell’s former self-love interest, Brian Mulroney, William graced the op-ed page of his former employer with his personal recollections of eight, count ’em, eight former prime ministers. Among these were the impressions of Lester Pearson he garnered as a teenager: “Pearson arrived at the western Canada Pavilion at Expo 67 with the Queen, so he had an excuse to be distracted. But he was barely there, preoccupied, immersed in his own reality, as was his wont. A brief encounter to be sure, but it was disappointing.” Writing as an adult in his late middle age, Thorsell remembers that a prime minister failed to notice him – a teenage usher – in the midst of his official duty to squire the head of state – and finds that oversight “disappointing.”

Beside that, Narcissus himself would appear a self-loathing nebbish, but such it seems are the wages of self-absorption among the über-cognoscenti.

Douglas Bell is the Toronto author of Run Over who starred in CBC’s The Newsroom and worked on a CPR tie gang.

I had the luxury of hanging around long after reporters went off to cover another story. I was able to cultivate relationships with staff until they developed enough trust in my story. I earned the right to film in the ward, to get to know the patients and to get the footage I wanted.

Dutifully, I asked all the patients (or their family members, if they were too sick to respond), if they were okay with my shooting footage of them. Invariably they said “yes,” but was it truly informed consent? This is Africa, and the reality is that none of them would say no to a white person. Being surrounded by white doctors and scientists, there was an assumption that I was in some way associated with the team that was there to save them.

Journalistic ethics require that we act as moral individuals and professionals. I asked myself three questions: Are these images integral to telling the story? Can I use these images in a way that is respectful to the people I’m filming? Am I doing this without harming the people I’m filming? At the time, the answer was yes to all three questions.

But deep down, I also know journalists go after stories with the goal of “seeing it all,” and this desire can influence us into making self-serving decisions. When I started making documentaries, I thought if I was able to tell an honest and balanced story, I could bring films with a clear vision and a conscience to my audience. But once I’d been in the field for a while, I realized that ethical issues would force me to consider my influence on subjects and my responsibility to those watching my films. My Ebola encounter profoundly changed the way I viewed myself as a “director,” as did another, radically different experience.

Recently, I produced and directed a documentary called Sex Slaves, about the trafficking of women from former Soviet bloc countries into the global sex slave trade. I wanted to take people inside the world of trafficking. I wanted to compel people to feel the horror so that they might be motivated to act – to donate money or to pressure their governments into taking action. The best way to get inside was to go “undercover” with hidden cameras.

The rules of engagement seemed clear. There was no way we could film these people openly – they were engaged in heinous criminal acts – but it was in the public’s interest to see how trafficking works and how these people prey on the vulnerable. Though there are many debates about covert filming, I had no qualms in this context. Other issues that weren’t so clear-cut surfaced on location, though.

The film follows the unfolding story of Viorel, a Ukrainian man whose pregnant wife was sold for $1,000 to a notorious pimp in Turkey. When I met Viorel, he had just returned from an unsuccessful mission there, posing as a trafficker to try to buy his wife back. He told me he was going back to try again. When we offered to document this second attempt to free his wife, he was openly enthusiastic. Suddenly, he had a support system.

One issue I didn’t anticipate – perhaps naively – was that our relationship with Viorel wouldn’t allow for the comfortable distance my crew usually maintains with subjects. We were no longer observers, but participants who could influence the story’s outcome. Viorel sought our advice at each stage of the search. He began to relate to us not as journalists, but as partners in a mission. Ultimately, the only way to acknowledge this behind-thescenes relationship was to film it. We ended up in the film.

Another issue came up when Viorel set up a meeting with the wife of the pimp who forced his wife into prostitution. Our plan was to follow him with hidden cameras and get the meeting on tape, and we were successful. Now we had proof that Viorel’s wife was being held, that she was forced into servicing clients and that her captors had paid off the police for information. Yet Viorel was no closer to getting his wife back.

Out of desperation, Viorel decided he wanted to use our incriminating undercover footage to threaten the pimp. This made me extremely uncomfortable. Did I have an obligation to use it to help him? Would I be responsible for putting him, his wife and, frankly, my crew in more danger? My crew and I discussed this at length and concluded that the stakes were too high – using the footage might do more harm than good for Viorel and his wife. He was quite upset, but I’m convinced we made the right decision.

Because we’d become part of the story, we felt this enormous weight of undeserved power. We also found out how dangerous that power can be. Luckily, the pimp eventually released Viorel’s wife. She believes her husband’s ability to apply pressure on the traffickers had an effect. Viorel believes he couldn’t have done it without us.

Unlike many other professionals, journalists in the field are pretty much on their own when facing ethical considerations. It’s important to ensure that our ambitions as professionals don’t conflict with our responsibilities as human beings.

Ric Esther Bienstock is an award-winning independent documentary filmmaker based in Toronto. Her most recent film, Sex Slaves, was produced for CBC and Canal D in Canada, Channel 4 in the U.K. and PBS’s Frontline Series in the U.S.

Hip hop blares in the mostly empty gym on this November Friday night. Located at Carlaw Avenue and Lake Shore Boulevard in Toronto, The Training Room is a ten-minute drive from the Riverdale home of The Toronto Star‘s Antonia Zerbisias. Dressed in a black tank top and yoga pants, she arranges and adjusts three machines for the weight-training portion of tonight’s workout. At 55, the acerbic columnist and ardent blogger says she’s “always the oldest woman in this place.”

The young, well-built man in charge of the facilities, Mike, wants to use the same leg press machine. Zerbisias agrees to share. Since I’ve promised not to interfere with her “work, workouts or sex life,” I stay out of the way. I’m wearing workout gear, but my notepad gives me away. I tell Mike I’m writing a profile of the opinionated media critic.

“The Toronto Star, eh?” he says. “You have some radicals in your editorial section.”

“What kind of radicals?” Zerbisias asks with a bemused smirk.

“You know, far-left.”

“That’s me.”

A lengthy, rapid-fire political debate begins, and I’m only able to capture a small piece of the dialogue in my notes.

“With the Star, I look at the fall of communist and socialist thought and think to myself, ‘You guys still exist?'”

“Being a liberal is not being a communist,” says Zerbisias.

Mike rails about “too much democracy” and “the declining moral fabric of modern society,” as seen on television.

Zerbisias fires back: “Those shows are on corporate stations that are all supporting conservative causes!”

When the young man returns to his administrative duties, I can’t help but laugh. “I should have brought my tape recorder,” I say.

“This is only a small part of the story,” she assures me.

I don’t argue. Telling journalists how to do their jobs is what Zerbisias gets paid to do. True to form, when I ask for additional contacts, she gives me the names and email addresses of twenty-two friends, family and co-workers. They include people who clearly aren’t fans, such as Matthew Fraser, her ideological opposite and former co-host of Inside Media, the now-defunct CBC show. “I don’t want this to be a puff piece,” she says. When I ask to tag along to any radio or TV appearances, she warns me that such events make up only one per cent of what she does. “If you want the clichéd opening of me walking into a room,” she advises, “you might not get it.” She’s very busy, and so many people want her time. “This is the story,” she says. “I hope you’re taking notes.”

As we leave the gym, the young man waves goodbye from behind the counter. “Tell some of your colleagues us conservatives aren’t all bad,” he says.

“Well,” she says on her way out the door, “then you have a serious communication problem.”

He isn’t the only one Zerbisias says that about. If journalism’s primary function is to keep a watchful eye on the powerful – politicians and the police, churches and corporations, city hall and the courts – then a media critic’s job is to observe the observers. These days the job has landed on the muscular shoulders of a woman who doesn’t care if she’s being observed, what’s being said about her or even how hard she gets hit. She may be a liberal-left ideologue, as some claim, but she provides a valuable voice. If there is a special rank for media critics in the underworld, Zerbisias would surely be crowned Hell’s Belle.

For years, many publishers and editors argued that readers didn’t care about what goes on inside newsrooms. Clichés ruled the day: journalism about journalism was “shop talk,” “inside baseball” and “navel gazing.” “Historically, news organizations have not felt it was necessary to let the public in on what they did in their newsrooms,” says Stephen J. A. Ward, associate professor of journalism ethics at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism. “Not necessarily because they had anything to hide – although there were plenty who did – but because it was assumed the public wasn’t interested in how they got the news, only that it was timely and interesting to read.”

But with declining newspaper readership and the public’s faltering faith in journalism, the media has come to understand that they are indeed newsworthy. “It is in the media’s interest to criticize themselves because it reaffirms their values and reconstructs their legitimacy within society,” says Carleton University associate professor of journalism Paul Attallah. In Canada, the concentration of media ownership makes things especially difficult. Torstar’s purchase of twenty per cent of Bell Globemedia in December 2005 illuminated Zerbisias’s warning that “the ass you kick today is the ass you kiss tomorrow.”

John Fraser learned this the hard way. In the January 2002 issue of Masthead, the former National Postmedia columnist wrote: “A hundred and fifty plus columns later, I ended the media commentary mandate myself and changed my column to one of arts commentary. I’d run out of cover. Media friends thought I had betrayed them; my then-proprietor’s spouse (Barbara Amiel) attacked me in her own column in Maclean’s, the ownership of my outlet had changed dramatically; and the general trend toward ‘media convergence’ had, in my view, made the very notion of media criticism not just foolhardy but downright suicidal.”

Even for those who can live with losing friends and alienating colleagues, writing about the media can be like taking a beanball from Roger Clemens – a lot of pain and not much gain. “Aside from the police, the most difficult subjects are journalists,” says David Hayes, a former media columnist at Toronto Life. “They’re particularly aware of what it means to have something about them published in a magazine or a newspaper because they do it all the time.”

But it’s not just their knowledge of the game that causes difficuly. Journalists, after all, are notoriously thin-skinned. “Reporters like to dish the dirt on every institution in the country, but they don’t like the dirt dished on them,” says The Globe and Mail‘s Michael Posner, who then tells a juicy anecdote – off the record. Zerbisias is even less tactful: “Sometimes I want to say to these people – especially the ones on TV – ‘Get the fuck over yourselves.’ They take themselves so freaking seriously. Not all of them, but a lot of them.”

Media critics are to newsrooms what Penn and Teller are to the world of magic. Like the Las Vegas comedy and magic duo who have built a career revealing how tricks are done, media critics lift the curtain for readers and viewers, taking them behind the scenes and guiding them through the good, bad and ugly ways journalism gets practised in this country. To put it another way, they’re rats who’ve broken the journalisticomertà.

Despite Rosie DiManno’s assertions, The Rat is not a new species. The Columbia Journalism Review (CJR) reports that American journalists like Upton Sinclair, George Seldes and Walter Lippmann were raking muck in their profession as far back as 1911. “Since its founding,” writes Jack Shafer, editor of the online magazineSlate, “the press-critic racket has been dominated by liberals and leftists whose critiques have usually owed more to their political mind-sets than to the media they consume.”

Zerbisias would have fit right in. And though she works for Canada’s largest newspaper, it’s fair to say she would agree with A.J. Liebling, considered by many to be the patron saint of American press criticism, who famously quipped: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

While that hasn’t changed, the growing resentment toward powerful institutions that sparked the rights movements of the 1960s also spread to journalism. According to the CJR, the Supreme Court’s 1964 ruling in the New York Times Co. v. Sullivan case, which put the onus on public figures to prove malice in libel cases, sparked a revolution in the American press, leading to more vigorous reporting on big institutions and more politicized commentary.

In a 2001 CJR article, Tom Goldstein notes that a host of localized journalism reviews appeared around the same time, reporting on the fourth estate itself. The movement inspired alternative papers like The Village Voice, which hired Alexander Cockburn to scrutinize mainstream journalism. In the establishment press, Timeand Newsweek experimented with media sections (which have long since vanished), reporters at The New York Times offered regular commentary (though almost never on the Times itself), and in 1974, the late David Shaw created a media beat at the Los Angeles Times. Institutions like Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR) and Accuracy in Media (AIM) offered ideologically-bent criticism from the left and right, respectively, while magazines like Quill and Nieman Reports presented material specifically intended for journalists. Over the last couple of decades, American media critics began popping up left (The Nation‘s Eric Alterman, online magazine Salon), right (The Washington Post‘s Howard Kurtz, Slate) and centre (Ken Auletta at The New Yorker, Dan Kennedy of the Boston Phoenix), paralleling the proliferation of Ivory Tower critics like Noam Chomsky, Mark Crispin Miller and Ben Bagdikian.

Canada’s history of media criticism is patchy. In 1970, the late Richard MacDonald founded Content. Canada’s first media criticism magazine fired bullets at spin-happy politicians and reported on the comings and goings of journalists for over twenty years. George Bain began covering the media for Maclean’s in 1985, attacking the press for its lack of courage and in-depth reporting, liberal bias and its unwillingness to be criticized. When Bain left just over a decade later, so did his “Media Watch” column. (Former Jerusalem Postpublisher Norman Spector now writes the Daily Press Review for the Maclean’s website.) In the late 1980s and early 1990s, CBC’s Media File (later revived as Now the Details with Mary Lou Finlay as host) ran investigative radio documentaries that examined the way stories were covered. The show had decent ratings, but it was sent to the guillotine when it came time to chop production costs. Rick Salutin wrote a media column in the Globe for eight years before moving to general op-ed. He wasn’t replaced. Ditto for Fraser at the Post. Gregory Boyd Bell, who wrote about media for Eye Weekly and The Hamilton Spectator, has moved into editorial management at the Globe.

By 2002, The Rat had become an endangered species. The sparse population of the media critic wilderness included Robert Fulford at Toronto Life, John Doyle and his TV news reviews in the Globe, Chris Cobb and Tony Atherton at the Ottawa Citizen, and Bruce Wark at The Coast in Halifax. But then something miraculous happened: Antonia Zerbisias stopped smoking marijuana.

In 1928, Petros Zerbisias climbed aboard a ship destined for Halifax. He met his wife Loula in Montreal, where they owned a restaurant called the Deli-Q and started a family. Life in the Zerbisias home was loud and lively. “In our house you had to fight to be heard,” says Zerbisias’s brother George. “And Antonia wanted to be heard so she fought pretty hard.”

In 1963, Miss Tanaka instructed her accelerated Grade 7 class at Merton Elementary School in Montreal to follow and report on a current event. Most of the class followed developments south of the border after the assassination of U.S. President John F. Kennedy, but Zerbisias was fascinated by developments in a far-off country called Vietnam. At first captivated by the image of Madame Ngo Dinh Nhu, who reminded her of Miss Tanaka, she was soon outraged as photos of Buddhist monks setting themselves on fire and news of political assassinations made their way across the Pacific. A spark was lit.

A couple of years later, at Wagar High School, Zerbisias organized a walkout in protest of a policy that forced students to stay in school during exam time even though there were no classes in session. She was suspended twice, once for smoking within sight of the school and not wearing the regulation sash with her uniform, and another time for “rude, obstreperous and bold” behaviour.

In the fall of 1968, Petros died suddenly of a heart attack. Depressed and caught up in the fervent political atmosphere of the time, Zerbisias lost focus on her studies. She dropped out of Concordia University (then called Sir George Williams University) midway through her second year, but after three months at Ogilvy’s department store she went back to school, where she earned a B.A. in applied social sciences, though she suggests her true major was “sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll and protest marches.”

Her journalism career began at Montreal’s Sunday Express, where she worked for just under a year, followed by a gig as a researcher for the Larry Solway Show in Toronto. In September 1975, she returned to Montreal, where her sister Denny was handling the divorce case for Mark Blandford, executive producer for the CBC’s newly created documentary unit. Blandford granted Zerbisias a half-hour job interview that turned into a four-hour conversation. Though Zerbisias was unqualified for the position she applied for, Blandford created one. Her first ninety-day contract read: “Analyst: Analyzes Incoming and Outgoing Mail.” “The CBC was so bureaucratic back then,” she says. Zerbisias eventually became a current affairs reporter for The City at Six, and in 1978, left her husband, moving in with and marrying Blandford.

Zerbisias returned to Concordia for an M.B.A in 1980. The lucrative job offers from banks came pouring in, but they failed to seduce her. During her M.B.A. studies, Zerbisias began writing freelance for the American entertainment trade journal Variety. One of her first assignments was the Montreal World Film Festival, run by Serge Losique. When Zerbisias trashed the event’s distribution and deal-making aspects, Losique sent a letter to head offices in New York threatening to sue. Zerbisias was not intimidated and refused to back down. Losique never followed through, and Zerbisias’s toughness left a lasting impression on her editor, Sid Adilman.

