Aw, you cluck. Those poor gluttons, force-fed with foie gras and truffles night after night. What hardships they endure!

Okay, I’ll admit that this is actually a pretty plum job. But during my three years as The Globe and Mail’srestaurant critic in Vancouver, I have learned a thing or two about how the racket really works.

If I had done things differently, I would definitely be much more successful, wealthy—and delightfully plump.

So before you embark on a new career path, please consider the following words of wisdom. Herewith, my five-step program for making friends, influencing people and rising to the top as a restaurant critic:

1. Publish a food blog

In the old-fashioned days of restaurant reviewing, critics were expected to have some semblance of food knowledge, an ability to write and a desire (at least feigned) to keep a respectable distance from the industry they covered.

Nowadays, all you need is a computer and an appetite to blog your way to fame. Cozy relations with restaurant owners and chefs will vastly improve your chances of success.
Take, for instance, the case of Danyelle Freeman. In 2006, the New York actress launched a website calledrestaurantgirl.com. In no time at all, she was being feted with free meals by all the major restauranteurs in town. Last summer, she was hired as the new restaurant critic for the New York Daily News.

Here in Vancouver, a former waiter called Andrew Morrison started up a website called waiterblog.com that chronicled his toils in the trenches. Some three years later, he is now the full-time restaurant critic for theWestEnder weekly, the Vancouver editor of Eat (a bimonthly magazine published out of Victoria), occasional contributor to the food pages of Vancouver Magazine, and the editor and publisher of a new website and member’s forum called Urban Diner (from which he draws a monthly salary from the site’s restaurant-fuelled advertising revenues).

Does Mr. Morrison ever bite the hands that feed him? He’s already built a small food-writing empire. Who cares?

2. Be nice to the other food bloggers

I am often asked about my feuds with restaurant owners and chefs. While I am sure there are many who hate my guts, I rarely hear from them and don’t have any great horror stories to share.

Well, there is one local restaurateur who stopped inviting me to his family’s Easter parties after a bad write-up. And I suppose that for some of the local restaurant reviewers, almost all of whom eagerly attend the lavish event each year, this would be a most disgraceful act of social ostracism.

But really, I have never received a death threat, been kicked out of a restaurant, poisoned, punched or verbally assaulted.

If, however, you were to ask me about my ongoing feuds with those pesky food bloggers, well, that’s a whole different story.

These self-appointed food critics regularly take me to task for being “mean,” not considering a restaurant’s economies of scale or not making repeat visits until the kitchen miraculously produces something vaguely edible.

What about honesty, you ask? Ha, in this business that value is highly overrated.

3. Take a course in restaurant management

If you think a restaurant critic is an independent journalist who pens impartial consumer reports for the benefit of the general public, think again.

In the increasingly compromised world of food writing, critic and consultant are often confused as being one and the same.

When new restaurants open, reviewers are routinely asked to sit down with the chef to help fine-tune the menu or dine with the owners to discuss their market positioning.

You think I’m joking?

Consider the invitation I received last December to a pre-opening dinner at Pinkys Steakhouse and Cocktail Bar.

This wasn’t just any ordinary meal. It was a “focus group” evening for a new Vancouver restaurant chain that was planning to roll out 10 locations over the following two years.

The goal was to get “honest feedback” in a “casual, enlightened atmosphere fed by large quantities of good wine and great big steaks.” The chummy night was hosted by the company president, director of operations, executive chef, general manager and interior designer. Invitations were issued to food writers and restaurant reviewers.

The event’s food and drink was provided free of charge. The cost to the professional integrity of the guests who attended? Well, that was the elephant on the table that nobody wanted to talk about.

Now if I were a restaurant consultant, I would have told the president of Pinkys that I didn’t plan to step one foot inside his establishment until he properly punctuated its name.

Unfortunately, I don’t get paid to represent the interests of the restaurants I write about.

4. Plead broke

If you are offered an expense account from the media outlet you write for, do not accept it. Any sort of budget, no matter how meagre, will put you at a serious disadvantage.

While you are at home, carefully counting your pennies and trying to empathize with the way the rest of the world lives, your peers will be out every night gobbling up free food and drink.

Why pay for your own meal when most restaurant owners will gladly cover it for you? Oh, sure. Some might begrudge the request, but most astute businesses know that this is the best way to get favourable publicity. All you have to do is phone ahead, tell them you’re coming in to review and all expenses will be taken care of.

Some city magazines and small publications actually depend (wink, wink) on this system. Yes, they pay by the word—maybe 50 cents, if you’re lucky—but you are expected to cover your own expenses.

“I love your columns,” a colleague said to me recently. “But I guess The Globe and Mail encourages you to be bitchy.”

Uh, no, I think that just comes naturally. “I wish I could write the same way,” she continued.

Why don’t you? I replied.

She rolled her eyes knowingly.

“It’s difficult to give an honest review when you go to a restaurant and it’s all on their dime. It’s hard not to write in their favour, especially when you’re getting the red carpet treatment.”

Hmm, I guess so.

In the end, the standard arrangement works out well for everyone—except, of course, for the consumer or any journalist with an ounce of integrity.

5. Break up with your significant other

In the old way of doing things, when anonym-ity was still a remote possibility, restaurant reviewers invested huge sums of money on wigs and identity-concealing, broad-brimm-ed hats.

The theatrics were, for the most part, a laughable affectation. Any restaurant in Manhattan fishing for stars had a full dossier on Ruth Reichl (when she was still the grand dame reviewer for The New York Times) that included full-blown portraits framed behind the servers’ stand.

When I began reviewing restaurants, my mug shot had already been regularly published in the newspaper for at least five years. I couldn’t pretend to be anonymous, especially not with those pesky bloggers who were more than happy to out me with digital cameras whenever they had the chance.

But the truth is, most servers are too busy doing their jobs to notice who they’re serving. I rarely get recognized in restaurants, especially because it’s mostly the new ones that I’m reviewing.

There have, however, been several occasions when my boyfriend has been recognized. And it was in much the same way that I discovered the identity of The Vancouver Sun’s so-called anonymous reviewer.

The moral of the story? It’s a cold, brutish world out there, with no place for family or virtues. Don’t even think of going into the restaurant-reviewing business unless you’re willing to sell out or be hated.

Alexandra Gill is a freelance writer in Vancouver. She is a graduate of Ryerson’s magazine program, Class of ’97.

For years, Lise Ravary had practiced a version of her short speech, so it was hardly impromptu. After a quarter-century of involvement with the National Magazine Awards as both judge and board member, the thought had become too difficult to ignore. Yet again, women’s service magazines had been bypassed in favour of more “respected” magazines. Maclean’s, Toronto Life and that cool new kid on the block, The Walrus, had hogged the spotlight while service titles such as Canadian Living, Canadian House & Home andChatelaine waited in the wings.

Prior to last year’s awards show, Ravary had meticulously tallied the list of nominees: only about 20 of the 300 had gone to women’s service magazines. So, when the editorial director of women’s titles and new magazine brands at Rogers Publishing stepped up to the podium to accept the health and medicine award for an absentee Chatelaine writer, her well-rehearsed words went straight to the point: “I’d like to accept this on behalf of the much-loved, much-read women’s magazines in this country, who, unfortunately, are not coming up here often enough.”

Customary applause filled the room and Ravary left the stage. But her words hit deaf ears—the complimentary bottles of wine had long ago been emptied, and the crowd had gone through several rounds of drinks. Apart from a brief mention on D. B. Scott’s Canadian Magazines blog, the magazine community glossed over Ravary’s speech.

