The castle on Mount Pleasant Road is formidable. After extensive negotiations to secure an audience with Chatelaine’s queen, editor-in-chief Sara Angel — including one cancellation, attributed to an unexpected out-of-town trip — I’ve been given 30 minutes of her time. But it isn’t quite that simple. After checking in with security, I head up to the 11th floor of Rogers headquarters in Toronto, three levels above the Chatelaine offices. I’m meeting first with director of communications in consumer publishing for Rogers, Suneel Khanna; he’s my guide for the afternoon. A few minutes later, we descend to the eighth floor. Khanna leads me through passageways of cubicles. I struggle to commit the scene to memory as he navigates quickly. We round a corner near the end of the row and I see the queen, sitting at her desk. She looks up and smiles — big grin, slightly askew — before silently waving us in as she wraps up a phone call. Before I can get to my first question, her BlackBerry rings from the desk. The queen hesitates for a moment then moves towards the phone. “I’m sorry,” she tells me, getting up. “Just… not very many people have this number.”

But something’s certainly had Chatelaine’s number for the past year and a half. Mass resignations. Pissed-off freelancers. Nine months without an editor-in-chief. Erratic newsstand sales. Some embarrassing editorial decisions. An industry punch line. The subject and source of more rumour and gossip than a daytime soap. This is not exactly the way I would expect a magazine to follow up on what was, by all accounts, its best year. In 2005, Chatelaine reached higher than any Canadian magazine before it, breaking the $50 million mark in annual revenue.  Relatively new editor-in-chief Kim Pittaway was hitting her stride. The magazine had a bigger circulation than any other women’s title in Canada. But by the time the year was wrapping up, things seemed destined to change. Pittaway, a highly respected journalist, had quit amid well-publicized criticisms of the magazine’s publisher, Kerry Mitchell.  What followed was a nine-month search for a new editor-in-chief while the magazine fell into turmoil. Management launched an international campaign to fill the position, and rumours were rampant about possible choices. While names such as Karen Kain and Adrienne Clarkson popped up, more realistic whisperings suggested Jane Francisco, editor-in-chief of Wish, and Charlotte Empey, former editor-in-chief of Canadian Living.

But no one mentioned Sara Angel. When Rogers announced in May 2006 that she’d be taking over, few staff at Chatelaine had heard the name before. Her expertise was book publishing, a world Angel (then using her maiden name, Borins) entered in 1992 as an intern at Madison Press Books. Over the next eight years, she built her career working mainly on picture-heavy titles for various companies before founding her own firm, Otherwise Editions, in 2000. With Otherwise, she was behind multiple bestsellers, including The Trudeau Albums and Canada: Our Century. She had, in fact, only ever worked at one magazine, the now-defunct Saturday Night, as a visual features editor and occasional writer.

Possibly because of this limited cachet in the insular magazine industry, Angel wasn’t the obvious first choice for Chatelaine’s top job. While Mitchell was “familiar with some of her work,” Masthead reports that the publisher started pursuing Angel in March 2006, more than six months after the search began. Yet, in the end, Mitchell entrusted her with one of the country’s most successful magazines. “It’s uncommon,” says Bill Shields, Masthead editor, of both the lengthy delay and the ultimate selection.  “But it gets to the second-rate status that editorial seems to have at Chatelaine. If you can go for nine months without an editor, and if you can tolerate one of the most toxic editorial environments for an even longer time, your opinion of the value of editorial probably isn’t that high.”  The direction of the magazine has shifted several times since Pittaway left. Different leaders have had different visions, and with all the changes Chatelaine has become significantly removed from what it — in its most successful year ever — used to be. “The ol’ gal is now an impressive 79 years old,” says Dré Dee, former senior features editor. “What she needs is maybe a little tummy tuck, and maybe a little eye lift. Instead, she’s been wheeled into Extreme Makeover about six times over the past two years. She must be scarred, bruised and generally quite miserable.”

Magazines do, however, go through upheavals from time to time, usually after sudden shifts at the top of a masthead. Surprisingly, despite the juicy gossip, continuing personnel turnover and disruptive management issues, the bottom line hasn’t suffered much. What’s more, despite a perplexing push toward high-end, “aspirational” service content, the feature journalism shows signs of becoming the strongest and most indepth it’s been in more than a decade.

The first indication of trouble at Chatelaine came abruptly, on August 29, 2005. Kim Pittaway, then editor-in-chief, returned from a vacation and promptly quit — no two week’s notice, no severance package, no new job lined up. Features editor Lori Seymour (currently on maternity leave) recalls visiting Pittaway in her office that morning with an everyday question about an article, to which she got an everyday response. Later that afternoon, Mitchell called a meeting and staff shuffled over to their usual gathering spot in the art department. “Kim Pittaway has left,” the publisher said, “and she won’t be coming back.”

In the days that followed, Pittaway’s public airing of dirty laundry pointed at Mitchell as the catalyst in her resignation. Though she’d been editor-in-chief only since the previous fall, that month marked Pittaway’s 11th year working with Chatelaine, having first appeared as a freelance writer in 1994. She claimed Mitchell was increasingly stepping on editorial territory. “The publisher told me my opinion was important, but hers was very, very important,” she said to The Globe and Mail, and added to Masthead, “I wasn’t going to be a hand puppet.”  But Mitchell says Pittaway didn’t voice her concerns. “I’ve never heard Kim say that [she felt pressured to compromise her editorial integrity],” asserts Mitchell. “I’m sorry she made the decision that she did, but I wish her very well.”

At the time, the team was in the midst of production on the November issue, what would be Chatelaine’s biggest ever. Beth Hitchcock — a six-year veteran at the magazine — was quickly thrust to the helm. Though her title of executive editor didn’t change, Hitchcock took on some of Pittaway’s responsibilities. After consulting with Mitchell, Hitchcock also agreed to take on the editor’s page. In the final product, the first installment of her letter to readers, it was clear Hitchcock wasn’t looking to outright replace Pittaway; the editorial’s title, “Between You & Me,” remained unchanged, as did the inclusion of “You First,” a blurb preceding the letter that showcased a reader’s response to a question posed in the previous issue. Hitchcock devoted a paragraph, buried in the middle of the editorial, saluting Pittaway. She’d originally written much more about the legacy and work of her predecessor, but according to Hitchcock, Mitchell asked her to water it down, claiming it was too sad and questioning whether there had to be so many words devoted to Pittaway. Hitchcock says she felt she didn’t have a choice in making the changes.

Toward the end of November, Chatelaine had been without an editor-in-chief for almost three months. Though Mitchell hoped to have the position filled by December, no end was in sight. The magazine looked for help from its sister, Quebec’s Châtelaine. Lise Ravary, then editorin-chief of the magazine (France Lefebvre took over the position in February 2007), became vice-president and editorial director of women’s titles and new magazine brands. Her focus at the outset was to help package Chatelaine, give it direction and act as “a shoulder to cry on” for staff frustrated by the lack of leadership. She was essentially the interim editor-in-chief.  But Christmas was just around the corner and the fanfare surrounding Ravary’s arrival died down when she went on holidays. With much of January being a transition period, Ravary didn’t get a serious start on her new position until the end of that month.

By then, staff casualties were coming hard and fast. Caren Watkins, the magazine’s art director since 1995, quit in December. Like Pittaway, she didn’t have another job waiting.  “Things were shifting a little bit, and it was unclear where the publisher was going to go,” says Watkins, now editor-in-chief of Gardening Life. “I thought it was a really good time to leave and go freelance.” Not long after Watkins jumped ship, managing editor Bonny Reichert departed as well. She’d already resigned once, in 2005, but Mitchell called her the night Pittaway quit to ask her to return on contract. After numerous extensions, Reichert left on good terms in January.

With Watkins and Reichert gone, though, the burden on Hitchcock grew heavier. She was already juggling the responsibilities of three different jobs — her role as executive editor of services in addition to elements of the roles of managing editor and editor-in-chief. “We were just sort of floundering,” says Seymour. “Something as large as Chatelaine, it needs focus and leadership.” To many, Hitchcock seemed like the most obvious choice to lead the magazine. Aside from having the most editorial seniority, she was, essentially, already doing the job. But the search for a leader from outside the Chatelaine family continued. “It’s not an opportunity that Beth pursued,” says Mitchell. Hitchcock, however, says she was never asked about her interest in the job, and staff members say it was clear she was never going to be the boss. “It seemed to me,” Seymour recalls, “that Beth was here to do the work until we could find someone to make the official leader. And I think it bore out that way, too.”

Meanwhile, Mitchell was looking to recruit new senior level staff. She brought in Rhonda Rovan, an ex-style editor at Canadian Living, on a one-year contract as contributing style editor,  to lead the services department. Mitchell also courted Craig Offman, a Torontonian who’d made his name as a reporter in the United States. He became executive editor, with many of his responsibilities being those that Hitchcock was slated to take on before Pittaway left. Hitchcock, who’d now been offered the title of managing editor, had not yet met Offman when his hiring was finalized. The situation led to confusion about the responsibilities of different positions and the leadership structure. Soon after, Hitchcock met with Mitchell for a performance review, but told her publisher before the review began that she was resigning. Three weeks later, on February 3, Hitchcock was gone. And like senior designer Kim Zagar, who quit the same week, she had no job on the horizon.

In 2000, Mitchell was publisher of Canadian Living magazine. She’d been there four years, following other publisher positions at fellow Telemedia titles Equinox and Style at Home (all now owned by Transcontinental Media). That year, Canadian Living stirred up controversy when it printed a supplement supporting genetically modified food, paid for by the Canadian Food Inspection Agency (CFIA). “Biotechnology is a complex issue,” Mitchell told The Gazette in Montreal at the time. “But we tackle many complex issues and clarify them for our readers.” Though the magazine’s New Business Initiatives Group wrote the supplement, all the information it included came straight from the CFIA, according to The Gazette. Mitchell’s next corporate position was at InBusiness Media Network, an Ottawa-based company behind outlets such as Le Montréal Économique and Toronto Business Journal. Her stint as chief operating officer for the company lasted until 2002, when she jumped to Rogers to become publisher of Profit magazine. Two years later, she was entrusted with Chatelaine, the company’s most lucrative title (it’s brought in more cash than Maclean’ssince 2001).

In July 2004, Mitchell arrived at Chatelaine amid extensive upper-level shuffling. The previous month, editor-in-chief Rona Maynard announced she would be resigning. She’d been in charge of the magazine since late 1994, and planned to end her tenure with the December 2004 issue. Under Maynard, the magazine became more personal, often dealing with the struggles, stories and needs of everyday women. “Our readers have told us, ‘This magazine is for and about me,’” Maynard said in Toronto Life. “That’s how they like it, and that’s how they want it to be.” Chatelaine also aligned itself more closely with Canadian Living, scrapping celebrity-focused covers and featuring models, food and flowers instead. (Angel, on the other hand, has featured three celebrities on her covers thus far: Nigella Lawson, Jann Arden and Sophie Grégoire.) Maynard hand-picked Pittaway to replace her with help from publisher Donna Clark. “I have identified and promoted and left in place a very strong successor who is going to do a stunning job,” Maynard told Masthead. Managing editor since 2001, Pittaway had also been a columnist, freelance editor and writer for Chatelaine at various times. Meanwhile, Clark was set to focus on her position as senior vice-president of women’s titles at Rogers when Mitchell took over the publisher’s duties. Clark had been juggling both jobs, and felt it was becoming too much. But shortly after she dropped the publisher’s position, restructuring eliminated her job as senior vice-president.

With Maynard and Clark gone from senior posts, Pittaway and Mitchell were left at the top. Eleven issues later, Mitchell’s name was still on the masthead, while Pittaway’s was not. Hitchcock’s name held the top spot for the next six issues, but it too was eventually gone, replaced by Offman’s. As executive editor, it was the first time he’d ever held such a senior position. While Offman was a seasoned reporter, having worked for a number of notable publications — Real Simple, Vanity Fair, Time Canada— his writing experience outweighed his managerial experience. When asked if she was concerned about hiring Offman into what wasChatelaine’s top editorial spot at a time of upheaval, Mitchell replies, “Craig brings a lot of positives to the team.” But Offman wasn’t leading alone. Both Mitchell and Ravary played integral roles in running the magazine, visually and editorially. “The two newspaper reports I read made it seem like I was the first guy in charge in 50 years,” Offman says. “It’s just not true.”

The collaborative approach, however, led to a lack of communication among freelancers, handling editors and bosses. In all, between Pittaway’s resignation and Angel’s hiring, six additional people were responsible for providing editorial direction in some manner: Hitchcock, Reichert, Ravary, Rovan, Offman and Mitchell. As certain staff members left and others came on board (or gained increased editorial sway), editorial approaches shifted. Many freelancers (all of whom declined to be interviewed on the record) describe extreme editorial confusion — stories changing direction multiple times despite initial approval, a breakdown in the autonomy of handling editors and general disorganization at the magazine. According to Dee, most problems stemmed from the top. “By the time the story finally found its way to the approving editor — Craig or Lise or whoever else was taking a look at things from a top-level editing position,” she says, “that person would clearly have a much different understanding of what the story was intended to be, what they personally wanted it to be, who should have written the story instead of the person who did, the issue month it should go in instead of the one it was slated for.” She thinks the decisions from that level sometimes reflected professional judgement calls, but “in the case of some others, who had far less editing experience,” misjudgements were made. Ravary admits that the process at the time wasn’t perfect, but states that it wasn’t out of the ordinary. “You get somebody editing, and then I come in and I have a different vision and I might change a few things around,” she says. “The relationships with freelancers at any magazine always have ups and downs. If we did upset somebody, I’m deeply sorry because it was never intentional.”

But there were also in-house troubles, with some questionable choices made in the issues headed by Offman, Mitchell and Ravary. For example, in May 2006 — when Offman first appeared on the masthead — one of the most noticeable changes was the relocation of The Last Word, a longtime back-of-book page featuring reader letters. It was moved toward the front of the magazine, replaced by a page dubbed Wishful Thinking. In its inaugural appearance, the page featured “Laundry Lad,” a hunky male model folding clothes while oblivious to the women’s underwear draped over his shoulder. Accompanying the photograph was a four-part description of this dreamboat, one part reading, “He’s reliable — he’ll impress house guests with his grooming, including clean feet and trim toenails.” Though foot fetishists may have appreciated Chatelaine’s efforts, the piece seemed rather misguided, and after one more issue (fantasy: an “Instant Cottage”), Wishful Thinking was trashed and The Last Word reinstated.

By the time production wrapped on that issue, Chatelaine had been without an editor-in-chief for more than eight months. Morale had hit bottom. Mitchell commonly opened meetings by jokingly proclaiming, “No, we don’t have a new editor yet,” but few staff members were laughing after the first couple of gatherings. Some felt strung along, the constant promise of permanent leadership and direction holding as much veracity as the weight-loss tips that repeatedly littered the magazine’s pages. Dee says staff was being told by management at least every month that a new editor was very close to being chosen. “When I’ve worked at a magazine and been told that a new publisher, editor-in-chief, or whatever the case may be, was imminent, it means in the next couple of weeks there’s going to be an announcement, and there always is,” she says. “Here, that went on and on and on.”

Though staff was clearly suffering without strong leadership or direction, seeds of positive change were sprouting. Seymour says that Offman spearheaded a push to include meatier, more topical, idea-driven content in the pages of Chatelaine. She says it seemed like they wanted to transform it into something of a general interest magazine that happened to be for women. “At some point, we can’t just be a cookbook and we can’t just be a décor/fashion book,” says Ravary. “What brings people back month after month is our unique ability to tell stories.  Personally, I felt that in previous incarnations of the magazine, it was something that was beginning to lack. Kerry and I felt that it was becoming very service-y.” The Ottawa Citizen reported that Pittaway had wanted to add more substantial features to the mix, but felt pressured by the idea that advertisers wouldn’t want their products placed adjacent to serious, perhaps depressing stories. As a result, the vast majority of features in Pittaway’s issues were either firstperson accounts or a series of small, personal stories told by regular women about a unifying topic. For example, the September 2005 issue included “First Day,” in which five average women shared tales of their “important firsts” — their first day of marriage, say, or their first day in Canada. By the June 2006 issue, after Offman and Ravary moved in, this type of content had all but disappeared. In its place came two strong features: the first, Dan Lett’s lengthy “Who Is Taking Our daughters Away?” explores the disturbingly high incidence of violent crimes against aboriginal women; the other,  “Kandahar’s Feisty Cop” by Katia Janjoura, tells the story of a policewoman in Afghanistan.

Despite the seeming improvement in editorial content, the question remained as to whether or not readers would like the shift. A possible answer came with the release of the 2006 Publisher’s Statements (the magazine’s unaudited but generally accurate claims of circulation and sales) by the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC). While newsstand sales were trending upward year-on-year until March 2006, a decline began with Hitchcock’s last issue in April (interestingly, the first without Watkins heading up art and cover direction). Single copy sales fell by 19 per cent, or 11,384 issues, versus 2005’s audited figures (verified numbers for 2006 likely won’t be released until December 2007). In May, sales were down by 5,461 copies, or eight per cent. But most dramatically, in June 2006, newsstand sales plummeted 55,455 copies, selling 54 per cent less than in June 2005. “What do you want me to say?” Ravary asks, laughing, when questioned about the numbers. “I’m not going to beat myself and I’m not going to beat anybody over it.” She adds, “No one’s going to pretend we were at our best. It was a time in our history, it was a brief moment in our history, and for me, it’s over.”

Is everybody here?” asks Sara Angel from the head of the table, some two months before our one-on-one chat. She’s five minutes late for today’s meeting. Sitting in front of her, and everyone else present, is a copy of the December 2006 issue of Chatelaine. Gracing the glossy, pink cover is a round, chocolate molten cake, garnished with raspberries and sitting on an ornate, antique-looking plate. The dish belongs to Angel. It was her grandmother’s. The issue is Angel’s sixth. While her name appears on the July 2006 masthead, content in the issue was nearly finalized by the time she started on June 1; her first editorial appeared in the August edition. For this late-November post-mortem meeting, staffers have been asked to analyze the December issue and to come prepared with two aspects of the magazine they like and two they don’t. Aside from a few people who have to leave early (they go first) the discussion goes around the table clockwise. Halfway through, it’s Offman’s turn. “What I’m still struggling with is the coherence,” he says. “The sections look different from each other.” For an example, he flips to the issue’s holiday gift guide. “It feels like five or six magazines in one.” Art director Cameron Williamson, hired in September after the position had been vacant for nine months, assures everyone that the January issue is more streamlined (it’s the first he’s worked on). The February issue, he promises, will be even better. Williamson gained prominence at Toro, having won a National Magazine Award in the Art Direction for an Entire Issue category. He met Angel years ago when he interned at Saturday Night.

Visual concerns alleviated, Offman moves on, flipping backward to the front-of-book section. “The only thing that drove me crazy was the ‘Decoding Ignatieff’ thing,” he says, referring to a short piece in which Heather Mallick breaks down Michael Ignatieff by physical features, complete with commentary (for example, his face: “Heathcliffy? No, demonic”).  “I felt like this was just a mass note,” says Offman. “The front of the book is getting so good that this piece lags behind.”

“Do you think the issue was Heather writing it?” Angel suggests. “The stuff that’s presented as front-of-book is presented as Chatelaine’s point of view. Maybe we shouldn’t have our columnists do front-of-book items.”

But Offman just doesn’t get the point of the piece.