In 1985, CBC’s Venture hired Zerbisias as a business reporter, but she was fired after eleven months of clashes with the executive producer. She didn’t return to journalism full-time until 1989, when Adilman, by then the Star‘s entertainment editor, called to tell her there was a job opening for a TV writer. Initially she said she wasn’t interested, but she changed her mind when she realized her marriage was deteriorating. She worked several beats over the next few years, including stints as a TV critic and Montreal correspondent and columnist. As a Star media reporter, Zerbisias wrote a biting critique of a Maclean’s profile on fiddler Ashley MacIsaac. The piece was quintessential Zerbisias: a snarky, breezy read, with humour masking the underlying rage. “Frankly, I couldn’t care less if Ashley MacIsaac won a gold medal for water sports,” she wrote. “He could step-dance his way through the leather bars of Church St., play with more than his violin, hitch up his tartan and moon all the nobs at the Hummingbird Centre inaugural tonight and it would not make a single note of his ‘Sleepy Maggie’ any less sweet.” The piece, along with two others including a critique of aSaturday Night profile on Craig Kielburger impressed judges for the National Newspaper Awards. They handed Zerbisias the 1996 NNA for critical writing, saying Zerbisias “is not one to mince with words as she focuses on the subject matter at hand. She proceeds to give us her insights, analysis and critique not only with rhetorical, stylistic and intellectual rigor, but with gusto and passion, a rare commodity in today’s bland politically correct journalism.” Not everyone was impressed. During her acceptance speech, Zerbisias jokingly thanked John Honderich and managing editor Lou Clancy “for not firing me.” Later in the night, Clancy approached Zerbisias. “We just haven’t fired you yet.”

Zerbisias returned to CBC in 2000 to host Inside Media. Co-host Matthew Fraser says the prospect of working for the public broadcaster made her competitive. “Antonia was very jealous of airtime,” he says. “She saw it as her big career chance to become a CBC personality, and she wasn’t going to let me bugger it up for her. Whenever I was on a roll and doing a lot of talking, she would pinch my thigh or kick me on the shin under the table to tell me to shut up and let her talk.”

Critics say Zerbisias’s relationship with CBC is too cozy. “She likes the CBC much more than she ought to,” says Adilman. “She’s not able to pull herself back.”

I first encountered Zerbisias in the Fall of 2004 at Cabeer Night, the annual booze-and-schmooze for Ryerson journalism students and pros at the Imperial Pub in downtown Toronto. After much conversation and even more beer, Zerbisias, dressed in a black long sleeve shirt and leather pants, recounted the story of becoming the Star‘s media critic.

In the summer of 2002, while still working as a TV critic, she decided to quit smoking cigarettes. But this posed a problem: every time she smoked a joint, her cigarette cravings became impossible to ignore. So she quit smoking pot. This solution created a bigger problem: the combination of sobriety and hours of sitcoms was unbearable. She had to get out. So she approached entertainment editor John Ferri to work out a proposal for a media column that would focus on journalism.

In August 2002, Zerbisias went out for dinner with her successor, Vinay Menon, in Toronto’s Greektown to discuss how the TV beat would change his life. “After a half-litre of white wine, Antonia sat upright and promptly reframed the discussion,” Menon says. “It wasn’t that my life would change, it was that I would cease to have one.” The TV critic beat had consumed five years of her life, and Zerbisias was exhausted. Although the media file is no less consuming (midway through our first interview, Zerbisias suddenly stopped and said, “I’m sitting here without the TV on. That’s bad. That’s not like me at all”), it comes with a whole new set of hurdles.

It is now March 2003. America has just launched a new war against another small, far-off country, and Zerbisias is once again outraged. On March 20, she writes the following in her weekly media column: “Remember how, when you were a kid, the toy you saw on TV never turned out to be as good as you had expected? It was then that you first learned a painful lesson about truth in advertising. Thanks to a consumer advocacy movement in the 1970s, one supported by ‘action hotlines’ and investigative reporters, most advertisers have since cleaned up their acts. But not all. Now there’s one marketing team that appears to have no qualms about lying, no hesitation about making false claims, no ethics at all when it comes to moving product: George W. Bush’s White House. So where are the media watchdogs now?”

Her critics pounce on this decidedly left-wing point of view. “Her biggest weakness is her ‘good and evil’ vision of the world,” says Fraser. “She sees no greys, no nuances. She sees good guys (left-wing people like herself, her pals at the CBC) and bad guys (neo-conservatives and people who like George Bush).” Robert Fulford described Zerbisias’s work as “pure ideology, simple-minded and altogether appropriate to the Star‘s editorial environment” in his Toronto Life media column. “There’s a point of view and then there’s a robot,” he says, “If she writes about George Bush, is she going to surprise anyone?”

Zerbisias doesn’t apologize for the political bent of her media criticism. She would often tell Fraser that the Atkinson Principles (the Star‘s liberal editorial policy written by late publisher Joseph E. Atkinson) were “tattooed on my ass.” In an interview with the Online Journalism Review she said, “Critiquing the U.S. media is like shooting fish in a barrel. Whenever I need a day off, I set my sights south of the 49th parallel and knock off a column quickly.” Meanwhile, she dismisses any suggestion she’s too sympathetic to CBC. “What I’m a big defender of is not so much the CBC – because God knows the CBC is flawed – it’s public broadcasting,” she says. “It infuriates me to no end when the Andrew Coynes of the world get a platform to say you don’t need public broadcasting.” And she responds to Fulford by attacking his increasing kneejerk conservatism. “I have always been admiring of his prose,” she says, “but in recent years I have found that he has become what he used to rail against when he was younger.”

This ideological ping-pong match is one of the great dangers Canadian media criticism faces. What readers need is wellresearched, thoughtful media criticism that deconstructs the world of journalism for readers, not the same tired arguments about liberal bias or vast conservative conspiracies. Zerbisias’s best work – thoughtful, provocative and uncompromising – proves she can do the job as well as anyone, but her inability to avoid a fight with the right often provides ammunition for those who say she’s nothing more than a predictable liberal apologist. “There’s no one who knows the facts on the ground better than her,” says Boyd Bell, Toronto editor of the Globe. “I wish that her work reflected more of the breadth of her actual knowledge.”

Over the years, Zerbisias has created an army of enemies outside the small realm of media workers. When her brother George moved to Toronto, he quickly pulled his name from the phonebook, fed up with callers demanding to speak to his “crazy bitch wife.” Zerbisias is a favourite target of conservative bloggers, who’ve called her everything from “fat Tony” to an “anti-Israel Hizb’Allah-supporting harpy.” During her coverage of the war in Iraq, Zerbisias received hundreds of emails of both support and contempt. She responded to all of them.

Of all the qualities that make Zerbisias a good media critic – intelligence, courage, feistiness – there is none more important than her masochistic spirit. “Nobody would hire me now,” she says. “They would all just be so happy to see me suffer and die. They don’t see it is as me doing a job. They don’t see it as a necessary evil. They take it personally.” Her language here is painted with a coat of hyperbolic paranoia. After all, Boyd Bell regularly criticized the Star and the Globe in his media columnist days, and he has since found employment with both companies. But there’s no denying the fact that when it comes to journalism, the predator can’t stand being made the prey. You may disagree with Zerbisias’s politics, but it’s hard to argue with the depth and breadth of her sourcing and reporting. The next time she comes after you, remember: it’s not personal. She’s just doing her job.

Outside, on this chilly November evening, the temperature is steadily dropping, but it’s all right. After a quick walk from the cab, Zerbisias will be cozy inside the Arcadian Court on Bay Street, where she’s about to play media host at the TD Bank Financial Group table for the Canadian Journalists for Free Expression 2005 International Press Freedom Awards dinner. Her formal attire includes a dark, flowing designer knit dress with black boots, “earrings left over from the ’80s which are back in style” and rectangular, red-rimmed reading glasses.

As we enter the bar area filled with journalists downing predinner drinks, Zerbisias greets CTV News president Robert Hurst with a kiss on each cheek. When I tell Hurst my reason for accompanying the media critic this evening, he puts a thumb and pinky finger to his ear and mouth and says, “Call me.”

At the bar, Zerbisias orders a light beer. “I’m avoiding Burman tonight,” she says, referring to CBC news honcho Tony Burman. She recently handed him a battering on her blog and he rapidly swung back, labelling the post “stupid and uninformed.”

Soon enough, it becomes clear that every journalist in the room has felt the impact of Hell’s Belle. Well, almost every journalist. As the mob moves to the dining area, an elegantly dressed Anna Maria Tremonti approaches.

“The champion of the CBC!” Tremonti exclaims. “How are you, darling?”

“I’m okay, thank you,” Zerbisias says mid-embrace. “How are you, darling?”

“I’m well.”

She’s feeling even better after dinner. As The New Yorker‘s Seymour Hersh takes the podium, his red tie slightly out of place, glasses balancing precariously on the tip of his nose, Zerbisias leans on the back of her chair, ready to soak in the eminent investigative reporter’s words.

Hersh lays into the George W. Bush administration, and she nods in agreement. Shifting gears, he then begins a short, brutal assault on American media. “The press failed the U.S. in preventing the war in Iraq,” he says.

Zerbisias smiles.

Inside The Gazette newsroom in the heart of downtown Montreal sits a three-drawer file cabinet filled with colour: folders in bright shades of red, yellow and blue, each one filled with stories, contacts and studies on Montreal’s cultural communities. The cabinet’s owner, Jeff Heinrich, covers Montreal’s minority communities for the Gazette, although the words “diversities reporter” do not appear under his byline. Heinrich says he created the diversity beat for himself three years ago because of the more than eighty ethnic and linguistic groups that shape his city and form a demographic reality that neither he – nor the Gazette – can afford to ignore.

For thirty years, the Gazette has been shedding its “Anglo paper” image in favour of a more broad-based approach that offers the promise of survival in the face of an ever-shrinking core readership of anglophones.The Gazette‘s most obvious nonanglophone target, and the single largest group of potential readers, has always been English-speaking francophones who make up just over half of Montreal’s population. But francophones have consistently formed about fifteen to twenty per cent of the Gazette‘s readership, and today that number sits at around seventeen per cent. With three dailies in their own language, it’s unlikely francophones will ever make up a big portion of the Gazette‘s readership. Survival, then, depends on Montreal’s allophones – people who don’t speak either French or English as a first language. According to a 2001 City of Montreal census, allophones formed twenty-nine per cent of the city’s population, a proportion that seems certain to continue growing given that more than three-quarters of immigrants to Quebec settle in Montreal. But since 1977, Bill 101 has driven all children of Quebec immigrants into the French school system and made French the prerequisite language of government and business. If allophones can read the news in a language their children are being educated in and in which they operate every day, and if these disparate ethnic and linguistic groups do not see themselves reflected frequently and proportionately in theGazette, chances are they will never pick it up in large numbers.

Still, editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips says he doesn’t scrutinize demographics. He believes many of the methods used to cover diverse communities are second nature for Gazette staff. Instead, he’s focused on putting out the best paper possible, hoping to attract readers by virtue of good journalism. And while Phillips can hardly be criticized for focusing on excellence, the question remains: Will simply putting out a good paper draw readers to the Gazette? More to the point, will it attract the allophone readers the Gazette needs to survive?

On the morning of February 21, 2004, a West Indian black man named Rohan Wilson died in the emergency room of the Montreal General Hospital after an encounter with Montreal police. The story made the news even though the cops refused to comment on the cause of Wilson’s death. A week later, Gazette photographer Phil Carpenter, also of West Indian background, went for food as he often does at Montreal Caribbean restaurant on the corner of de Maisonneuve Boulevard West and Vendôme Avenue. While eating, he overheard another customer talking about Wilson’s death. Carpenter joined in and discovered the customer had been friends with Wilson and his wife, Lecita Audain. Carpenter got Audain’s phone number and called her that night. He was the first journalist in the week since Wilson’s death to contact the household. On March 2, 2004, the Gazette printed an exclusive story about Audain’s struggle to get police to disclose the cause of her husband’s death, a story the paper wouldn’t have broken without Carpenter’s serendipitous community connection – a connection unlikely to have been as easily made by a white anglophone reporter.

Carpenter is a member of a minority group in Montreal, but he’s even more of a minority in the Gazettenewsroom. Like most major newsrooms today, the Gazette employs mainly white, middle-class anglophone reporters and editors. “We’re not a bad reflection of our readership,” says Phillips, while admitting, “We’re not a great reflection of our community.”

Gazette management has expressed a desire to diversify the newsroom, and even added three new managers this year – all women, two from minority backgrounds – but it admits that given the limited number of openings and the lack of resources to create new positions, this process will be slow. What’s more, the already limited pool of potential employees with diverse backgrounds is even smaller for the Gazette because all of its staff must speak both English and French. Publisher Alan Allnutt says that while the Gazette seeks out people from different backgrounds, it hires the best candidates for positions and does not use quotas. Instead, he prefers hiring a range of staff and covering diversity “organically” rather than mandating the coverage of different communities. Such “organic” growth takes time, however; although today the ratio of men to women at the Gazette borders on equal, it took over two decades to strike that gender balance.

Still, while one of the advantages of having reporters from diverse backgrounds is their ability to push stories out of their communities and into the news, that doesn’t mean non-minorities can’t reach out as well. Sue Montgomery, a white reporter and columnist for the Gazette who focuses on immigrant and refugee issues, says reporters who come from outside certain cultural communities can still cover those communities if they are diplomatic and take the time to appear outside their roles as journalists. Montgomery spends free time with immigrant community members, building her reputation among them as a trustworthy journalist. Leading up to the municipal elections in the fall of 2005, for example, when the Gazette profiled every Montreal borough, Montgomery entered the municipality of Outremont and discovered a culture clash between the Jewish and francophone communities living there. Knowing it would be hard to win access to the Hasidic community but eager to pursue the story, Montgomery visited one of Outremont’s many synagogues, only to be turned away by the Orthodox men there who explained that they could not be interviewed on their holiday, Simchat Torah. Montgomery went next door to a deli and struck up a conversation with the deli’s Jewish owner who eventually brought her back to the synagogue to drink Scotch and hang out with the men outside. Montgomery tried once more to question the men for her story, and while again they refused to answer on account of their holiday, they offered her an interview for the next day.

Montgomery and Heinrich, like many Gazette reporters, say they reach out to minority communities because they choose to, not because of specific targets from management, of which there are currently none. “There’s nothing coming from up high like, ‘Here is your quota this week’ and ‘Why are all your sources white?'” says Heinrich.

“Allophones are an extremely important and valued part of our readership, and we can always do more,” says Phillips. But his top priority isn’t diversity, it’s focusing on what he likes to call “substantive journalism,” which he describes as work that increases people’s understanding of and involvement in public issues. To single out a couple of examples, he points to the Gazette‘s in-depth series in spring 2005 on Montreal as the capital of private health care as well as a three-part series on contract awarding at City Hall last October. “We want to do a good job in serving the community,” he says, “in terms of bringing important public things to light.”

Covering – and uncovering – Montreal are not new goals for the Gazette. As one of the world’s oldest newspapers, the Gazette has been a Montreal chronicle for well over two centuries. Founded in 1778 by French printer Fleury Mesplet, the Gazette began as a French-language paper under the name La Gazette du Commerce et Litteraire, although it was revived in 1785 in both English and French. In its early years, theGazette changed names and proprietors like characters in moveable type, going from a weekly to a twice-weekly publication and from bilingual to entirely English under the name The Montreal Gazette in 1822.

From before the creation of Canada until well into the 20th century, the Gazette was stalwart in its support of Confederation and of Montreal’s English community. Even the vast changes that took place during the Quiet Revolution in the early 1960s were not enough to cause the Gazette to re-examine what it stood for. In 1976, though, the Parti Québécois gained control of the provincial government, sparking the beginning of an anglophone exodus. The bleeding of potential readers continued over the next two decades. Even with the death of its only English competition, The Montreal Star, in 1979, the Gazette still experienced a slow but steady decline in circulation throughout this period. As its core readership of anglophones withered, theGazette‘s management realized that a failure to soften its stance and cover the plethora of news in Montreal’s other communities would be akin to suicide.