While service journalism is read and adored by its intended audience, with the aforementioned service-heavy magazines dominating Canadian newsstand sales in 2006, the editorial elite regards the category as entirely forgettable or, worse, trite and insipid. Toronto-based freelancer Astrid Van Den Broek, who’s written her share of service pieces, says her craft is perceived as a lesser form of writing. “I feel like service pieces are seen as the sloppy seconds of journalism,” she says, sometimes deservedly so. Guides to losing weight in time for bikini season, nine different ways to make chicken noodle soup, reviews for restaurants that never earn less than three stars—these stories are hardly the stuff that byline dreams are made of.

But writers’ aspirations aside, service is what hooks readers—providing tips for doing things faster, easier and smarter—and keeps them coming back for more. Don Obe, editor of Toronto Life from 1977 to 1981, credits Clay Felker for first introducing service into New York magazine in the late 1960s. It wasn’t enough for a magazine to be informative and entertaining—it also had to be perceived as useful. As New York journalist Michael Wolff wrote in an anniversary issue, “Felker’s magazine wasn’t so much a guide to the city as it was a guide to being cleverer, hipper and more in-the-know.” Nation-wide, city magazines followed suit. They became the source of where to get the best goods for the cheapest price.

Forty years later, the definition of service remains subjective, but one thing’s certain: while many industry insiders view service as junk food in the spinach aisle, readers keep devouring more. In the spirit of the genre in question, here are five reasons why service is the healthy choice for the magazine industry.

1.  Size doesn’t matter: it’s time to focus on quality, not quantity There’s no denying the nostalgia for the decades prior to the 1990s—that magical period when features regularly ran at 8,000 words in general interest magazines such as Saturday Night. Collectives such as the West Coast’s FCC (whose members include J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, co-authors of the alternative service cook- book, The 100-Mile Diet: A Year of Local Eating) have formed to celebrate narrative non-fiction. The Walrus, a general interest magazine that routinely publishes 5,000- to 6,000-word features and is known to have run 12,000-word features, regularly cleans up at the NMAs. In addition, until November 2007, when the NMAF introduced the short feature category, stories of 2,000 words or less were always underdogs against the heavyweight long-form champs.

Today, feature stories are often limited to 3,000 words—with service pieces coming in at half that or less. But word count isn’t the only thing decreasing: so is the frequency of meaty stories in magazines. “Four or five years ago, I was running a couple of feature-length stories in Western Living every month,” says former editor Jim Sutherland. “By the time I left a year ago, I was having a hard time getting one into every second or third issue.”

Gary Ross, editor of Vancouver magazine, attributes the shorter stories to shrinking attention spans. “Unless you’re a devoted New Yorker reader,” he says, “nobody wants to spend time getting to the end of an 8,000-word story.” Stories that may have run as features 20 years ago, Ross says, are often reimagined as service pieces. “You communicate the same information in more digestible chunks.”

That doesn’t mean chunked-up stories require any less work for the writer and editor—a common misconception. A service piece done well takes hours of painstaking research, numerous interviews and a fresh approach to what may be a familiar story. Freelancer David Hayes recalls the first service piece he wrote for Toronto Life in the ’80s; it was on home renovation. His editor, Stephen Trumper, told him: “You treat this exactly like you’d treat any feature. You do research the same way, you do interviews the same way, you do everything the same way.” The feature ran as the cover story for a Toronto Life supplement. Hayes says, “It felt very much like I could have been doing any story.”

Charlotte Empey, former editor of Homemakers and Canadian Living, agrees that when it comes to process, service isn’t all that different. “Bad copy, lazy copy, stories with no concept—they’re not good enough for service,” she says. “Service needs to adhere to the same standards of excellence as any other kind of journalism.”

2.Selling copies doesn’t mean selling out.  A quick scan of newsstands reveals more women’s service titles vying for readers’ attention. But in the past half decade, grocery checkout classics have been forced to share rack space with the bastard love child of fashion magazines and catalogs: the magalog.

When Lucky launched to immediate success south of the border  back in 2001, Canada followed. St. Joseph Media released Wish in August 2004 and Rogers Publishing started LouLou in late 2004. Suddenly, so-called shopping mags were hot and a new category was born. “Magalogs were it,” says Matthew Mallon, former editor of Vancouver magazine. “All our fancy-schmancy 5,000-word essays about public issues were unnecessary interruptions of cool stuff to wear, eat or sit on.”

In 2003, when Mallon had the task of redesigning Vancouver, he saw an opportunity to prevent the magazine from drifting in the all-shopping, all-the-time direction. Instead, he tried to duplicate Clay Felker’s New York. The new Vancouver would represent the city, warts and all, with a combination of issues and smart, critically informed service journalism. Now, Mallon thinks his vision was naive and idealistic. “I wanted to try and make the magazine an actual city magazine,” he says, “rather than an ad delivery mechanism.”

While the redesign was critically successful, winning Magazine of the Year at the Western Magazine Awards for the B.C./Yukon category in 2006, it was criticized by The Vancouverite blog for “pretending to be a big cosmopolitan magazine.” Mallon’s model proved financially infeasible, and almost three years after the magazine’s transformation, he was fired. Gary Ross, a Saturday Night and Toronto Life veteran, took over the editor’s chair.

Under Ross, packaging became more important. He encouraged smaller stories—the more diverse information crammed into the magazine, the better. While Mallon’s September 2004 issue featured articles such as, “Transit Strikes: Megaprojects Versus Small Businesses,” and, “A Hard Place: Refugees Face the Prospect of Zero Legal Aid,” Ross’s September 2006 issue on service included: “Renovation Hell (Home Renovation)” and “Wind, Water, Money: The Growing Popularity of Feng Shui.” The result? A  25 per cent increase in newsstand sales for 2007, which Ross partly attributes to the service-oriented covers.

While Mallon admits that well-done service is part of a healthy mix in any magazine—and may boost sales—his concern is that advertisers aren’t comfortable with service that really serves. “It became clear to me that a successful city magazine was aimed pretty squarely at comforting the comfortable, ignoring the afflicted and creating an extremely advertising-friendly environment,” he says. “Toss in a couple of features for awards season and you’re done.”

Even Ravary, one of service journalism’s biggest champions, acknowledges that magazines have to be careful not to disservice their readers by selling out to advertiser demands. But her solution is simple: “If we rewrite press releases, if we pay homage to the big beauty advertisers, then we deserve all the scorn that’s heaped upon us,” she says. “Do your work with integrity.”

3.Check the “best before” date. The content is fresher than it appears Women’s magazines are often accused of recycling ideas, information and articles—a charge editors don’t necessarily deny. Service grows wearisome when we read, for the third time, to drink lots of water (Chatelaine: January 1999, April 2000, August 2001); how to get your body beach-ready (Flare: July 1998, April 2000, June 2001); and to always eat breakfast (Canadian Living: April 2004, September 2005, March 2008). Service doesn’t have to be, and shouldn’t be, repetitive.

But consider this: recycled features are often seasonally motivated and high newsstand sellers. This obvious point—being timely for the reader—sometimes isn’t so obvious for ambitious magazine editors. Once, as editor-in-chief of Elle Quebec, Ravary decided to ignore Christmas altogether after hearing complaints about the stressful nature of the holiday. “It was a huge mistake,” she says with a laugh. “There are anchors in our lives that we want to read about.”

Similarly, every year Chatelaine runs a feature on foods, but each time it incorporates new medical research and focuses on a new angle. It’s not an exaggeration to say the genre’s success relies on the enthusiasm and creativity of writers and editors. For example, Hayes once wrote a story for Toronto Life about car washes—a pretty mundane topic. But throw a car wash trade show and some dazzling new technology into the mix, and suddenly, the world of soap and suds is more than just another chore. More recently, exploremagazine’s July–August 2007 cover boldly promised to tell readers, “How to Make Love in a Canoe.”