“She was sharp in it and, tone-wise, I thought that’s what we were aiming for,” chimes in Maryam Sanati, the deputy editor (a position created when Angel hired her in August). She met Angel while attending Toronto’s Havergal College, a prestigious private school for girls.

“The front-of-book should have some cheek,” says Angel. “It should be thoughtful, fun, thought-provoking.”

“This is an exercise in objectification that we don’t ever see women doing to men,” contends senior articles editor Sheilagh McEvenue. The comment sets off a series of “oohs” and giggles around the table. For the moment, at least, things seem settled at Chatelaine. The staff seems happy.

But just weeks after the meeting, McEvenue is gone, the details of her resignation still unknown (she didn’t return phone calls requesting an interview for this story). She’d been hired at about the same time as Sanati, making her stay at Chatelaine less than four months long. In fact, following Angel’s arrival, six people abandoned senior positions at the magazine: Dee, copy chief Ruth Hanley, deputy art director Daniel MacKinnon, managing editor Margaret Nearing, home editor Amanda Eaton, and McEvenue. All told, three members of the magazine’s editorial staff remain from Pittaway’s days (not including the unscathed team of  “kitchen girls” under longtime food/nutrition editor Monda Rosenberg, or Seymour, who’s set to return from maternity leave at the end of June). “It’s no secret that Chatelaine has been a meat grinder for editorial people,” says Shields. “They’re dropping like flies.”

The December issue, discussed at that meeting, seems to be a good example of Angel’s approach to the brand. Aside from displaying her dishes on the cover, the magazine appears to reflect Angel’s personal — and high-end — taste throughout. For instance, a “Holiday Tipping Guide” in the issue featured recommended gratuities for the likes of nannies, gardeners and interior designers. In the gift guide cited by Offman, numerous lavish suggestions seem absurdly priced for the average Canadian woman — a $280 Louis Vuitton change purse, a $550 box set of three moisturizers, and a $975 wine bottle holder. “There are some things that are going to be affordable and some things that are purely aspirational,” says Angel, her words escaping a mouth boldly outlined in rich, red lipstick, as she touches a hand to the dramatic sweep in her prominent hair. A hint of Valley Girl in her voice betrays her gracious poise. “Our goal with that issue, as with everything that we’re doing, is never to say that everything we do is going to be a bargain item.”

Angel has more than delivered on that promise, with luxury and excess common in her issues, particularly in the fashion spreads. While Pittaway rarely featured an item of clothing priced north of $500, Angel seems set to explode the concept of affordability. The increase in top item price was somewhat steady: a $275 Michael Michael Kors jacket in August 2006, a $595 Anne Klein New York blazer in October, $950 Christian Louboutin python shoes in November (the issue also included a $3,200 diamond watch from Birks as an “Editor’s Pick”), a $1,185 Balenciaga bag in January, an $825 pygmy headdress in February (“…for Valentine’s”), and most recently, a $945 Jeremy Laing jacket in March 2007. One former staffer says the magazine used to receive complaint letters when they featured an item priced higher than $80. Though likely an exaggeration, the point seems clear.

The quality of service pieces, Chatelaine’s meat and potatoes, has also suffered occasionally under Angel. Tips are often unrealistic or simply insipid. In the January issue, the magazine ran what it called the “Chatelaine Better Living Guide.” Angel wrote in her editorial, “This represents the sum of our wisdom — a compendium of the experiences of the real-life Canadian women we surveyed.” One of the helpful tips in the guide was, “Buy baskets — they’re the all-purpose solution to the chaos that is family life.” Another tip? “Be a charming dinner guest.” Many home décor ideas have been equally useless for “real-life Canadian women.” In the March issue, a bathroom redecorating spread called “Vanity Fair” suggested,  “Hang a dreamy chandelier over your tub to add a touch of romantic luxury.” Chatelaine was definitely no longer for every Canadian woman. “I’m not clear on who the reader is now,”  says Hitchcock. “I’ve been to countless focus groups, I’ve met readers at events, I’ve read piles high to the ceiling of reader letters. I don’t see the reader who I knew reflected in the magazine anymore.”

The continuing saga of Chatelaine’s sales and circulation success is a two-sided affair. One perspective suggests ongoing trouble at the newsstand. For the July through December 2006 period, the monthly average of single-copy sales dropped 19 per cent from 2005 figures. It was Chatelaine’s worst second half since 2001. Meanwhile, across town at the offices of their chief rival, Canadian Living, numbers are booming. In the same period that Chatelaine fell 19 per cent, Canadian Living’s single-copy sales jumped by 8.7 per cent, despite having no sponsored subscriptions or grace copies (Chatelaine’s second-half figures, by comparison, included a per-month average of 100,822 sponsored subscriptions and 9,818 grace copies).

Much of the decline in Chatelaine’s single-copy sales figures can be attributed to the launch of an additional full issue. Dubbed October Halloween, single-copy sales of the issue barely broke 30,000, dragging down the average across the board. In fact, Chatelaine’s regular October issue sold 2,500 more copies in 2006 than in 2005. Though the magazine repeated the feat in November, exceeding 2005 sales by some 1,700, newsstand figures fell again in December, down 16 per cent from 2005.

All other paper-based indications, however, show that Chatelaine has withstood its upheaval. Subscriptions declined by only a single percentage point in the second half of 2006 — which Mitchell insists was a managed reduction — now sitting consistently at around 540,000. Chatelaine’s massive ad revenue also grew in 2006, up 15 per cent from its previous record-breaking year to hit $68.9 million (or $48.2 million, using the 0.7 weighting multiple generally employed by Masthead to account for discounting). Accompanying this growth was a 15 per cent increase in run-of-press ad pages — 146, to be exact — pushing the 2006 total to 1,445. By all financial measures, it was a banner year for Chatelaine.

And, perhaps surprisingly, there are positive changes on the editorial front. The resurgence of more narrative, journalistic features initiated under Offman has continued. Since last fall,  the magazine has featured some of its strongest stories in years. The September issue included an excellent 4,000-word story by Alexandra Gill about clothing company lululemon athletica. Titled “Mind-bending Truth: The Untold Story of lululemon,” Gill’s piece explores the connection between the company’s founder, Chip Wilson, and the controversial self-help organization Landmark Education Corp. Another notable feature, from the January 2007 issue, was Rebecca Godfrey’s “Murder and Mystery,” an emotional story about two parents from British Columbia who forgive one of their daughter’s killers. “In my opinion, women readers have wanted more meat on the bones of their stories for a very long time,” says Sally Armstrong, former editor-at-large for Chatelaine, and now a contributing editor. “It’s to be applauded that the current leadership is addressing that issue.” There are others in the industry, such as investigative reporter and ex-Elm Street editor Stevie Cameron, who are pleased with the change. “I stopped working for the former Chatelaine years ago because of its excruciating editing practices and its unwillingness to offend anyone,” she says, adding that she penned two technology pieces for the magazine last year and hopes to write more once her schedule allows it. Cameron remains listed as a contributor on the masthead.

While other freelance writers continue to voice complaints about the editing process, Angel says she’s the first to tell them that, in many ways, the magazine’s going through an editorial start-up. She admits there have been stumbles along the road, but is adamant that she has been successful. “It’s like buying a house that needs a complete overhaul,” she says. “If you invite your friends over after two weeks, after three weeks, even after six months of work, it’s not going to look the way you want it to.”

Thirty minutes into my audience with Angel, Khanna comes back into the office. My time with Chatelaine’s newest monarch is up. We shake hands again and I leave while Angel collects her things and moves on to another meeting. Khanna walks me down a new set of grey cubicle passageways. He quickly leads me to the elevators. We shake hands and he heads back upstairs. While I may have breached Chatelaine’s walls, I was told little, didn’t see much and learned even less. The castle remains formidable.

Andy Barrie pulls up in a taxi to the Front Street entrance of CBC’s downtown Toronto fortress at approximately 5:30 a.m. After settling the fare with his long-term driver, who jokes that Barrie has paid for at least 10 per cent of his mortgage, the king of morning radio grabs his copies of The Globe and Mail and Now, a Toronto alternative weekly. He shuffles toward the doors, letting a few flyers fall out of the papers. Then the soft-bellied man with pure white hair passes through the restricted-access interior gates. He takes the elevator up CBC’s tower to the third floor and heads to his desk. Amid family photographs, books, notes and a computer, there is a little black pillow with white lettering that reads, “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.” A large picture of Barrie as a young boy at Camp Skylemar in Naples, Maine, shows him wearing headphones, leaning over a microphone. As the camp’s radio host for “The Wake-up,” the nine-year-old played records, gave ball scores and led “camp chatter.” Barrie’s desk also boasts a plaque congratulating him for 10 years of “outstanding contribution to the success of Metro Morning.” These are not empty words of praise. He is the voice of the morning show ranked No. 1 in Canada’s largest city.

While Barrie flips through his morning papers, technician and associate producer Kim Holmgren is already in the control room. Sitting to his left is Gord Cochrane, a wiry, hunched-over man who rattles his knees incessantly. According to Barrie, Metro Morning’s studio director is one of the most valuable players on the “incredibly functional” morning team. The extent to which the show sounds fluid and relaxed, Barrie says, is largely due to Cochrane. The ever-smiling Jim Curran, who has reported on traffic since the show began in 1973, walks in not long after Barrie, carrying a cooler with milk for the crew’s coffee. Other team members, like producer Jessica Low, will trickle in later. At 6:12 a.m. Barrie sits comfortably in the studio with his headphones on, waiting for Judy Maddren to wrap up World Report. Then a red light above Barrie goes on to indicate ‘on-air’ and his voice unfurls like velvet over the airwaves with a leisurely morning greeting.

Across town and a few weeks later, in CFRB studios at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair, Ted Woloshyn entertains himself between on-air moments with cracks about a dating website he’s discovered. “We’ve lost him for the whole morning,” board operator Robert Turner says of Newstalk 1010’s morning show host. Meanwhile, producer Amy Allison chases a story about a Durham farmer who has been selling raw milk without a license and is on a hunger strike. She and Woloshyn disagree about what he and Globe columnist Christie Blatchford, a regular commentator, should discuss. When Blatchford comes on, Woloshyn goes ahead with his idea, ignoring his producer’s wishes. Allison rolls her eyes, huffing audibly. It’s near the end of November 2006, just a few weeks after Woloshyn celebrated his 10th anniversary as the show’s host. On December 15, he will unexpectedly resign, leaving management temporarily unsure of what to do with the show.

Two things are clear about Woloshyn’s departure: “It’s a major change for a major station,” says Brian Thomas, professor of radio news and media issues at Toronto’s Seneca College School of Communication Arts, and Barrie’s success will influence the new show’s direction. Woloshyn’s show was dry, in need of energy, Thomas says, and suggests that CFRB has been tuning in to Metro Morning. “All stations in town compete with each other in one form or another,” he says. “Barrie’s strengthening in the morning would affect CFRB — they’ll pay close attention to what he’s doing to get the ratings.”

So CFRB is fighting to reclaim a larger share of the morning audience with Woloshyn’s mic now in the hands of Bill Carroll. The station has flexed its marketing muscle for the new host with an ad campaign occupying almost 400 of Toronto’s billboards. None of this has anything to do with overtaking CBC though, says Carroll, because his listeners are “much busier, more active people” who would never listen to Barrie in the first place. After stints as co-host on MuchMusic, and news man on Q107 and then AM 640, Carroll joined CFRB as a weekend newscaster, then became news director, until 1999 when he started hosting his own late-morning show. Carroll’s hair and beard are the colour of fire and ash. The man is small but his personality is big and his opinions bigger. Industry veterans such as Jerry Chomyn, director broadcast media at Humber College’s School of Media Studies and Information Technology in Toronto, call Carroll an intelligent interviewer. “He has solid credentials as far as current affairs go,” he says. “His speed to be able to hear what the caller is actually saying and react is one of his strongest skills.” CFRB is using Carroll’s strengths with the hope that they will return the morning show to its glory days of a decade ago.

Perhaps, but back at the CBC building Barrie is safe in the belief that his audience is growing because people want more with their morning coffee than news-talk staples: a constant drumbeat of crime and highway carnage combined with open-line radio and aggressively opinionated hosts. “Private radio, and CFRB in particular, has gone seriously down-market,” says Barrie. “At one time it was an important current affairs station.” Former Metro  Morning host David Schatzky goes even further: “Compared to CBC, CFRB is mindless drivel.”

Metro Morning shot to No. 1 in the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement Canada’s (BBM) ratings, surpassing private morning shows, for the first time in summer 2004. Now nearly a quarter of a million listeners tune in to CBC Radio One’s Toronto morning flagship. But those numbers didn’t happen overnight. A series of changes, beginning in 1995 when CBC hired Barrie away from CFRB, perceptively altered the show’s tone and content.

CBC Radio Toronto launched the first incarnation of its early morning show on April 2, 1973, with a mandate strikingly similar to what it is today. The open-door studio at 509 Parliament Street sat in a former 450-seat cinema, built in 1913. The show was originally called Tomorrow Is Here, a title host Bruce Rogers thought too “hokey” to say on air. A year later it was renamed Metro Morning. Rogers left that same year and four other hosts led the morning show before Barrie. The late Harry Brown lasted from 1974 to ’76, followed by Schatzky from ’76 to ’79. Joe Coté hopped aboard in 1979 and took the helm for 13 years. Finally, Matt Maychak played host from 1993 to ’95 — when Barrie took over — after leaving his long-time position as host of his namesake CFRB show.

Hosts have come and gone but there haven’t been many fundamental changes to programming or ideology since the early 1970s, says Alex Frame, who started at CBC Radio in 1971 and was vice-president from 1999 until 2003. “Probably the description you read in ’75 is the same one you read in 2006.”

The basic elements of Metro Morning remain: news, weather, traffic and a range of interviews.  Reflecting on the original purpose of the show during Metro Morning’s 30th anniversary celebrations in 2003, initial host Rogers said, “The idea was to transform mornings across the CBC from DJ shows into programs reflecting their communities. In Toronto it would be multicultural and would make an effort to report on issues and events important to Toronto’s many neighbourhoods.”

But at the time, there were limits to how well the show could accomplish its goals. Schatzky says, “CBC hesitated to put someone on the air with an accent because they thought no one would understand them.” The show was trying, but not quite succeeding, to reflect the city’s diversity. This is where, in recent years,Metro Morning has truly shifted. “The sensibility of the program may have changed,” Frame says. “The consciousness changed.” Jim Carr, coordinator of the broadcast radio program at Seneca College and a habitual radio listener, picked up on the nuances Frame refers to. “I thought the show had changed, but I couldn’t put my finger on how,” he says. Now he’s better able to articulate the differences. “It sounds like you’re walking around in any one of the neighbourhoods downtown.” This was the effect Susan Marjetti, regional director of radio for Toronto, strove to create when she initiated Metro Morning’s revamp in spring 2001.

When CBC hired Marjetti, she immediately walked onto the floor, gathered up relevant staff and asked her “folks” if they thought Metro Morning reflected the fact that Toronto is the most multicultural city in Canada. The answer was a “resounding no.” Thus began a year of research in order to “move forward” and “become more relevant” to the city’s residents. Hosts, journalists, producers, as well as music and performance contributors met to discuss the gap between market research and what was actually being heard on the radio. The “transformation team” also brought in people from all walks of life and different communities to tell CBC about issues in their neighbourhoods. “I wanted to add music and performance under the same program values we’d choose for the news,” Marjetti says. They chose to “build a cast of characters around Andy,” regular columnists who host segments like “What’s Goin’ On,” or “Beyond Burgers,” bringing “new, diverse voices” and “fresh perspectives.”

The new voices make Metro Morning successful in “catering to a multicultural reality,” says Schatzky, although he’s less enthusiastic about how the changes have been accomplished journalistically. “Sometimes they do it through music and food, a softer approach,” he says. Schatzky laments, or perhaps nostalgically romanticizes, earlier days when the show had “harder hitting” content. “For the flagship current affairs morning show, it spends a lot of time telling people about new CDs and infotainment.” He wonders aloud whether taxpayer’s money should be spent on tips about consumer items, but acknowledges, “The ratings reflect that as a corporate strategy it has worked extremely well.”

For Metro Morning staff, the six columnists who have regular spots on the morning show are a part of how it better reflects Toronto’s diversity. Critics, on the other hand, might dub them leftovers from what Robert Fulford of the National Post calls “the year of trauma.” No one pointed out more scathingly how rough the show sounded during its makeover. In a 2002 Toronto Life, Gold National Magazine Award–winning column called “Mourning Show,” Fulford ripped apart the changes. “It sounded like Barrie was a guest on his own show,” he says. “It was so pitiful, so pathetic.” He explains, “People who grew up in Toronto and had pure Toronto accents, and poor Andy had to find a way to get them to say they weren’t white people.”

Frame defends the choices made as well as the challenges that ensued. “The move to be more contemporary is going to be rough for a while.” He says CBC’s ultimate job is to reflect the country back to itself. Toronto’s cultural make-up changed so radically over four decades — according to Statistics Canada, in 2001, 44 per cent of Toronto’s population was born outside of Canada — that Metro Morning had to change with it. The show moved “to tell the story from different perspectives, not just middle- class, white liberals,” he says. “Change and development is risky, but not changing is more risky. It would become irrelevant.”

Listening to the show now, Fulford says he doesn’t think many of the changes stuck and the show has reverted to the way it was before he wrote his cutting column. “The weird self-consciousness they developed about ethnicity is gone,” he says. But other than Priya Ramu, the senior producer who worked through much of the seven-month transformation process, and Natasha Ramsahai, a meteorologist Fulford called too “perky,” who moved on, Marjetti says the changes made between February and September 2002 have remained a part of the show and Metro Morning’s audience share has doubled as a direct consequence. “The track and path we’ve chosen has proven to be a good one,” she says. “Those changes actually catapulted the show to No. 1.”

Designed to help set advertising rates, BBM ratings play an even more significant role in the world of private radio. Pat Holiday, general manager of Standard Radio Toronto, which owns CFRB, says the 2006 fall ratings (the most important quarterly period) that placed Metro Morning at the top and CFRB in fifth place, don’t matter. He looks at trends, not specific periods. It’s hard to believe CFRB isn’t concerned about its morning show’s BBM position. The program used to be the No. 1 morning show back in fall 1995 and summer 1996, and even after that was well ahead of CBC, but its ratings have withered to the point where three music stations now stand between it and CBC.

James Cullingham, program coordinator in broadcast journalism at Seneca College, says the fact that CBC’s morning show is No. 1 “must just make the private stations mental.” He says he imagines they’re now looking at what CBC does successfully in order to move forward. Besides having the highest audience share in the 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, all-ages (12-years-old plus) category, what the ratings really say is that Metro Morning is winning the battle to stay relevant by giving the audience what it’s looking for. “People are starved for news content,” Cullingham says. “Despite what advertisers and private radio want us to believe, people are interested in a slower paced, more substantive morning show.” In addition, he says, CBC has “carefully tuned itself to a newer and rapidly changing audience.”

Seneca College journalism instructor Thomas, who attends a convention every year held by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada, as well as one in the U.S. held by the same group, says what invariably comes to the top of the agenda is that people want not only a fair, objective report of what’s happening, but more news. Unfortunately, not all news-talk stations have heeded the trend.

“The last few years, CFRB had its head in the sand about CBC,” says Seneca College’s Carr. He claims high-ranking people in private radio listen to CBC, even if they say they don’t. “It’s the dirty little secret in Toronto broadcasting. No one talks about counter programming with the CBC.” They may have been listening, but they failed to respond. Metro Morning is successful, Carr says, because “CBC has gone back to the roots of what radio is all about — local issues and stories.” Starting the morning show over with a new host gives CFRB the perfect opportunity to follow the public broadcaster’s example. Carr suspected the show would be “completely retooled.” Sure enough, it’s happening.