“We wanted to be the best newspaper on the island of Montreal,” says managing editor Raymond Brassard, “and that means reaching out to everybody.” The Gazette conducted research and held meetings with writers on the importance of diversifying sources and putting different perspectives into the paper, and these efforts produced results – the Gazette‘s diversity coverage began to outshine that of most metropolitan newspapers. John Miller, then-chair of the diversity committee of the Canadian Daily Newspaper Association (now the Canadian Newspaper Association), noted that success when he conducted a content analysis of Canadian newspapers in 1993. Of the six Canadian newspapers Miller examined in his study, the Gazette was the only one to have a higher percentage of minority representation in news stories and photographs than the percentage of minorities in the local population.

Under Peter Stockland, who took over as editor-in-chief in 2001, the Gazette took more bold steps including printing a full-page press roundup every Sunday – in French. But while such gestures showed the Gazettewas open to all Montrealers, its slogan in 2002 – “The English Language. Daily.” – did not. The Gazette needed to re-brand itself, and in February 2002, CanWest Global Communications Corp. hired well-known Montrealer Larry Smith as publisher to do the job.

Claiming they’d been covering Montreal’s diverse communities for years, many reporters saw the attempt to reach out to Montreal’s various communities under Smith as redundant. “It was, in my view, a distortion of what we were and had been for a long time,” says columnist and university life reporter Peggy Curran. Lucinda Chodan, now editor-in-chief of the Victoria Times- Colonist and, in 2002, the Gazette‘s readership development editor, defends the efforts, however, calling them “groundbreaking” and “innovative.”

The Gazette relaunched in September 2002 with a fresh look, a new slogan and content that responded to the demands of potential readers. Its outmoded slogan was replaced with the more inclusive “The Gazette IS Montreal,” a phrase featured in different languages around the city and tacked onto bulletin boards on every floor of its St. Antoine Street offices. This “is not just a moral and philosophical stance,” wrote Chodan in a column just prior to the relaunch date. “In order for us to continue to thrive economically, we have to make sure we appeal not only to our traditional loyal – and valued – anglophone readers, but to anyone of any linguistic background who wants to read a lively, reliable, accurate and fair account of what’s happening every day in the city we share.” Allophones weren’t the only target; francophones, women aged 35 to 54 and youth aged 18 to 34 also warranted special attention. The Gazette developed ten to twelve content initiatives for each group, all designed to address feedback received in extensive marketing research.

Responding to feedback that allophones wanted coverage of their communities yearround, not just around festivals or holidays, the Gazette introduced a World Sports page in the Monday Sports section that covered international sports, with an emphasis on soccer. During the 2002 World Cup, the paper hired writers from various communities to report on the tournament in their respective languages, running copy in languages such as Chinese, Greek and Italian. It also added a rotating column of community news in the Sunday Insight section that corresponded to some of Montreal’s largest allophone communities – Spanish, Chinese, Greek and Italian. Like the World Cup coverage, the columns were written by representatives of those communities in their respective languages. The Gazette also increased the number of cultural community listings in its daily Arts & Life section and began actively soliciting listings from cultural communities for the daily What’s On page. While some of the initiatives didn’t last, overall the changes gave potential allophone readers a reason to take another look at the Gazette.

When Phillips took the helm in November 2004, the Gazette was in the best position it had been in for at least a decade. Circulation numbers even rose just slightly in the fall of 2005, something Phillips takes care not to overstate. But the efforts that in the 1990s moved the Gazette to the head of the class in diversity coverage have lately not been keeping pace with Montreal’s burgeoning allophone population. The proportion of today’s coverage of minority communities appears to be nowhere near their percentage in the population. While stories and photos of minorities do pop up, the coverage still leaves the sense that the communities are being covered from the outside in, and not the other way around. Far from leading the way, the Gazette has slipped back to haphazard diversity coverage. Many of the diverse faces appear incidentally, but most of those who do appear because of deliberate efforts to include them do not represent the everyday realities of their communities. Rather, too often, they’re either the underclass or the overachievers.

Last November, an article in the Gazette about Shimon Peres’s decision to join Ariel Sharon’s newly founded party, Kadima, was paired with a disturbing photo of a young boy caught between his father and a solider, his small body just inches from the soldier’s rifle. While Leah Berger, coordinator of government and community affairs for B’nai Brith in Quebec, generally approves of the Gazette‘s coverage of the Jewish community and issues surrounding Israel, she says it frustrates her when the Gazette pairs articles about Israel with unrelated and sensational photos. Yet while the lines of communication are open between the Gazette and Montreal’s minority communities, allowing people like Berger to express their concerns, minority voices within the paper remain faint. The Gazette‘s op-ed pages appear virtually minority-free, although they provide the perfect opportunity to include different voices and perspectives. Salam Elmenyawi, chair of the Muslim Council of Montreal, for one, says it’s impossible to challenge misconceptions about his community when he is allowed to respond in the op-ed section only once or twice a year. “Say what you want,” he says, “but give me the right to respond with equal space.”

So what should the Gazette be doing? Diverse staffs are a long-term solution, but only a part of the equation. While proportional representation in the newsroom is an ideal, Aly Colón, former director of diversity at the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, says editors and reporters who want to cover diversity would benefit from conducting research and consulting extensively to develop a clear picture of the city they want to cover. Colón, who worked as a reporter and diversity coach at The Seattle Times, says it’s also of value to have an editor or reporter act as a resource on diversity. Having sought out that knowledge on behalf of theTimes, Colón took on the role of in-house consultant, holding sessions on reaching out to communities and offering suggestions and ideas – rather than orders – on how to do that. It was also his responsibility to monitor the paper’s coverage, “always thinking about areas that are not being covered, trying to say who’s missing from a story – being a sentinel of sorts.” He notes that there is no set job for a diversity monitor, though. “Every newspaper needs to find its own path that works best for it.”

Perhaps this is a job for the Gazette‘s own Heinrich, with his cabinet full of diversity resources and ongoing experience in the field. No thanks, he says. He’s fine with being the Gazette‘s go-to person for community phone numbers and census data, but he rejects the diversity coach label, saying he wouldn’t want to “formalize something that happens naturally.”

But that’s exactly the problem – whether or not it happens naturally. Poynter’s visual journalism group leader Kenny Irby says that while newspapers can never mirror the always-changing communities in their cities, “They have an opportunity to diversify and enrich the content of their publications.” In order to do that, he says, “Among the staff, there must be a commitment to include new voices, topics and faces.” And that won’t happen without commitment from the top. “If the management is not making it a priority and insisting that it be done,” continues Irby’s Poynter colleague Colón, “no single reporter is going to make it happen for the paper.”

Phillips stresses that the lack of specific, targeted plan is not because the Gazette takes Montreal’s allophones for granted, but rather, it is the result of his desire to fulfill one or a few goals at a time. “If you have too many priorities all over the place, your risk is you don’t get anything done.” He also disagrees that allophones are the only way to expand the Gazette‘s readership, pointing to the fact that there are still many anglophones in Montreal who are either not reading the Gazette at all or not reading it as frequently as he’d like. Besides, he says, he doesn’t look at the market and see just three silos. “This whole business about anglophone, allophone and francophone is just one way of looking at your audience. I mean, you can look at it by age as well or by gender or communities of interest. We don’t just slice it up by language.”

Phillips hopes his focus on journalistic quality will win out. “People will come after me and they’ll do their best and they’ll be doing it under different circumstances. I hope they don’t look back and say, ‘Those guys in 2006, what the heck were they doing?'” But the number of people who come after Phillips will depend on whether excellence is enough – and whether the Gazette can ever be truly excellent unless it reflects Montreal’s diversity as precisely as possible. The paper’s slogan – “The Gazette IS Montreal” – shows it knows what it can be. What remains to be seen is whether allophones – and the Gazette‘s management and staff – believe the slogan’s promise.

On April 5, 2001, a brown paper envelope arrived anonymously at the Ottawa offices of the National Post. It was addressed to Andrew McIntosh, an investigative reporter who had been looking into then-Prime Minister Jean Chrétien’s business dealings in his Quebec riding, which was known at the time as Saint-Maurice. McIntosh was particularly interested in the prime minister’s involvement in the sale of the Grand-Mère Inn, and the mysterious document seemed to support his suspicions. It was a copy of what purported to be a $615,000 loan authorization from the Business Development Bank of Canada that showed the inn owed $23,040 to JAC Consultants, a Chrétien family holding company. McIntosh realized that if these documents were real and not forged, as Chrétien, his lawyers and the BDC later claimed, they could place the prime minister in a conflict of interest and trigger demands for a wider investigation.

The next week, McIntosh was notified by a source – one to whom he had already pledged confidentiality while obtaining other information – that the document had come from him or her. The source asked McIntosh to destroy the document so that his or her identity would not be revealed through fingerprinting or DNA analysis. McIntosh refused and moved the document to a safe place. On July 4, 2002, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police obtained an unprecedented search warrant and assistance order that would help them obtain the document. Believing its Charter rights were being violated, the Post applied for an order to quash the warrant and assistance order.

Two years later, in November 2004, Ken Peters, a reporter with The Hamilton Spectator, found himself in court. “I’m sorry, your honour. With all due respect, I can’t do that,” he said in a loud, unwavering voice when Ontario Supreme Court Judge David Crane ordered him to divulge the name of a third person who was in the room when he was handed documents alleging abuse and neglect in a Hamilton nursing home. Peters, who knew that revealing the name of the other person in the room would ultimately lead to the disclosure of his source, refused. Crane cited him with contempt of court, and Peters was left to wait for his next court date to find out his penalty.

Although both cases involved secret documents and confidential sources, the outcomes – both of which are being appealed – were starkly different. McIntosh and the Post were ultimately able to keep their source from being revealed, while Peters was found guilty of contempt. Crane ordered the Spectator to pay a fine of $31,600 – the largest penalty ever levied in a contempt case against a newspaper in Canada.

In McIntosh’s case, Justice Mary Lou Benotto chose to quash the warrant and assistance order against McIntosh and the Post specifically because they violated section 2(b) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms by eroding the ability of the press to inform the public. She also found that protecting the confidential source was vital to the public’s interest, and that the fingerprint analysis of documents would do little to advance the case.

In Peters’s case, Justice Crane moved the proceedings from criminal to civil court, likely to keep Peters from having a criminal record. But Crane chose to proceed with the $31,600 fine even though the identity of Peters’s confidential source, former city councillor Henry Merling, was ultimately revealed in court by another city councillor. In his ruling, Crane attacked the business of journalism, describing newsroom culture as “oppressive” because it forced reporters to make promises they could not keep. He also referred to Peters as a “pawn in a much larger game” – something Peters and Spectator editor-in-chief Dana Robbins believe demonstrated an appalling lack of knowledge of how newsrooms actually work.

To some people, especially those unacquainted with the nuances of law, the conflicting outcomes in these cases could be construed as perplexing. One judge recognized the importance of journalist? source confidentiality, while the other chastised journalists for making promises of confidentiality they could not keep. But it’s important to realize the details of the cases are not the same. Dean Jobb, an assistant professor of journalism who teaches media law at the University of King’s College in Halifax says the search for the confidential source in McIntosh’s case was a fishing expedition because searching for fingerprints on the document would likely have proven unsuccessful. On the other hand, he says, revealing the source in the Peters case was key to advancing a $15-million trial suit against the City of Hamilton. Although the courts usually bend over backwards to avoid rulings similar to Peters’s, Jobb says information in this case was crucial to the trial and there wasn’t much else the judge could do. “What journalists should take from that is,” says Jobb, “if it’s not crucial to the case, if it isn’t relevant, you’re not going to have to give it up.”

So what can reporters conclude? Despite the differences in the cases, the opposing and quite passionate statements made by the judges suggest that there are no precise rules in law surrounding the protection of sources – and there probably never will be. “Everyone hailed the McIntosh decision as a precedent for protection of sources,” says Mark Bantey, a Montreal media lawyer with Gowling, Lafleur and Henderson. “But if you read it carefully, the judge says very explicitly that every case has to be decided on a case-by-case basis, and the public’s right to know has to be balanced with other considerations before you grant privilege to a reporter. In fact, I don’t think it is a huge precedent. It merely reiterates the rules that already exist.”

Historically, English common law cited only relationships between lawyers and their clients, police and informers, and spouses as privileged. A privileged relationship means that communication is exempt from the powers of a court to demand it be heard. In current Canadian law, communication between doctors and patients, priests and confessors, and journalists and sources isn’t privileged, and whether a court will force them to reveal evidence is decided on a case-by-case basis, with much of the outcome resting on the socalled Wigmore criteria.

In 1905, John Henry Wigmore, dean of law at Northwestern University in Chicago, concluded that if the following four stipulations are met, the judge may rule that the communication is privileged: one, the communication originated in confidence; two, confidentiality is essential to the maintenance of the relationship between the parties; three, the community sees the relationship as important; and four, disclosure of the communication would do more harm than good.

The Charter, which came into force in 1982, combined with the Wigmore criteria, has improved how source confidentiality is dealt with in court. That’s because section 2(b) of the Charter gives Canadians the right to freedom of thought, belief, opinion and expression, including freedom of the press. These rights are upheld in most cases, except where they can be justifiably limited. So, only when the court determines that the importance of a trial trumps the importance of keeping a source confidential must a journalist either give up the source or face a fine and possibly a prison sentence. No Canadian journalist has ever gone to jail for protecting a source, but in the Peters case, the Spectator was levied a stiff penalty.

A recent ruling dealing with confidential sources shows how the Wigmore criteria and the Charter work together. During the pre-trial discovery phase on October 18, 2005, Alberta Court of Queen’s Bench Justice Vital Ouelette denied an application by former Edmonton police chief Bob Wasylyshen to force CBC to turn over 627 pages of confidential documents. Justice Ouelette was hearing a defamation suit over a segment of a Disclosure television program alleging that Wasylyshen had engaged in sexual relations and unlawful conduct with prostitutes. Ouelette used the Charter and the Wigmore criteria to decide that in this instance, “The interests served by protecting the communication outweigh its immediate disclosure.” While this seems like a victory for Canadian journalism, the trial judge may still order the documents to be released once the actual trial begins.

For many journalists, a case-by-case analysis under the Wigmore criteria and the Charter isn’t good enough. “There should be a more absolute rule protecting sources,” says Bantey, “because in the long run, it would be beneficial to the public to give reporters some sort of privilege. The public would end up getting more information.” The most obvious option is for Canada to adopt a press shield law, similar to ones used in thirty-one American states and the District of Columbia. While these laws are supposed to protect confidential sources and information from being revealed in court, they’re no panacea. Some provide absolute privilege, but others are subject to a judge’s discretion. Also, there is no federal shield law in the U.S., which means that journalists are protected only in state courts and not in federal courts. So, while having shield laws in Canada could create more consistency in the courts, they would probably not be absolute, which would still make a judge’s discretion the ultimate deciding factor.

Spectator editor-in-chief Robbins would like to see a clearer approach taken on the question of protecting sources. He says in the absence of a shield law, the federal government could spell out a specific process that the courts must follow when subpoenaing reporters – similar to the route already taken with publication bans, which includes notifying the media and allowing their lawyers to object to a ban. Although it’s not a perfect solution, Robbins says creating a similar process for subpoenaing reporters would help establish consistency and transparency.

Any way you look at it, journalists are at risk when they promise confidentiality to a source. For instance, last year, New York Times reporter Judith Miller was sentenced to eighteen months in jail after she refused to divulge the identity of a source – I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, U.S. Vice-President Dick Cheney’s chief of staff and assistant to the vice-president for national security affairs – who leaked the name of a CIA operative. Miller decided to talk after serving eightyfive days of her sentence, even though she was given leave by her source right from the beginning. Even so, there have been numerous instances where it has been beneficial for journalists to use confidential sources. The most famous case is the Watergate scandal, of course.Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein wrote articles from 1972 to 1976 based on information they received from an off-the-record source nicknamed Deep Throat (who we learned just last year was W. Mark Felt, the FBI’s second-highest ranking official). Under deep cover, Felt confirmed facts and added context to the duo’s investigation, which eventually led to the impeachment and resignation of President Richard M. Nixon in 1974.

Like Deep Throat, many other confidential sources have been paramount in revealing societal wrongdoings. Few would dispute the importance of keeping their identities hidden. The exposure of Canada’s 1985 tainted tuna scandal – when Fisheries Minister John Fraser approved the sale of one million cans of rancid StarKist tuna – relied on confidential sources. So did the “Dirty Dining” series published by The Toronto Star in 2000, which improved health standards in Toronto restaurants. But when journalists are forced to reveal their sources in court, it puts a chilling effect on the future of investigative journalism. “If sources don’t feel comfortable to come forward to expose some kind of wrongdoing,” said Anne Kothawala, president of the Canadian Newspaper Association, in a statement to media organizations the day after Peters was cited for contempt, “then those stories that serve the public interest – where we find out about wrongdoing or corruption or any of those types of issues – aren’t going to come out because people are not going to feel protected in coming forward to a journalist.”