Done right, service journalism is like a favourite casserole: the ingredients might involve a few leftovers, but with some spice and fresh ingredients, it can have an entirely new flavour.

4.Packaging is more than just a pretty wrapper. Despite their proven audience appeal, fresh and honest service articles still fight for attention at the National Magazine Awards. Since 1985,Canadian Living has won only nine honourable mentions. Chatelaine has earned a total of 56 since 1977. The Walrus, however, won 93 in its first four years alone. “There was a growing chorus of people who were concerned that their work wasn’t being adequately recognized,” says Kim Pittaway, president of the foundation. “The awards recognized a wide range of narrative stories, but not a wide range of service stories.” Pittaway has been pushing for the inclusion of more service categories ever since she joined the NMAF as a board member about 10 years ago.

But the creation of three new service awards in 2003 didn’t cause everyone in the industry to stand up and cheer. “Those are the categories people are least excited about judging,” says Sutherland, himself a former NMA judge. “I’d probably rather judge essays or one of the more journalistic categories.” It could be this kind of attitude, which is pervasive in the industry, that explains why the shiny golds and silvers for service are often handed out to decidedly non-traditional service stories. In 2007, the Walrus, a magazine not exactly known for its service journalism, earned two silvers in service categories, while Canadian Living andChatelaine went home empty-handed. It was a judging decision that left Ravary even more disappointed. “Are they magazine awards?” she asks. “Or are they serious journalism awards?”

These were the kinds of questions Empey asked herself last year when the Walrus won silver for Nora Underwood’s “The Teenage Brain,” a story about “why adolescents sleep in, take risks and won’t listen to reason.” Although the article fell into the service category simply by being “explanatory” (the NMAF’s definition of service at the time of the 2007 awards), it didn’t feature any of the characteristic structural elements of a service story—there were no instructional subheadings or advice. It could have just as easily been entered into the health and medicine category.

“Canadian Living had done that story five years earlier when it was really news,” says Empey. “And I thought we’d done a really strong package.” The Canadian Living article, “Hardwire Your Teens’ Brain for Success,” by Kristin Jenkins, was a sharp contrast to Underwood’s. As well as presenting the information in narrative form, Canadian Living offered a guide for parents. Accompanying the story were sidebars featuring conversations with real-life teenagers and parents, information on why adolescents need more sleep, as well as an explanation of the MRI studies conducted on teens.

Canadian Living didn’t even bother to enter the story into the competition. Empey doesn’t remember the specific reason why not, but says it was probably because the service categories aren’t taken seriously or given importance.

In November 2007, the NMAF board addressed the issue and unanimously voted to change service-related content in the program. In addition to creating a new category for service story editorial packages (which takes into account the complete collaboration of a service story including the illustrations, sidebars and writing), the board redefined the categories. Service was reclassified as “informational,” and the how-to category as “instructional.”

Although the foundation made an effort to recognize service journalism, the category remains ambiguously defined, allowing for the entry of any story with informational content. “I don’t think it’s the foundation’s job to come up with a definitive definition of service,” says Pittaway. “We trust the editors know what they’re doing is a service article and that they’ll submit it accordingly.” But this won’t stop articles from the Walrus being judged alongside articles from women’s service books.

“There’s a sense that the only valuable stories are the ones that are big and groundbreaking,” says Empey. “The challenge—when it comes to the magazine journalist community—is which is more important, but I don’t think the reader gets snobby about these kinds of things.”

5.It doesn’t hurt to offer food: readers can’t think on an empty stomach. While advertisers indisputably play a role in the content that appears in magazines, it’s clear that the women’s books and city magazines answer to a more powerful god. “There’s no doubt that most readers want service,” says Mallon. “It’s the crack cocaine of the magazine industry world.” Ultimately, readers determine content by voting with their cash, which, according to Pittaway, is an important sign of credibility. The numbers say it all: in 2006, Canadian Living, for example, earned nearly $5 million on newsstands, and in 2007 maintained 388,953 subscriptions over a six-month period. Meanwhile, the Walrusmaintained 37,106 subscriptions for an entire year.

Magazines such as Chatelaine and Homemakers regularly receive mail from readers thanking them for their advice. Homemakers even publishes pictures of crafts or recipes readers have made with guidance from the magazine. Sutherland agrees that service doesn’t appear in magazines because editors or publishers are enthusiastic about it, but because it’s what readers want. “Magazine editors are not involved in a conspiracy,” he says. And despite his own efforts to include more features in Western Living, he acknowledges that longer stories don’t thrive in the marketplace: “All magazines end up looking the same—service oriented—because that’s what readers buy.”

Ravary, for one, despite her small protest at last year’s NMAs, says she isn’t basing editorial decisions on the advice of her peers. “What the industry thinks—whether service matters or doesn’t matter, or any of those prejudices—doesn’t keep me from sleeping at night,” she says. “All the industry can do is meet reader expectations and exceed them.”

In the end, if magazine editors do their jobs and create content that engages readers from the contents to the back page, service stories become the teaser to a book full of great stuff. “You have to hope there is an intrinsic interest in the magazine,” says Ross. “So maybe after people finish reading about where to get great pastrami sandwiches, they’ll actually read a profile about their mayor.”

This hostile, icy metropolis is exhausting. Every stereotype—the constant military presence, the babushkas begging in the crowded Metro, real fur, stray dogs, dirty slush, the Christmas trees next to statues of Lenin—overwhelms the senses almost instantly upon arrival. Many Moscow buildings carry plaques: this or that historical figure lived here. This land explodes with stories marinated in local colour that attack all western senses. Many foreign journal-ists deal with the intensity of this city by escaping to more familiar terrain every few months. Or they hunker down in groups, eating and shopping in favourite places. They might buy an iconic fur hat and try to fit in, but the effort is often futile. Few stay very long.

Not so Fred Weir, whose 21 years in Russia have not only made him the longest-serving Canadian journalist in the country, but also shaped him into a typical suburban Muscovite family man. If anyone understands Russia, it is this former reporter for The Canadian Press, who now writes for The Christian Science Monitor.

Traditionally, other correspondents call up Weir when they arrive. Typically he briefs them at the Starlite Diner, an overpriced 1950s American-style establishment where short-skirted waitresses wait on journalists in lacquered red and gold booths. This is where Weir and his old friend Matthew Fisher meet me one day last December when I come to Moscow to observe our press corps at work.

“Fred’s really the dean of foreign correspondents here,” says Fisher, who normally reports for CanWest from the Middle East. Fisher has dropped into town for December’s Russian parliamentary election. Since the ’70s, he’s been flying in and out of Moscow for the important stories. He likes Russian ballet and hockey, he tells me, but feels frustrated by the system, the soaring prices and the difficulty getting people on the street to talk. “Matthew doesn’t like it here,” says Weir, half teasing his friend.

“Ask Fred, ask him why he isn’t going to a polling station to do interview streeters,” retorts Fisher, putting down his Oreo milkshake and pointing at Weir.

“We already discussed this,” Weir replies in his calm and thoughtful manner. “For years and years I did these stories, and I don’t think it changes anything.” He is through running around.

Today, Weir, a bookish man of 56 who bears a resemblance to Liberal Party leader Stéphane Dion, works mostly out of his study, surrounded by bookshelves. He produces analytical pieces while others pound the pavement in search of the stories Weir knows will never be as black and white as they initially appear.

Two days later, Fisher, his translator and I stand huddled on a dirty staircase in a Moscow elementary school. Voters are submitting their ballots to scrutineers at the electoral station installed on the second floor. Afterward they drift toward the staircase, where we’re waiting to ambush them.