“What ’RB has done, if you listen carefully, they’ve reduced and repositioned the commercial load in the morning show,” says Humber’s Chomyn, who has worked in the broadcasting industry for more than 38 years. “The result is a nicer flowing show.” And there are other notable changes. Chomyn says, “We’re seeing a kinder, gentler side of Bill Carroll.” This is a big change for someone who has made a name for himself as an edgy, opinionated host. Lastly, Chomyn says, “You’ll notice there’s a team around Bill, it’s not just him.” The news anchors and other contributors constantly interact with Carroll on air. These transformations sound familiar.

Carroll goes on air at CFRB weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Right now it’s 8:30 a.m. and time to shift to the show’s open-line segment. Sitting in the studio in a high- backed leather chair on wheels, dressed in jeans and a button-up black shirt, he’s asking callers whether Toronto members of the Ontario Teachers’ Federation should be using union time to bring up Middle East issues. “The stronger my opinion is,” he declares, “the more reaction we get.”

Carroll pulls out his wallet, unprompted, to reveal a photo of his wife and two children. This is the new Bill Carroll, and perhaps why, according to Chomyn, he’s ready for the morning show, whereas a few years ago he wasn’t. Carroll is a family man now, more people can relate to him.

Eager to point out the show’s format changes, Carroll says there are “fewer regular features, fewer commercials, more opportunities for me to speak.” As for how his employer will handle the decrease in advertising revenue, he says, “The station makes less money, but in the long run you hope you’ll get more listeners and be able to charge more for the ads.”

Carroll has a specific strategy for gaining listeners. He says CFRB spent way too much time in the past competing against other news stations, so to recapture some of the lucrative morning audience he’s going after the people who tune into FM music stations. “I want John Derringer’s listeners, Erin Davis’s listeners.” The public broadcaster doesn’t come into Carroll’s crosshairs at all. “The CBC is too sleepy for me,” he says. “I don’t want to hear about Darfur, not for 20 minutes anyway. I’d rather know what’s going on in my backyard.” It’s a peculiar criticism directed at a show that owes its success to becoming more relevant and more local.

Apparently, CFRB’s ratings don’t concern the Metro Morning team either. Producer Jessica Low and her right-hand man, senior producer Nicholas Davis, who will be interviewed only in tandem, say it’s like comparing apples and oranges. “We’re CBC — we don’t have to cater to advertisers. Our mandate is to serve the public. We have two distinct operating principles,” they say over speakerphone, never interrupting each other’s answers. They attribute Metro Morning’s success not only to the way it reflects the audience it serves, but also to the way its stories have a strong impact on its audience.

Marjetti identifies another important factor that helped Metro Morning climb to “the top of the heap,” one CFRB won’t be replicating any time soon — CBC Toronto’s move from 740 AM to 99.1 FM in 1998. There is an obvious difference in sound quality between the AM and FM bands — the former sounds hollow, tinny and fuzzy, while the latter projects full and clear. But, according to Standard Radio’s Holiday, more than the improved sound quality it’s the increased number of people who tune in to the FM band. “If Metro Morningwasn’t on FM it wouldn’t be half the show it is because it wasn’t before it went to FM,” he says. “I’m not knocking the show — they still do a really good show.”

There is one last thing the Bill Carroll Show will never have, which is crucial to Metro Morning’s success: Andy Barrie. The show’s ratings have gone up with a host who even critics such as Fulford admit is “smooth” and “professional.”

The American-born Barrie studied theatre at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, hoping one day to be an actor. He volunteered at the student radio station, which quickly became his main outlet for performing. “You could actually get better and better,” he says. “Unlike an actor, where you might get a show every two years if you were lucky, you could be on every day.”

Although he was a conscientious objector, he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. On orders to ship out, he deserted and came to Canada in 1969 — a past that surfaces on his show and contributes to his style. Now a Canadian citizen, he refers to himself on-air as an immigrant and is obsessively patriotic about his adopted country.

Still, CBC makes a mantra out of the cliché, “a station is more than the sum of its parts,” in a way that private stations don’t, which places limits on Barrie’s voice. “There are judgments I’ve made about what we ought to do on the show — everything from what kind of music we ought to play to who we ought to interview — that aren’t shared.”

But he plays ball with the team format, and attributes the show’s continued success to the entire staff, not just him. “I cannot claim, as I once could when I did my own program, that what you hear on that show belongs to me,” he says. “This isn’t The Andy Barrie Show, and I’m thrilled it’s not.”

Just after 8:30 a.m. Barrie signs off Metro Morning for the day. Following the requisite story meeting, he heads down to the ooh la la! café in the main atrium. He orders a BLT and a fruit salad. “My first love was puppetry,” he says, eating pieces of watermelon and berries with his fingers while still in line. He admits he thrives on having an audience. On Metro Morning, CBC is master puppeteer, the airwaves the strings and Barrie’s voice the puppet. They perform a show about a diverse city called Toronto for a very pleased audience. “There’s something wonderfully powerful,” he says, “about projecting yourself into a world where you can’t be seen.”

On a late fall morning, Kirk Makin walks out of room No. 13 in Ottawa’s Elgin Street courthouse. His tall, imposing figure stands above a clutch of lawyers and court officials. The hearing he’s covering — Her Majesty the Queen vs. Ontario Power Generation, John Tammadge and Robert Bednarek — has just finished, and Makin’s journalistic guard is temporarily down. Attorneys call him by his first name, talking to him as if he is a colleague rather than a reporter. OPG’s lawyer, Donald Bayne, speaks to him in the hushed tones of a co-conspirator. More lawyers gather around, and soon Makin and Bayne are part of a group of 10. They talk and joke about the case in the relaxed, off-the-record manner of old associates. The lawyers try to persuade Makin to come to dinner with them that evening, as he sometimes does, but this time he declines. “We’ll have your glass then,” says one of them. Makin, who has worked at The Globe and Mail for over 20 years, is considered the gold standard in beat reporting by colleagues like Ian Brown and Marina Jiménez. “If it wasn’t for Kirk,” says Paul Taylor, a Globe staffer since 1979, “there would be some innocent people sitting in jail.” People like Guy Paul Morin. Makin covered the Morin case over an eight-year period and wrote a best-selling book on the subject, Redrumthe Innocent. Thanks largely to Makin’s endeavours, Morin was exonerated in 1995.

But Makin, a court reporter who gradually became a justice reporter, also epitomizes the way the beat system has evolved at the Globe. Beats that were once narrowly focused are now concerned with social issues and trends, or as one Globe veteran puts it, “things going on in society that need explaining.” In Makin’s case, that means a beat that’s more about laws and the functioning of the justice system than about the trials and tribulations of lawbreakers. Along the way, life has become more demanding for beat reporters. News holes have shrunk, and competition for available space has intensified. Reporters vie not only with other reporters, but also with the growing ranks of opinion columnists who increasingly dominate coverage. And newspapers such as the Globe no longer exist in isolation as they once did, but form pieces of larger media organizations. This means more work for reporters on more than one media platform. Deadlines have proliferated, but now they’re for quick newsbreaks that will be posted on the paper’s website, for a breezy television commentary on CTV Newsnet, and last but not least, for the paper itself. To stay on top of a beat, reporters have to go to conferences, speak to groups and generally blend in with the people they cover, all the while retaining their independence and distance. Once a job, beat reporting has mutated into a way of life.

“It seems like societal values have changed, and the beats are reflecting that,” says Globe education reporter Caroline Alphonso. “Years ago people weren’t interested in social trends, but now we’re writing about people giving their dogs massages — and it’s going on the front page. It’s a ‘news you can use’ kind of thing.” Alphonso and former education reporter Jennifer Lewington represent the past and present of education reporting at the Globe. Lewington, who is now Toronto City Hall bureau chief, says many education issues haven’t changed, but the way the paper presents them has. “Instead of me writing about charter schools,” she says, “Caroline’s writing about parents living on campus to get a taste of university life.”

For many at the Globe, the tipping point for the beat system came in 1989, the year A. Roy Megarry became publisher and William Thorsell editor-in-chief. Thorsell wasted little time exploding the accepted notion of beat reporting. “He just declared there was going to be a national education beat, and people looked at him like, ‘How could you have a national education beat, it’s a provincial entity?’” Lewington recalls. But Thorsell was firm and she came around. “That allowed the Globe, unlike anybody else, to look through the prism of what was happening in Ontario versus what was happening in British Columbia.”

Tim Pritchard, the Globe’s managing editor at the time, says Thorsell’s idea to change the beat system was a good one. Thorsell himself says that he was “always optimistic about the future of newspapers.” But according to Pritchard, both men knew the realities of their time, and accepted that newspaper readership was diminishing. They could see the newspaper business losing its “news edge,” and the need for beat reporters to be able to string together news patterns to provide information that readers couldn’t get anywhere else. So Thorsell developed a “double agenda” strategy: deinstitutionalize the classic beats, and then go and find out “what’s actually happening” and what matters to Globe readers. According to Thorsell, one of the most successful new beats was “development issues.” For the first time, the Globe had a foreign beat, with its Delhi-based reporter John Stackhouse roaming throughout India, Africa and Southeast Asia for stories. “I certainly wanted to have a heartbeat of strong beat coverage,” says Thorsell. “Frequently, the daily news agenda does not justify the reader’s time.” Thorsell saw the Globe as a magazine that should produce more trend stories, so he broadened the mandate of the beats. “We revamped some old beats, we added some new ones and for the most part it went pretty well,” says Pritchard. The system — which included new beats such as “social trends” and “ethics and religion” — worked for a while, but Thorsell’s managing style didn’t endear him to some staff. “Thorsell is what I call a top-down manager.

He really thought he was on top of everything and he knew what should be going in the paper, and wasn’t as dependent on the knowledge and the skill of his beat reporters as I was,” says Pritchard. Many in the newsroom were not pleased. “A reporter who was in the arts section came by my office and said, ‘I just spent 40 minutes talking to the editor-in-chief and during that 40 minutes he told me everything he thought I should be doing and didn’t ask me one question about what I was working on or what I thought about anything,’” recalls Pritchard. “Thorsell and the other senior editors increasingly began to feel that they knew what was going on and they would tell the reporters what was going on. Once you start undermining the beat system like that, beat reporters feel undervalued.” To compound matters, Thorsell introduced “Super G.A.’s” — star general assignment reporters who were sometimes given priority over beat reporters on breaking news.

Over time, though, the new approach took hold. Joan Hollobon, who mined the medical beat for 25 years primarily by attending medical meetings, now watches the Globe’s exploding health coverage from retirement. “I look at the paper and there’s Andre Picard, there’s Carolyn Abraham and a whole lot of other people doing either medicine or peripheral health issues around medicine,” she says. Hollobon did it with legwork, but today medical writer Paul Taylor is inundated with story ideas without leaving his desk. He sifts through hundreds of emails a day, and looks at several hundred medical or scientific studies per week. “What it’s actually done,” he says, “is greatly increase the workload.”

Wilf List, Hollobon’s contemporary, covered labour for 35 years — the longest time any reporter at the Globe has ever worked on a single beat. His successor, Lorne Slotnick, would have no such longevity in what became the “workplace beat.” Pritchard says Slotnick had a very narrow vision of the labour beat. He wanted to write about unions and bargaining situations. Thorsell disagreed with his labour reporter, and broadened the beat to include all aspects of the workplace, including issues like technology, downsizing and staggered hours. Slotnick eventually quit.

His fate was part of the larger political dynamic at the paper. According to Makin, Globe reporters believed the orders for change were coming directly from the publisher. Megarry’s contacts in the business community “did not see us as friendly to them,” Makin says. “They thought there were too many left-wing zealots writing for the paper.” As Pritchard recalls, Megarry had a saying that summed up his perceived need for management intervention, particularly in the news section: “The newsroom is an asylum that’s being run by the inmates.”

Makin, for one, escaped the worst effects. In the early 1990s, by agreement with his editors, he shifted his attention from prisons to the Supreme Court of Canada, and the “legal” beat became “justice.” According to Makin, the Supreme Court was becoming much more important. “I recognized that, and my editors also recognized that,” he says. Plus, it was clear to Makin that his editors were losing interest in his prison stories, and when that happens, he says, “You either move with the tides or you may be looking at a different line of work.”

To Colin MacKenzie, now managing editor of the Globe’s news side, the evolution has been natural. “As with society, beats evolved,” he says. “We cover health obsessively, as you can see from the paper, but that’s changing with the culture.” Labour, on the other hand, no longer had a “central place in the national conversation,” so the beat had to change. As for social trends, MacKenzie justifies the beat by saying that “newspapers are much more ambitious in how they try to analyze all parts of life.”

But the Globe is still a beat-driven paper “if you include Ottawa among the beats, which you should,” says Catherine Wallace, a former Globe editor who is now an assistant managing editor at The Gazette in Montreal. “It’s a paper that likes to have exclusives, and it leaves people on the same beat for enough time to develop stories.” As Wallace and others note, though, the news hole in some editions (such as the national edition) is tight and competition for available space has become tougher, thanks in part to the growing influence of columnists. “There have always been star columnists who are so popular with readers that when they write something it gets in,” says Wallace. “What’s different now is that the columnists are being used for news coverage as well.”

“Look at the Globe today and the Globe 10 years ago,” says Lewington. “The amount of column inches devoted to opinion versus storytelling — that’s where the trend has been.” Alphonso agrees. “There is a fight there,” she says. “A lot of opinions make their way into the paper, and beat reporters are fighting for news stories to get in.”

This struggle didn’t become any easier with the arrival of the National Post in 1998. For about the first year, “at the Post we didn’t have a system of beat reporting,” says Marina Jiménez, who was a reporter there prior to joining the Globe. She says that before reporters fell into their areas of interest, “it was a free-for-all, and we were thrown on the big story of the day.” The Post also pushed columnists to the forefront as news writers with opinions. The Globe’s competitive response, in part, was to dismantle or diminish many beats. “For reasons that none of us could fathom, they just dropped or changed a lot of beats,” says Lewington. There was even a short time, she adds, when the Globe had very light coverage on the education beat. Alphonso rectified that problem in 2003, when she stepped in.

The paper’s editorial predilections after the Post arrived also played a role in reshaping the beat system. Under editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon, coverage of Ottawa has become even more prominent. “Ten years ago we didn’t have three people writing columns from Ottawa, for God’s sake,” says Lewington. Wallace and Alphonso concur, with Alphonso taking the criticism one step further. “There is a formula to the front page. There are always two Ottawa stories, a foreign story and — maybe — one beat story.” But MacKenzie doesn’t believe columnists crowd out beat reporters. “I guess we’ve got one more Ottawa columnist then we did have, but there always was a city columnist, a Queen’s Park columnist.” He says the amount of analysis is the same, yet the way stories are reported is different. “The Post changed a number of things,” he says, “principally news reflex, which impacted beats as well.”

With heightened competition from the Post, feature writing took a hit. “You’re specifically looking for breaking news stories,” says MacKenzie. But the Globe, he adds, has the beats to thank for the bulk of its exclusives and Saturday specials. “It’s as much a beat-driven paper as it ever was,” he says. “In order to have a boogie, you’ve got to have a bottom, and that’s your beat system.”

Nowhere is it more evident than in the Globe’s Report on Business section. Currently, ROB’s beats include economics, retailing, media, mining, global energy, technology, the auto industry, telecom, transportation, real estate, investment, biotechnology, mutual funds, the workplace, steel, marketing and banking. By one estimate, 90 per cent of the reporters on ROB have beats. “All business sections are beat-driven because they have to be,” says Paul Waldie, a business specialist at the paper who nevertheless has no specific beat himself. “You need someone to follow banks all the time, to follow transportation all the time.”

Waldie says he prefers being a generalist, arguing that he learns more that way. Still, he’s been sucked into news cyclones that are hard to escape, in essence becoming a story specialist instead of a beat reporter. He has become the Globe’s ranking Conrad Black expert over the past three years, and, prior to Black’s criminal trial, was anxious for it to start. He has already flown to Chicago to cover the events leading up to the trial. This kind of expertise is now exploited in much more than the paper’s news columns. “There are days, literally, where I’ll write a story for the web in the morning, a story for the paper in the afternoon and go on ROB TV that night,” says Waldie. “You’re doing all three things at once, and it’s not just me.” He spends so much time in this news media triangle he rarely has time to step outside the office.

Television, in particular, changed the way beat reporters function, says Makin. It takes time to tape TV spots, and because reporters have to be in the office to do them, their mobility is reduced. Then there’s the worry of having to fully understand their story for a noon taping instead of the usual 6 p.m. copy deadline.

There is also the fear of becoming obsolete. Waldie, for one, thinks newspapers eventually must succumb to the Internet. Business news in newspapers — now consumed mostly by middle-aged or older men, as opposed to twenty-somethings — is losing ground to the Internet. And according to Waldie, the web is not beat-friendly. “The people that we’re hiring tend to be the web people, and those people will be generalists,” he says. “Maybe at some point the web will evolve to having beats, but I doubt it.”

Web or no web, there’s lingering dissatisfaction with the Globe’s modified beat system. Former ROB reporter Kimberley Noble says the Globe, “is not a confident newsroom in the way that it was,” blaming the change on the micromanagement of beat reporters’ story ideas by their editors.

Even in an ideal newsroom situation, beat reporting is far from perfect. Former Globe writer — now Toronto Star business and public affairs writer — David Olive points to the danger of beat reporting as a general practice. “You end up becoming one of them,” he says, citing fashion, business and sports reporters as examples. “You are somewhat beholden to the beat you’re covering.”

In the case of fashion in particular, Olive may have a point. But as far as most other beats go, Makin disagrees. “At a serious paper that’s trying to do a serious job, I don’t think someone who is a cheerleader is going to be tolerated for long.” Maintaining distance and perspective from sources, he says, is “part and parcel” of the job.

As is making public appearances. Makin stands at the front of a computer lab at Toronto’s Centennial College, talking to a small class of journalism students. Four women sit attentively in the front row, three guys at the back videotape his presentation, and journalism program co-ordinator Lindy Oughtred watches and takes notes.

Unlike Waldie, Makin has no trouble getting out of the office. Though he turns down many requests because of time constraints, he visits colleges and universities about once a month. A few days earlier, Makin spoke to 80 captivated University of Toronto law students after a screening of a 1992 episode of the fifth estate on the Morin trial. Makin was chief consultant on the program, and appeared on camera, sporting what he calls his “porn director’s moustache.” Now moustache free, Makin considers speaking engagements part of a beat’s maintenance. “There’s only a certain period where there’s fruit in the trees,” he says, “but you have to do a whole lot of gardening in between.”

Makin tilled the soil at U of T last year as well. He won a Canadian Journalism Fellowship at Massey College for 2005-2006, and studied law courses such as constitutional litigation. He hasn’t freed any innocent men in the past decade — though he still sees Morin regularly — but perhaps one is enough for a beat reporter’s career. He continues to spend time talking to lawyers and judges at numerous conferences, and still reads legal publications late into the evening. “That’s what a beat is — a lifestyle,” Makin says. “There’s a lot of stuff my employers really don’t know I do.”

Eight thirty p.m.: the crunching sound of a key working a lock. George Stroumboulopoulos opens the door to his Queen West home in Toronto and throws his keys on the coffee table. He sits down with a plate of pasta to watch the Canadiens game. He’s reading The Guardian online when Jennifer Dettman, executive producer of The Hour, makes her nightly call to talk about tomorrow’s show, right about the same time Peter Mansbridge begins reading The National.