Without the unequivocal protection of the law, journalists have to take measures to protect themselves. Before proceeding, the first thing reporters should do is make the terms of the agreement absolutely clear. Jennifer Fowler, national vice-president of the Canadian Association of Journalists, suggests asking sources a number of questions: Can I tell my colleague that I talked to you? Can I tell my editor that I talked to you? Can I use the information that you’re giving me in my story? Can I use the information you’re giving me when I talk to other people?

Since there are no formal definitions for terms like “off the record,” “not for attribution” and “on background,” it’s important to clarify. The CAJ defines them on their website. Not for attribution: “We may quote statements directly, but the source may not be named, although a general description of his or her position may be given (‘a government official,’ or ‘a party insider’). In TV and radio, the identity may be shielded by changing the voice or appearance.” On background: “We may use the thrust of statements and generally describe the source, but we may not use direct quotes.” Off the record: “We may not report the information, which can be used solely to help our own understanding or perspective. There is not much point in knowing something if it can’t be reported, so this undertaking should be used sparingly, if at all.”

Journalists should also make sure their news organizations are willing to pay the court costs. Warren Barton, a retired editor who worked for The Globe and Mail and the Spectator, advises freelancers to never go off the record because if the story leads to a court action, they’re on their own without a lawyer from a powerful organization to help them. Even when journalists are represented by media lawyers, it’s important to take precautions. Journalists must keep their notes on hand in case of a defamation case, but they should make sure that nothing in their notes would give up a source. Bert Bruser, the Star‘s libel lawyer, doesn’t understand why journalists include the name of confidential sources in their notes in the first place, or why they keep secret documents around that would reveal the source. “If the police come with a search warrant to get your notes,” he says, “and your notes contain the name of the confidential source, then you’ve got a problem because you made a promise that you can’t keep.”

Before journalists and editors at the Star use a confidential source, they make sure they know why the source doesn’t want to be identified, if the source is in a position to know the facts and if the source has vested interests or biases. “It’s not to say you don’t use information because someone might have an axe to grind,” says Robert Cribb, a Star investigative reporter. “People with axes to grind still have extremely valuable information that the public would want to know, but it’s very important to understand what the biases are so you know how to treat the information.” Cribb’s experience using confidential sources has taught him that there’s a possibility confidential sources may lie, so he says the same thing to every source: “If you lie to me – and I’ll probably find out because I’ll be talking to a lot of people – the deal is off.” It’s his only caveat to the deal.

But journalists shouldn’t just take precautions that prevent them from being duped or that decrease the chance they’ll have to testify in court. They should also try to maintain credibility for their news organization. In their book, The Elements of Journalism, Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel stress the importance of transparency. That means if you’re not going to name a source, you should tell your reader why. “It certainly should be as explicit as possible who the source is,” says Jobb. “Not by name, but by what makes them credible.”

While the McIntosh ruling seemed like a great victory for the future of Canadian journalism, and the Peters ruling seemed like a grand defeat, neither case will have an overwhelming effect on how confidential sources are treated in court. They will continue to be ruled on a case-by-case basis. Confidential sources need to be protected, but since Canadian law won’t be changing anytime soon, reporters need to be honest with them. Jobb says, “Journalists should just level with their source and say, ‘I will do everything I can, but you have to recognize that if this ever went to court, and if I ever were compelled to give this information, I have no legal right to deny that.’ And I’ve done that with sources, and you know what they say? ‘Thanks. Sure.’ And they’ll tell me.” Sometimes the simplest solutions are the best ones.

An empty studio desk at the Weather Network headquarters in Oakville, Ontario never stays empty for long. Within seconds, it becomes scattered with lipstick-stained coffee cups, maps of Canada and piles of meteorological data printouts. Suzanne Leonard Feliz, the afternoon program host, leans forward, pen poised over her maps, listening as the studio meteorologist on the other side of the desk briefs her on the latest conditions across the country. Five computer monitors glow with radar and satellite images, showing current fronts, plotted temperatures and precipitation for Atlantic Canada. “This is a big country, where weather is always changing,” explains Feliz. “There’s a lot to learn as a presenter and a lot of responsibility as you’re passing along this information. It’s not just talking for a living – it’s talking, focusing, listening, concentrating, remembering, targeting and compiling. You’re making journalistic decisions all the time whenever you’re live.”

A survey of 3,000 people conducted by Ipsos-Reid and the Weather Network in 2004 showed that more than eighty per cent of adults go out of their way to check the daily forecast. (An Environment Canada survey produced similar statistics.) With those numbers, it’s clear that weather broadcasters have a responsibility to break down complex meteorological data and deliver the weather in a journalistic fashion that strives to be accessible, timely, newsworthy and, above all, accurate.

Weather reporting has come a long way since September 8, 1952, when Percy Saltzman not only became the first person to appear on English television in Canada, but also the first weatherman. As part of the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan during the Second World War, Saltzman prepared forecasts under the direction of the Meteorological Division of the Department of Transport and taught meteorology to air crews.

But news directors began to see weather as an integral part of the newscast. Gradually, weather broadcasters evolved from reciters of Environment Canada forecasts to broadcasters with meteorological training. Advancements in technology, including the Doppler radar, which converts radio waves into images, and the U.S.-based WSI weather system with high-resolution satellite imagery used by CTV, CNN and NBC, have provided increasingly accurate forecasts.

“It’s never going to be an exact science,” says Sylvia Kuzyk, co-host and weather reporter for CTV News in Winnipeg. “Now we have a tremendous wealth of tools at our disposal and it’s a more high-tech job. People are demanding good weather information.” That’s why Frank Cavallaro is known for fighting for more on-air time. Whenever CTV Montreal’s weather presenter is brushed aside for wanting to increase weather coverage, he pulls out his secret weapon: a copy of a 2004 article from The Cincinnati Enquirer that quotes a journalism assistant professor at the E.W. Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University in Athens as saying, “The No. 1 reason people watch local news is for the weather. It’s the one story that affects everybody.”

While neither Kuzyk nor Cavallaro holds a degree in meteorology, both have presented the weather for so long (twenty-five and eighteen years, respectively) and gained such extensive backgrounds that it comes as naturally to them as if they were certified meteorologists – which is one hope for Dr. Neil Campbell. In 1994, the former executive director of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS) helped introduce a program that endorses broadcasters who have meterorological training, a meteorology degree, or professional broadcast training with sufficient knowledge in meteorology to present weather in a scientifically correct manner. “Back then, stations didn’t care about the weather – it was pared down to a few seconds on air,” remarks Campbell. “But CMOS members were complaining about the weather quality on television, that people were just reciting the forecast without really understanding what they were talking about.” Over the years, almost fifty Canadian broadcasters have met the CMOS endorsement criteria for high quality weather presentation – Kuzyk and Cavallaro included.

Regardless of their educational backgrounds, weather broadcasters, like journalists, must be good communicators. They aren’t just spewing scientific jargon about jet streams and dewpoints – they’re educators of meteorological knowledge. “How many times have you watched a weather forecast wanting to know whether it was going to rain the next day, and when the forecast was over, you still didn’t know?” asks Paul Rogers, vice-president of news and news director at CTV Toronto. “The green blob on weather maps is just a green blob until someone can explain it to you.”

Though U.S. networks generally hire meteorologists, a symptom of the wide range of extreme weather in that country, the same isn’t true on this side of the border. “Some meteorologists don’t work on TV,” explains Ian Haysom, news director at Global B.C. “If I had an opening, it really would depend on the person. The audience has to believe weather people have the knowledge.”

When Campbell began the CMOS endorsement program, he discovered that broadcasters with meteorological training were often more successful at delivering a forecast than meteorologists, some of whom were “so dry and technical that no one could follow them.”

But Campbell also stresses the importance of a broadcaster having a solid weather background, and with stations such as the Weather Network, which offers extensive, inhouse meteorological training, he says credentials are fundamental to the profession. And, in times of severe weather, having a knowledgeable on-air personality who can immediately explain the scientific cause behind a weather event is far more efficient for the station and helpful for the viewers.

That’s one reason why on-air meteorologists are valuable assets for networks. Meteorologist Chris Scott, co-host of the Weather Network’s national evening program, grew up watching the U.S.-based Weather Channel on satellite. In states such as Florida, which are prone to severe weather, he says meteorologists are crucial in the interpretation of data to deliver the necessary safety information to viewers. Before a hurricane, for example, a meteorologist can track the storm’s path and give people ample time to prepare, or even evacuate, before it hits. With increasingly advanced weather information available to the public, the demand for more specific information will become greater over time.

“We’re not going to see it being all scientists on air, but you’ll see more of them in the future,” says Scott, who holds a master’s degree in atmospheric science. “People are getting more educated about meteorology, and they have a little bit more hunger for the in-depth information.”

And when it comes to satisfying that craving, weather broadcasters are serious about having the same high standards as news reporters. Like any reputable journalist, weather people arrive at the station hours before broadcasting to prepare the forecast, checking for breaking news and updates right until the final seconds before airtime. In fact, the weather often becomes the news. When that happens, news reporters may take over the story, but weather broadcasters still play a vital role in deconstructing important meteorological angles of what’s happening before, during and after the weather event.

Mike Piperni, news director of CTV Montreal, calls the ice storm of 1998 that hit parts of eastern Ontario, Quebec and New Brunswick, a “significant moment of weather in this province that really put weather on the map.” Weather-related reports were leading each newscast at the time. “Weather people were working as reporters, as journalists, going to local shelters,” recalls CTV Montreal’s Cavallaro, “but we also had to do our own work, like explain the cause of all the freezing rain.”

The simple fact that forecasters can see what’s coming well before it hits gives media outlets the opportunity to provide the public with vital information, including local area weather warnings and the impact of the severe weather on the public. Environment Canada senior climatologist David Phillips says the media do a tremendous job of this, but there is also the real danger of over-dramatizing the weather. “Information should be played, not hyped,” he says. “There’s a sensational way and an authoritative, reliable way. You can’t always trust the public to know what’s right and wrong.”

And with a history of weather broadcasters’ fondness for gimmicks, achieving authority can sometimes be a challenge. Cavallaro hosts the Great Zucchini Challenge in early autumn, in which viewers send in photos of large or oddly shaped zucchinis. “It began as a joke,” he says. “Once I brought this five-footlong zucchini into the station from my grandfather, who said the right amount of sun and rain will give you a great zucchini. And when people told Cavallaro they didn’t grow zucchinis – they grew tomatoes – he started another contest called Show Us Your Tomatoes.

Early in her weather career, CTV Winnipeg’s Kuzyk swung onto the studio set on a tire swing. Tamara Taggart, of CTV Vancouver, has been known to chase pigs, milk cows and deliver the forecast while cooking dinner at a viewer’s home. She was also named best TV weather person and best TV personality by Vancouver’s Georgia Straight in its annual readers poll from 2002 to 2004. While such antics may make for fun viewing, the real challenge is to have personality without the gimmicks, and that’s a balance that successful weather broadcasters have reached. “It’s important to be fun and accessible but not goofballs,” says Global B.C. news director Ian Haysom.

This past Halloween, Global Ontario’s Michael Kuss donned a cloud costume with a sun-shaped hat while delivering his forecast, but aside from the occasional exception of a fun holiday, he remains engagingly informative on a daily basis without the props. “There isn’t always a lot going on, so you have to have fun,” admits Kuss, who says gimmicks are becoming a trend of the past. “The station isn’t going to show a politics story if there’s no story in politics, but we will always have to show the weather.”

Despite the strides weather broadcasters have made in being seen as real journalists, there will always be those who disagree, even among their own ranks. “Weather is not large-J journalism, it’s a smaller-J journalism,” says Zack Spencer, weather anchor for the morning news at Global B.C., who prefers a more down-to-earth approach instead of an emphasis on maps and weather graphics, which he says detracts from the forecast rather than enhances it. “While it’s all those things about affecting people, being timely and accurate as possible, at the end of the day, it’s just the weather.”

But for Feliz, the weather is a journalistic story that Canadians want – and need – to know, and for the eight years she’s been at the Weather Network, she’s delivered that story five days a week. “Some pers-para-pre-bleh! Perpetual precip. Precipitation! Too many Ps in that sentence!” Feliz smiles, shrugging off her on-screen error, and finishes the rest of her sentence with ease. In a matter of minutes, the CMOS-endorsed weather broadcaster has run through the country’s forecast, including current temperatures, precipitation, isobar lines and an indication of where snow will fall from coast to coast.

With the cameras off, Feliz steps away from her spot in front of the green screen flanked by trios of TV monitors and relaxes at the studio desk. “You have to remember what’s important to people and what it all means,” she says. “If you can connect with people and give them the straight goods and the information they need in a timely and effective fashion, and it’s accurate, then you’re off to the races.”

I’m with twenty or so other reporters and cameramen, and, as Whyte leaves the photo op, our frazzled handlers sweep us out of the lobby through a back door, send us down a maze of corridors and through the kitchen past bewildered servers and busboys, finally ushering us into the green room. We’re not totally cut off from the festivities, though. We can watch the guests eat via the closed-circuit TV bolted to the wall. At least I think we can; the fuzzy blobs on screen are hard to decipher.

“Does this thing get any other channels?” someone asks. No one laughs. As we settle into our purgatory, a reporter from Sun TV’s entertainment show Inside Jam! pulls out a copy of the new Maclean’s from her press kit and asks me, “This is like the first redesigned issue or something, right?”

I tell her it is.

“Huh,” she says, flipping through the pages. “It looks like a tabloid.” Furrowing her brow, she puts it down.

Forty minutes later, a reporter from Omni Television tires of staring at the blurry figures and asks, “Does anyone have a magazine to read?”

“I think we’ve got Maclean’s,” says a cameraman with a smirk.

She wrinkles her nose. “Ugh.”

After waiting for thirty minutes, we’re released back into what’s now an empty lobby. The cameramen form a wall in front of the doors, hoping to catch anyone noteworthy skipping out to the washrooms, but it’s nearly another hour before the dinner ends, and the guests come out for champagne.

When Whyte walks through the doors, he hops from person to person, greeting the likes of Edward Greenspon, John Honderich and Black. Judging by the smile on his face, you never would have guessed that after being fired from the National Post two years ago – the newspaper he helped build – Whyte never wanted to work as an editor again. So this event isn’t just for a tired magazine struggling to regain relevance, it’s also for a renowned editor trying to top himself.

“We’ve got to overcome some really deeply ingrained impressions of what Maclean’s is – that it’s your grandfather’s magazine,” Whyte told me a week earlier over the phone, “and not something you yourself would find interesting.” As a result of those impressions, at least in part, he added, Maclean’s has been losing money and resonance with readers for years. Whyte calls it a “death spiral.”

But he also said he’d been thinking about ways to fix the magazine for practically two decades. In 1993, for instance, he called Maclean’s “boring” in his Globe and Mail column and suggested it could learn a lot fromAlberta Report – the raucous conservative publication where he got his start in magazines. His solution then is not much different from his solution now: “If you want to attract readers,” he told me, “you gotta grab ’em by the lapels.”

Whyte doesn’t just grab people by the lapels – he slaps them in the face with sex, sizzle and contrarian ideas. Although his cerebral-meets-trashy approach never failed to attract attention at Saturday Night and the Post, there’s one thing it never produced: profit. And while Whyte’s previous boss, Conrad Black, seemed content to live with losses in return for the influence that came with owning a prestigious publication, it’s unclear whether Ted Rogers and his company want the same deal, especially since Maclean’s still makes a profit. Whyte’s bosses have given him enormous clout – he’s both editor and publisher – to stop their flagship magazine’s decline. If he fails, not only will the death spiral continue, but as Whyte’s former boss David Asper told The Toronto Star, he’ll have to take his “high priced tea party to another employer who will also get tired of the act – and the losses.”