With his Russian-style ushanka (fur hat) tucked safely under his arm, Fisher targets a young couple strolling down the corridor hand in hand. Olga Podolskaya, the translator, stops them at his request.

“Excuse me, can we ask you a couple of questions?” she inquires in Russian. “This is Canadian correspondent Matthew Fisher.”

“Matvei Ribkin,” Fisher pipes. He likes this literal translation of his name.

The conversation flows well until the Russian man asks, “What’s Canada doing here asking questions about Vladimir Putin?”

The translator relates the query to Fisher.

“Because we’re concerned about what’s going on in Russia,” the Canadian replies seriously. “In some countries, the government doesn’t control the television like this. So you don’t see ads for the same candidate again and again.”

The Russian couple shifts uncomfortably as Podolskaya translates the response about Putin and his United Russia party hogging all the ad time. “Maybe,” the young man allows politely. Then, as they’re leaving, he jokes in Russian, “That’s it, I’ve been exposed. I’ll get an angry letter now.”

Fisher, who hardly speaks Russian, doesn’t catch the quip. Having grown up in a Russian home, I do. And not only do I speak the language, but I also identify with the local culture. Still, for me it’s tempting to judge Russia from the point of view of a western observer, because it truly feels like a different place. Peter Solomon, former director of the Centre for Russian and East European Studies at the University of Toronto, says many western reporters falsely attempt to apply “our universal moral perspective” to Russia. “The coverage is too systematically critical,” he says. “Western correspondents based in Russia have been lulled into a position to see themselves as defenders of democracy.”

Correspondents come here planning to write stories about a land in transition: Russia, the country recovering from the iron clutches. Or, more often now: Russia, the country sinking back into the darkness. A readiness to mistrust Russia prevails in Canadian media. We remain concerned, while the locals remain skeptical of us. It’s a kind of mutual triple “mis”: mistrust, misinterpretation and misunderstanding. Similar problems exist in any foreign correspondence, but the political atmosphere in Russia seems to reach toxic levels more often.

This readiness to mistrust is long-standing. Canadians have always been concerned about Russia, even before uprisings, tanks and Bolsheviks dominated the country’s landscape at the beginning of the 20th century. As early as 1896, The Evening Star, now the Toronto Star, was issuing a “familiar cry” about Russia’s “tyranny” and “barbarity.” Mainstream reporters rarely visited until 1953, when CP correspondent Bill Boss visited Russia. In his five-month stint, he talked his way inside one single Russian home. He took to dining out at 1:30 a.m. in order to entice Soviets drunk enough to exchange words with a foreigner. “Reporting from Russia can be honest and objective,” Boss wrote upon his return. “It cannot be complete.”

By the time the Canadian Press, CBC and the Toronto Telegram established permanent bureaus in Moscow in the mid-’60s, the Soviet Union was a place where a reporter could make his career. During the Cold War, stories about the U.S.S.R. landed easily on the front page. When someone crashed into Peter Worthington’s black Mercedes while he was in the Soviet Union and threatened the then-Telegram correspondent over the phone, his account read like a spy thriller.

Working there was like becoming a character in a John le Carré novel. It seemed glamorous, almost heroic. Yet it was also lonely. While setting up CBC’s bureau, correspondent David Levy would “send long, 90-line telexes from Moscow about how he couldn’t get a chair for his kitchen,” remembers his successor David Halton. “The bureaucrats at CBC thought he went bonkers or something.”

Around this time in Canada, young Fred Weir was bullied by other kids because his father had run for Parliament as a member of the Communist Party of Canada. His peers expressed disdain when, at age 34, he landed in Russia as a correspondent for the party’s newspaper. The Canadian Tribune wasn’t considered real journalism, and until 1990 Weir wasn’t invited to weekly briefings at the embassy—meetings open to other Canadian reporters. “The Soviet Union was misunderstood, a Cold War reflex—everything was painted black,” recounts Weir. “With Putin, there’s a return to the Russia-as-threat image.”

Putin’s increasingly aggressive stance, coinciding with the steep rise in the price of a barrel of oil, has created a sense of déjà vu for Weir. “Maybe it’s what readers want,” he hastens to add, “something breezy and superficial. You know, ‘Oh gosh, what a different place Russia is,’ from fresh eyes. This is a problem for me. I don’t want to be a parrot, regurgitating pretty much the same stories I wrote before.”

Nevertheless, for Weir and his colleagues it is a risky proposition to dig deeper into Russian stories, especially when reporting for the local media. According to Reporters Without Borders, Russia is now one of the most dangerous places for journalists in the world. The state dominates Russian TV broadcasting, and local zhurnalisty tend to lose their lives if they investigate too deeply: at least 21 journalists, including the highly publicized murder of anti-Putin author Anna Politkovskaya, have been killed in Russia since 2000. Foreigners are not immune if they choose to become localized: in 2004, Paul Klebnikov, an American who crossed over and became an editor at the Russian edition of Forbes magazine, was shot outside his office in Moscow. “One of the hallmarks of the Putin era is the bureaucratic mentality coming back,” says Weir. “Never mind ‘Send a letter,’ ‘Submit your questions,’ ‘Submit a transcript.’ You don’t get to see them at all. Their offices don’t return your calls.”

Weir is referring to the time-honoured Russian procedure of obfuscation: being asked to write formal letters, for example, with questions attached; or the fact that sometimes you really do have to let subjects edit their quotes later. I ask which offices, specifically, are starting to elude him, and suddenly Weir sounds alarmed. “Hmm, I’m not going to… what are you going to do with this?” His voice tightens. “I- I- I don’t think I’d like to mention any specific offices because they’ll get pissed off if they hear of it.”

Nichego is a word that Russia’s foreign correspondents know well. In this dualistic society, the word means both “It’s okay” and “nothing.” Here, “nothing” stands for what is accessible to unlicensed reporters. “Nothing” shows the amount of journalistic progress in the former Soviet Union. “Nothing” measures the amount of western journalists’ knowledge about the Kremlin. Foreign correspondents can drive up to a dacha (summer home), enjoy a steamy banya (Russian sauna), sip vodka and share a dinner and their frustrations. In a turbulent country bursting with activity, not a single person within that circle would have any “inside” information.

“Why don’t you ever write anything positive?” an official at the Canadian embassy in Russia once asked Jane Armstrong, The Globe and Mail’s temporary correspondent in Moscow.

“Why don’t you tell me something positive?” Armstrong shot back.

“Many here believe the foreign media circulate a lot of negative information,” says Russian freelancer Igor Malakhov. “Basically, it’s true.” But what are they given to work with?

A spokesman for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs voiced concerns about “the maintenance of the country’s positive image abroad” in a 2006 article from a Russian journal titled International Affairs. “Unfortunately, some foreign correspondents… are still enslaved by old stereotypes, creating the impression that there are no changes in the political, economic, social or public life in Russia,” wrote Mikhail Kamynin. The Kremlin recruited pro-fessional stylists—New York-based public relations agency Ketchum—to help in preparation for the 2006 G8 summit in St. Petersburg.

For occasions like the summit, Putin meets with journalists reporting for the countries involved. But at other times, unless a meeting with Canadian officials is on the Kremlin agenda, the only chance to grill the president is at the annual Kremlin press conference. During this approximately seven-hour affair, most answers are buried in subtleties: Russian language is complex. Clinging to a headset, reporters pray to catch a strong, clear quote that will satisfy Canadian readers. “Anything you say about Russia is a vast generalization,” says Malcolm Gray, a Moscow-based freelancer who files to the Star, referring to a country that spans nearly 17 million square kilometers.