Dettman’s calling to discuss Second Life. The Hour’s crew has been working on a story about the online universe for a few weeks now. It’s a bizarre phenomenon: more than a million people plug in to a digital world not dramatically different from our own and spend a combined $1.5 million there every day. American Apparel has a store inside, Reuters has a news bureau. Tomorrow, The Hour has an interview with Julian Dibbell, a magazine writer who quit his job to live in the fantasy world full time. It looks like a slow news day tomorrow and Dibbell is available, so they’ll go with the piece. George hangs up the phone by midnight, making the work-related part of his day about 15 hours. “This isn’t a job,” he says. “It’s a life.” George heads to his computer to poke around online, eventually falling asleep listening to The Ricky Gervais Show podcast, the voice of the British comedian ringing in his ears.

To some extent CBC has always been free from the usual constraints of for-profit television. But in the current multi-channel universe, it must regularly produce intelligent Canadian programming in order to justify its existence. For the past decade it has been constantly reinventing itself, offering creative vehicles it hopes Canadians actually enjoy. Like Jian Ghomeshi’s >play and Big Life with Daniel Richler before it, The Hour is CBC’s attempt to balance current affairs with entertainment value for a mass audience. So far the mix has been unbalanced, often showcasing neither effectively.

At the heart of this latest experiment is The Hour’s frenetic, black-clad host with the exceptionally long surname, George Stroumboulopoulos (or just George). The program drew immediate and heavy criticism for dumbing down the news in order to reach younger viewers, but then George isn’t trying to be a youth-friendly Peter Mansbridge. Nor is he trying to be a pundit, an academic or a politician – or a journalist, for that matter. George is just some guy who likes his music, sports and politics mixed together in one fast, long conversation. The Hour gives that guy the chance to speak with the newsmakers of the day and interpret the news his own way. Given the roasting George has received so far, it’s suprising to see that – every so often – he delivers an original kind of television product. What is a little more difficult to calculate is whether or not it’s news programming or infotainment.

George strolls into CBC a little after nine, with four hours sleep under his belt, black-waxed hair, sad dog eyes and friendly as hell. In the echo of hard-soled shoes parading the halls, his Adidas are almost silent. He’s in standard uniform today: jeans, silver-studded belt, black shirt. The only variable is the type of black shirt. Today, it’s a button-up, no branding. He crosses the foyer on his way to The Hour’s ground floor offices but detours when he sees people lined up for The Gill Deacon Show. He works the crowd, shaking hands, looking people in the eye and giving the distinct impression he cares about what they tell him. After a few minutes, he heads for the office’s back entrance where producers Dettman, Susan Taylor and Dave Freeman wait for him. It’s usually a bigger crowd, but this is a slow news day, so the writers and segment producers are off finishing pieces they’ve had in the works for a while. George takes his seat, gets updated and gets down to work.

George was raised in the Rexdale and Malton areas of suburban Toronto by his mother, Mary Ivanyshan, a Ukrainian immigrant, and a close extended family. “It was old-school immigrant, the village raises the kid,” says George, now 34 years old. “It was always fun. My house was always filled with love.” When his father – a Greek who emigrated from Cairo – left home, Uncle Paul filled in as male role model. In high school, George was a terrible student and was saved by a charitable drama teacher who let him come to class on the days he was suspended so he wouldn’t fall behind. Other than drama, his extracurricular career was limited to curling. He liked gliding across rinks, competing against the upper crust, clad in black.

George began his already lengthy media career in radio. From Humber College’s radio broadcast program he landed jobs at Toronto’s Fan 590 in 1993 and then 102.1 The Edge in 1997. Spider Jones, who hosted the Fan’s overnight show, remembers meeting some young punk with a ponytail, his new sound engineer. “George had the earrings, he was the new generation,” Jones says. “Nobody took him seriously because they didn’t get a chance to know him.” But George was a hard worker and knew his sports, so when a producer’s spot opened on Jones’s show, he surprised his colleagues by giving the gig to the weird new guy. And George took every shift he could get. On Friday evenings he’d do Jones’s show, then work straight through the weekend. By Sunday morning, he’d be asleep in the on-air booth when a voice would come on over his headphones: “You’re on in five.” He’d wake up, jog around the office and sit back at the mic to give the sports update before falling back asleep again.

After seven years in radio, George moved to MuchMusic in 2000. He hosted The Punk Show, MuchLOUD and MuchNews. He also jumped at the chance to do The New Music, traditionally considered one of the few bright spots in Canadian music broadcast journalism, and a show that graduated respected journalists Daniel Richler, John Roberts and Avi Lewis. By the time George arrived, though, Much had moved closer to the MTV model, dedicating more airtime to fan culture and less to the journalistic analysis found on The New Music. However, during this period George’s reporting occasionally became overtly political. In 2002, he filmed a documentary in Zambia, a joint project between Much and the humanitarian agency CARE Canada, about the impact of aids in Africa. He followed that up in 2004 with a documentary in Sudan about the Darfur conflict.

The same year, Much assigned George to host Fandemonium, a cheap Fear Factor knockoff where viewers humiliated themselves to prove their devotion to a particular band. The first episode climaxed with contestants changing a doll’s diaper, complete with real baby shit. At the end of the show, the host presented the winner with a choice: a home entertainment system or one of two mystery boxes, one of which contained an invite to a weekend trip to blink-182’s hometown. “Or, you can go through the whole day of dangerous, vomitous, ridiculous, asinine challenges and then walk out with a box of dog biscuits.”

George started to think about quitting that day. The move would be gutsy – at Much he gave the impression he was the smartest guy in the room, but CBC would be a different world, with a different audience.

A year after Heaton Dyer took over as CBC Newsworld’s director of programming in 2003, he told Dettman to try something new. The format was almost entirely open – develop a new prime-time talk show for Newsworld. Throughout the development phase, one very long name came up: George Stroumboulopoulos. Dettman and Dyer met their prospect that fall, about a month after he filmed CBC’s The Greatest Canadian. George wasn’t moved. He thought CBC would pull the reins on him and he didn’t think he’d fit in – his better judgement told him to stay away. Then, a week or so later he got a call from his manager, Michael Sugar. Dettman and Dyer weren’t going away, Sugar told him. You can keep your clothes, your piercings and your attitude – that’s what they want. You should meet them again. George finally decided to leave Much in fall 2004. He told Sugar in a text message while waiting at Pearson International Airport for a flight to Sudan. When he got back to Toronto he phoned his boss at Much and slowly started telling his co-workers that he was leaving to do a show on the CBC – does anyone want to come? He won one convert that day, segment producer Darby Wheeler (now a VJ on The Hour).

At first, CBC created The Hour to give Newsworld a flagship interview show that would bring people back to the channel every night at 8 p.m. Part of what informed this plan was a massive study done by CBC that told the network they had to broaden their definition of the news. “I’d been thinking about this notion of the news anchor as Voice of God, as the person who knows everything,” Dettman says. “I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great to create a show with a guy who has an opinion, just like you and me?'” During the next few months, George, Dettman and producer Susan Taylor set about turning their regular guy with an opinion into the news.

George bought into Dettman’s concept and CBC’s willingness to take a risk. “No one has the fucking balls to put a guy like me on the air and let me steer a show the way they do,” he says. “And to do the subject matter. And to let Jen have as much control as she has. And to let me have as much control as I have.”

If you were standing behind George while he’s on camera, you’d be able to follow what he’s saying on the teleprompter for a few seconds. Before long, though, he’ll veer off on his own. The prompter will then stop, jump in one direction, then another, trying to figure out where George has gone. This makes scriptwriting for The Hour a strange process.

By the time George gets to the boardroom at 9:30 a.m., the office has been buzzing for at least an hour. His staff has gone through the day’s news and pitched various stories and approaches. The first thing the host does is give his thumbs up or thumbs down. Then he pitches his own ideas. Once everything’s decided, they all sit down to write the day’s script. Because of George’s delivery, it mostly fills in the bullet points and punch lines. At about 10:30 a.m. the meeting disperses and people head to the archives, editing suites and computers to prepare the various segments. George drifts between everyone to see how things are coming, researches for interviews and calls audience members to confirm tickets.

In October 2006, when The Hour premiered on CBC’s main network and took over the 11 p.m. spot from The National recap, it gained a live studio audience. Since it shoots live to tape (filming in exactly the same running time as on TV, commercials included), George gets a lot of face time with the audience. When the show breaks for commercials the monitors go to black, the crew goes about their quieter tasks and an awkward silence falls over the set. Today, George chats with the audience to fill the gap, giving them a little insight into what he’s doing. “This is kind of new to TV,” he says. “When politicians come on, they look at me – and when I say me, I mean you – and they don’t think we have a right to be in on this. But fuck off, we do. I don’t look like people on television, but I look like you.”

Dettman and just about everyone who works at The Hour will tell you that the show was never intended to reach young people so much as people of a certain mindset: the host’s. But despite how often they say it, no one seems convinced. The truth is, only about four per cent of The Hour’s viewers are under the age of 18. About two-thirds are between 18 and 49, and the remaining third is over 50. On an average night, The Hour pulls in about 125,000 viewers after The National, which hooks about 600,000 in the 10 p.m. timeslot. To put this into perspective, CTV News, also on at 11 p.m., brings in about 930,000. Further up the dial on the Comedy Network, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report come in a little closer to The Hour’s numbers, at about 158,000 combined.

If you dissect The Hour you’ll find pieces of other shows: Conan O’Brien, The Daily Show, Entertainment Tonight, >play and, of course, The National. Some nights it ends there, simply splicing bits together, retelling them in the host’s voice. But on other nights George produces something original. The Hour is at its best when it makes connections across genres. George will talk to Ludacris about the differences between reflecting ghetto reality to suburban kids in rap and in film, or to Terry Gilliam about the semantics of the term “Aboriginal,” or to Kenny and Spenny about societal trends of cheering for the bad guy. George recognizes this restless jumping around as the show’s strength. “How do you describe it? I don’t know,” he says. “To talk to Gerard Kennedy on the same night that we talk to Jack Black, or Billy Connolly on the same night we had Muhammad Yunus. What I like about it is the audience has just come to realize that’s just The Hour.”

The show falters most when it stays focused, because that’s when it becomes predictably journalistic. George isn’t specialized – he’s not the sports guy when he talks to hockey players or the movie guy when he talks to actors. What saves the show on any given night is the fact that George isn’t a journalist, but a quirky – albeit thuggish – Everyman.

Early in the season, George lands an interview with Michael Ignatieff, then a Liberal Party leadership candidate, now deputy leader. Ignatieff had fumbled badly when talking about the Israel-Lebanon conflict during the summer, managing to offend both sides. Then, one week prior to taping The Hour, his campaign co-chair and Liberal MP Susan Kadis walked out on him when he refused to clarify his position. Ignatieff’s publicity appearance on The Hour is an opportunity for damage control.

“This has been a tough week for you and your campaign, hasn’t it?” George enquires.

“It’s been a week in which I’ve listened and learned,” Ignatieff responds. “So it’s been positive. But it’s been a week in which I made a decision to go to Israel. I made a decision to make sure that I learn how Canada can contribute. Because we need to understand that Canada can do a lot here. Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, we’ve been focused on this issue for many years – for 60, 70 years. We can make a contribution, I want to help.”

“But you had to listen and learn because you spoke. And you spoke twice and the things you said. Now, you said this thing – that you wouldn’ t lose sleep about the Lebanese, then you went and apologized…” Ignatieff cuts in: “Taken out of context. It has to be said, I’ve always called Qana a tragedy. From the beginning. I’ve been completely consistent about that.”

“But when you went on to apologize, or clarify the second time, you got into trouble again.” George sits up a bit. “Which, the interesting part was….”

Ignatieff cuts him off again, trying to control the interview, speaking slowly, punctuating his sentences with “uh” so it sounds like he’s not done speaking. “Well, understand what the clarification was about. Reports came out, from reputable human rights organizations saying that there had been violations of the laws of war on both sides. I’ve never hesitated to say that. Uh…”

“But you said it was a war crime by Israel is what you said the first time out.”

“No. No. What I said: Qana was a war crime. That makes it very clear that there were terrible things that happened at Qana, done by Hezbollah, against Israel, other actions by Israel which may have violated the laws of war. Now, there’s been reaction to that. I take those reactions seriously, I take those reactions respectfully, going to Israel to listen, learn. Talk to people.” George seems bored. Annoyed. “Figure out where we need to go forward.”

“Did you say Israel committed a war crime?”

“I said,” Ignatieff squirms. “The words I used were Qana was a war crime.”

“But if that’s the case then why did a key member of your group quit over this? Like, this was more than just, you know, Qana, this was a big deal and this person quit on you and that painted you in that light.”

Ignatieff says he respects Kadis’s decision and segues into outrage against Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s handling of the conflict with a quick, “We have to move forward here.”

George grilled Ignatieff long enough to make the interview worth watching. Weeks later, during one of The Hour’s silent commercial breaks, he reflects on the interview with bravado that might be attributed to the fawning questions of his audience. “Whenever a politician comes on I tell them, ‘You’ve come on here because you know we’ll be fair, but if you dodge my questions, if you make me look like a punk, I will fucking kill you.'”

The George you meet off-air isn’t much different from the one you see on TV: a friendly smartass with more confidence than he knows what to do with. His badass image is well advertised and encouraged by CBC. If it’s an act, it’s one he himself believes. While the image is laughable to his critics, it can also work to George’s advantage: no one expects him to be polite, so he can skip the subtler scalpels of interviewing and just start swinging the hatchet.

Not everyone buys George’s regular guy schtick. Shortly after The Hour launched, Globe and Mail television critic John Doyle called George a “kid doing a grown-up’s job. Grown-ups have to get it right, not just do it fast. Fast and flippant news isn’t cool. It’s condescending crap.” A lot of criticism also hinges on George’s interview technique. Shortly after the show premiered on the main network, the National Post’s Rob McKenzie wrote about his interview with Liberal MP Belinda Stronach. “He’s a good listener. Maybe too good. The Stronach interview became tedious as he let her rattle on about how, when it comes to the Liberal leadership convention, she’s a big believer in one member, one vote.”

Of all the criticism The Hour has attracted, Barrett Hooper’s November 2006 piece for Now magazine, in Toronto has to be the most negative. “Strombo, the sideburned, sleepy-eyed ex-VJ, is the over-hyped host of The Hour, a Daily Show-and Access Hollywood-inspired wankfest that sets out to answer such burning questions as ‘Are African babies the new Von Dutch trucker hat?’ It also unintentionally asks how much journalistic integrity the CBC will sacrifice to attract younger viewers.” Hooper is more forgiving in person, saying George is improving, but adds, “The soul patch, his black outfit, it’s like Mr. Rogers putting on his sweater-vest and his loafers are his sneakers – every night it’s the same thing.” Hooper says he’s not sure why, but his critique of The Hour inspired more reader feedback than anything he’d written in years. He suggests the program draws interest because it’s not what we expect. “Even if people at the CBC don’t quite understand what is hip and cool, they’re at least stepping outside the normal CBC box to try something.”

Tonight, when the The Hour ends, the audience and crew drain out of the room and leave the set and its surrealist stripper motif looking lifeless. The empty studio is cold, muted, like a bar after closing. The Hour is supposed to add a new dimension to the news. It rarely achieves this goal to much satisfaction, but there is the odd glimmer of its capabilities. The show needs time to mature – a luxury commercial networks wouldn’t have. But even if the public broadcaster nurses the show to adulthood, there’s no guarantee it would be worth it. If George continues to scratch at the surface of issues, he’ll end up on top of the stack of failed CBC experiments. But if he adds depth to his omnivorous approach to reporting on entertainment, culture and news, The Hour could work. George comes across as everyone’s regular guy, so the question is: When does a regular guy like George grow up? The Hour will only grow if he does.

Late one morning last October, Carol Off, the new host of CBC Radio One’s evening flagship As It Happens, prepares to interview Zemedkun Teckle, spokesperson for the Ethiopia Ministry of Information. Ensconced in a recording studio in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in downtown Toronto, she dons her headset. The wall behind her features a groovy 1970s AIH sign and photographs of past hosts such as Barbara Frum, Elizabeth Gray, Michael Enright and Mary Lou Finlay, who collectively have interviewed quirky oddballs alongside serious newsmakers for the past 39 years. Watching through a glass window in the control room, the producer and technician are thrilled with how clear the line is to Addis Ababa. Off has been to Africa many times as a reporter and knows from experience how to cover stories of war. Ethiopia has just sent military personnel into Somalia, ostensibly to train the fragile transitional government there. The goal is to prevent the Union of Islamic Courts, the group that has controlled the Somali capital of Mogadishu since June, from making headway into the country. Off is in her element.

 She grills Teckle about whether his government has mobilized forces into Somalia: “Along with these militias you say are just in there to train, have those Ethiopian militias gone in with any military hardware? Do they have tanks with them?”

“The military men who went in to give training to the Somali side have to be able to protect themselves,” says Teckle. “In that case, they may have taken some basic weapons.” “And tanks?” Off persists.

“I don’t think so,” says Teckle, chuckling softly. “I’m not going to comment on the details. I don’t have all the details.”

Off is enjoying this. She likes interviews in which she can hold public figures accountable for their actions. “Teckle is a warmonger,” she says later in her office. “He’s not taking any responsibility for what’s going to happen. And that makes me cuckoo.” (In late December, her suspicions were confirmed when Ethiopia launched a full-scale offensive, successfully ousting the Islamists and plunging the capital into chaos.)

For Off, hosting AIH is the right job at the right time, an opportunity that allows her to stay in one place after years of travelling while still providing a vehicle for her considerable experience and talent as a journalist. But at the same time, as the 40th anniversary of AIH approaches, the venerable radio program is part of a less innocent zeitgeist than when it was created in 1968. Televisions in the office are tuned to 24-hour news outlets, direct dialing makes sending flowers to overseas operators at Christmas unnecessary and the world is connected by email, cellphones and even satellite phones.

Still, the format of the show has barely changed — including the 38-year-old theme song, “Curried Soul,” by late Canadian jazz legend Moe Koffman — and to some it feels like a time warp. (One former producer, Lesley Krueger, says, “I get a shock of displacement when I’m out in the car somewhere and the theme song starts playing — what year is this?”) It also operates in a medium sometimes thought to be anachronistic in the era of the Internet, not to mention that CBC itself is under pressure from parsimonious federal governments.

There is no doubt that Off, when she started at AIH last September, was the latest in a long line of distinguished hosts, bringing a new energy and perspective to the show. The question is not so much whether this serious, hard-charging, ambitious journalist can shake up AIH’s “heritage” formula, but whether she’ll fall under the spell of its quaint and sometimes whimsical charms.

In the newsroom, Off launches into a pigeon impression. She flaps her arms around her head wildly and flashes a mischievous grin, a reminder that she has a reputation for having a lighter side, too. She has just interviewed a British photojournalist who snapped a photo of a pigeon struggling down the gullet of a pelican in a London park. Most of the producers have already seen an amateur video of the incident on YouTube.com, but they enjoy Off’s performance anyway.

Working at AIH brings out a different side of her personality, one that was rarely seen in her previous work. “There is absolutely no humour in filming the bodies of people being held up by branches in a river in the Balkans during the spring thaw,” says Margo Kelly, a reporter for CBC National Radio News, who has known Off since university. “It’s nice to hear her laugh.”