Two months later, Whyte, slightly over dressed in a dark blue suit and yellow tie, is far removed from the glam of the anniversary party. We’re sitting in a half-empty cafeteria in the Rogers Publishing building, and his mind is on more practical matters like story selection, tightened leading and decreased font size (2.3 per cent smaller). We’ve been talking about Maclean’s for the past hour, yet Whyte seems to be somewhere else. Hunched forward on the table, he’s scanning the cafeteria or picking the label from his water bottle and wrapping it around his fingers. This is the Whyte I’ve heard about, the one who rests his head on his desk when he’s thinking, the one of awkward silences, the one whom Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells calls “reclusive and borderline autistic.” Whyte once half-jokingly remarked that he’s probably spoken to every journalist in Canada; despite this, no one will admit to knowing him well. “You’d kinda think you were close to him,” says Kirk LaPointe, a former Post executive editor. “But you probably weren’t.” Whyte speaks in a quiet, rambling monotone, and conversation with him is sometimes a challenge. “He does that thing where he doesn’t speak and waits for you to speak,” explains Michael Cooke, who was on the Post development committee and is now editorial vice-president of the Sun Times Group in Chicago. “There are long, uncomfortable gaps, and you feel some kind of social obligation to talk.” Yet Whyte’s remoteness is merely a reflection of his wild attention span, says LaPointe. If you were boring him, “He’d find something else to do in a room. It could be frustrating, but he didn’t drift off. He’d just multi-task all of a sudden.”

And so when I ask Whyte about his final days at the Post, he stops fidgeting, sinks into his chair and remains silent for a while as he stares out the window at the grey January afternoon. Whyte says he considered quitting when the Aspers bought the Post from Black in 2001. Instead, he stayed and was fired two years later. When I ask if he’s read Ego and Ink, Chris Cobb’s account of the rise of the Post, Whyte replies, “I have my own memories of it and most of them are good. I don’t want to pollute them with anyone else’s interpretation of what happened.”

The Post consumed six years of Whyte’s life, and when he was fired, he didn’t know what to do next – other than to go back to bed. Whyte was called into the Post‘s headquarters early in the morning on May 1, 2003 and told by Rick Camilleri, CanWest Global Communications Corp.’s chief operating officer at the time, that he was being “transitioned out of the company.” Whyte says he went back home and slept (he doesn’t like waking up early) until he got a call from someone at the Post telling him Martin Newland, his deputy editor, had also been fired. The two met for lunch, and, after making jokes at the expense of Camilleri – all of which were “very juvenile,” Whyte says – they reminisced. “We kinda felt a lot of relief,” he adds. “We’d had a great adventure and accomplished a lot more than either of us thought we would when we got there.”

When Whyte later returned to the Post to gather his things, he called Newland into his office. He’d been saving a message on his voicemail Black had left him on the day the Post launched. Whyte played it for Newland. “I’m really phoning essentially to congratulate you. It was a damn good paper,” Black said. “You have a first-class team there, and they have a first-class leader. You don’t have to phone back, but I’d be happy to hear from you.” Whyte erased the message and left the Post for good.

He thought he was leaving editing for good, too. He never wanted to do it again. He couldn’t even look at a Canadian newspaper. “I just felt exhausted,” he says. “Whatever I’d had in me as an editor I’d given there, and there was just no need to do it again. Where else would you go after you’ve been at a startup like that? To just go and edit another existing paper, most of them in quasi-monopoly, non-competitive situations – anybody can edit those things.”

His career had been on a phenomenal arc up until that point. The Winnipeg-born, Alberta-bred Whyte shuffled through a variety of jobs after dropping out of university and he was working as a janitor when he stumbled upon an ad in the local paper for a sports reporter. He finished his shift at midnight, drove to theSherwood Park News office and slept in his car that night to be interviewed first. Within a year, the 21-year-old Whyte was running the News. Two years later, he left for Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report, where he developed his political-writing voice and was influenced by the magazine’s zest for provocation and outrageousness. Whyte has called Byfield a “right-wing redneck radical” but also one of the most skilled newsmen he’s ever met.

Saturday Night editor John Fraser soon plucked him from the Report to become a national affairs correspondent. “He was much brighter than most of the troglodytes writing at that magazine,” Fraser says. By 1994, at only 33, Whyte packed up his family and moved from Edmonton to Toronto to become editor-in-chief of the Black-owned Saturday Night. Along with his editorship came concerns that the Byfield-groomed Albertan would turn it into a neo-conservative rag. While it didn’t stray as far to the right as some worried it would, there was no shortage of provocative stories: nude photographs of an 80-year-old woman; an article implying author Farley Mowat was a liar (complete with a cover illustration of Mowat with a Pinocchio-esque nose); and another criticizing child-poverty activist Craig Kielburger, which resulted in Saturday Night shelling out $319,000 in a libel suit. While the magazine won a string of National Magazine Awards under Whyte, it was also bleeding red ink.

His last year at the magazine was taken up by another concern: an offer from Conrad Black to start a new national newspaper. By day, Whyte edited Saturday Night, but by night, he planned, researched and courted potential writers and editors for what would become the National Post. Some on the planning committee were skeptical of Whyte’s abilities since the only newspaper he’d worked at was the thrice-weekly Sherwood Park News. He earned the moniker Magazine Boy, a term that came from the people who were “massively envious,” LaPointe says. It quickly became apparent, however, that Magazine Boy knew more about newspapers than any of them. “If you spend four minutes talking to the guy, you’d very quickly understand he was a great, avid reader of newspapers,” adds LaPointe. Whyte absorbed himself in every aspect of planning, even going so far as to research printers and production schedules to ensure the latest possible deadline for the Post.

So after building a national newspaper, what does a guy do for an encore?

I ask Whyte this question in the Rogers cafeteria, and instead of taking time to ponder and drone out his usual series of “ums,” he abruptly states: “Anything but edit.” Although the terms of his departure from thePost didn’t contain a non-compete clause, he found himself turning down job offers, except for one from the McGill Institute for the Study of Canada, where he became a visiting fellow in media and communications. Whyte guest-lectured, organized conferences and spent a lot of time working on a book. (He won’t say what it’s about, except that it involves newspapers and he’s superstitious talking about it.) McGill gave him the chance to recharge, he explains. Employers still courted him, however, and Whyte would talk to them out of duty (and at his agent’s insistence) but still couldn’t get excited about journalism. Then came the call from Brian Segal, president and CEO of Rogers Publishing, sometime in the summer of 2004.

Rogers was planning to launch a handful of new magazines, and Segal wanted Whyte to sign on as a consultant. Whyte did so, hesitantly, “mostly because I thought I should,” he says. “It was the first time I actually started thinking like a journalist or an editor again. And aside from the fact that I felt a bit rusty, it wasn’t as bad as I expected.” Talk with Segal inevitably turned to Maclean’s, and Whyte shared his ideas informally on what the problems were and how to fix them. Eventually, Segal got serious and offered him both the editor and publisher positions.

Whyte spent a while considering the offer and negotiated his contract with the company by himself. He wanted to make sure Rogers executives understood that if Maclean’s was going to succeed under his direction, there would be major changes, and a serious investment from the company would be required.

Whyte started in March of last year. He was nervous about editing again and viewed it as a necessary chore; it was the publisher position that really interested him. As far back as the Sherwood Park News, he had recognized just how much control publishers had over editorial. He went on to dabble in publishing at Alberta Report and expected to become publisher at Saturday Night had he stayed. He then served as deputy publisher at the Post during his last year there. He even attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania for a three-month-long executive MBA program in his last year at the Post. “I’d worked so many years at money-losing publications. Most of my life, in fact,” he says. “I wanted to prove that it wasn’t all my fault and that I could turn one of these things around given the chance.” If he wanted a challenge, he couldn’t have picked a better one than Maclean’s.

As Ahyte’s career was taking off in the 1980s, Maclean’s was, in retrospect, starting its death spiral. All weekly newsmagazines were struggling – or at least that was the perception in the media, says Paul Jones, Whyte’s predecessor as publisher. Jones clipped an article from The New York Times the day in 1978 he told the Financial Post he was leaving to become research manager at Maclean’s. The article predicted the demise of newsweeklies, says Jones, and “I remember going home with a clipping to show my wife, thinking, ‘I’ve made a horrible mistake.'”

The Times may have been overly dramatic, and Whyte counters by saying that the more news there is, the greater the need for a publication to make sense of it all. “That’s sort of what we aim to do,” he explains. “To sort through everything that’s out there and figure out what’s interesting, what’s meaningful and present a coherent, well-packaged look at the world and Canada in a particular week.”

In a way, that’s always been the Maclean’s mandate, but certainly something was wrong by the 1990s. Jones left the magazine in 1990 to run a subsidiary of Maclean-Hunter, but he returned in 1999 as publisher. “In 1978, there was very much a role in Canada for a magazine that told you what happened last week,” explains Jones, but “by 1999, that was a laughable concept. I made this very clear the moment I arrived. My view was that the evolution was not going quickly enough.” Jones worked with editor Robert Lewis to move Maclean’saway from regurgitating last week’s news, but Lewis was only partly successful, says former executive editor Bob Levin. “He was very much a news guy at heart.” In Lewis’s view, if a big story broke Friday night,Maclean’s should do all it could to cover it. When the RCMP raided the home of then-premier of British Columbia Glen Clark in 1999, the magazine scrambled to get something together for its readers on Monday. The problem was that Clark had been in the news for four days by the time Maclean’s arrived on the newsstands. “It’s like a dog walking on its hind legs,” Jones says of the magazine’s ability to pull off such a task. “It’s a remarkable achievement, but it isn’t necessarily pretty or useful.”

Lewis left in 2001 to become vice-president of content development for Rogers Media, but the vestiges of the traditional newsweekly didn’t leave with him – many other editors had also been with the magazine for years. “You can’t put out a continually evolving magazine with a group that’s been together for fifteen or twenty years with very little new blood,” Jones says. “We all knew there would have to be some very difficult decisions.” The first decision was finding a new editor. Jones wanted to bring in an outsider (Whyte was called for an interview but was unwilling to leave the Post), and when he was unable to find someone, he appointed national affairs columnist Anthony Wilson-Smith.

Wilson-Smith was swift in ushering in change. He fired nine people and hired a bunch of young writers, mostly those fleeing the National Post. He also changed the production cycle so that if something broke Friday night, it wouldn’t make it into the magazine. Story range became broader, shifting towards lighter, general interest fare (“How to Take the Fear Out of Your Fridge,” for example). “I wasn’t fond of it,” says executive editor Peeter Kopvillem, “but if somebody thinks it’s going to make money, we may as well. I’m just glad I didn’t have to handle it.”

“I hated writing them,” says national correspondent Jonathon Gatehouse of the borderline service pieces. “That’s not why I got into journalism. Thankfully, I wrote very few of them.”

Yet the magazine did begin to package news in a different way. A 2004 poll about Canadian antipathy toward George W. Bush ran on the cover under the headline, “Canadians to Bush: Hope You Lose, Eh.” Maclean’sran another cover story a few months later calling Canada the “Know-It-All Neighbour,” intent on telling America how to run itself. Both covers created big buzz, yet despite the success, there was sense among some staff that the magazine was still not doing enough.

“I worked hard at Maclean’s before Whyte arrived, and I gotta say it often felt like shoveling your copy off a cliff. It wasn’t getting noticed,” says Paul Wells. “Maclean’s is an institution, so people are going to buy it. But when you think that way, people have no desire to do anything great.”

Former writer Sue Ferguson, who left in 2005, thinks the slow change process had more to do with a fear of upsetting loyal readers. “Maclean’s reputation had brought it so far already. It might be too risky to try something different because, well, we’re Maclean’s,” she says. Jones says that was the whole point of the changes under Wilson- Smith, but they happened so gradually media critics didn’t notice.

Whatever else Wilson-Smith had in mind for Maclean’s, he was strained financially; he had to cut $2 million, nearly twenty-five per cent of the magazine’s budget, when he first became editor. Jones left as publisher in 2004, and for him, the biggest disappointment was that Wilson-Smith never had the investment from Rogers to make the necessary staff changes. “If you can, it’s most satisfying to add fresh faces,” he says. “The only other option is to start replacing people, each of who individually is doing a perfectly acceptable job. These were the people who’d been supportive to Tony throughout his career, and I think he was loyal to them. Loyalty in this business is a two-edged sword. There are times when it’ll get you to the top, and there are times when it’ll move you out the door.” Wilson-Smith left two months after Jones.

Ken Whyte wouldn’t have the same problem with loyalty.

Remaking a Canadian institution may seem like a daunting task, but Whyte says he felt little pressure. “It’s just the pressure you put on yourself,” he says. “I have certain goals I want to accomplish at Maclean’s, and if I don’t do them, I’m gonna be really unhappy.”

His first step was research – pouring over data about Maclean’s readership, circulation, advertising and past redesigns, studying issues of old Maclean’s, Time and Newsweek from every era as well as tabloids, celebrity magazines and old police gazettes. Whyte made a point to interview all Maclean’s employees about their roles at the magazine and how they thought it could be improved. When he started, he told staff he didn’t have a specific vision but later came up with a list of four goals to achieve with his redesign: more text, more excitement, more news and a sense that his Maclean’s is a fundamentally different magazine. Past redesigns, he says, have played it safe by catering too much to existing readers. “We’re going to be noisy.”

Whyte decided not to make any decisions about staff for three months, and during that time, he used story meetings to judge writers’ creativity, enthusiasm and how much they challenged his ideas – he likes it when people do that. He also looked at how much writing they’d done, both the inches of copy they produced and the impact their stories had. “I don’t mean to be dramatic,” senior writer Brian D. Johnson says, “but some people felt they were writing for their lives.”

The firings came swiftly after that; Whyte let over a dozen people go, and three others, including twenty-eight-year-veteran Ann Dowsett Johnston, left of their own accord. Assistant editor Patricia Hluchy moved to theStar in January. “Let’s just say that there were things about the new regime I wasn’t so crazy about,” she said. The changes might seem ruthless (for instance, Whyte called writer Sharon Doyle Driedger the weekend before she was due back from a year-long parental leave), and when I ask him about letting people go, he rolls his eyes as if expecting the question before turning apologetic. “Anybody that’s done it knows it’s about the worst thing you ever have to do,” he says with a sigh. “Even if you’re confident that the team you’re putting together is going to be an improvement, it’s still hard to do and hard to justify morally. I mean, you’re taking away people’s livelihoods.”

The other big internal change is Whyte’s insistence that writers and editors bring story ideas, on paper, to story meetings each week. “I don’t think I’ve seen such long and detailed meetings take place here,” Johnson says. It’s a competitive, nerve-wracking process, but many writers say meetings are also more engaging and communal, and more ideas are generated as a result. Whyte has told staff more than once that Maclean’s will live or die based on the strength of its ideas, and so concerned is he about not disturbing the creative process of these meetings that he won’t allow any outsiders to attend – no curious journalists, not even senior Rogers Publishing executives. Whyte himself is usually impossible to read during meetings. “He’s Sphinx-like,” says Gatehouse. “You’ll pitch a story and there’ll be no expression on his face. You’ll think it’s flopped, and then you’ll hear back from somebody a week later asking, ‘So when are you gonna do that story?'” It’s not because he’s forgetful; he just needs a lot of time to think.

If Whyte’s editorship can be boiled down to one trait, it’s his story sense. Each publication he’s edited has been stamped with the Whyte brand of sex, quirk, intellect and contrarian ideas. A flip through Maclean’sshows it shares more with the Post than just its former writers. Whereas the Post became known for mixing serious items with offbeat stories (and pictures of Anna Kournikova) on its front page, Maclean’s will run a profile of a blind, homeless trapeze artist and a story on slavery in Canada back-to-back.

This editorial mix comes from Whyte’s desire to marry high-end magazines like The New Yorker with low-end celebrity rags like In Touch and US Weekly. Of the latter, Whyte says, “They’re newsmagazines. They just do one particular branch of news: celebrity news. That stuff is all over the Internet. It’s all over the TV. But there’s still room for these weeklies, and it’s because of the way they push and shape their stories.”

Whyte also read a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, an institute affiliated with the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, which dissected the weekly newsmagazine genre. It found traditional newsmagazines like Time and Newsweek are moving toward softer, trendoriented coverage as their readerships shrink. According to the institute, smaller newsmagazines like The New Yorker, The Economist and The Week are not only playing a larger role in setting the news agenda, but their readerships are slowly growing – and the latter two do the unthinkable by reporting on last week’s news. This was proof for Whyte the newsmagazine wasn’t entirely dead.

The new look, though, has more in common with the low-end magazines – screaming headlines, candid photography and salacious display copy – but it’s a look Whyte says is elegant with “tabloid flourishes.” Both the Star and the Globe praised it, and a roundtable of art directors at Masthead concluded the redesign conveyed a sense of urgency not usually seen in Maclean’s, and, despite going overboard at times, the energy level is “cause for optimism.”