Armstrong recruited a young local journalist to do some reporting for her. Her Russian shadow played detective, interviewing shopkeepers at marketplaces, for instance, or infiltrating the Kremlin-funded youth movement, Nashi. The week I was visiting, a store clerk told Armstrong’s researcher his boss would get an additional stall if all the employees voted in Sunday’s election. And Nashi spilled the beans about an upcoming demonstration. But it’s still just scratching the surface.

Reporting gets even more complicated if journalists want to tackle the sensitive subject of the Chechen war. They must apply for a permit to enter Chechnya. After that, correspondents will be escorted around Grozny in a truck. No time will be allocated for independent sightseeing. Reporters can try to bribe their way through the border without a convoy, but they’ll lose their license if caught. Canadian reporters have been detained and questioned in Chechnya before.

In phone conversations, some say “south” rather than “Chechnya” these days. According to rumours, the C-word triggers recording devices. Just before he left his Moscow post in late 2004, the Globe’s Mark MacKinnon published a brief email interview with now deceased Chechen warlord Shamil Basayev. In response, the Russian Foreign Ministry Press Center issued “an official protest,” identifying MacKinnon as “the initiator of the provocative action.” A year later, in 2005, an ABC producer lost his license for airing an interview with the rebel leader.

Even something as straightforward as getting full names of sources that agree to be interviewed for streeters remains difficult. Some say people smell the new mood in the air and try not to speak out too much—just in case.

Back at the elementary school, a United Russia observer, white name tag strung around her neck, scans the narrow hall as she perches herself on a children’s stool. Fisher spots her clutching a book called English in Two Years, and balances himself atop a miniature stool next to hers. With his translator, Podolskaya, mediating, the correspondent throws out some questions. “Speak in English—I speak English, too!” he dares her with a smile. Has he just winked?

Tense and uncomfortable, she starts a phrase in English. Stops. Jumps up. Looks at Podolskaya. Sinks back into her chair. Murmurs one or two short answers. Then she’s on her feet again, promising to return momentarily.

“Get her last name from the name tag, in case she doesn’t want to give it to us later,” Fisher tells Podolskaya as the observer returns. Irina Pavlovna Sharova, the name tag reveals.

The conversation resumes. As it does, another stern-looking woman begins to circle us. Shooing bystanders away—“Keep walking, comrades”—she sneaks discreet glances at my notes.

“Oh, I can only imagine what these dear new acquaintances of mine will write from this now,” the observer prophesies gloomily in Russian, addressing no one in particular. The translator doesn’t relay the statement to Fisher.

“So, you are satisfied with the current government?” continues Fisher, ignorant of this woman’s comment.

“No, no, now that’s enough!” the observer rises again.

“What’s your family name?” tries Fisher, throwing a hand forward to stop her.

“It’s a secret,” she mumbles in Russian.

“It’s a secret,” repeats Podolskaya.

The observer brings an A4 sheet of paper, examines the journalist’s laminated accreditation card and copies down the information.

“This is very Soviet. It was much better before, they didn’t do this,” Fisher tells me. “It’s much better when people aren’t afraid.”

Fisher and Weir still clearly remember Russia in the 1990s—a chaotic, free, confused, corrupt and outspoken nation. The locals stopped reciting textbook answers and wanted to talk to the foreign press. “They thought the westerners were influential,” says Weir. Western money flowed into the country as unrestricted reporting took place. You could waltz into the Chechen war zone and dine with representatives of either side of the conflict. You could show up at the offices of local officials—with their identical red carpets, L-shaped wooden desks and numerous phones—and chat, if they were free.

“Russia was the place to be,” Weir says, fondly recalling the glasnost era. “Real things started happening.” Not to mention a little comedy. Once, as Weir was wandering through the ominous corridors of the Kremlin, an intoxicated Boris Yeltsin, supported by his unsteady presidential bodyguards, burst out of an office. “C’mon Hans, let’s go,” Yeltsin yelled to a Swedish correspondent who was standing next to Weir. Like a stampede, the group swept through the hall, dragging Hans along.

But readers eventually grew tired of stories from Russia. The tales of communism, espionage, superpower conflict and, finally, Gorbachev’s perestroika and glasnost, all of which had fascinated Canadians for decades, grabbed headlines until the late ’90s. But then the suspense ebbed. We in the West had “won.”

“When I later talked to the newspaper’s publisher,” says Olivia Ward, the Star’s former Moscow bureau chief, “it became perfectly obvious that as far as the Star was concerned, the big story in Russia was over.” Ward sealed her bureau’s heavy metal door with its numerous locks in 1997. Today, apart from a couple of freelancers, only CBC and the Globe remain in Moscow.

Some believe that, with the exception of the Middle East, a shift in priorities has caused a general drop in international focus in today’s media. Weir has ceased pitching his stories to Canadian publications because there are fewer opportunities available to sell them. Besides, newspapers are content to publish international wire copy free of a Canadian angle. “I remember from the years I worked with CP,” he says, “part of its belief was to bring a Canadian view to the news. Now it runs AP copy and puts its own logo on it.” Last year, Canadian Press chose not to renew its contact with him as a “symbolic” correspondent. “They couldn’t afford me,” Weir says quietly. “Apparently, they blew their foreign budget on Afghanistan.”

It costs somewhere between $400,000 and $450,000 to maintain a Moscow bureau for a Canadian print-based publication, according to Globe executive editor Neil A. Campbell. Moscow is not as expensive as London or Tokyo, but it remains a pricey place where piles of paperwork and accreditations are required in exchange for an uncertain payoff in terms of quality, in-depth coverage. For a foreign channel to film in Russia’s famous Amber Room, for example, the cost can be upwards of 10,000 euros per day.

At the end of my stay, I watch a small television screen in a minibus called a marshrutka blink with advertisements and trivia while the bus shuttles between terminals at Sheremetyevo airport. The solemn face of Russian poet Fyodor Tyutchev appeares on the screen, followed by a few verses he wrote in the 1860s:

You will not grasp her with your mind

Or cover with a common label,

For Russia is one of a kind—

Believe in her, if you are able…

An award-winning journalist, Brian Stewart began his career as a political reporter for The Gazette in Montreal, before joining CBC in 1971. Now 65, Stewart has reported from innumerable war zones and ravaged countries, including El Salvador, Ethiopia, Beirut and Sudan. Graeme Smith, 28, is technically The Globe and Mail’s Moscow bureau chief but spends most of his time reporting from hot spots in Afghanistan.

The Review brought the two together at Dora Keogh, an Irish pub in Toronto, to discuss the business of foreign correspondence.

Miranda Voth: What’s been your biggest eye-opener working outside Canada?

Graeme Smith: One of the best lessons I learned—one of the first things I learned in the field—was when the Uzbek government massacred some people in a place called Andijan during my very first month on the job in Moscow. I was sent down to the Uzbek-Kyrgyz border to try to figure out what had happened. We went to a refugee camp of people who had fled the shooting. On the first day, no one had seen anything, no one had been there, no one had any idea what we were talking about. On the second day, some people admitted they’d seen some things. On the third day, some people admitted they’d been wounded and under fire. By the fourth day, we’d found the ring-leaders involved in leading this revolution that was violently put down. That was all from hanging out in the same tiny bunch of tents in this barren wasteland on the border between these two countries. Suddenly I saw the value of just being there—and the value of being a westerner, because otherwise those stories wouldn’t have been told. It’s not, if you don’t get it someone else will. It’s, if you don’t get it nobody’s going to get it.