But she has another reputation to contend with. A long-time CBC producer who has worked at The Nationalsays she is a micromanager who wants to control every aspect of production. She would second-guess the producers and crew, telling an experienced cameraman how to light a scene, for example. “It got to the point where many of the producers just wouldn’t work with her at all anymore,” he says. He remembers her interviewing style — asking the same questions, sometimes for over an hour, until her sources gave in. Her tenaciousness drew both incredulity and grudging admiration from her colleagues.

Despite burning out some of her teammates, she has forged a highly successful career. She has reported from 40 countries, including war zones like Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Persian Gulf. She won a Gemini Award in 2002 for In the Company of Warlords, a documentary about Afghanistan that she made for The National. She has written three non-fiction books that explore sober issues surrounding world conflicts. Her most recent, Bitter Chocolate, tells the story of boys as young as nine who are forced to pick cocoa in the Ivory Coast, pointing out the tragic irony involved in producing the world’s favourite treat.

Her awareness of injustice started early. She grew up the third of seven children in a family of mixed Polish and British descent. Off spent her childhood in post-war northern Winnipeg, a working class community of immigrants and refugees that was home to Holocaust survivors. Her outrage at hearing their stories from the war — and on one occasion seeing a tattooed forearm — was supported by her parents, who had a social-justice bent. She decided to become a journalist while studying English at the University of Western Ontario in the late ’70s. After reading through an issue of Western’s Gazette, the student daily, she knew she could do better. She has been working in journalism ever since.

This level of determination was nothing new. After leaving high school, Off travelled across the country for almost two years before marrying an artist named Fred Harrison and settling in London. She gave birth to their son, Joel, when she was 21, and had to juggle university studies with caring for her baby. After graduating, she made the difficult decision to leave Joel in the care of his father — whom she had divorced — and move to Toronto to find work as a journalist. (Joel, now 30 and studying urban forestry in Toronto, sees Off weekly).

Off’s singular drive impressed her current husband Linden MacIntyre, host of CBC’s the fifth estate, when he first met her in the late ’80s (they married over 10 years later). “She wasn’t a glamour girl who got spotted and nurtured,” he says. “She essentially set out to invent herself and her journalism and did it bit by bit, seeing the world on her own dime, learning French on her own initiative and in many cases, coming up with her own stories and executing them against great odds.”

One dramatic example: in 1986, she sold most of her possessions to buy a plane ticket to Karachi. She planned to interview Benazir Bhutto, who was in jail at the time, and had pitched the idea to CBC radio showSunday Morning. When she arrived at the Karachi airport, she ended up being one of the only journalists in the midst of a bloody hijacking. With the airport shut down, she filed radio and television stories for CBC, along with major networks in the U.S. and Ireland. MacIntyre heard her reports from the scene and says, “I thought that was pretty gritty.”

By 2005, when she heard Mary Lou Finlay was to retire from hosting AIH after eight years, Off realized she was ready to throw her hat into the ring. The hiring process took over six months, during which time there was both a federal election and an Olympics, but CBC wanted to find the right fit. When Off finally won the job, she realized she was ambivalent about giving up her foreign reporting, which MacIntyre describes as addictive, but she accepted after much soul-searching. She doesn’t miss travelling as much as she feared. At 52, working at AIHallows Off a new level of comfort and security: “I’ve started to realize the degree to which folding myself into tiny airplane seats for 25-hour journeys to other parts of the world, and spending weeks sleeping in makeshift rooms, tents or ditches, is hard on the body.”

Her schedule today is more conventional — she has weekends off and dinner at home most nights — but the intense, sometimes daunting necessity to be prepared and effective for interviews that are scheduled at the eleventh hour is demanding in a different way. The new pace is relentless. Where she used to travel intensely for a month or so and then return to a more flexible timetable, now she gets up each weekday and reads all the newspapers to prepare for work. Often she reads all weekend, too, leaving little time for stacked-up errands and personal obligations.

When she arrives at the show’s open concept office in the mammoth, glass-enclosed broadcasting centre at around 10 a.m., the show’s chase producers, mostly in their twenties and thirties, are already absorbed in intense research behind their computer screens. At 10:30 a.m. she joins them for a story meeting in the alcove by her office — a cozy space with couches, a stereo and a giant fern. Leslie Peck, the executive producer, presides over the meeting like a den mother. The producers pitch their ideas according to categories, everyone listening respectfully before jumping in with comments. Peck has the final say about which ideas to chase and which to kill.

Back at their desks, the producers hunt down sources. Having scheduled interviews for Off, they write the times in dry erase marker on the storyboard, sometimes accompanied by little editorial cartoons, if they feel so inspired. (For one worthy but less-thandramatic story, a producer wrote, “Wheat Board: Manitoba,” followed by Zzzzzzz…). Before each interview, the producer handling the story gives Off a one-page research summary with a list of suggested questions. Then, at the appointed time, the segment is taped. Off goes back and forth from her office to the studio a dozen or so times on a busy day.

The brilliant illusion of AIH is that most listeners think it’s live. In fact, it goes out in waves across the country, reflecting different time zones, and airing from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in each one (except, needless to say, a half-hour later in Newfoundland). Off and veteran announcer and co-host Barbara Budd are not really together in the studio the whole time the show is on the air. Budd comes in at three, reads through the script and makes her notes. At 5:30 p.m. EST they introduce the show together to the East Coast. Budd then reads the transitions between each of Off’s earlier recorded interviews, which are edited for length and clarity. (It’s only on occasion that Off’s interviews are live, such as during a breaking news story). Then they pre-record the goodbyes during a newsbreak. Off heads home most days by the time the clock in the studio ticks around its green fluorescent circle to 7 p.m.

As important as the co-hosts are, the format of AIH is the real star of the show. It offers listeners an unusual mix of smart, in-depth interviews with current newsmakers and kooky ones about ordinary folks involved in unconventional situations. As former host Michael Enright puts it, “We always had a crazy vicar story. You know, some nutty Church of England vicar that came out in favour of ordaining white rabbits or something.” Within the first six years of her tenure as host, Barbara Frum had interviewed: the grower of the world’s largest cabbage (who was both hard of hearing and just back from the pub), “Bozo” Miller, who held the 1980 Guinness record for eating 54 pounds of chicken in one sitting, and a stuntman who planned to catapult himself across a river with a giant slingshot.

Over the years, producers have also reached Soviet dissidents at a clandestine meeting the night Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled; the boxer Muhammad Ali after he talked a suicidal young black man down from a ledge in Chicago; Sir Geoffrey Howe, a long-serving member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, in his bathtub; and a 17-year-old Dawson College student recuperating in a café after fleeing from a gunman in a trench coat.

In an age of high-tech gadgetry and the Internet, AIH has the same elements today as it had at the beginning: a telephone, a microphone and music. It’s a simple, relatively inexpensive model that so engages listeners, some report sitting in their driveways waiting to hear the end of an interview. In a Bureau of Broadcast Measurement report covering January to March 2006, AIH had a weekly reach of 895,100 listeners and captured an impressive 11 per cent share of the listening audience in Canada. Its popularity has grown to include Americans too, who tune in for a syndicated hour-long version in 105 markets in that country.

The origin of the show goes back to 1968, the brainchild of Val Clery, a former commando in the British Army, who devised the call-out concept. He used a new technique called “roller-coasting,” meaning the show would start on the East Coast and run for two hours in each time zone adding new, breaking material as it went along. It was completely live and ran for six hours, thus the name, As It Happens.

It was an era of experimentation in radio broadcasting. The all-night Radio Unnameable on WBAI in New York, for example, combined impromptu poetry readings with reports on the local Greenwich Village drug scene, all in an open format. But Clery’s idea to reach out globally was, in an era before digital and satellite technology, a technical nightmare. The phone system was so unreliable that Bell engineers had to be on hand for the first few shows and phone wires were rigged loosely around the studio. There were far fewer conversations and they lasted up to 15 minutes each, partly because it was so hard to reach people live. Guests would show up late, forcing AIH producers to play entire songs between interviews. It was slow and chatty, and ratings were terrible.

Luckily Margaret Lyons, a pioneering CBC executive, had a vision for current affairs programming and an eye for spotting talent. She believed CBC radio had become irrelevant to the average Canadian — the audience was so small in the ’60s that CBC thought seriously about shutting the network down — and she intended to change that. In 1970, she recruited Mark Starowicz, a 23-year-old ex-student radical who had been fired from both The Gazette in Montreal and the Toronto Star — as a producer. She wanted him to shake up the stuffy network from the inside, and put him to work on AIH.

So, in 1973, over one night during the New Year’s long weekend, Richard Bronstein, Starowicz and a technician reformatted the show. They more than doubled the number of items, making each one as topical as possible. They decided to use short stings of music in between items and engineered a mix of serious stories and lighter fare.

The premise — that you could start each day fresh and go around the world talking to newsmakers on the telephone — took a lot of chutzpah to execute. The staff was young and rebellious. “Our offices were next door to one of the middle-management types in radio,” says Alison Gordon, a producer from 1975 to 1978. “I remember at one point we took to playing on the turntable in our office an old marching band version of ‘O Canada’ before the morning meeting. Even though we knew it would never happen, we were hoping that he’d complain so we could then get the word out that ‘middle-management’ is anti-patriotic.”

In those days AIH was located in the radio building on Jarvis Street, a former girls private school at the turn of the century. It was “haunted in the best way by all kinds of radio ghosts,” says Karen Levine, a producer who fondly remembers working there despite its flaws. “It was falling down, there were mice, there were flies in the bathroom. It was just a dump.” Cigarette smoke filled the air along with the constant clacking of typewriters. Producers had three black rotary telephones in their offices, and there were three more in the studio with corresponding lines. When calling overseas, they would cling desperately to the line (a lot of calls got dropped accidentally) and holler down to the studio for a technician to pick up. They rifled through paper reports coming in from the wires. They had a Telex machine to message out, though it was glacially slow. They edited tape with razor blades and then hauled the reel onto an Ampex machine to listen (and they had to listen hard because three other producers might be simultaneously doing the same thing). They used overseas operators in Montreal for every international call and received every incoming call through the overburdened CBC switchboard.

Unlike Off and company, who simply walk along a hall to the studio, producers on Jarvis Street had many levels of stairs to navigate, which they did at increasingly breakneck speeds as show time approached. Tempers flared and on occasion a typewriter would fly across the office, but the creative intensity also gave rise to the feeling that they were part of a large, rowdy family.

In then-host Barbara Frum, they found a witty older sister with an unorthodox fashion sense. Alan Mendelsohn, a former producer who later went on to write and direct a CBC Life and Times documentary about her legacy, remembers people teasing her about her wardrobe of busy prints, plumes and faux fur. “She was very good at laughing at herself and being made fun of,” he says. “She did not have a thin skin.” The loud blouses became one of her trademarks when she moved to television in 1982 to host The Journal, the second half of the national newscast, which she hosted for 10 years before passing away in 1992.

Although she achieved greater fame with The Journal, the legacy of AIH still has Frum at its centre. With her co-host Alan Maitland — a much-loved announcer with mellifluous pipes — by her side, she created a legendary intimacy with her audience. She had the ability, so valuable in broadcast journalism, to sound as though she was representing listeners, asking the question they would have asked in her place. The personality of the show evolved around her style, and over the years, her name became almost interchangeable with the show itself, as in, “I heard it on Barbara Frum last night.”

It was Frum’s cheeky and irreverent comments that first caught Off’s attention when she was in university and growing tired of the same rock music on the radio. She liked how Frum challenged authority in her interviews and says, “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that on radio.”

As one of the few hosts to have a primary background as a field reporter, Off’s forceful style has changedAIH, but not the basic character of the show. Jennifer McGuire, executive director of programming for CBC Radio, says the show is not static. There was minor tinkering with pacing when Off came in, and there are plans to continue exploring ways to use new technology. (The weekly podcast, The Best of AIH, is consistently near the top of iTunes’s most downloaded list). But even though the voice of the show is different, CBC brass seem to have adopted the position that they shouldn’t try to fix what isn’t broken. “You’re not going to see it turn into a documentary show, or start talking about earthworms,” says McGuire. “It’s a heritage show for CBC. It’s an important anchor in our schedule and the face of CBC Radio to the world.” Of course, offbeat items like ones on giant cabbages or record-setting chicken-eaters are part of what makesAIH the show that it is.

Take this morning in late October, for example. Off interviews Clive Farrell, one of the foremost butterfly experts in England, who just happened to have a monarch butterfly all the way from North America land in his garden while he was eating lunch. Dara McLeod, the producer, tells Farrell to hold while she transfers him to the host. “He’s quiet,” she says to Off. “Be forewarned.”

Off, who today wears a skirt and a soft blue sweater, asks her guest to describe the butterfly (“excellent condition, it just had a tiny tear in the hind wing”), what he feeds it, (“fresh flowers everyday and a pad of cotton wool that I soak in a 10 per cent sugar and water solution”) and where he keeps it (“this particular greenhouse I’ve got is quite large and there’s a little stream running through it”). He explains that the butterfly likely migrated across the Atlantic on the jet stream, where the temperature is -50 C. It’s one of the few monarchs ever to land in Britain.

Beyond the glass wall, McLeod types a question on her computer: how can the butterfly go so long without being able to rest on land? Off instantly sees it on her laptop, and weaves the question in. McLeod gives her the thumbs-up sign. Listening intently, the tough investigative reporter with the fearsome reputation for grilling subjects gazes into the distance with a dreamy look on her face, imagining herself in that greenhouse. Once the interview is over, she turns to her colleagues and says: “I’m going to go live with Mr. Farrell.”

Editors hunched over their desks throughout The Canadian Press newsroom in downtown Toronto command an army of reporters and strategize with bureaus across the country. All around, flashes and blasts of light and noise radiate from televisions tuned to CBC, CNN and Sportsnet. The sounds of snapping computer keys and shrieking phones clutter the air. Yet, in the office at the back of the room, all is quiet. The TV is on mute. A telephone and a BlackBerry sit silently on the desk. Beside them stands a series of quote cards from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. The office, the desk and the cards belong to Scott White, editor-in-chief of CP, a news agency owned by some 100 paid-circulation newspapers, that, as members, submit and share content for a fee. Colleagues tease their boss for showcasing the cards, but White calls the sixth century BC masterpiece “the world’s greatest strategic thinking book,” and often dwells on Tzu’s lessons when he’s contemplating the challenges CP faces.

 To describe them, White uses a phrase you won’t find in Tzu’s writing: “Yet another fucking thing.” First on that list is the impending departure of Canada’s biggest newspaper publisher, CanWest Global Communications Corp. Last summer, it gave CP the requisite one year’s notice to pull its 10 daily city papers—including the Ottawa Citizen, The Vancouver Sun and the Calgary Herald — out of the co-operative. As a result, CP stands to lose $4.6 million, just under 10 per cent of its annual budget. This is the biggest assault on the organization since 1996, when Southam Inc. threatened to pull out its newspapers (now, ironically, owned by CanWest) and bury CP.

Though Southam backed down, it took massive restructuring and staff cuts to quell the complaints. Over a decade later, the co-operative is still around, but fighting more battles. As newspapers suffer from dwindling circulation numbers, CP is saddled with the task of staying affordable for its member-owners without cutting services. Meanwhile, demands have increased, both from newspapers and CP’s newest generation of customers, online news outlets, which have unique needs like multimedia content and Internet-friendly formatting. But staff numbers at CP haven’t recovered since the Southam incident, remaining lower than they were before the cuts. Over-exerted reporters are now all-in-one journalists, on the hook for copy, audio and photographs. Add in the expected loss of CanWest’s regional content and CP is spread even thinner across Canada. The list of looming obstacles keeps getting longer.

CP has, however, survived its share of conflicts since it was founded in 1917. And White insists the co-op has a store of defences, including new revenue streams, to ensure its next victories. “It’s not like we didn’t see this coming,” he says of CanWest’s departure and the consequences. “We’re ready, and we will be ready.”

With newspapers, broadcasters and online outlets fighting for the same audience, the news industry in Canada has become a battleground. CP’s co-operative structure, bringing together all these opposing forces, creates a volatile reality for the organization. “The notion of journalistic camaraderie is long, long gone,” says Gerry Nott, editor-in-chief of the CanWest News Service. “If you don’t think this is about outright, straight, hard, cutthroat competition, then you’re wrong.”

The declaration of war between CP and CanWest came early last year in the form of a strategic review report. The document, based on about five months of internal discussions at CP, revealed a gross division in outlook for the co-operative. CanWest stood at odds with the rest of the members, calling for a pared-down CP, with less focus on original content and a completely overhauled structure that would offer “à la carte pricing,” allowing CanWest to pick and choose which material it would buy. Currently, members have only two options when it comes to receiving content from the wire — NewsStream, meant for small or medium-sized papers, and Datafile, the enhanced CP service, which provides about 40 per cent more material. Neither of the services satisfied CanWest’s desire for less CP content. As Nott explains, much of it is redundant for his organization, which has papers covering all of Canada, except the East Coast. “We didn’t want to pay for what I’d describe as a fire-hose feed,” he says. It’s the same fundamental problem Southam had with CP a decade ago.

CanWest also took issue with CP’s return news exchange, the foundation of its co-operative structure. The system requires that members submit their news stories and photos (features, exclusives and related photographs are exempt) to the service, with coverage areas defined geographically. CP then rewrites the copy and distributes it on the wire, but only to papers and broadcasters outside the originating zone, and never online. CanWest, however, didn’t want to share its content with competitors, arguing it contributed more to the co-operative than it used. It was particularly irked by how the system functions in Vancouver, where The Globe and Mail’s city section rivals CanWest-owned dailies The Province and the Vancouver Sun. Because the Globe’s return news area is limited to the Greater Toronto Area, it receives member contributed content from every other market, despite being a national paper. As Nott illustrates, if a ferry sank in the harbour and the Vancouver Sun had a photograph of it going down, it is bound by CP bylaws to submit the picture to the co-operative. The Globe could then, in theory, use the picture for its cover in the Vancouver market—but CanWest’s own National Post couldn’t, as it’s not a CP member (it dropped out in 2004 to save costs), nor could the Province, which is restricted from seeing the Vancouver Sun’s content because the two share a commercial market. When CanWest’s complaints didn’t spark any immediate action, it asked to leave the return news service. CP refused the request. “That was a point of departure for us,” says Nott. With CP reluctant to meet its demands for change throughout the strategic review process, CanWest felt it had no choice but to break ranks.

Even the members sticking with CP are calling for changes. As demand for online news content increases, these papers want CP to become a “multimedia, multiplatform” news agency, according to the strategic review report. Eric Morrison, CP’s president, says that its member newspapers have become much more than print entities. “We would’ve had the Toronto Sun newspaper as a client 10 years ago, and now we have [Sun owner] Quebecor, which has TV and Internet presences” as well. This change has CP struggling to file stories faster while also providing video clips so that its members can compete in a news world increasingly dominated by the likes of AOL Canada and Rogers Yahoo!. Meanwhile, CP has to satisfy the demands of these lucrative online outlets without the help of its member newspapers. Since CP keeps return news off the Internet, websites can only use copy generated by the collective’s reporters.

The Internet poses another challenge to CP in the form of news accessibility. International and national content, CP’s primary product for newspapers, is available to readers 24/7 online. Nott suggests that, as a result, dailies will need stories that are more relevant to their local markets instead of CP’s multiregional content. “[Newspapers] need to drill down locally so deeply to maintain their relevancy in their community that a lot of the traditional kinds of content CP went to great lengths to provide has less value,” he says. It’s an issue that The Associated Press in the U.S. faces as well, and is tackling head-on. One of its latest initiatives is the creation of a web-based system that will allow member newspapers to seek out regionally significant content—not just local news, but also stories related to companies, industries and other entities relevant to the member’s market. “You have to listen to your customers and develop products that are useful to them,” says AP’s Tom Brettingen. “You have to find ways to become more valuable.”