The slightly trashy look is perfect for the display copy, some of which seems right out of The National Enquirer: “Norman Bethune Sex Shocker”; “The Scariest Man on Earth: The Nuke-Happy, Jew-Hating Lunatic President of Iran”; and “Jesus Is My Homey.” The Globe‘s Michael Posner thinks Maclean’s is going down-market, trying to appeal to a younger, less sophisticated audience. But Robert Fulford, who wrote for Whyte at the Post, says: “If it attracts attention, then I’m all for it.”

Whyte’s had no problems attracting attention or making noise, but the serious journalism for which Maclean’sis known is sometimes hard to find amid all of the clatter.

“The Female Chauvinist Pig” ran on the cover in October 2005 and featured a blonde woman in a cowboy hat flashing her breasts. The article, which discussed young women’s tendency to treat themselves as sexual objects, was primarily a book review. When I tell executive editor Kopvillem, who’s been with Maclean’s for nearly twenty years, that it seemed the article contained little original reporting, he says, “I don’t think a magazine piece, by definition, needs to have that much original reporting. You’re bringing something to people’s attention, and it’s what you’re writing about that’s provocative.” Another employee was blunt: “Why was it still a cover story? Because it was about slutty chicks.” An article about Governor General Michaëlle Jean “showing some leg in Winnipeg” was in a similar vein, primarily criticizing her fashion sense.

Yet the serious reporting is still there – despite what the display might lead you to believe. Maclean’s featured NDP leader Jack Layton on the cover in December under the cover line, “Who Is This Man and Why Is He Running the Country?” Layton was photographed in stark black and white and bore more than a passing resemblance to Vladimir Lenin. (“We didn’t direct him,” Whyte says. “He posed that way himself.”) The article itself, however, was a thorough, thoughtful and measured portrait of Layton. Ditto “The Spielberg Massacre,” George Jonas’s critique of how Steven Spielberg transformed his book Vengeance into Munich. While Jonas was critical of Spielberg, his understated tone was at odds with the blaring display. “Whyte is coming at it with spirited mischief and a sense of humour,” film critic Johnson says, “and that’s the first time I’ve seen that in all the time I’ve been at the magazine.” Fulford doesn’t think it’s a problem. “If someone’s accused of going too far,” he says, “that means he just might be going far enough.”

Others are concerned that Whyte is taking Maclean’s too far to the right politically, as many stories have had a predominantly conservative slant, including gentle criticisms of Stephen Harper, an anti-Kyoto feature, a cover story on why the rich are happier than the poor and that attack on Svend Robinson accompanied by a “From the Editors” column titled “Let’s Svend Him Packing.” (The new column space sometimes functions as an editorial. Whyte says the process is informal and anyone who’s available could end up writing it, but the point of view is almost always Whyte’s.) There was also the arrival of Mark Steyn as a book columnist. In his first article, he mentioned a few books in passing while railing against feminists, Canadian manhood, abortion and Cameron Diaz, among other things.

Steve Maich, who was promoted to senior editor by Whyte, wrote an article titled “Why Wal-Mart Is Good,” which showed how Wal-Mart helps the poor, creates jobs and stimulates the economy. While over 4,000 words long, it still found little space for the company’s detractors. Maich argues, “There are still many people who, understandably, don’t think articles should take a point of view or make an argument unless they’re clearly marked as ‘opinion.’ Had I pitched a Wal-Mart article in the past, I’d have been encouraged to give equal treatment to both sides of the debate…That’s a legitimate journalistic approach, but not the only one.”

Whyte is either being coy or naive when he says, “Nobody talked about balance at Maclean’s before I came in…My idea of political balance is much more balanced than other people’s.” Certainly there is an attempt at balance (Whyte interviewed former NDP leader Ed Broadbent, for example, and at least two of his recent hires came from the left-wing This Magazine), but despite Whyte’s denial that Maclean’s has shifted to the right, Wells and Johnson say it’s absolutely clear that’s what happened. Wells is quick to point out it’s not necessarily a bad thing, saying the shift is a welcome change from the old, safe, middle-of-the-roadMaclean’s.

Media have followed staff changes and story selection closely; for bloggers, the reappearance of Barbara Amiel and Linda Frum, for example, indicated some kind of conservative conspiracy. While Whyte’s formerPost colleagues are having little trouble getting along, there’s discontent among some of the staff, judging from the emails I received requesting anonymity; a couple of people forwarded me a Janice Kennedy column from the Ottawa Citizen in which she accuses Whyte of debasing a Canadian institution, and one employee even suggested Whyte, rumoured to be a member of the ultra-conservative and secretive Catholic faction Opus Dei, is on a mission to change Canadian society. (He’s not a member, however, and laughs at the rumour. “I can barely claim to be a Catholic,” he says.)

But should Whyte be trying to influence political discourse in Canada, as he was unabashedly doing at thePost, he’ll have an easier time doing it as both publisher and editor. The positions give him more power than any of his recent predecessors, but magazine industry expert D.B. Scott says, “It’s impossible to do both jobs well.” Combining the positions is unusual but not unprecedented, as it typically occurs when a magazine is just starting out. And the only other time it has ever happened at Maclean’s was when John Bayne Maclean founded the magazine in 1905. Aside from the amount of work involved, Whyte’s appointment also raised concerns among staff as to whether his loyalty would lie with advertising or editorial. His decision to allow Cadillac to sponsor a series of articles by Peter C. Newman caused a minor ruckus, and in Mastheadmagazine, Don Obe, an associate editor at the magazine in the early 1970s, accused Whyte of “selling out [the magazine’s] integrity,” concluding “the sovereignty of Maclean’s is being nibbled all around the edges, and if the nibbling continues long enough, there’ll be nothing left of it.”

Whyte ran another controversial ad in the magazine’s annual university rankings issue. The four-page pullout for Axe deodorant spoofed Maclean’s rankings with provocative pictures and fake categories like, “My university is known for having the best looking students.” Dowsett Johnston, who’s managed the university issue for over a decade, told University Affairs magazine she hadn’t been aware of the ad beforehand, fielded many calls from upset readers and professors and said it “undermined me in a very public way,” sending a “terrible message to the reader.” Dowsett Johnston also told the magazine University Affairs, as well as theStar, that she left Maclean’s in part because of the ad. When I mention the issue with Whyte, he says the ad was available for anyone to see before publication, and nobody questioned it. Dowsett Johnston, now vice-principal of development, alumni and university relations at McGill University, didn’t return calls.

Whyte argues that part of his interest in publishing comes from a desire to protect editorial. “We on the editorial side like to think everything revolves around us, but the more time you spend editing, the more you realize that a surprisingly high proportion of decisions that affect readers aren’t made in the editorial suite, they’re made in the business suite,” he says. “It’s fine if the publisher knows what he’s doing editorially, but fewer and fewer of them do.”

As publisher, Whyte is one step closer to his goal of turning the business around, despite the fact that ad revenues have been falling by around $1 million a year since 1997. Maclean’s finished last year with $19.5 million in ad revenue, up from $18 million the previous year, and given Maclean’s history of decline, the increase is a big one. “We’re not by any stretch done yet,” Whyte says. “We’ve got to prove we can do it at least two years in a row.” He’s going to hold circulation at 350,000, convinced Maclean’s can be more profitable at that level. It means targeting a slightly different audience, one that’s younger and more affluent, Whyte hopes. Yet he’s careful not to get too specific with readership just yet. He’s put his editorial product out there, and now he has to see who it’s going to attract. He’s still in the process of gauging response to the redesign, and with reader surveys set up, he won’t know for a while. In the meantime, he’s focusing on publishing the best magazine he can. He admits he’s made mistakes, but he won’t say what, and smiles and blushes when I ask. “It’s embarrassing,” he protests, looking out the window. “We’re not accustomed to putting it out yet,” he says. “And that’s gonna take several more months of just watching it more closely and getting everybody accustomed to the expectations of each element of the design.”

Newsstand sales are slowly climbing (they rose during Wilson-Smith’s last year, too) and Maclean’s finished 2005 averaging nearly 9,000 copies a week, up from the 5,000 it was averaging last June. Whyte sees it as a sign Canadians will be able to handle his brash, loud and right-wing Maclean’s. “I don’t think Maclean’sreaders are dullards. They have a sense of humour and a sense of mischief,” he says. That said, between 300 and 400 readers cancelled subscriptions in November and December last year – that’s twice as many cancellations as in 2004. Whyte jokes he expected to lose that many readers with the Svend Robinson cover alone, but he’s confident he can pull in more than he loses. “If there had been any less than that, I would have been disappointed,” he says. “It would have meant nobody had noticed any change.”

The one hundredth birthday and relaunch party is coming to an end. Guests are leaving, but some stick around for more champagne. Suddenly, Mark Critch from This Hour Has 22 Minutes nabs Whyte for an interview.

“Aw, geez,” Whyte groans before composing himself, pulling his lips into a tight smirk.

“Here we are with the man himself,” Critch says. “Tell me of this new Maclean’s.”

“Well, it’s the same old magazine,” Whyte says. “We just shuffled a few things around.”

“Way to do the hard sell,” Critch eggs on.

Whyte’s smirk tightens. He tries joking with Critch about the prevalence of Maclean’s in doctors’ and dentists’ offices, but he scans the crowd as if for a way out, looking annoyed, amused, embarrassed and smug all at once.

“So I guess it was just Peter C. Newman and Allan Fotheringham starting it off a hundred years ago,” Critch says.

Whyte doesn’t crack a smile.

“What’s the biggest change in a hundred years?”

Whyte pauses. “Uh…geez. I can’t really think of anything.”

He looks at Critch for help, who starts asking another question.

Then Whyte finally finds his answer:

“I’ve shown up.”

The poster is everywhere in the offices of the Western Standard-in the foyer, in the coffee room, beside individual cubicles and on the walls by the office of Ezra Levant, the magazine’s publisher and co-founder. Professionally done and beautifully rendered, it could be mistaken for actual advertising for The Sopranossecond season DVD box set. Up close, the faces of Jean Chrétien, Jean Brault, Alfonso Gagliano and a somewhat bewildered looking Paul Martin are as clearly discernible as the heads on Mount Rushmore, sitting atop a stylized logo proclaiming The Librano$ in all its politically incorrect glory. “I love that poster,” says a grinning Levant. “It’s so beautiful. I have it wallpapered all over my bedroom at home.”

Based on his reputation, you wouldn’t be surprised if this were true. You might, however, be surprised that Levant himself isn’t a larger-than-life western caricature, a cigar-chomping Bunyanesque lumberjack wearing a stetson and drinking mug after mug of steaming hot crude. Instead, what you get is a stocky, dark-haired, bespectacled, 34-year-old man with a gregarious personality and an interesting lisp that accentuates his enthusiastic always-politically- on comments.

Levant bounds out of his office past the poster and the mezuzah affixed at an angle to his doorframe, sporting a white shirt, black slacks, shiny black shoes and a natty bow tie. Noticing the glances he’s receiving for his tie – also affixed at an angle on his collar – he smiles boyishly and starts into a bit of the political comic relief he’s famous for. “There are two things bow ties are usually associated with,” he explains. “The first is U.S. senators, especially southern ones. The second is journalists.” Like Tucker Carlson, for example? “I don’t know,” he jokes skeptically, “he wears his as a bit of an affectation.”

Critics of the magazine have dismissed the Standard as one big right-wing affectation – indeed, stunts such as The Librano$ tend to detract from the notion of “serious political journalism,” whatever that means. On the other hand, there’s no denying that the Standard has done some interesting things with the medium, extending its content and political agenda beyond its glossy eight-byeleven inch confines. It has established a strong presence in the Canadian conservative blogosphere, with its website and lively The Shotgun Blogreceiving over one million unique hits per month. It’s on the airwaves with Western Standard Radio, a talk-radio show co-hosted by Levant and Grant Farhall, which, combined with four other shows, gets an estimated 80,000 listeners a week. And it continually revels in its self-styled identity of brazen political incorrectness by cranking out gimmicks that elicit chuckles from the right and sneers from the left – from the poster, derided as racist by former Minister of Citizenship and Immigration Joe Volpe, to the buttons excoriating the Charter of Rights and Freedoms (“It’s the Stupid Charter”) during the 2005 federal Conservative convention to the annual cruise that features prominent wonks on the Canadian right talking politics over crab legs and sunning their pale skin in the sun.

The Standard has gained a respectable following since the first issue rolled off the presses in March 2004, claiming a circulation of 40,000 and a readership of 240,000. Compared to its left-of-centre competitor, The Walrus (circulation: 56,000), that’s not bad at all. Levant makes no bones about his mission: to provide a counterweight to what he calls the country’s “mushy, left-wing, politically correct media” and to forcibly insert the views of Red State Canada into the national news narrative. In two years, the Standard has certainly delivered on that promise, covering stories and issues of interest mostly to western conservatives – from the federally imposed environmental programs to warning shots fired by western separatists to raising the spectre of the infamous national energy program. The result is everything a central Canadian would expect it to be – a provocative news-and-views publication that is pro- West, pro-conservative, pro-Christian and, in Levant’s own words, “pro-beef.”

But to attain the golden grail of “serious political journalism,” a magazine has to have a greater impact on national political discourse over and above its actual circulation and niche readership. There’s an idea that through the savvy use of the medium a journal can punch above its own weight in political thought. American publications like The Nation and Harper’s embody this phenomenon on the left of the political spectrum, The National Review and The American Spectator on the right. The Standard is a cocky new entrant in the arena that just might be the voice that helps shift the Canadian political landscape towards the right, from the right.

Kevin Libin, the 34-year-old editor-in-chief of the Standard, leans back against his own doorpost, placidly observing The Ezra Show with a look of amusement. He’s as low-key as Levant is naturally brassy, which is a good thing: he provides journalistic focus that counterbalances Levant’s energy.

The Levant-Libin duo goes back to the early 1970s, when they were members of the small Jewish community in Calgary. “We went to the Jewish day school together,” recalls Libin, “and there were like ten kids in our class. It wasn’t exactly a big group.” He says Levant’s political zeal can be traced back to his father, Marvin, a Calgary radiologist. “Ezra was certainly more political than your average child,” Libin says. “He used to live in the country, and his dad would drive him to school in the morning. They’d listen to the CBC on the way, and his dad would discuss politics with him.”

In class, Levant was never embarrassed to show his allegiances, pouncing at an opportunity to savage the Liberals in a Grade 5 drawing assignment. “We had to draw something to do with current affairs,” Libin says. “Ezra drew this picture of Pierre Trudeau as a bird of prey – the head was Trudeau, the body was a bird with its talons sunken into planet Earth. It was 1982, right about the time of the national energy program, so,” he says with a chuckle, “that’s probably one of the things they were talking about on the way to school.”

It’s that unapologetic tone that defines the Standard. “Strident, partisan, relentlessly regional” is how Graham Fraser, a columnist for The Toronto Star, describes the magazine, likening it to Ted Byfield’s ultra-conservative Alberta Report, the Standard‘s predecessor. “That is Ezra’s style,” says Fraser, “and from what I’ve seen, it follows in the footsteps of the Byfields.” But while Levant’s political enthusiasm may set the tone, Libin is the arbiter of all editorial issues. He’s the one who scans the news, picks the important stories, fields the proposals from writers, rewrites articles when needed and composes the provocative headlines. His mission: to provide a fortnightly news and opinion magazine that appeals to western Canadians – something he says is sorely missing in mainstream Canadian media.

Still, it’s hard to believe that Levant’s history as a political backroom operator doesn’t seep into the Standard. But he insists that his role is publisher, not journalist. “My own partisan background is certainly interesting,” he explains, “but it’s not a defining component of our content. It’s fair to say that there is zero correlation between who I was allied with or worked with or worked for and what we write in the magazine.” A pause. “Well, not zero correlation. Because we often criticize people who were my political friends, and we sometimes praise people who were my political foes.”

If Libin is the head and hands of the magazine, Levant is its heart, pumping to the beat of the hard right. That beat has always manifested itself in what Levant calls “a revolving door between politics and the media,” even when he worked as a reporter for the Alberta Report, wrote columns for the Calgary Sun and served for two years on the editorial board of the National Post. He’s also been extensively involved in party politics, as a member of the old Reform and Canadian Alliance parties and a supporter of Ralph Klein during the Alberta premier’s early days. “I’ve known Ezra since 1992,” recalls Don Martin, political columnist for the Post and theCalgary Herald. “The first time I saw him, he was chanting ‘Ralph! Ralph! Ralph!’ when Klein was announcing his first election campaign. He’s been rooted in fiscal and social conservatism for a long time.”