Brian Stewart: The biggest eye-opener I ever had was the first conflict zone I went to, El Salvador in the 1980s. It really struck me how petrified I was, and how much more incredibly frightening a combat area—I won’t even say war—is than you think. The atmosphere of fear where people have to hold their lives together, where aid workers have to try to do some good, where human rights people have to take the kind of risks that would make my hair stand on end.

GS: Knowledge can be an engulfing experience, too. You were in Ethiopia, Brian—you were smelling it. It’s not something you can send back through the camera. I remember being in Balakot after it was destroyed in the Pakistan earthquake. The smell is just not something you can capture in writing or photographs. It’s something that becomes you.

BS: Even sounds. Microphones don’t pick up the real sound of a field of people coughing with pneumonia, or anything like the sounds of battle. They’re incomparably larger and more terrifying than they can ever be on a television screen.

GS: The sound of an American A-10 Warthog military jet, flying low and firing over you, has a certain dragon howl. The bullets don’t go rat-a-tat-tat because they’re firing so quickly. They just make this sort of “Harroooooh!” howl—you can’t put that in your copy anywhere.

And we’re just occasional visitors to that world—there are people who do this sort of thing full-time.

MV: Have you ever experienced culture clash?

BS: Once I had to interview, with my producer, the guy we think planned the Air India bombing. We went to see him and I forgot, unforgivably, to bring headgear along with us to the shoot. And I knew that because he regarded himself as a religious leader, we’d have to do something to show respect. The only thing they had in the room was kind of a tea doily, a little lacy doily from the side of an armchair, which I had to drape over my head. And my producer had to put a tea coaster on his head. That’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever done—conduct an interview with this guy without looking over at my producer with the tea coaster on his head and breaking into laughter.

GS: I’ve never been religious myself, but in southern Afghanistan it matters, especially when you have a Taliban contact. Some guys are willing to work with me for money, or because they think improving the understanding will make the foreign troops wiser, or the hate better. But in a lot of cases they won’t work with me unless I promise to read the Qur’an.

MV: Is it better to be embedded with the military or not?

GS: The biggest problem in southern Afghanistan right now is the difficulty maintaining the physical presence of an office, or a place to sleep without being invaded. I had one, but then it got raided. For me, it’s terribly useful to be able to travel with the troops, to get the interviews and be welcomed into places that would normally be off limits. Then again, they trust me because I’m restricted by an embedding agreement.

It depends on how you do it. Embedding gets a bad name because it makes you more sympathetic to the troops—you start to appreciate their human struggles as they do their jobs. And it’s a good thing that you become close to them and understand what they’re going through, so long as you also become close to the civilians and the others who are involved in the conflict and not become sympathetic to only one side. It can be too much of a good thing, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is a good thing.

BS: I had an experience during the Gulf War in 1991 where only the British were embedded by the British, the Americans by the Americans and the French by the French, which left a whole bunch of us out. We were so desperate to get to the front we formed our own international press corps on the spot, declaring ourselves embedded with the “Kuwaiti” army. We made it into Kuwait, but only because we had to design our own union.

MV: Is there anything you wish you’d done differently in your career?

BS: Take photographs. I could kick myself for not having done it. All those years as a foreign correspondent and I didn’t take a camera along.

GS: I’m teaching myself video for the same reason, because I’ve been in situations where I wished I had a video camera. Now where I’m starting to carry one, it’s turning out to be very useful, not only for me but also CTV [Smith occasionally files to the Globe’s corporate broadcast affiliate].

MV: Being a foreign correspondent can be a tough job. What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

BS: I think it was Pierre Berton who said, “just read everything. Read the Kleenex box, read the back of Rice Krispies—read everything you can get your hands on.” The degree of stories you will find that way is just fascinating.

But first, although the job might strike you as glamorous, you need to make sure you have a real interest in working abroad. It can be disillusioning and much more difficult than you think.

GS: I absolutely agree with that—about having to want it. It’s much more of an unhealthy fixation than people realize. You have to be willing to actually shape your entire life around the pursuit of stories.

MV: What story are you most proud of for breaking to Canadians?

BS: Ethiopia was, I suppose, the defining stage of my career. [Stewart was the first North American reporter to cover the Ethiopian famine in 1984, reports of which were initially suppressed by the ruling Marxist regime.] There wasn’t a lot of investigative reporting going on there. It was brought in—forced in—and then smuggled out.

GS: Well, I’ve had a pretty short career so far, but it would be the detainee situation in Afghanistan [“From Canadian custody to cruel hands,” April 23, 2007]. It was lovely to see effects right away, as a young journalist, to see something that will make me want to keep doing this. I wrote the story about how bad things were happening in the Afghan prisons, and within a matter of days Canada had a new understanding of the Afghan government. And things have gotten better.

BS: The good thing about that story is we never know how bad things could have gotten.

MV: Did either of you ever have any other career ambitions?

GS: I’m still not sure I want to be a foreign correspondent. In my teenage years I became interested in helping the world understand itself. I can do that by writing for the Globe, making little videos, writing a book, becoming an academic. I always think if journalism doesn’t work out there are other things I can do.

BS: Really, there’s only one job in the world I could do and that’s journalism. I couldn’t manage anything else. I can’t even get a cab to pull over. I have no organizational skills, no money skills. My daughter, who is 14, says, “Daddy, you really aren’t that bright.” All I can do is report.

For some people, home smells like baking bread, apples and cinnamon, maybe even hay and manure. For David Estok, it smells like ink. When he arrived for his first day as editor-in-chief of The Hamilton Spectatorand climbed up the back stairs, boxes in hand, the smell of the ink from the presses down the hall hit him in the face like summer heat. It was March 5, 2007, one day before his 50th birthday.

The ink told him he was home: back to Hamilton, back to journalism and back to the Spectator. It had been a long time: 12 years since he’d worked in journalism and more than 20 years since he’d worked at theSpectator. In the last 25 years, his career has balanced out pretty evenly between public relations and journalism.

Those on the outside found it strange that a job-jumping PR flack could be out of daily journalism for a long, long time and suddenly land a plum job at one of the country’s healthiest newspapers. But those on the outside don’t know David Estok, a Hamilton boy from a blue-collar family who carries the pride of the city in his heart like a brand. After two highly publicized, controversial redesigns in 2003 and 2006, the Spectatorneeded Estok. Public perception was that the paper, once as much a part of the fabric of the city as the steel mills and the Tiger Cats football team, had lost touch with Hamilton.

Although the Spectator has resisted decline better than many other North American city dailies in the Internet age, readership has suffered. Since Torstar Corp. bought the paper in 1999, circulation has declined by roughly five per cent, trimming revenues and profits in the process. There has also been something of a revolving door for senior management, with five changes of editors-in-chief and almost as many publishers in the past eight years.

For Estok, who was born and raised in the city’s east end, the job was to put the Hamilton back in theSpectator. Local news would be the only thing to help his paper stand out from the clamour of media competing for Hamiltonians’ attention. “You can go on the Internet and get The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times and The Independent,” Estok says. “You can look at all the best reporting, nationally and internationally, in a moment. But what you can’t really get is local news.”

In a recent news meeting, Estok—a man whose simmering energy is barely contained by his five-foot-six frame—is a model of restraint. For most of it, he sits quietly, his dark hair and eyes made even darker by the low lights of the room, and listens to his staff hash out details. But there’s no doubt he’s engaged with the discussion: his eyes never stop sweeping the room, moving from editor to editor like searchlights.

It’s a slow news day, and everyone’s a little punchy, trading sarcasms across the boardroom table. Definitely going on the front page is a story about the Oriental Blood Brothers, an east-end gang that has recently graduated from petty crimes to Mafia-style shakedowns. There’s a throw from A1 to the Go section—a story all about bagels. Art director Bob Hutton riffs off the proposed caption: “What’s in a cinnamon raisin bagel?”