These demands require more of CP’s staff than ever, but it’s had to keep costs as low as possible for members. That challenge has left little room for growth since the massive cutbacks in 1996. When Hollinger bought out Southam and cancelled the pullout of its papers, there were conditions. Hollinger’s then-owner, Conrad Black, wanted “more service for less money,” he told Maclean’s. After immediately eliminating a quarter of its staff—and putting more work on the desks of those reporters it kept on — CP began a major restructuring process. According to Osprey Media’s Michael Sifton, a former Hollinger executive and now chairman of the CP board, that meant scaling back on the creation of unique and costly material. “Therefore there was less original generation, more refinement and circulation of member content,” he says.

It was a move that’s now creating a serious headache for CP. The fact that it put increased reliance on its member exchange 10 years ago means that the loss of CanWest will leave gaps in coverage areas. Though CP has a Vancouver bureau, it won’t have a member paper providing content from the city when CanWest departs (the same goes for Windsor, which doesn’t even have a bureau). There will also be holes in Saskatchewan, where two CanWest papers, Regina’s Leader-Post and Saskatoon’s The StarPhoenix, cover most of the province for the member exchange. “Sitting here in Toronto, a lot of people think that’s fine,” says Jim Poling Sr., former general manager of CP. “But I can tell you most assuredly, news from down here isn’t the way people are living their lives out there. And that’s how you start getting these great divides in the country—different parts of the country don’t understand each other because they’re not getting a good exchange of the news.”

Filling those gaps will be yet another battle for CP, as its purse strings haven’t slackened in over a decade. While the budget has gone up from $46 million to $48 million, the cooperative would have needed a $10 million increase to keep up with inflation. As a result, hiring has been kept to a minimum. The 250 reporters it does employ are maxed out — at the expense of better journalism. “You can’t be a perfect, full-time French broadcast reporter, English broadcast reporter, English print reporter and photographer,” says Montreal’s Les Perreaux, who covered all these positions on the sandy, war-torn plains of Afghanistan. “You’re always just trying to do the most that you can, but you’re never doing anything to 100 per cent.” Reporters in Canada have been feeling the pressure, too, as their list of responsibilities grows along with demands from CP’s clients and members. Like Perreaux, reporter Tara Brautigam has to provide content for print, online and broadcast—and he’s solely responsible for all of Newfoundland and Labrador. “I have to be on top of a lot more things here, because it’s just myself to cover the entire province,” he says. “It’s like that old Looney Tunes cartoon — water spouts out of one hole in the ground, you cover it and two more holes pop up.”

White’s been aware of the changing, competitive news industry since the tumultuous experience with Southam in 1996. He recalls being angry, and says the event left a deep scar on CP staff. For over a decade, he’s been strategizing, a general preparing his troops for the second attack. “You never forget those days, and it’s been a driving force ever since then,” he says. “We’re not going to fail. We want to succeed. There wasn’t anybody who thought this wave wasn’t going to come again, but we’ve had a long time to get ready for it now.”

CP’s first line of defence is financial stability. Over the past 10 years, it has reversed the ratio of member to non-member revenue— that is, newspaper versus TV, radio stations, etc. In 1996, it was a 60-40 split, with member newspapers carrying the bulk. Today, after expanding its marketing division and selling aggressively, non-members contribute 59 per cent of the cooperative’s annual budget, while members represent just 41 per cent (and, as a result, their annual fees haven’t gone up in 14 years). This means CP is not only less reliant on the declining newspaper industry, but also less reliant on any single source of revenue — such as CanWest. Additionally, because CanWest is slated to leave in July, this year CP will only have to deal with $2.3 million of the $4.6 million loss, says Gerry Arnold, CP’s executive editor. Better still, the 2006 Conservative budget included changes to federally-regulated pension plans. As a result, CP’s annual contributions dropped by about $1 million, further softening the CanWest blow.

CP is also branching out by supplying nontraditional customers, like government agencies and corporations, with news. Last November, CP announced a contract with the Toronto Stock Exchange to create a financial market news service, TSX/CP Equities News, directed at traders and other financial houses that receive TSX data. It’s a joint-branded venture, and is distributed by TSX, but CP has complete editorial control. White says that the service has redefined the way CP staffers cover business; they’ve had to increase their speed even beyond the usual demands of the Internet, as seconds can make a huge difference in the financial world. To that end, CP offers 40- word “Biz Flashes” when news breaks. “Sometimes that’s all the information a trader needs,” White explains. He says TSX/CP will outshine business coverage from Reuters and Bloomberg by providing a distinctly Canadian service; while the other agencies offer immediate coverage for the top 30 companies in the country, White says CP will cover the top 100. The venture will add a decent chunk of revenue, though Arnold won’t say exactly how much.

CP is also diversifying its core product, with an increasing focus on multimedia news. In January, for instance, it created a package examining the individual lives of Robert Pickton’s 26 alleged murder victims. Aside from its unparalleled depth, the project reflected a changing news agency. It provided content purposed for broadcast, print and the Internet. There were feature stories and short radio pieces on each of the victims, but also a broader, 20-minute radio documentary, as well as some video content. The print component is one of CP’s early hopefuls for the 2007 edition of the National Newspaper Awards.

White disagrees with the notion that ease of access to national and international news via the Internet treads on CP’s territory. He believes newspapers will always require news from outside their immediate area, and that CP will always be ready to provide. “No one’s buying a newspaper for the CP content,” he says, admitting that it’s an interest in Vancouver news, for example, that drives sales of the Vancouver Sun. “But they also want to know what else is going on. They would want some non-local stuff, sports or business or whatever. Where are they going to get the rest of their news? That’s the whole beauty of the co-operative,” says White. And while readers could, in theory, seek out all their non-local news online, it would be a massive, unfiltered search for the stories that truly matter. As Kelly Toughill, an assistant professor of journalism at University of King’s College in Halifax and former deputy executive editor at the Toronto Star, argues, few people have the time for that kind of information quest. “CP aggregates the best news every day and offers it to every market,” she says. “The chances that readers are going to go through the Internet and find the interesting stories from every small community is ludicrous. This is what I do for a living, and I don’t even do that.”

As for covering the news gaps left by CanWest’s departure, White says CP has brought back a second correspondent to Saskatchewan (it had cut one to save costs) to cushion the loss. Though it’s looking at enlisting a freelancer to help with coverage in Windsor, White says it’ll also rely on broadcasters to cover short-staffed regions. “We’ve got a lot of ways we can reach out and get the news,” he says. “Not to say that I’m not worried —I am worried— but I’m also confident that we’ll be able to do it.”

For now, one of White’s priorities is experimenting with online video. He thinks that soon most people will seek news online first, and then go to other mediums to complement the information. “As wireless expands, it’s just going to be way easier to access your information that way. People are starting to watch video on these things,” he says, holding up and waving around his BlackBerry to illustrate. White has established the video offerings as an optional add-on for a fee (even from member newspapers’ websites). He’s already purchased more than 50 cameras, certain that his staff will embrace the new opportunity. He knows they can confront the battles ahead.

There are two important terms in The Art of War —the tao and the ch’i,” says White. He explains that the tao refers to the way, or the mission, while the ch’i refers to the spirit, the drive to do better. “People have to know where it is we’re going and have the ch’i, or pride, in their work. And when you get excellent people, why do they stay here? Because they believe in the mission that we’re a not-for-profit company whose job it is to keep Canadians informed. And it’s corny as shit, but there are a lot of people who do believe that.”

Despite his confidence, White doesn’t want to bog down reporters with another responsibility, so he’s letting them test the waters on a voluntary basis with video. “But at the same time, I say, it’s a good thing there’s yet another fucking thing. It’s the time that somebody doesn’t want something from you when you have to worry.”

Boris Spremo lugged his 125-pound trunk through Toronto International Airport. The Toronto Starphotojournalist was off on a six-week assignment in several countries of famine-ravaged Central Africa. Inside his trunk he’d packed a small retractable enlarger, film-developing chemicals, processing trays, a hair dryer and a thermometer. The photographer, who had dark shaggy hair, also carried a transmitter inside a heavy black briefcase and one small bag filled with clothes and toiletries. His Nikon F3 and half a dozen lenses hung from his neck and shoulders. Even he thought he looked like a Christmas tree. Once in Africa, Spremo set up his darkroom in the hotel bathroom before heading out to shoot. He placed a towel under the door to keep the light out, lined three trays—for developer, fix and water—in the tub and tied a string across the top of the shower to dry his film. Outside, he posted a note for the chambermaids: “Please don’t enter. Just bring the towels.” After a long day of shooting, Spremo retreated to his room, “souped” his film in the developing chemicals and printed the images onto photographic paper. Once he was happy with his pictures, he unscrewed the phone’s mouthpiece, hooked two butterfly clips in place, dialled the Toronto Star’s line, and rolled his prints through the transmitter’s black drum. The process took about eight minutes per picture. At the other end, the images rolled off a similar machine in the paper’s darkroom. The photo editor then chose the most striking, well-composed shot to complement the article.

The process was tedious. “Sometimes I didn’t finish until one or two in the morning, and the next morning I had to be out on the road already shooting for the next day,” Spremo says. “But today it is much easier.” Everything he did in that makeshift darkroom, Mike Carroccetto can now do from a local Starbucks. The freelance photographer for the Ottawa Citizen downloads his pictures of a pumpkin carving contest, the advanced mayoral polls and a ballet rehearsal, from his digital camera’s memory card onto his Apple Macintosh iBook laptop. For these three assignments, Carroccetto took more than 200 photographs. He selects about five or six photos per shoot that have the potential to make the paper. As Spremo did, Carroccetto crops and adjusts the brightness and contrast of his photos before sending them, but instead of doing it in a darkroom, he uses Photoshop. He adds basic cutlines using Photo Mechanic, and he dumps his images into the Citizen’s Merlin archiving system. It takes only seconds and can be done over a latté.

Spremo, who started at The Globe and Mail in 1962, and moved to the Toronto Star four years later, is now 70 and retired after an award-filled, 40-year career. Also retired from photojournalism are film, darkrooms and transmitters. Digital technology has revolutionized newsrooms in recent years and the main tools of the industry are now digital cameras, memory cards and laptops. Many news photographers are pleased to see the end of developing pictures in small, dark, chemical-filled rooms. But this new technology comes with its own dangers. Photographers now have to compete with citizens armed with digital point-and-shoots or camera phones. And with newspapers posting original video clips on their websites, photojournalists may soon become videojournalists. Worse, photojournalists are now under greater scrutiny as more and more people question the authenticity of pictures appearing in print.

Photojournalism didn’t have the most ethical start. In 1855, William Howard Russell, a war correspondent for the Times of London, had been writing accounts of military mismanagement and the soldiers’ insufficient and unsanitary living conditions. In response, Thomas Agnew of publishing house Thomas Agnew & Sons sent photographer Roger Fenton to cover the Crimean War, instructing him to produce photographs that would offset the public’s aversion to the war. Using daguerreotype, an early process that exposed images directly onto silver-coated copper plates, Fenton produced 360 photographs in four months despite developing with dirty water in high temperatures under enemy fire. Some of these photographs appeared in the Illustrated London News. Like Fenton’s photographs, the first newspaper pictures had to be carved into wood to run through printing presses, so they were often unrecognizable.

The Ermanox in 1924 and the Leica in 1925 were landmark developments for photography. The two German cameras had wide aperture lenses that allowed short exposure times for outdoor work. The Leica camera had the added advantage of using 35mm film, which advanced quickly. The technology was not perfected, so Canadian photojournalists stuck with the Speed Graphic, which used four-by-five inch film, from the 1930s to the end of the ’50s. It’s the big, black box-like camera Jude Law’s character, Harlan Maguire, uses to photograph crime scenes in Road to Perdition, a 2002 movie set in the ’30s.

Spremo, whose old Speed Graphic now sits on his office desk in his basement, says it was like a “piece of furniture.” He couldn’t shoot discreetly because it was too large to camouflage and it didn’t have a telephoto lens.

When the single lens reflex camera arrived in the early ’60s, photojournalists finally started using 35mm film. Spremo, who bought his first 35mm, a Pentax S1, in 1961 for $125, says that once photojournalists could use telephoto lenses to shoot from a distance, they could get more candid shots. One result was the rise of the paparazzi in the late ’50s. Tired of dealing with publicists and movie studios, Robert Harrison, publisher of the scandal magazine Confidential, hired freelancers to capture stars on film. By the mid-’60s, Nikon’s super-long telephoto lenses allowed the paparazzi to shoot from afar, making it easier to satisfy the growing obsession with celebrities.

Kodak, Canon and RCA began researching digital technology in the ’70s, but the first cameras weren’t available until the early ’90s. Though early models were bulky, had long shutter lag and could shoot only one or two frames per second, by 2003 the technology had improved enough that most news organizations had switched. Digital cameras allow photographers to shoot without worrying about film costs and to see their shots right away on an LCD screen.

Although the camera of choice has changed over the decades, the power of photojournalism hasn’t. “When you walk across a newsstand, it’s a photo or a headline that grabs your attention, never the text,” says Carroccetto. “Text is text —it always looks the same.” One of the most dramatic news photographs in recent years is Falling Man. Taken by Associated Press photographer Richard Drew, it shows a man in a white dress shirt and black trousers falling head-first from the World Trade Center. Even the most talented writer would have trouble depicting the despair felt by those trapped in the burning buildings as well as this picture does. Another haunting example is Nick Ut’s 1972 photograph of Pan Thi Kim Phuc with her arms outstretched from her naked and burned body as she fled her village after a napalm bombing. The horror of that picture only increased the American public’s aversion to the Vietnam War.

After Robert Kennedy’s assassination in 1968, Spremo travelled with the press on the train carrying the body from New York to Washington. The train kept stopping as people lined the tracks to pay their last respects, so it didn’t arrive until midnight. Kennedy was buried at around 1 a.m. After a night of shooting and developing the prints, Spremo woke up early and returned to the cemetery. Knowing the best shot would be of Ethel Kennedy visiting the grave for the first time, Spremo staked out a spot under a tree about 50 to 75 metres from the grave and waited. Soon other photographers and news crews gathered until military police asked everyone to leave out of respect for the family’s privacy. Not one to abandon a shot, Spremo took off his jacket and press credentials, grabbed one camera and telephoto lens and joined the line of people going up the hill to visit the grave. Each time he passed the grave, he would jump the line and go back up again, circling for two hours before Ethel and her son Joseph arrived. Dressed in a dark suit, with black wrist-length gloves and a scarf draped over her head, Ethel leaned down to place a single white rose on her husband’s grave, while Joseph knelt and crossed his hands. Spremo was the only photographer to get the shot.

Spremo doesn’t think staying at the cemetery was unethical. Emphasizing the importance of being discreet and shooting people respectfully, he says, “You’re there because it’s a news event. You can’t just say, ‘Okay, you kicked me out of the cemetery,’ and that’s it. No way. I’m going to go back again and do whatever I can do just to illustrate that event.” Refusing to name names, Spremo does, however, admit that he’s seen competitors stage photos and remove billboards from backgrounds.

Even though most newspapers have policies in place against manipulating pictures, some photographers have fallen prey to Photoshop’s temptations. Last summer, Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj was covering the Israeli- Lebanon conflict until blogger Charles Johnson publicly exposed the repetition of Beirut buildings and billowing smoke in one Hajj picture. “This Reuters’ photograph shows blatant evidence of manipulation,” wrote Johnson, speculating that it was done using Photoshop’s “clone” tool. Reuters responded by advising news agencies of the discrepancy, severing ties with Hajj and withdrawing 920 of his photos. Hajj told the BBC that rather than doctoring the image, he was cleaning dust off it.

No one bought that excuse though, especially after blogger Rusty Shackleford found a problem with another Hajj photo of an Israeli F- 16. The caption said the plane was firing missiles at the southern Lebanon city of Nabatiyeh, but Shackleford figured out that the warplane was firing flares, not missiles, and that only one of these “missiles” was real. The other two had been “cloned.”

Bloggers, who had already appointed themselves watchdogs over reporters, editors and producers, were now taking on photographers. While the goal of increased transparency in the media is laudable, it may foster greater cynicism about journalistic ethics. “Photographers were always able to manipulate pictures in the darkroom,” says Keith Morrison, a former Calgary Herald photographer who is now publisher of C-ing Magazine, a publication about photojournalism. “But now, as the public gains awareness of digital photography and Photoshop, they have stopped trusting the pictures in newspapers and magazines.”

Alfred Hermida, an assistant professor at the University of British Columbia’s School of Journalism and a founding member of the BBC’s website, says photojournalists shouldn’t fear greater media accountability. Instead, he says, newspaper websites should clearly state the organization’s code of ethics including what types of photo manipulation are acceptable. As for the Reuters debacle, Hermida says Photoshop is a dangerous tool because it allows photographers to distort what really happened. “Photographs are supposed to show a moment in time,” he says, “and ultimately the Reuters photos show a moment that never happened.”

When on location at sporting events in the ’60s and ’70s, UPI technicians would convert deserted change rooms or janitorial closets into darkrooms. “All we needed was water and we would beg, borrow and steal any table we could to put our easel on and make prints,” says Bob Carroll, formerly a UPI photographer and darkroom technician and now the photo editor at The Windsor Star. They would cover the windows and cracks with black garbage bags and duct tape so white light couldn’t creep in. After shooting a roll, a photographer packaged the film in an envelope, wrote simple cutlines on the outside and handed it off to the runners, who took the film to the temporary darkroom. “And then,” says Carroll, “we would process and transmit them in the dumpy little room.”

With his travelling-darkroom days well behind him, Carroll walks through the Windsor Star’s old darkroom one afternoon last November. Once filled with hurried photographers trying to make prints before deadline, it now has an eerie feeling. The old off-white, five-footlong film processor sits in the back room unplugged. Although it hasn’t been an operational part of the newsroom for about eight years, the film-loaders are still in the machine. Rectangular safelights hang from the ceiling. An old container of fix and a loaded reel sit on the bookshelf in the corner. It’s as though the photographer processing the film abandoned it as soon as he received word about going digital. The water basins once used for developing and processing are now filled with old pipes and there are holes in the walls where the pipes used to be connected. Stacks of boxes filled with old negatives fill the counter where enlargers used to sit. Dust is everywhere. Under the cupboards are drawers that house bits and pieces of the old room’s life, including a holder for fourby- five inch negatives, enlarger parts and an empty rum bottle. As Carroll leaves the darkroom, he says, “They’re thinking about changing it into a web room.” Then he chuckles, ironically.

A month later, it’s no longer just an idea— the transformation from a darkroom to a room for producing website projects is underway. The safelights have been ripped from the ceiling and the old processor has been stripped to its bare bones. The film reel is gone from the shelf and the drawers are empty. Even the rum bottle has disappeared. Carroll walks around pointing out doorways they plan on expanding and walls they want to build. He seems excited about the room’s new life.

Not everyone agrees on the wisdom of the changes. “The one thing I miss is that my creativity isn’t being used here,” says Julian Riches, a former darkroom technician and now a photo editor at the Citizen. “My ability was used in those days and you were famous for your ability.” Today, Riches spends his nights hunched over a computer. But WindsorStar photographer Nick Brancaccio prefers digital. “I don’t miss the darkroom at all,” he says. “I don’t miss getting my hands dirty in the chemicals and the headaches. This is much easier.”