After the 2000 federal election, Levant signed on as director of communications for Stockwell Day, the former leader of the former Canadian Alliance and current Minister of Public Safety. While displaying his marketing savvy during Day’s campaign to become prime minister – Levant was the man behind the catchy Stock-a-holic moniker – it was, by most accounts, a failed tenure. “A very short and gaffe-plagued reign,” says Martin, “He was just in way over his head. He couldn’t handle his staff, morale was terrible, his timing was awful. He basically sent Day down the tubes.”

Levant had always had aspirations to sit in Parliament, which led him to seek and win the federal nomination for the Calgary Southwest riding in 2002. But internal forces within the Alliance were against him, erupting into messy battle for the riding between him and the current Conservative Prime Minister, Stephen Harper. After initially refusing to resign the nomination, Levant stepped aside under vocal pressure from party bigwigs and grassroots voters, adding even more colour to his political history.

Four years later, Levant seems to have left behind the rough-and-tumble life of partisan politics. Does he miss it? “Surprisingly no,” he responds. As proof, he cites an agreement that he signed willingly with one of the magazine’s largest investors that specified Levant would not run for public office for the next five years. “I understand why they wanted me to do that,” he says. “They saw I had politics in my blood.” But he’s adamant that the siren call of the new Conservative government won’t lure him back to Ottawa. “I wouldn’t even dream of it,” he declares, “at least not until the magazine is big and strong.”

Publishing the Standard seems to have tempered Levant, oddly enough, by shifting him even farther to the right. He’s learned some hard lessons, and now he applies his energy to an environment that is more controlled, focused and far more ideologically consistent. “This job has all the satisfaction of partisan politics,” he says, leaning back into his chair with a satisfied grin. “We’re still talking about the issues and shining light on things that need to be given scrutiny.”

That includes the Conservative Party itself. In a stroke of irony, Levant has parlayed his current non-partisan status into what he considers an important role for the Standard as a watchdog of the right. While Prime Minister Harper slides towards the middle and backslides on issues like abortion and Iraq, the Standard is more critical of the federal Conservatives than you would suspect. “We’ve become a loyal, friendly, sympathetic critic of the Conservative Party,” he claims. Levant himself is not a member of the party, having given up his Alliance party membership to start up the magazine, “and that allows me to thoughtfully criticize the Conservative Party from the right.” He pulls out a special souvenir edition of the Standard, distributed at the Conservative Party’s convention in Montreal in March 2005. “We had a hospitality suite where they handed these out. The theme of the edition was: Is the Conservative Party going too close to the centre? Are Conservatives too afraid to stand up for principles?” He shakes his head. “That’s not a love-in. And that’s my freedom. If I were an MP, I’d be whipped – I’d either have to accept the party line or quit the party. Here, I can be true to our core values.” And, presumably, true to his.

The Western Standard emerged from the pile of spent shell casings that was Ted Byfield’s Alberta Report. During its colourful twentyfour- year run, the Report faithfully reported news and views with an ultra-conservative, pro-Christian, pro-life mandate, becoming the rallying point for all the rage and anger and grievance during Trudeau’s national energy program, reporting the every move of the Reform Party, and continually hammering away at the enemies of the West and God Almighty.

But while the magazine – disparagingly termed “Alberta Distort” by some wags on the left – was completely frank about its political bias, the years matured it into a quality publication, earning plaudits from readers across the political spectrum. It’s something the Standard has yet to achieve, according to critics like Brian Laghi, The Globe and Mail‘s Ottawa bureau chief and former western Canadian correspondent, who was a faithful reader of the Standard‘s predecessor. “I thought it was a pretty decent and effective magazine,” he says, admitting that his fondness for the Report colours his opinion of the Standard. “What I used to like about Alberta Report was its focus on news stories – something the Standard lacks. It used to delve into nooks and crannies to illuminate the day-today lives of people…even if it was kind of one-dimensional.”

Despite its reputation, Alberta Report, which became simply The Report after merging with its two other editions, B.C. Report and Western Report, folded in the summer of 2003 under the rocky steerage of Byfield’s sons, Link and Mike. Its demise elicited an outpouring of nostalgia in the province – more a reflection on its contributions to Alberta heritage than endorsements of its politically incorrect, fire-and-brimstone declarations. But it also precipitated a sense of satisfaction from elements of the Canadian left – at least according to Levant. “It felt as if someone was saying, ‘Oh, good, I don’t have to debate any more! Ha! Your ideas are obsolete, the market just proved it! Ha ha! Sweet irony, that!'” He leans back in his chair and snorts. “One should never celebrate the demise of another voice in the debate. Either you challenge or rebut that voice.”

At the time, Levant was busy with his law practice, but his impression of smug lefties laughing at the corpse bothered him. “I felt this gnawing inside,” he admits, “so I drove up from Calgary to Edmonton to meet with some of the old editors and writers. What struck me was no one was being the entrepreneur; no one was saying, ‘Here’s the plan, here’s the money, here’s the talent, put it together, make it go.’ It dawned on me, to my regret, that no one was going to do this if I didn’t do it.”

Nineteen other right-minded Canadians rose with Levant to pick up where the Report left off, a group he calls “conservative ethical investors” – ideologically driven backers who wanted a financial rate of return, but who were willing to receive a lower return to put out a magazine that delivered “a moral rate of return,” presumably, the satisfaction that comes with putting out a right-wing read they could be proud of.

With chairman Lyle Dunkley, a wellknown oil patch executive and also the chair of Rider Resources, theStandard financial team raised just over $750,000. With the joint endorsement of Ted and Link Byfield, Levant left his law practice, partisan Conservative politics and riding squabbles with party leader-elects behind, and moved into a world with more ideological consistency. And a lot more fun.

“A pretty face and a nice pair of thighs.” David Warren, columnist for the Standard, isn’t the originator of the pejorative quote used to describe the current Governor General. (He attributes it to one of Micha?lle Jean’s former colleagues at Radio-Canada.) But Warren does start off his September 19, 2005, column with the quote, commenting that it was “refreshingly sexist,” and then goes on to refer to Jean as “governess general of our nanny state” and “the spaciest vice regal selection in the whole history of our Dominion.” All in the first paragraph, no less.

In the February 13 issue, Standard columnist Ric Dolphin took on Colleen Klein, the wife of Alberta Premier Ralph Klein, theorizing that she is the primary reason for the premier’s extended tenure. Controversy erupted when Dolphin quoted an anonymous source – purportedly “one of Klein’s fishing buddies” – as saying that Mrs. Klein’s motives are less than altruistic and accusing her of being fond of the trappings of office. “Once she stops being premier’s wife, she goes back to being just another Indian,” Dolphin reported, leading to accusations of shoddy journalism and outright racism against the magazine.

And in the February 27 issue, the Standard published the Danish cartoon depictions of the Prophet Mohammed that enraged much of the Muslim world. Aside from the fact that the cartoons were “the biggest story of the week,” Levant told the Herald, he published the offending cartoons to highlight the hypocrisy of the mainstream media. “They mock Christians and Jews,” he said, “and they’re not afraid of offending them because they know Christians and Jews won’t cut off their heads.”

The Standard certainly pushes the envelope in its quest to provide what it considers to be an entertaining political read. It is, however, all part and parcel of being provocative and true to its mandate. Nowhere is this more evident than in the headlines that grace the covers of the magazine. “The Big Heist.” “A Nation Torn Apart.” “Puppets of Beijing.” “Profiles in Cowardice” (referring to the Paul Martin minority government). “Wild and Sensationalistic,” sighs Don Martin. “Screaming banner headlines in the front. Well, that’s just Ezra’s magazine. If you’re going to plunk down your five bucks on the Standard, prepare to be regaled with hard-done-by, ripped-off, mistreated Alberta kind of features and columns. That’s just what you’re gonna get.”

Libin, however, shrugs off such criticisms. “Magazines aren’t very good unless they’re interesting,” he says. “I’d rather err on the side of drama than on the side of dullness.” He compares his headlines to movie titles: “It has to sound dramatic to catch the reader’s eye. You can’t be benign or watery when you’re competing against seventy-five other titles on the magazine stand.”

“Benign” and “watery” are certainly not words you’d use to describe the bounty of oped pieces in each issue. The Standard‘s editorial mix tends to be heavy on opinion, especially compared to other mainstream publications. Libin says it’s necessarily a function of catering to the readership. “I was worried about it at first,” he admits, “but I’ve discovered that our readers like the balance. We bring value to the reader in a number of ways, and one of them is through great opinion pieces. That’s not at all tiring for the reader when you have writers like Mark Steyn and Ted Byfield. They’re always a pleasure to read.” Indeed, recruiting Steyn – former writer for the Post and current book reviewer for Maclean’s – for its pages was a coup for the upstart magazine. “The Standard isn’t one of those religious reads for me,” says Martin, “but I do flip to the back and read Steyn. He is one of the great writers on political commentary in this country.”

Beyond the swaths of opinion, the Standard does make an effort to include news and reportage. To Libin, it’s a necessity based on its mandate. “Canada’s such a small country relative to the U.S.,” says Libin. “We can’t afford to be like the National Review and be strictly political opinion. We need to bring value to the reader in other ways, including the news. Our readers think that western news isn’t getting enough representation in other publications out there. We’d be remiss if we didn’t fill in some of that gap.”

Laghi agrees, but he believes the Standard comes up short. While the current foundation of news reporting comes from several writers who cut their teeth as shoe-leather reporters for the Report – journalists such as Dolphin, Colby Cosh, Kevin Steel and Terry O’Neill – Laghi feels that the Standard is still too heavy with columns. “And hence,” he says, “it’s a little less useful to someone like me. It tries to be a political magazine more than a news magazine, and in skimping on the latter, its political coverage suffers.”

Which is not to say that the magazine’s political coverage is necessarily light – especially on the controversy scale. One of the topics the Standard covers regularly is the spectre of western separatism. The August 22, 2005 issue featured a poll conducted by a political science professor at Lethbridge Community College and commissioned by the magazine. The poll indicated that 35.6 per cent of respondents from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta and British Columbia were interested in “exploring the idea of forming their own country.” While the poll and the story did garner interest from a number of media outlets – the Post ran the poll on the front page of its August 9, 2005 issue – Martin, for one, felt that as a news report, it was dubious at best. “Frankly, I don’t think it’s that accurate a poll,” he says. “I just don’t think that Albertans think that way about Canada.” He believes the Standard inflates the issue of western separatism, which he says is still very much on the fringes – and only in Alberta at that. “I’ve been to the Saddledome for hockey games where ‘O Canada’ is sung,” he says, waxing anecdotal, “and it’s the loudest, most boisterous ‘O Canada’ in the country. Albertans are Canadians first and Albertans second. The average Albertan might find the federal government irrelevant – a black hole where their money goes, never to return – but the magazine makes things out to be bigger than they are.”

Cosh, the Standard‘s sports columnist, whole-heartedly disagrees. “You’ll find in talking to the people behind the Standard that many of them believe a serious debate about the West’s place in Confederation is a real short-term possibility,” he said in an interview prior to the 2006 federal election. “There is a prevailing belief that Ottawa simply won’t allow the economic reordering of the country; that if the West threatens to become too powerful and attractive, it will be punished for its insolence.” They’re strong words, full of grievance, and Levant thinks that it’s fair game for discussion in the pages of the Standard. “We have three columnists who are separatists,” he says, “Byfield, David Warren in Toronto, and Pierre Lemieux lives in Montreal.” He chuckles. “Funny, only one of them is in the West. But with them, you can have a debate. What would be unreasonable and unfair would be to marginalize or demonize an opinion held by forty-three per cent of Albertans.”

But if the Standard wants to have an impact on political discourse over and above its own constituency, it has to have appeal beyond Alberta’s borders. “People outside Alberta don’t use it as a definitive voice of the West,” Martin says. “They look at it as a very strong voice, but more for a fringe of Albertans. It might be a good and lively read, but it’s not something you look to for to take the true pulse of the West.”

Back East – and, arguably, where it counts most, on Parliament Hill – the Standard gets mixed reviews. At least prior to this year’s election, it didn’t make inroads with a key political demographic; prominent Canadian political journalists like Jeffrey Simpson, Richard Gwyn and Lawrence Martin, for example, don’t read it. “I’ve never read the Standard,” remarks Hugh Winsor, long-time columnist for the Globe. “When I want to know what is happening in the Canadian right, I just look at the National Post.” Other columnists, including John Ibbitson, Graham Fraser and Chantal Hébert, glance at it in varying degrees in the interests of their job as political writers. Unsurprisingly, the journalists who do read it regularly tend to have links to the West themselves, like Martin or Laghi, or tilt towards the right of the political spectrum, like John Ivison.

The problem, Martin says, comes back to controversy. You get the feeling that The Ghost of Ezra’s Past is floating above copies of the Standard on Parliament Hill, and not for the better. “Levant has a reputation in Ottawa,” Martin says, “as being the ‘Western-Dial-a-Rant.’ If you need a quote from someone who says anything that conforms to the old western stereotype, he’s the one to call.” Specifically, Martin refers to Levant’s failure as Day’s communications director as the reason the magazine isn’t taken more seriously. “That kind of reputation lingers,” he says.

It doesn’t sound fair, but that’s politics, and, as Levant insists, he doesn’t do politics anymore. He still does controversy, though, and it has erupted around the magazine in the past few months – with repercussions. “A handful of advertisers have decided to cool off for a bit,” he admits. Two of the more high-profile losses include Indigo Books & Music Inc., which pulled the magazine off its shelves, and Air Canada, which temporarily suspended distribution of the 5,000 copies per issue it placed on selected flights and in their elite Maple Leaf Lounges, primarily because of security concerns based on the republished Danish cartoons. “We value our relationship with Air Canada,” he says, “and hope to have them back.”

Levant says that there is still a plus side, claiming that individual subscriptions have increased, largely on the basis of support for the Standard‘s approach to freedom of speech. “We’ve had two walk-up ad sales because of the hype by advertisers seeking to capture our larger number of eyeballs,” he says. “Most advertisers are in the business of buying eyeballs, not engaging in a navel-gazing editorial debate.” He dismisses the speculation of the Standard‘s economic losses as schadenfreude by what he calls “politically correct journalists.” “Much of the media speculation about this issue is a projection of other journalists’ mixed feelings about not demonstrating their own commitments to journalistic ideals like free speech and independence,” he claims. “Some journalists want to see evidence that our publishing the cartoons was economically dangerous to justify, ex post facto, their own meek decisions.”

Polarizing controversies aside, Levant insists that the Western Standard is serious about journalism. “We’re building a large national reputation as an independent magazine that doesn’t take orders from anyone,” he says. “It’s been a real coming of age, where we showed we are real journalists who care about the ideals of the craft.”

The publisher and the editor-in-chief get together near the back of the office, beside a Warholian display ofLibrano$ posters plastered over the wall. A photographer snaps pictures of Levant hamming it up, grabbing Libin by the neck and giving him a mock noogie. It’s consistent with the Standard‘s self-styled brand: feisty, irreverent, over the top.

“We aren’t as immediate as daily newspapers or television,” Levant says, holding up a copy of the poster. “So we have to do stuff like this to compete. You have to rely on the strengths of your medium – the chance to be more reflective, to come up with neat ideas that couldn’t be executed in a twenty-four-hour news cycle.” He chuckles. “It was such a hit. All over this country there’s this Librano$ poster up in peoples offices all over Parliament Hill.”

Gimmicks aside, any impact the Standard has had so far as “serious political journalism” is questionable – at least on an official level. It does seem to have made inroads at the grassroots level, notably among closet conservatives in the middle of Liberal-land. Jane Taber of the Globe reported on January 12 that a mole had leaked copies of the Liberal Red Book to members of the press corps. The Standard was one of the first recipients. “We posted it on our blog about ten hours before the Liberals announced it,” says Libin, noting that it was interesting that the mole, which he suspects is “very highly placed in the Liberal organization,” leaked it specifically to the magazine. With its outspoken brand of conservatism, the Standard may be garnering a guerrilla force of disgruntled central Canadians chafing under years of rule by the natural governing party.