“It’s like, who’s buried in Grant’s tomb!” he says. “Are we really going with that?”

In managing the Spectator’s newsroom, Estok has leaned more toward evolution than revolution. For the first few months, his changes were minor, and invisible to outsiders. The 3:30 p.m. news meeting used to start at 4 p.m. Estok changed it to give the day a sense of urgency, and to get people to think earlier and faster about major stories of the day. He did the same thing with the 10:30 a.m. meeting, which used to get going at 11, jump-starting the journalistic juices before the Tims have a chance to cool off.

Then editorial team members saw their responsibilities shuffled, and suddenly everyone had a new job. News schedules were changed. Estok’s management style emphasized decision-making from the bottom up. “In a smaller newsroom, you have to push the decision-making down,” he says. “At the beginning, some said, ‘Tell me what to do.’ I’d just push back and say, ‘What do you think you should do?’”

For a newsroom used to sweeping, rapid transformation—the hallmark of Estok’s predecessor, Dana Robbins—the slow pace of change to the paper itself was initially a little stressful. Some staffers scratched their heads and wondered what exactly their new editor was going to do. Bill Dunphy, manager of Metroland’s web training programme, remembers thinking, “Why is he waiting? Come on, let’s see what you want to do here!”

Estok began to deliver in September 2007, starting with a Saturday editorial titled, “Putting the Hamilton Back in the Spectator.” The following Monday, readers opened a redesigned paper with a renewed emphasis on local news: a front page “heavily tilted” towards local stories, and a local section that started on A2 and continued from there. On the op-ed page, the paper requested columns from readers. In the Go section, there was a Local People page, anchored by Paul Wilson and Suzanne Bourret. The Sports section now featured a Game Day package for Ticats games.

Beefed-up local coverage has been anchored by more ambitious projects. One of the largest to date is a continuing series called “Hamilton Next.” Under Robbins, the Spectator had run the three-year “Poverty Project,” an inquiry into poverty in the city and what could be done about it. “Hamilton Next” was the next logical step, says Wade Hemsworth, a member of the series’ reporting team; it is an effort to “determine what Hamilton should do differently to achieve the kind of prosperity that appears to have passed our city by while it has lifted other cities in the Golden Horseshoe.” Along with compelling articles, the project included a multi-section stand-alone publication that was distributed with the paper in late October. There was also a Hamilton Next blog, and a SimCity-esque game called Future City in which readers could log on and choose initiatives for the city while watching the results of their decisions through the course of the game. And with that, the Hamilton was definitively back in the Spectator. “The revolution was a brilliant, brilliant thing,” Estok says, diplomatically. “The trick is to find ways to improve the paper without reversing what had been done in the past.”

Estok grew up on Martin Road, the middle child in a Slovakian Catholic family of five kids. He had two brothers, two sisters, a father who worked for a die-casting company, and a mother who was a secretary for a local developer and was active in church life.

Estok read the Spectator as a kid, particularly the sports pages, but it wasn’t until he went to Carleton University in 1979 to study journalism that he developed an all-consuming passion for news. After school, he interned at the Spectator in the summer of 1982—with Dana Robbins, among others—and quickly became known as a crackerjack reporter who made up for what he lacked in, as he puts it, “natural abilities,” with sheer dogged hard work. Robbins recalls that Estok was “so much better than the rest of us,” and veteran reporters regularly asked him to work on projects that, as a student, “he had no damn right being involved in.”

The Spectator hired him full time later in 1982 and he quickly became a city hall reporter, working with the man who would become his friend and mentor, Jerry Rogers. Together, they regularly skewered Hamilton’s dysfunctional city council, their efforts culminating in a municipal election where fully half the councillors lost their seats. Later, Estok became the Spectator’s labour reporter, winning the Journalist of the Year award in 1988 from the Western Ontario Newspaper Association (now the Ontario Newspaper Association).

It may have been tempting to hunker down and get comfortable on those laurels. “It’s very easy to be mediocre,” he says. “You hit your five years, you’re a veteran reporter, you make the calls and you punch out the stories.” But easy never interested Estok. That year, he jumped ship to work at the Financial Post where he covered the steel and automobile industries. The business paper had just gone daily, playing David to The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business’s Goliath, and needed a stable of hard-assed general reporters with daily news experience. Estok joined other young reporters such as Eric Reguly, James Walker and Andy Willis—all now established business journalists—in the aggressive, scrappy, underdog’s newsroom, and quickly established himself as a boundlessly energetic idea machine. Willis remembers Estok coming in “every day with 20 ideas that he thought up in the car.” Others noticed Estok’s talents and he quickly moved on to the assignment desk and then to a senior editor’s job.

By 1991, he had tired of business reporting (“Dow was up, Dow was down,” he remembers thinking), and moved into public relations, becoming the director of communications for the Workplace Health and Safety Agency. Four years later, he stepped into the associate business editor role at Maclean’s, but he was now living in London, Ontario with his wife, Kathy, and two small daughters, and the commute to Toronto was wearing. In 1996, Estok made a second move into public relations, this time to the communications and public affairs department at the University of Western Ontario, with a sideline job teaching business journalism and newsroom management to bright-eyed j-schoolers. “David ran our PR shop like a newsroom,” says Malcolm Ruddock, one of the department’s communications directors. “I don’t think the newsroom ever really got out of his blood.”

He stayed at Western for 10 years, until the siren song of journalism called him back to Hamilton. Someone Estok would rather not name phoned to ask if he’d let his name stand for consideration as editor-in-chief of the Spectator.

The newspaper Estok heads was first published in July 1846, the same year the city of Hamilton came into being. In 1877, the Spectator was the first newspaper William Southam bought; his family would go on to form one of Canada’s leading newspaper dynasties for more than a century.

However, the venerable past has given way to a sparse present. Like other daily newspapers, the Spectator’s circulation declined in the face of alternatives, particularly the Internet. This gradual falling away of subscribers had an attendant effect on profit margins. A spring 2007 article in Biz, a Hamilton-based business magazine, estimated that annual gross revenues at the Spectator had dropped from approximately $78 million in 1996 to $70 million in 2006. The magazine also speculated that profit margins had shrunk from 20 to 25 per cent to 12 to 15 per cent.

In response to the Internet and other threats, cost-cutting has become a permanent discipline at most papers. In the Spectator’s case, regular ownership changes in the late 1990s, culminating in the sale to Torstar, did not help staunch the bleeding of journalism positions. Since the Toronto-based corporation took over, the newsroom has shed at least 22 reporting and editorial jobs through buyouts, and has undergone periodic hiring freezes.

From a reader’s perspective, the biggest upheaval at the paper came on October 1, 2003 with then-editor-in-chief Dana Robbins’s “revolution.” Robbins and the Spectator’s senior managers had been impressed by the groundbreaking Impact Study released by Northwestern University’s Readership Institute in April 2001. Sparked by slow and steady circulation declines in the United States, the study outlined strategies to reverse the trend, including increased local content, lifestyle news and feature writing. The study also spoke of making newspapers easier to read and navigate, and changing the culture of newsrooms to encourage adaptability and innovation. Change became the official religion of the Spectator, and the study was its Bible.

By 2003, Robbins had initiated the Spectator’s first revolution, collapsing the paper’s six sections into four, eliminating separate sections for business, entertainment, and national and international news. Sports went tabloid. Baby boomers and suburban women between the ages of 25 and 49 were targeted with a new section, a broadsheet “magazine within a newspaper” called Go, that covered health, fashion and lifestyle news, in a graphic and photo-heavy format. Regular news stories got shorter, but there were also much longer series, usually heavy on crime and drama, which according to the study, were of interest to female readers.