Either way, there’s no turning back. After all, the Windsor Star has begun to upgrade its newsroom to keep up with the demands of the time. Many newspapers now post additional photos on their websites. For example, last October, as part of the paper’s series about Alzheimer’s, the Citizen ran a slideshow about Gerry McKee, who has the disease, and his wife Joan.

Pictures of the couple singing at church, walking along the water, and gardening flicker on and off the screen as Citizen photographer Julie Oliver narrates. Instead of picking one shot to run alongside an article, websites give newspapers somewhere to display more of the photographer’s work.

The web not only offers photojournalists another venue, it may transform their role. According to Dirck Halstead, former Time magazine contract photographer and creator of the online photojournalism magazine,TheDigital Journalist, “The business of still photography is dying quickly and still photographers are an endangered species.”

The National Post, the Citizen and other papers already upload original video content on their websites, and Halstead believes more will follow suit. Instead of hiring videographers, he says, photojournalists equipped with highdefinition cameras will shoot video for the web and grab stills for the newspaper.

Halstead’s Platypus Short Courses are weekend workshops that prepare photojournalists for this new role by teaching them the language of television. CanWest photographers attended the workshop in Toronto early this past October. Halstead is optimistic the change will allow these employees “to step up in the newsroom.”

Even as their traditional job faces extinction, photographers must deal with competition from amateurs. “Now every Tom, Dick and Harry can take a decent photograph because of how easy a point-and-shoot digital camera is,” says Peter Robertson, former Toronto Star photo editor. Citizens captured pictures with cellphones after the terrorist bombings in the London underground on July 7, 2005. Though grainy, dull and unclear, the photos were all news organizations had.

Similarly, the first photographs of the Dawson College shootings in Montreal to appear in newspapers were taken by the college’s photography students. “They were there and they had cameras,” says Lynn Farrell,The Gazette’s photo editor, who, like other photo editors, says she’ll use pictures from the public only when it’s impossible for her staff or freelancers to get the same shot.

Carroccetto isn’t worried about the moonlighters because “most of them have good paying jobs,” he says, “jobs that may pay better than mine.” But with the Windsor Star considering adding a page to showcase readers’ photographs and television networks soliciting pictures from viewers, it’s likely we’ll see more amateur work than ever before.

Remnants of the old days—when professional photojournalists weren’t concerned about their changing role or questions about their ethics — fill Spremo’s basement office. There’s a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Spremo wearing khaki pants and a vest with cameras draped from his shoulders and a display case housing his camera collection. His Pentax S1, finger marks worn onto either side of the base where he used to grip it, sits on a middle shelf. The walls are plastered with pictures: Ethel and Joseph Kennedy, Princess Diana’s flagdraped coffin being carried out of the cathedral and Terry Fox wading in the water.

Spremo, who’s wearing a camera belt buckle, pulls out a black case from the closet. Inside is the blue transmitter that accompanied him on foreign assignments. Although he wants to open a museum with his memorabilia, he sold his enlarger because all he needs now is his computer and scanner. Spremo fondly remembers the darkroom ages—it’s been seven years since he retired and he still won’t leave the house without a camera on his shoulder. He feels naked without one. “I miss, you know, photojournalism.” He struggles for the words as his eyes sadden, “But I guess it’s the end of the line after 40 years. It was good.

On November 16, 1986, Brian Linehan lounged in a wooden chair in Tucson, Arizona, and interviewed Three Amigos!star Martin Short for City Lights, an in-depth Citytv celebrity-interview show. Always classy in grooming and attire (he never owned a pair of jeans in his life), Linehan asked the probing questions that showed off the impeccable research he was so famous for. “Have you been telling producers of your passion, I mean the dream to go back to those days in Hamilton in the attic and The Martin Short Show when you thought the coolest thing in the world was to be Frank Sinatra and introduce your special guest on The Martin Short Show? Do the producers know you want to do a movie musical or a Broadway musical?” Besides having an authoritative knowledge of Short’s childhood experiences and early career, Linehan spoke with an intimacy usually reserved for close friends. “Are you a Canadian in California or are you adapting? What’s happening with Nancy and the two children? Are you commuting?”

In return, Short spoke with an ease and openness that’s rare in celebrity interviews today. Once the cameras were off, they behaved like two young boys whose mothers had left them alone. Short scooted up to the edge of his seat and whispered excitedly during every commercial break. During one, he confided in Linehan his frustration about how he felt ignored by the Canadian press:

“Are we rolling?” Short asked.

“Are we on?” Linehan asked the crew, and was assured they weren’t.

“When the Americans would sit here,” he leaned in toward Linehan and lowered his voice, “they would talk to Steve, Chevy and I. When the Canadians would sit here, they would just talk to Steve and Chevy.” Short laughed.

“Really.”

“It’s like — I’m the Canadian! But there’s….” The production crew interrupted them and the conversation stopped.

Linehan developed this kind of rapport through years of meticulous research, accurate reporting and a genuine passion for his craft — a type of rapport that no longer exists in Canadian celebrity journalism today. He set a standard for celebrity interviewing and reporting that no one has matched. In fact, as today’s bevy of junketeers and sound bite grabbers from L.A. to Hollywood North prove daily, Linehan’s work ethic seems to have died with him in 2004.

Brian, you’ve said that you owed your start to Citytv. “If stations like City didnot exist,” you told journalist John Hofsess in a 1977 interview, “I would neverhave been given a chance. I wasn’t a radio or TV arts major. I never took actingor voice lessons or practiced sounding like Lorne Green.” What was it, then, thatmotivated you to step up and fill in for that first interview?

Linehan was born in Hamilton, Ontario, on September 3, 1944 — not in 1945, as reported by the Canadian Who’s Who. It’s a detail, credited to a Linehan white lie, which sifted the good reporters from the mediocre ones after his death. A private man, Linehan had his fun with the media, lying about his age and completely fabricating childhood anecdotes. Fact checkers couldn’t keep up with him.

The truth is Linehan was one of seven children, five boys and two girls, born to an Irish steelworker and a Serbian housewife when Hamilton was booming with steel production. One of his brothers, Patrick, now 59, has himself recently retired from a career of working in the mills. In a modest country-style home, Patrick repeatedly shoos one of his daughter’s cats off the dining room table while telling stories of Linehan keeping him awake at night by constantly talking about actors. But it was with his sister, Connie Kataric, that Linehan was closest. Kataric lives in Hamilton and still cries when she talks about her brother. She remembers him as the odd one out in the family — he preferred reading entertainment magazines while his other brothers were out playing sports.

“He was always into movies,” remembers Ted Hammond, a high school friend of Linehan’s, who also worked as co-editor with him on Omnia, the student paper at Delta secondary school. “Back in those days, the movie theatres in Hamilton gave out a gold pass once a year for anybody in the city who could select the most Academy Award winners. Brian was a teenager, and he won it two years in a row in the early ’60s.” AtOmnia, Hammond found Linehan obsessive. “He’d spend hours and hours doing research for one story. And that spun off later on. That was his thing. I thought he was too narrow focused that way, just doing research. I never thought that would help him the way it did.”

Journalist Philip Marchand hinted at a darker side to Linehan’s childhood. In a 1981 Chatelaine profile, he wrote, “Linehan speaks without bitterness of his childhood, but behind the style and the wit and the courtly manners of his presence, it is clear that something from that past, something in his bloodstream, won’t let him go.”

Michael Levine was Linehan’s close friend, lawyer and executor of his estate. He says Linehan confided in him about his family difficulties. “He came from a group of Irish- Yugoslavs who all worked in the steel mills. For Brian to be a gay man in a steelworker town was so painful for him that he just learned to hide…. He was basically Jeff Daniels in The Purple Roseof Cairo — ran away to the movies and the movies happened to be Toronto.”

Linehan was best known as the host of the long-form interview show City Lights, which ran on Toronto’s Citytv station from 1973 to 1989. He conducted more than 2,000 interviews with celebrities such as Jane Fonda, Norman Jewison, Barbra Streisand, Joan Rivers, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Clint Eastwood, John Ritter, Sophia Loren and John Travolta. With a reputation for uncovering the most obscure details of his subjects’ lives, Linehan often lobbed questions that elicited shocked responses. Among them, Burt Reynolds’s “You’ve just hit nerves!” and Dustin Hoffman’s “I’m starting to sweat with the information he’s got on me!”

Linehan’s research skills may have escorted him into the good graces of many celebrities, but they also made him the subject of sketch comedy. In Second City Television’s parody, Martin Short played “Brock Linehan,” a horrible interviewer who would confuse his interview subjects, and cause them to fall asleep in the several minutes it took him to preface a question.

The stars loved the real Linehan, though. “They adored him because he was more than just, ‘get that quick sound bite,’” says his friend and Citytv colleague Marcia Martin. “He knew everything about them. And when you start with a reputation like that, it builds and builds.” Celebrity respect was not a privilege Linehan took lightly. He once said, “There is much more to stars than one or two bad movies, and that’s what I try to get at — the whole human being, or the whole career in perspective.” He later said, “I believe people will reveal more about themselves, ultimately, by being gently understood, than by being savagely attacked. If there’s no market for what I believe in, then I’ll get off television.” Years later, he kept that promise.

Linehan started at Citytv not as an interviewer, but as the producer of programming responsible for purchasing all feature film products. Linehan got his first on-screen break when the interviewer scheduled to tape a show with director Eric Till cancelled, and Linehan was asked to fill in. “I remember I went into the bathroom and I brushed my teeth. That was the preparation. I brushed my teeth,” Linehan told a Citytv interviewer. Linehan had never been on television in his life. Throughout the interview, the camera crews kept making hand gestures at him from off set. “I finally turned away from Eric Till and I said, on camera, ‘What are you trying to say to me? What are you doing?’ The crew was hysterical. Everybody was laughing.”

After the filming Linehan was told that for his own sake, and for the sake of Citytv, the tape would never be shown. To date, no copy can be found. Undaunted, Linehan spent the next eight hours on set watching other interviews. He then called up Till and asked him to come back. Till agreed. “If he hadn’t come back,” Linehan later said, “I wouldn’t be here talking about it.” The experience also taught him what he has described as one of his success secrets: “If you can’t be beautiful, be memorable.” It was a phrase that Linehan took to heart. And lack of preparation would never again be his downfall.

Celebrities were moved by you, Brian. John Travoltaonce told Citytv, “He was the first person to go out ofhis way to validate me on Saturday Night Fever.”But beyond simple flattery, you encouraged Travoltato see himself in a different light. He went on to say, “Iremember his opening line to me was, ‘Do you knowwhatTravolta means,’ and I said, ‘Tell me.’ And hesaid, ‘To take by storm. You’ve taken the world bystorm haven’t you?’ I was a kid, but I was just so takenby that.” According to your friend Michael Levine,you “allowed us to see ourselves not as bush leagues butas major leagues.” How did you develop such a talentfor making people feel important?

On July 9, 1977, Canadian magazine told the story of every interviewer’s biggest nightmare. Linehan had finished a fabulous interview with Margaret Atwood “only to learn at the end of the session that City’s taping equipment had malfunctioned and there was no show. Instead, what the public got to see was a second run in which both of them ‘winged it’ since Atwood had said, to maintain spontaneity, none of the same questions should be asked.” Yet Linehan described this as one of the key interviews of his career, “by which the whole direction of my shows underwent a change. I realized how much fun it was just to relax and talk, than to try to do a PhD thesis on the air.”

Linehan had a flair for attentive, easy colloquy that extended beyond celebrities. At a memorial for Linehan at Toronto’s Winter Garden Theatre, actress Sharon Gless told a touching story about something that happened after a dinner with Linehan. “I walked [Brian] over to Al, my driver, who’s here tonight. And I said, ‘Brian, I’d like you to meet Al. Al, this is Brian Linehan.’ And they talked for a while, and apparently had a lovely talk, and I was just watching. We got in the car and Al stopped talking. I said, ‘Are you okay?’ He said ‘Yeah.’ I said, ‘What’s wrong?’ He said, ‘I have never met a man before who looked me in the eye like that. I have never met a man before who really was interested in everything that I said. He actually let me finish all my sentences before interrupting,’ like people tend to do, you know? And he had tears in his eyes.”

Another touching story involved Linehan befriending a flight attendant on one of his Air Canada jaunts. He saw her occasionally when travelling, and they kept in touch. When he later discovered that she had breast cancer, he tracked her down, went to visit her at the hospital and bought her a Pooh Bear. “It was the kind of heart he had,” says Martin. “It made such an impact on her life. In fact, when she died, a friend of hers sent [Linehan] the bear saying, ‘Please take good care of this bear. She loved it when she had it.’ And so he actually had it until he passed away.”

Equally common are stories of Linehan excusing himself early from family visits and dinners. The excuse was always the same: he had to prepare for an interview. Martin remembers his research process as continuous. “In his spare time, on the weekends, that’s all he would do. He’d be sitting down with the opera, reading The New York Times, Maclean’s, Time or The New Yorker. He had files on everything.”

He would read with scissors and a highlighter. And he would clip. “We would always get clippings on our desks of things that were of interest to us. We all remember the clippings. He’d send them to everyone.” But most of the clippings were for himself.

Linehan kept a personality file for each of his interview subjects, sometimes three or four. Each contained photographs, press releases, highlighted newspaper and magazine clippings from countless Canadian and American publications, and neatly hand-written notes in black, red and blue pen. Some clippings were dated long before Linehan ever knew he would be interviewing a particular subject, or long after the interview had been completed. He developed a personal archival system, paying particular attention to his subject’s quotes.

During an interview with publicity guru Irving Mansfield about Jacqueline Susann, his deceased wife of 35 years and author of the bestseller Valley of the Dolls, he brought up one of her quotes: “It’s tough when you’re No. 1. There’s no direction to go but down.” Mansfield responded, “She also said, ‘You know the longest drop in the world? It isn’t from the top to the bottom. It’s from one to two.’ It’s true isn’t it?”

“Well, I’d say yes it is. I don’t know,” Linehan answered.

“You’ll find out one day,” said Mansfield.

And he did.

Your friend and lawyer Michael Levine also saidyou had a difficult time with disappointment.“Everything was going to destroy Brian’s life,” hesaid. “His whole take on [the Woody Allen lawsuit]was that every single thing was personally directedat him and the world was about to end. That’s theway he took the world.” This was just one episode ina long streak of unfortunate luck. What happenedlater in your career? Where was the Brian Linehanwho refused to give up?

The personality files Linehan put together in preparation for his Woody Allen interview in 1982 sit in the Film Reference Library in Toronto. They consist of six file folders, altogether more than two inches thick. In one of these folders there is a photo of Linehan and Allen taken during the interview. Allen is wearing a plaid shirt and a pensive expression. His hand is resting on his chin in an intellectual pose. A smiling Linehan is casually resting his arm over the couch where they both sit. The photo is autographed by Allen.

The interview went smoothly enough, but a $5-million lawsuit followed when the show aired in New York. Allen was furious, stating that he had only granted the interview under the condition that it would not be aired in New York.

Levine, who acted as Linehan’s lawyer, remembers his “sense of devastation and loss” about the situation. He explains that it was all “a complete misunderstanding and technical error that had nothing to do with Brian.”

Linehan’s frustrations were exacerbated when Toronto Life used the lawsuit as ammunition to criticize him in a 1983 article. Journalist Martin Knelman also attacked Linehan’s technique: “As the years went by Linehan lost his charming amateurness. His pauses got longer, his style became more pompous and self-important, and he developed a smile more chilling than Joan Crawford at her most regal. The questions became more ostentatiously knowing, the desire to have the flattery reciprocated more naked.”

Knelman wasn’t the only one with that opinion. Journalist David Hayes is adamant about meticulous research. He recognizes Linehan as a vital part of journalism history and upholds him as a superior researcher, but feels that at times Linehan might have gone too far. “Sometimes [his] mega-research became silly. It seemed like he was just showing off his knowledge and looking very smug and self-satisfied about it.”

Much to Martin Short’s dismay, Knelman also used Second City Television’s Brock Linehan parody to attack him. Soon after the piece was published, Short retired Brock and set the record straight in the 1986 City Lights interview in Tucson. “To me it was a total compliment to you. The joke was your research. The fact that you were so researched. The Canadian press took what was done in good intention and with great affection and tried to imply that it was done as an attack. And when I would state that it wasn’t done in an attack — and I’m specifically talking about Martin Knelman right now — that section of my statement was not in an article on you. And I resented it so I just stopped doing it because it was wrong.”

But the criticism didn’t stop. Paula Todd, the host of the long-form interview show Person 2Person on TVOntario, remembers watching City Lights. Her admiration for Linehan’s technique and superb research was tempered by her observation that Linehan “went on and on. It seemed that he was trying to impress us with his information.”

Carleton University journalism professor Catherine McKercher suspects that some of Linehan’s critics lost sight of the bigger picture. “You have to keep in mind that his interview shows were not hard news. They were entertainment based. Yes, he was a performer and he liked to perform. That was part of the show.”

It’s an echo of a comment made to Linehan by Kate Reid, the late Canadian stage and screen actress. Linehan described the exchange to journalist John Hofsess of Canadian magazine in 1977. “In response to my question as to why she had become an actress, she turned the question around and asked me why I did the show. And when I replied that I enjoyed meeting great and famous people like herself, she said, ‘Oh, knock it off — you’re just as much a performer as anyone else, when the lights and camera go on.’ When I thought about what she had said, I realized it was true. I too had become a public performer who gains much — perhaps most — of his self-esteem by what others think of him. What do the critics say? Are the ratings good? How many people like what I’m doing?”

Apparently not enough to keep him on the air. “Television changed and things were faster. The pace was faster. And what Brian was doing really didn’t fit where we were going,” says Martin. In 1988, City Lightsevolved into MovieTelevision, a quick-hit show that touches on many film-related topics, which Linehan started hosting with Jeanne Beker. He lasted a couple of years. “It was just not something he wanted to do,” says Martin. “He did nothing on a superficial level.” Linehan started turning to other journalism outlets for work. Among them, a job writing an entertainment column for the Toronto Sun. Jim Slotek sat beside Linehan and edited most of his copy until 1991 (years later, he wrote Linehan’s obituary for the Sun). He remembers watching Linehan agonize over each column. He had a tendency to write long, but had a sense for great leads: “Why am I in bed with Anne Murray? I was invited,” and “Movies, like raccoons, should not be seen in daylight.”

In print, Linehan lasted only three years. (Beside his 1963 high school graduation photo, Linehan had listed “newspaper deadlines” as his pet peeve.) “The problem Brian had with writing for a newspaper was the same one he had when they started packaging five-minute TV infotainment sausage interviews,” Slotek explains. “Brian could barely preface his first question in five minutes, and really needed time to wheedle, massage, flatter and probe. Similarly, it was a great struggle for him to précis his thoughts in the way print journalists do by nature. He could have done it in time, but a budget cutback at the paper led to a purge of freelance columnists back then and we lost a potentially tremendous asset at a paper that lived and died by its personality columnists.”

After Linehan was laid off, he turned to teaching, which he loved. He picked up a course called Inside Television at Toronto’s Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning. But it wasn’t long before he grew too sick to continue.

Linehan was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma in March 2002. By May, he had been admitted to St. Michael’s Hospital. Two months later, his partner of more than 30 years, Dr. Zane Wagman, committed suicide. It was a hit that Linehan hid well from the general public, although it affected him tremendously.