Which is a thing of the past – for now. As of January 24 the Canadian electoral reality is blue: Conservatives, 124 seats; Liberals, 103; the rest, 81, plus or minus one due to partisan shenanigans. The West wants in? The West is in. “Most of our sources in the Tory party, are moving into the centre of the action,” Levant says. With the new government, the theory goes, a whole new range of people might pick up the Standard, and he’s considering adding a reporter on the ground in Ottawa. “I think we’re favourite bedtime reading for some of the cabinet ministers,” he claims. “People who want to ‘get’ Harper and the West will definitely find us of use.”

But being a primer on who runs Ottawa now doesn’t imply the Standard will be any less vigilant, vows Libin. “This Tory party isn’t exactly the conservative party that westerners really desire,” he says. “We’re not a Conservative Party magazine. We’ll be watching them just as closely as we watched the Liberals. If they implement stupid policies – which they surely will – then we’ll say so.”

It’s a bold promise, and one that stays true to the proud western nature of the magazine, which Levant is only too happy to espouse. “Our heart is in the West, our headquarters is in the West, our emphasis is on the West,” he declares. “‘Western is our brand. It means entrepreneurial, pioneering, swashbuckling, politically incorrect, growth, youth.”

The Standard, in being too western, misses the mark in punching above its own weight and having a real national impact. Yet does it matter, if the principals involved are being true to their principles and having far too much fun to care? If the goal is serious political journalism, it does. In order to influence the national discourse, a publication needs to engage a political system as much as it agitates it. The controversies that develop over the magazine’s attention-grabbing antics ultimately detract from its news coverage – there’s only so much influence you can have when people are talking about you, and not with you.

After the briefing, National Post crime reporter Nicholas Kohler (who is now with Maclean’s) begs Ross’s friends to talk about her, to give him something new to write, something no other paper has. “No comment,” a guy shouts back.

No matter. The next morning, the Post – along with the Toronto Sun – features Ross on the front page. She becomes province-wide news with articles in papers such as the Ottawa Citizen, The Hamilton Spectator andThe Peterborough Examiner. The following day, the media frenzy goes national with a headshot of the effervescent blonde plastered on the pages of over twenty dailies including the Edmonton Journal, The Daily News in Kamloops and the Cape Breton Post.

Not all missing persons, however, become celebrities. For every Alicia Ross there is a Misha Kleider, a 24-year-old from Vancouver who didn’t make it beyond a police news release. In fact, the list of missing and unreported people goes on and on with cases such as Ayesha Hussein, 18. Only a handful of the thousands of Canadians who disappear each year make the front page – and the ones who do are typically young women (frequently white, often attractive) from good families and nice neighbourhoods. But while socio-economic and racial factors can play a role, the drive to match – and, ideally, beat – the competition usually determines the amount of coverage a case will get.

When I was 13, I moved with my family into a house two blocks from Ross’s home. I began Grade 9 at Thornlea Secondary Schooll just after she graduated. Her name was probably scribbled amongst the many others on the cabin walls at Camp White Pine: “Alicia Ross wuz here.” Even though we never met, we had much in common. If I went missing, I’d likely be described as bubbly, ambitious and responsible. We’ve both taken kick-boxing classes and travelled – she to Australia, I to Europe and Israel. Although I can’t single-handedly portage a canoe through thick Algonquin Park bush, we both listened to The Beatles on our iPods and loved our dogs. That’s what makes stories about missing persons tick – they’re relatable. It could have been me.

If I went missing, I would probably make headlines because I fit the profile: young, white and middle-class. There are two kinds of stories. The first are conventional ones about politics and policies, money and power. A Stephen Harper speech, for example, fulfills journalism’s traditional definition of newsworthy material. The second are relatable and sensational stories about murders and missing people. David Estok, an adjunct professor of journalism at the University of Western Ontario (UWO), explains that within missing persons coverage there are two types of stories. The first, he says, is about well-known people, and these stories get lots of media coverage. The second is about the coverage of unknowns. “If the person is found, either dead or alive, it is a complete story with a beginning, a middle and an end, and there will be lots of coverage,” says Estok. “If the person is not found, the coverage dies down because the media get bored and they assume their readers are bored.”

These stories start when police get a report that someone is missing and alert media outlets with a press release. York Regional Police send the release by fax or email to more than a hundred media outlets, most of them in the Greater Toronto Area. In some regions, including Toronto, police offer an Internet subscription service. Along with 1,124 other subscribers at the time, I received as many as five or six releases a day.

The media’s urge to sensationalize some of these stories certainly isn’t new, but it does go in cycles. The current wave started in the early 1990s with the horrific case of Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka. When Leslie Mahaffy disappeared in June 1991, police assumed the 14-year-old had run away as she had earlier that year. The media published no reports until police found her dismembered body encased in concrete in a lake two weeks later. But when Kristen French was abducted in April 1992, police connected the cases, and the 15-year-old quickly became front-page news.

Since then, coverage has swelled. Not coincidentally, so has the competition, especially after the arrival of the Post sparked a newspaper war. In 2003, Holly Jones disappeared from her Parkdale neighbourhood in Toronto after walking a friend home. Even after the 10-year-old’s body parts were found in two bags off Toronto Island, the media searched for new angles, including her murderer’s pornography addiction. Later that year, someone snatched Cecilia Zhang from her North York bedroom, and media outlets across the country fixated on her story until police identified her remains in a wooded ravine more than five months later. Canadian newspapers have published more than 1,500 articles about the 9-year-old, and she’s often cited as background in stories about new cases. Still, this pales in comparison to U.S. media reaction to such cases. Elizabeth Smart, for example, a 14-year-old abducted from her Salt Lake City bedroom, became a tabloid favourite during the nine months she was held captive. Publications invented all kinds of theories – including that she had been abducted by aliens. The National Enquirer even speculated her family was involved in a gay sex ring.

Gregory Boyd Bell, The Globe and Mail‘s Toronto editor, asks himself three basic questions when deciding whether to cover a lead: Is it a good story? Is it an important story? Does my reader need to know this? With Ross, it was a no-brainer – yes, yes and yes. “People who live in nice neighbourhoods and in nice homes don’t just go missing overnight,” he says. “It was readily apparent, immediately, that this was not going to have a happy ending.”

The truth is that most cases do have happy endings. The Canadian Association of Police Boards claims that ninety per cent of missing people surface within two weeks. And editors naturally want to avoid false alarms. Dailies, bound by a twenty-four-hour cycle, face challenges broadcasters don’t. “Here’s the problem,” saysToronto Star crime reporter Bob Mitchell. “When people go missing at ten in the morning, we don’t know whether they’re going to be found before the paper hits the stands.”

Mitchell uses the same criteria as Boyd Bell to evaluate the releases he sees. When he calls police to learn more, the first questions he asks are: Is this a runaway? Or is there something more to this? He then consults his editors, who usually decide to wait until day two to run the story, in case the person surfaces.

Few news outlets hesitated on Ross. “With Alicia we were inundated with media calls daily,” says Kim Killby, who was a corporate communications officer with York Regional Police during the case. “This is the opposite of most cases. Usually, I have to call the media and beg them to air a story. We consider ourselves lucky if we see it on the local Rogers cable station.” Still, police usually put out press releases just in case something terrible has happened. Unfortunately, the press releases don’t always receive enough attention. When Rene Charlebois went missing in December 2003, everyone assumed that the quiet 15-year-old had run away after Peel Regional Police received reports that he’d been spotted. Nonetheless, they issued a press release asking the public for help within a week of his disappearance. The media ignored it.

After speaking to the boy’s mother, Mitchell was sure Charlebois hadn’t run away, but he couldn’t convince his uninterested editors. The story sat on his desk until March, when Charlebois’s dismembered body turned up in a public landfill site. Even then, it wasn’t a big story until the next month, when police tied a convicted pedophile named Douglas Donald Moore – who committed suicide in his jail cell – to the case. “Rene Charlebois,” says Mitchell, “is a thorn in my side.”

In August 2005, Aziz Fatima Nizam Ahman grabs her purse around 1 P.M. and tells her mother she’s heading to the Canadian Forces Base Borden, where she used to work. The 18-year-old never arrives. A Star brief announcing her disappearance includes a photo of the brown-skinned, full-lipped Ahman clad in her high school graduation cap and gown. The same photo runs in the Sun. I email Colin MacKenzie, the Globe‘s managing editor, to ask why his paper is ignoring Ahman. “She was reported missing in a 9:11 P.M. police news release on August 25,” he responds. “We didn’t run anything because by the time we looked at it the next morning, she had phoned her parents to say she was fine.” The Star drops the story without alerting readers she had been found, and I accidentally skip over the Sun‘s brief bearing the miniscule headline: “Woman Found.” For weeks I think she is missing and neglected by the media, perhaps because she is an immigrant from a struggling neighbourhood.

In September, I sit on the subway flipping through the East York Mirror when I see a photo of a black girl with piercing brown eyes and the headline “Public’s Help Sought.” Alisha Nollmeyer, 12, was last seen four days ago at 7 A.M. She is five-foot-seven, 115 pounds, with straight, shoulder-length hair in a ponytail and a thin build. That’s it. I flip the pages searching for more. Nothing. “Why no Amber Alert?” I say out loud in the crowded subway car. At my stop, I rush to the newsstand to grab the Sun, the Globe and the Post. I comb the pages. Nothing. I mention it to my mom. “Do you think it’s because she’s black?” she asks. “It’s because she’s black,” smirks a friend. Mistrust of the media is widespread, but, in this case, unwarranted, because Nollmeyer is a repeat runaway who turns up safe days later.

Not surprisingly, reporters and editors deny race is a factor. “Whether they’re black, Chinese, it doesn’t matter,” says Mitchell. “It’s about the circumstances.” Those circumstances include the location (rural areas get neglected while the media spotlight shines on urban centres) and police tactics (extensive searches and press conferences mean big news). “It also depends what other news is happening in the world,” says Boyd Bell. The Ross obsession, for example, faded during hurricane Katrina.

Stephen J. A. Ward, associate professor of journalism ethics at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism, says gender, age and socio-economic status do in fact influence coverage. As Paul C. Whitehead, a UWO sociology professor says, “There is a lot of interest in middle-class people as opposed to working-class people. It’s more interesting than when a poor 16-year-old black kid goes missing.” It’s no surprise that newspapers choose to cover people who are most like their predominantly middle-class readers, but that can mean missing some big stories. When sixty-one women vanished from Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood over two decades, they received little coverage until police found evidence of the murders, leading them to charge pig farmer Robert Pickton with twenty-seven first-degree murders. “If these women were wives of white, middle-class men instead of aboriginal prostitutes, they would have gotten much more attention off the bat,” says Ward. “This is systemic racism and classism growing from social attitudes towards the homeless and powerless.” He suggests editors think about why they are or aren’t writing about a particular person. “It cannot be totally equal, but the disparities can be evened out.” And while he doesn’t believe editors are racist, “It is important to remember that racism can be unconscious.”

Star columnist Linda Diebel sees no race bias in her own work and points out that she’s worked on cases involving many different races. But, she says, “You can only be responsible for the work you do yourself.”

On the day reporters first gather outside Alicia Ross’s home, Kohler hears that reporters have been calling Ross’s office line, hoping to speak to one of her colleagues. They’re disappointed when they get her voicemail from her last day at work: “Hi, it’s Alicia Ross on Tuesday, August 16. I am in the office today but I can’t take your call…” Four days later, Kohler is determined to speak to Ross’s parents, Sharon and Julius Fortis.

“Hello?”

“Hi, this is Nicholas Kohler from the National Post…”

A Fortis family friend says that neither parent can take the call. The reporter pushes, asking if anyone there read his article about her love of Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd and her Brady Bunch? like family. Minutes later, a man comes on.

“Hello. This is Julius Fortis…”

They chat for a while before Fortis opens up. “Alicia’s always been my Pooky,” he says. “I don’t know why…it’s just a name. Pooky. I call her Pooky. That’s all.”

Kohler jumps on the Pooky angle. With no new leads in the case, that is as good as it gets. “Pooky Didn’t Leave on Own: Stepdad” is plastered across the front page the next morning. As the only one with a new angle – even if it was just a nickname – the Post trumps the competition.

Ironically, Kohler skipped the first police release about Ross. It’s not uncommon to get ideas from other media. Sun crime reporter Rob Lamberti admits, “It’s no secret that we sometimes do what other media do.” Still, the rivalry on these stories is fierce, and reporters feel the pressure from their editors to get something the other guys don’t have. On August 28, 2005, the Star won the day with a front page that looked like the Ross family’s photo album. Snapshots captured Alicia as a toddler driving her toy car, riding a merry-go-round, swimming with dolphins, in a school portrait and blowing out the candles on her twenty-fifth birthday cake.

It may have been overkill, but everyone noticed. “If you can beat the other person, go for it,” says Sunreporter Jack Boland. “The problem is there is too much saturation of media. There are way more papers than there used to be, and press conferences are packed.” The problem is, competition breeds repetition. “There is the sense that you have multiple occurrences happening,” says Whitehead, “when in fact it’s the same one being repeated over and over again with only a slight bit more information.”

And repetition breeds fear. There has not been another case like Ross’s in my neighbourhood during my lifetime, but crime is a major issue for urbanites, and the media hype it recklessly. To counter the fear, Ward suggests the media teach parents how to do a reference check on babysitters and street-proof their kids. “Journalists,” he says, “need to take a less sensational approach, tell the whole story, including what people can do.”

After four months of research for this article, I finally muster the courage to call Sharon Fortis. My hand shakes as I dial the number. I’m terrified she’ll hang up on me, but instead, after my stuttering plea, she pauses before putting me at ease.

“Well,” she says. “I’d love to help you out, but I’m just on the other line. Are you at home? I can call you right back.”

Within thirty minutes I understand for the first time how the news desensitizes us. It doesn’t matter that I’ve read every article, stared at every photo and know every detail. When I hear Fortis’s voice crack, I begin to see Alicia as human and not a creature conjured by the media. Through tears she speaks about reporters who followed her as she walked her dogs. As I fight to hold back my own tears, I want to reach through the phone and hug her, to comfort her the same way I might my own mom – the way I’m sure Alicia would want her to be comforted.

Instead, she takes me back to six days after Alicia disappeared. “I believed she was alive and I needed to get a message to my daughter,” says Fortis. “Perhaps she could see or hear me. I knew I had to bring the issue to the forefront.” Although a total novice with media, she realized she needed help to find her daughter. The day before, she’d made a plea during a press conference. “I will never, ever give up. You will come home, Alicia. You’re going to come home, safe and sound.” When a friend of the Globe‘s Christie Blatchford approached Fortis about giving an interview, Fortis gave it some thought. The petite blonde decided to give her first one-on-one interview, based also in part on Blatchford’s reputation for the way she’s handled these kinds of tragedies in the past. The story ran on the front page under the headline: “Big Family is Missing One of Its Jewels.”

After that, Fortis sifted through the business cards on her kitchen table and took media calls. She began welcoming strangers with cameras and tape recorders into her home, sharing photos and anecdotes. She and her husband described a mischievous little girl who grew into a soft-spoken adventurer who jogged with her sister, ponytail swinging side to side. They cherished a compassionate Alicia who visited her high school sweetheart’s mother after he was killed in a car accident. Later, they tried to think of anything new to keep the story alive.

The Fortises may have only known it instinctively, but while class and race do play a part, an even greater factor in the amount of play a case gets is the willingness of the family to feed the media’s hunger for narrative details. “Coverage depends on how much cooperation there is from the family,” says the Star‘s Mitchell. “Families need to reach out. The more publicity they can get, the better chance they have of finding their child.”

If that sounds like a self-serving attitude, Mitchell can be forgiven. After all, covering missing people is far from the most pleasant assignment for a reporter. But not everyone agrees with him. Blatchford, for instance, thinks the family’s involvement makes the reporter’s job even trickier. “It’s not easy talking to people who are in shock and grieving and frantic with fear,” she says. “If I went missing as a little girl, my dad probably would have been out there with a fucking shotgun telling the media to get away. People don’t always know where to draw the line. It’s easy for people to forget I’m not their friend. The line drawing has to be done by me.”

But Sharon Fortis seemed to know what the media could do for her, and she was willing to accommodate them for the sake of her daughter. “We kept pushing until this monster came forward.” For the public, the story became all the more relatable when the monster turned out to be the 31-yearold next-door neighbour, Daniel Sylvester. He confessed to the abduction and murder of Ross, leading police northeast of Toronto to where he dumped her remains in two separate locations. On September 21, 2005, photos of a bushy-browed Sylvester sporting a Gap T-shirt and empty expression on his face dominated the front pages. Newspapers scurried to outdo their competitors. After all, the only story bigger than a missing woman is a dead one.