Levine was one of the few who saw his pain. “Brian could never get over that loss and so his immune system, I think, never kicked in the way it should’ve kicked in.” Linehan lived with the disease for more than two years before he passed away in his home on June 4, 2004, at the age of 59. The night of his death he was surrounded by close friends, including Levine and Martin.

Linehan’s ashes were scattered alongside his partner’s in the garden of the home they shared in Toronto, but a portion was given to close friend Joan Rivers as a memento. Longtime pal George Anthony confirmed that, despite Rivers’s quote in Toronto Life’s 40th anniversary issue (November 2006), she did not actually scatter them from the roof of the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto.

It wasn’t until Linehan’s final days when his various groups of friends started to meet each other and interact. “His life was very compartmentalized,” says Anthony. And whenever he spent time with each of them, they were made to feel like they were the only ones. Even today, if you ask Linehan’s friends whom he was closest to when he was alive, the responses are identical: “It was me.”

Despite all the negative criticism you received late inyour career, the news of your passing inspired reverentialobituaries, outpourings of grief, a memorialservice attended by your peers and blog entries fromfans around the country. On June 4, 2004, fanBradford Gibson wrote, “Brian was a tower of witand intelligence in the world of celebrity. His level ofpreparation and in-depth research of his subjects leftthem wondering how he became the proverbial flyon-the-wall in their lives. He was quintessentiallycharming and mesmerizing — his greatest strengthas an interviewer.” Can you imagine one of today’scelebrity interviewers inspiring such warmth andrespect?

The mark Linehan made on Canadian celebrity journalism is immeasurable, but it stands out in dramatic relief against the work of his current would-be colleagues, who largely practice a dumbed-down version of celeb “journalism.” “Most celebrity interviewing these days is so stupid, so quick and dirty,” says McKercher. Consequently, reporters are portrayed as dirt-diggers, and in return publicists have become substantially more protective.

It’s a complaint that Canadian Idol and eTalk host and celebrity interviewer Ben Mulroney makes as well. “Publicists are much more heavy-handed in the direction they want to take the celebrity, the interview, the story. It happens with the Canadian Idols I work with.” Some of Mulroney’s duties include red carpet coverage and four-minute celebrity junket interviews. Although he doesn’t do long-form interviews as often as Linehan did, he considers his profession valid journalism. “I prefer to be a little more reverent to entertainment journalism. If there is a story that is changing the world, it should be dealt with the weight that it deserves.”

For reporter Zain Meghji of eTalk, the television program offering the latest in celebrity and entertainment news, the research process is nothing near what it used to be for Linehan. “I will research the person on the Internet,” says Meghji. “I will consult the notes the production provides me with, watch their videos and write a bunch of questions.” Meghji might also read books or articles, depending on the subject. Deciding what questions will be asked is usually a collaborative process shared between the interviewer and the producer.

Also at eTalk, David Giammarco has had his share of celebrity interviews and junkets. More than 20 years of his experience, however, is in print. “Having spent my whole life doing long interviews and then to do a four-minute is a big change. Junkets are four-minute chats — sound bites — not journalism by any means, and certainly not interviews.”

Giammarco laments the deterioration in the quality of celebrity reporting. “Real journalists notice and think it’s a joke. The professionals (actors, directors and musicians) are also astonished at the lack of seasoned reporters who come to interview them. Entertainment journalism on television these days has been populated with good-looking people who don’t have the knowledge and can’t do the research.” Like Linehan, Giammarco avoids this in his own work by establishing a rapport with and a reputation among celebrities. “I respect the art of filmmaking and music. I respect the artists and what they create. When they feel comfortable with you it comes down to trust and relationships and your integrity as a journalist.” In this field, Giammarco’s research strategies are also uncommon. “I try to stay away from the Internet because it’s populated by erroneous information. There’s too much of a heavy reliance on it.” These trends only validate Linehan’s craft and how important it is to aspire to it. “He was unparalleled really,” says Martin. “I think he would be impressed by his legacy and it’s living on.”

Before his death, Linehan donated 30 years’ worth of research to the Film Reference Library. These documents contain personality files for more than 2,000 interviews, 973 videos, 350 sound recordings, books, artifacts and photos. Linehan left his entire estate — in excess of $4 million — for the benefit of young filmmakers. It’s a staggering amount that shocked even his closest friends. “The joke amongst all of us was that it was actually our money being recycled,” says Levine, “because we had bought Brian so many dinners that he had just saved his money, and he was able to do this.” As executor of Linehan’s will, Levine has initiated scholarships at Humber College (where Linehan last taught), helped to fund programs at The National Screen Institute, supported the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), and is currently looking into creating an actor’s studio.

Levine has also asked Anthony to write Linehan’s biography. The book will be released this year, in time for the TIFF 2007. Levine’s job is to ensure that Linehan’s legacy, which he considers twofold, is never forgotten. He describes it as: “A profound respect for research and accuracy, a rare combination of diligence, intelligence and passion, as well as a recognition of the value of Canadian artists as being worthy and competitive with their peers anywhere in the world.”

Steve Paikin is nervous. It’s a few days before the debut of TVO’s new current affairs show, The Agenda With Steve Paikin. He has spent months preparing for the show, not to mention pursuing the man who now sits in front of him for an interview. The show has made some accommodations to land this coveted guest: despite the fact that it’s supposed to go live every night, this segment is being pre-taped. The charcoal grey of Paikin’s suit complements the blues and greys of his new studio. He clutches his questions and his pen. Paikin’s living every interviewer’s dream. The first guest on his new show is none other than the notoriously outspoken and opinionated Conrad Black, the former press baron who faces 14 charges including mail-and-wire fraud, racketeering and tax evasion.

Paikin doesn’t waste any time wading into Lord Black’s legal difficulties. Black often jumps in before Paikin has a chance to finish a question.

“I heard you say there are delicate negotiations in place,” says Paikin, “and I’ve also heard you say you want your day in court.”

Lord Black curtly replies, “Yes.”

“The first suggests there’s going to be a plea bargain before it gets to court….”

“No, no, no, no, no, no.”

“No?” asks Paikin.

A few minutes later, despite renouncing his Canadian citizenship in 2001 so that he could join the British House of Lords, Black announces he wants his citizenship back.

The show airs September 25, 2006 and the next day Lord Black’s desire to renew his Canadian citizenship is all over the news — and so is The Agenda. In fact, it can’t get much better for the new show, which has risen from the ashes of the now defunct Studio 2, taking over its Monday to Friday, 8 to 9 p.m. timeslot.

At the next morning’s daily meeting, the producers and Paikin gather around The Agenda’s boardroom table. They exchange congratulations for a job well done. While the staff considers the first show a success, everyone realizes they have to produce a high-quality episode every night. Shows become hits by being consistently excellent and attention-grabbing, but considering how low the morale has been at TVOntario over the past few months, they’ll take the initial victory.

Paikin believed they could create something great with his new show, a belief that helped him stare down the question he met everywhere he went in the province: “What were they thinking cancelling Studio 2?” In the time between June 29, 2006, Studio 2’s last episode, and The Agenda’s premiere, a new roster had to be hired, including producers drawn from Studio 2 employees, as well as others from around the broadcaster’s offices. It had taken time for the team to find its rhythm, and both executive producer Dan Dunsky and Paikin were putting in long days. Because the show was created in controversial circumstances, there’s that much more pressure to succeed — pressure to succeed under reduced budgetary circumstances.

The death of Studio 2 and the birth of The Agenda can be traced back to an internal company report called “Reaching Beyond: Strategic Agenda 2006,” which was approved by Lisa de Wilde, TVO’s CEO. The report was a reality check: TVO needed to modernize and upgrade its technology, and fast. The execution of the report’s recommendations — making changes through a mixture of one-time grants and cuts — led to Studio 2’s demise. During its 12-year run, the program won several awards, including the Gemini in 2003 for Best Talk Series, and by commercial television standards was produced relatively cheaply — but not cheaply enough for a public broadcaster falling behind technologically and in need of a quick fix. For reasons that included the program not being cost-effective enough, it was euthanized.

Paikin’s new show would be cheaper to produce — for one thing, it would have one fewer host, as Studio 2’s Paula Todd was not invited to participate (her new show, Person 2 Person With Paula Todd, a spin-off of aStudio 2 segment, airs Fridays at 10 p.m.). For another, guests would come into the studio rather than producers going into the field. But the new scheme, which gave Paikin more creative control, had drawbacks. It meant fewer staff and longer hours, and the way the new structure worked it seemed like they had to perform cartwheels every weekday — if Paikin went down, there had to be an emergency list of back-up hosts.

But on the triumphant first night, the anxieties associated with the transition from Studio 2 to The Agendawere behind Paikin and his producers. Not only had they dodged a bullet, they’d returned fire and silenced cynics and critics alike. Dunsky attempted to rein in the team’s excitement: “Let’s not let this go to our heads, guys.”

Dunsky has the world at his feet. Two worlds, in fact: on the floor behind his constantly swivelling office chair, two framed maps of the world are waiting to be mounted on the wall. He’s only been in this office for a short time, but his political paraphernalia is already in place, including a black and white photograph of former U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt, a communist Chinese military cap, and American and Canadian flags side by side. “The world is a phenomenally interesting place,” Dunsky says, sweeping his arms and twisting around in his chair to take in his room. “And it’s in a constant state of change.”

So is the place he works for. The man now responsible for TVO’s flagship current affairs show, Dunsky has watched the provincially funded broadcaster go through enormous changes over the past year. His new office and his promotion to executive producer are two results of this tumult. He now works next door to Paikin, his host and fellow current affairs junkie, at TVOntario headquarters in midtown Toronto.

When Dunsky leans back in his chair, he scans the office bustle through a large glass wall. What he sees are the offices and cubicles where some of his producers help put the show together. Just beyond his view is a large boardroom table where story meetings are held every morning. It was only a year ago that Dunsky was the producer of “Diplomatic Immunity With Steve Paikin,” a program he co-created with Paikin eight years ago. The show aired as part of Studio 2 during its final season, and consisted of regular panel members discussing the hot political topics of the day. He had also been a series producer of the TVO program Big Ideas.

Dunsky plunks a foot on his desk and lets it rest near a pile of books and papers that appear not to have been touched for days. Poking out of the bottom, decorated with bold red lines, is the Strategic Agenda. It’s one of the main reasons Dunsky is where he is and why there is a new show in the first place.

Back in September 2005, the Ontario Ministry of Education announced that it wanted TVOntario to review its operations after picking a new CEO. Two months later, Isabel Bassett stepped down and de Wilde took over. She had an impressive resumé — in 2001 she was celebrated in the Financial Post’s Power 50 as one of Canada’s most influential corporate women. She was president and CEO of Astral Television Networks from 1993 until 2001, and a practicing lawyer from 1989 to 1993. De Wilde was not only involved in the development of the Strategic Agenda, it was also her job to follow through and tighten the budget. One month into her new position, she assembled a committee of TVO management that began a strategic review of the organization, which ended with the report that called for serious change. Over the past 10 years, TVOntario has limped along on a stagnant government base grant of approximately $45 million per year. Even with the $7 million to $8 million in pledges the station receives annually, other lesser government grants, and corporate funding, the broadcaster has been without the means to evolve, expand or modernize. It all added up to just over $76 million in 2005.

If it’s any consolation, TVOntario is fairly well off compared to the other four provincial public broadcasters. TVOntario and Télé-Québec, which had a revenue of $73.4 million in 2006, are the Cadillacs. British Columbia’s and Saskatchewan’s had 2006 revenues of $10.6 and $9.3 million respectively. Alberta’s operates on radio only. The other main difference is that TVO produces more original programming than the others.

According to the Strategic Agenda, however, TVO’s problems could not be explained away entirely by citing financial woes. It wasn’t just a case of their main government grant remaining the same for a decade. The stiff increase in media competition and the diversifying market both required immediate attention. TVO competes against big corporations such as CTV and Global, as well as the national public broadcaster, CBC, and innumerable channels available to cable and satellite subscribers.

With broadcasters adding interactive media — one example is Kevin Newman’s Global National being available as a nightly podcast — TVO had to evolve if it wanted to continue to be relevant and competitive. To do this, the ministry gave the station a one-time grant of $25.4 million, to be used over two years. Of that, $10 million is earmarked to convert TVO’s production facilities from analog to digital technology. The remaining sum is to help support TVO as it makes the transition into new media and builds its revenue streams. So far, TVO has begun to expand its reach  into cellphone downloads, podcasts and other interactive media.

To support the digital expansion while continuing regular programming, the Strategic Agenda advised considerable financial shuffling: “The cost base of the organization must be reduced.” This is why Dunsky and the rest of TVO’s staff found themselves packing and unpacking personal effects — the office space was shrinking. Another initiative was to separate TVO from its long-time network partner, TV Français Ontario. Soon TFO will have its own board of directors, its own control over programming and its own budget worries. Many of these efficiency-seeking changes would be invisible to the general public. More tangible to viewers would be cuts to programming, something that would affect employees on a personal and emotional level.

On June 28, 2006, Doug Grant, executive producer of Studio 2, arrived for work just before 10 a.m., weary from lack of sleep. He’d put in long hours on the show the night before. The entire time he was in the office he was inundated with media phone calls. He didn’t answer, because he knew the reason everyone was calling. For months there had been whispers and notes exchanged. Studio 2 host Paikin had written to Grant, asking if he should be looking for a new job. And in the wee hours of June 28, as Grant read the Toronto Star’s online morning edition, his fears were confirmed: Studio 2 was over.

Grant had a meeting scheduled for 10 a.m. with his boss, Nancy Chapelle, managing director of English programming services. He knew he was about to lose his job. Chapelle began speaking to Grant in a cookie-cutter corporate tone when he walked through her door. “Cut the crap,” he said.

Chapelle handed Grant his severance package and told him to assemble staff — it would be his responsibility to tell them. About a half hour later he stood in front of Studio 2’s crew, fighting back tears. By then everyone had either heard through the media or been told by a colleague. Tears flowed and tempers flared. As Grant made the official announcement, Chapelle stood and watched, deflecting harsh words and raised voices with corporate catch phrases. Grant told them: tomorrow’s live broadcast will be Studio 2’s last.

The format of Studio 2 included short documentaries, which involved sending out crews to shoot and then editing raw footage back in the studio. It’s a method that costs money to do properly. The show also included segments such as the Dunsky-produced “Diplomatic Immunity With Steve Paikin,” which often featured the same freelance panelists who received stipends for their regular contributions. Musical acts also performed, and were paid for their services (the music segments, which broadcast every Thursday night, were cut inStudio 2’s final season for financial reasons). In addition, the two big-name co-hosts, Paikin and Todd, pulled in salaries of $214,037 and $178,034 respectively.

As the program’s executive producer, Grant was in charge of the budget. In the world of television, it was a budget that was below average, especially since in its final two seasons the show achieved its projected target of 100,000 viewers per minute, meaning it had developed a loyal following province-wide. Per hour, the cost of producing Studio 2 was very reasonable — but not reasonable enough.

Sometime in April or May, before Grant’s final staff meeting, Chapelle called Paikin into her office. He had been co-host of Studio 2 since its premiere in 1994. He knew many current affairs shows didn’t last long, and believed every year might be the last. Every time his contract was about to expire, he and the director of English programming would make a lunch date. The two would talk hobbies and life for 43 minutes. Then, right before paying the bill, Paikin’s boss would ask him back and offer him a salary.

Studio 2 was about to complete its 12th season when Paikin went to Chapelle’s office. He sat in a chair facing his boss as she broke the news to him. There would be no negotiation lunch as in past years — Studio 2 had a good run, she told him, but its time was up. Without much of a pause, she then proposed that Paikin host his own show and work side by side with Dunsky, sharing production responsibilities. This project would provide him with new opportunities, including more involvement in story choice, panel selection, guest selection and other aspects of the show. He’d never been offered this level of responsibility before, and his excitement helped numb the pain.

It wasn’t as though Paikin didn’t have a choice. After moderating a 2006 federal election leadership debate, he’d become a sought-after man. Already known for his thorough research and interviewing skills, his emerging national prominence combined with the sudden death of the beloved Studio 2 created the perfect opportunity for him to take any of several offers. Yet he decided to stay with TVO. “As corny as this sounds,” he says, “I’m really quite sold on the agenda of this place, which is to look at the in-depth issues for the people of this province today.”

“I’ve never made a move for money, it just doesn’t motivate me,” Paikin continues. In the past, he says, he’s taken radio jobs that have paid $18,000 and less annually simply because they’ve met his four criteria: Is it work he loves? Is it with people he respects and likes? Is he having an impact on society? And does he believe in the organization’s mission? “I know with The Agenda I have four yeses,” he says. “I don’t know that about anywhere else.”

Sending out crews to gather new material, then having it edited back in the studio like the old days, wasn’t going to be part of the new plan. “Typically, what is expensive in television is news production,” says Dunsky. “Obviously we chose a different route with The Agenda, and the budget reflects that.” The show’s hour of current affairs programming is divided into two main parts: a 10 to 15 minute one-on-one interview followed by a debate with several panelists.

The format is simple, but painstakingly difficult to pull off night after night. Securing a fresh panel of guests who are experts on the topic up for discussion is a laborious job for the producers, and Dunsky’s team has put in 12 to 14 hour days to make the show work. The pace can be fatiguing for Paikin, which is one of the reasons why the show has an emergency list of replacement guest-hosts.

Since that first show with Lord Black, The Agenda has dealt with a wide range of subjects. Each of the show’s producers is responsible for pitching ideas and putting them into action. Back in October 2006, producer Meredith Martin, who was previously a producer on Studio 2, said there was some adjustment needed for her new role. “I’m still figuring out how to structure and pace a 35- to 40-minute discussion,” she said, “and how to make a topic meaty enough for it.”

A month later, Martin produced a show about fertility. The hour included an intense and personal discussion with people who have experienced adoption, childless lives, or struggles and successes with fertility. These professionals, including another TVO producer, spoke tearfully and candidly, creating the most human moments seen on the program up to that point.

As a current affairs show, The Agenda has dealt with the expected topics: Afghanistan, the Liberal leadership race, global warming. Story ideas, however, are not only brought forth by producers. Every Thursday, the show is dubbed “Your Agenda” and the topics covered are ones suggested by viewers. Audience members also take turns being political pundits on the show’s website. There are forums, blogs, streaming video and podcasts.

The show has received some criticism. The Toronto Star’s media columnist, Antonia Zerbisias, who is quick to state that she and Dunsky have clashing political views, says his track record as a hard-nosed right-winger can be problematic. She felt one episode was blatantly biased programming, and wrote in an email: “I thought it fascinating that The Agenda would welcome the Israeli [Internal Security Minister] Avi Dichter on the program without a ‘balancing’ guest to discuss the wall or his other controversial moves.” If this is a flaw, it is a structural flaw, since the first segment of the program is simply one-on-one with Paikin.

On the other hand, Now, a Toronto alternative weekly, has nothing but praise for the new show, declaring it the best current affairs program on television.

Fans and critics aside, ratings will be the ultimate test. The Agenda’s audience numbers climbed over the past months and now match Studio 2’s final season’s ratings.

Chapelle says she’s proud of what The Agenda has achieved so far. “We’re ecstatic, we’re thrilled,” she says, beaming. “We’re excited about where it’s at today.”

Now, with almost a full season under its belt, the show has found a successful rhythm. Yet, until the organization’s 2006-2007 annual report is released this summer, the public won’t know just how much de Wilde’s Strategic Agenda has saved TVO.