The reaction was initially positive. Readership went up 6.3 per cent in the first year, with even higher gains among boomers and women. The Spectator won a 2003 National Newspaper Award for Special Projects, and favourable attention from the Newspaper Association of America and the Associated Press Managing Editors website. The paper was even featured in a May 2006 presentation by the Northwestern Readership Institute, the very author that encouraged the changes in the first place.

The second phase of the revolution, in 2006, was less dramatic. There were no more turns off the front page. The news mix in the front section was shuffled, with a photo montage of major international stories at the beginning of the section followed by wire stories on national and international news. Local news, opinion and business made up the last half of the front section.

The relegation of local news (and its overemphasis on crime) didn’t sit well with readers. “The paper had gone into a lot of negative coverage,” says Ron Foxcroft, a Hamiltonian and CEO of Fluke Transportation Group and Fox 40. “It had deteriorated to a National Enquirer kind of paper.” Steve Petherbridge, a former managing editor at the Toronto Star and Estok’s former boss at the Financial Post, who reads the Spectator“in spasms,” says that the page-three photo montage looked like “a child had cut up a number of tabloid pages and stuck them together in a scrapbook.”

Many in the newsroom weren’t happy. “Reporters never thought the revolution worked,” says veteran columnist Susan Clairmont. “The integrity of the journalism we were doing was compromised by the design of the paper.” Writers stopped wanting their stories to land on the front page, since stories there were more likely to be severely cut to fit the space. Reporter Wade Hemsworth also says reporters were “a little uneasy that local news was pushed farther back in the section.”

Readers made their voices heard, too. Their letters, phone calls and emails argued for more prominent local news. Estok points out that there was an industry-wide push towards local content—sparked in part by that same study that inspired the revolution—and the Spectator needed to follow suit.

Robbins left the Spectator in December 2006, shortly after the second phase of the revolution began, to become publisher of both The Record in Kitchener-Waterloo and the Guelph Mercury. Any changes made during his tenure could never be considered definitive, he believes. “We always need to be evolving to meet the needs of our readers,” he says now. “If I’d stayed, it would have changed.”

Robbins left a list of people he thought would be ideal to help the paper readjust its sights. One of them, according to then-publisher Ian Oliver, would not only bring a much-desired outside perspective to the newsroom, but was “passionate about journalism and passionate about Hamilton.”

Estok says that working at the Spectator is a “great privilege and a special joy,” although he admits he had no intention of getting back into daily journalism. But he jumped at the opportunity. “How many times does someone call you up and say, ‘How’d you like to run one of the best local newspapers in Canada?’” he says, the glee fairly making him dance. “I was just a bit surprised they would consider someone like me.” But those who know Estok say the move was a natural choice, both for the paper and for Estok. His PR and academic experience was a plus, according to Ian Oliver. “He always stayed in touch with Hamilton, but brought back a bigger world perspective, which shows in the paper,” he says. “By having David there, you expanded the role and the knowledge of the newsroom.”

It wasn’t just the bosses who were happy to see Estok assume the top chair. Those who knew him, both from his work at the Spectator 20 years earlier and in other positions, thought he’d be ideal too. Nicole MacIntyre, the Spectator ’s only city hall reporter and one of Estok’s former journalism students at Western, says that when a few staffers spotted him in the lobby during the selection process, rumours started and there was “a real energy of people really hoping that he was going to get the job.”

The way ahead will be hard. The Spectator ’s circulation has grown 1.4 per cent in the past year, to 106,530 for weekdays and 117,172 on Saturday according to audited figures released by the Canadian Newspaper Association, but that increase is overlaid on a decade-long decline. Telemarketing, which once accounted for 75 per cent of new subscriptions, has been severely limited by privacy laws. Increasing or even maintaining ad sales, which account for 80 per cent of the paper’s revenue, is a constant challenge for the paper’s ad execs. According to Kelly Montague, the Spectator ’s vice-president of advertising, local advertising is strong, whereas the paper’s national ad campaigns, which are arranged partially by Torstar and partially by Metroland, are “flat,” and classifieds are “a mixed bag.” As in editorial, the payoff for the ad department is local. Following the example of community-oriented parent company Metroland, which has managed better than most news outfits to resist the shrinking revenue epidemic, the Spectator highlights local advertising through a variety of means—calendars, consumer magazines, the website and even a banner on the building’s outside wall—as well as in the daily paper itself.

Of course, the great conundrum for the future is the Internet and how to profit from it. No one seems to have figured that out yet, but like other papers, the Spectator is working hard at developing its website with video footage, blogs and breaking news. Spectator staffers go through a week of training at WebU, Metroland’s Internet training centre. There, reporters learn how to file stories to the web and how to shoot video to lend their stories the requisite online visual appeal. Blogs from reporters go behind the scenes and take an in-depth look at issues concerning Hamilton. Estok hopes to get readers interested in the fate of the city. More eyeballs looking at the website’s ads wouldn’t be a bad thing, either.

With the reader jury still out on his changes, Estok is getting ready to reduce the width of the paper to save on the cost of newsprint. The weekend paper was retooled in mid-February. So far though, his critics are giving him passing grades. “With the previous publisher and editor, you got the sense that he drove in from Burlington or Oakville, got off the highway, went into the Spectator ’s parking lot, and then operated from inside that environment,” says Ryan McGreal, editor of Raise the Hammer, a magazine devoted to urban issues in Hamilton. “Estok seems to identify with Hamilton in a way that management hasn’t necessarily in the past. He identifies with Hamilton as an urban environment, not as a bedroom community.” For Naomi Powell, who covers Estok’s old steel beat and sits at his old desk, the changes are logical. “We’re a local newspaper, right? Local news is our bread and butter.”

It’s November 3, 2007, the first night of the year when snow is no longer a hypothetical consideration. At Ivor Wynne Stadium, smack in the middle of the north end, the Ticats play their last game of what’s been a dismal, 2-15 season.

David Estok sits in section 26, row D, seat 13—same as always. His brother and best friend sit with him, in the seats his parents bought when Estok was a young boy. He rarely misses a game, rooting for the team, cheering them on, hearkening back to the glory days when winning a Grey Cup wasn’t a distant memory and it seemed certain that great things were just around the corner.

Loving the Ticats these days is a little like loving Hamilton itself, a lunch bucket steel town with the highest poverty rate in Ontario. Appreciating the city requires a sure and unshakeable faith that its fortunes are bound to improve some day. Estok loves both.

Estok knows he’s come back to daily journalism at a challenging time, but he says he’s never been happier. Even his friends have commented that he looks 10 years younger. “What do you do on Saturday? You wake up, put coffee on, go get the newspaper, sit at the kitchen table and read the newspaper. On Monday, I come in to the Spectator, get my coffee, sit at my desk and read the newspaper.” He leans forward and grins. “In other words, they’re paying me to do what I do on my own time!”

Outside the central market in La Matanza, an industrial town on the edge of Buenos Aires, a crowd of journalists and camerapeople stands on a wet three-tier bleacher. Correspondents from BBC, the Japan Broadcasting Corporation and Al-Jazeera are among about a hundred journalists waiting for the presidential candidate Cristina Fernández de Kirchner to take the stage and deliver her last speech before the Argentine election on October 28, 2007. Past streams of cameras and microphones, CBC Radio reporter Connie Watson stands alone in the corner. Her head is covered by the hood of a plastic rain poncho. Below her brown eyes are smudges of purple eyeliner, and her face gives off a cold sheen. She turns to the sea of Kirchner supporters below her and lowers her long black CBC-emblazoned microphone into the crowd. Some Argentines wave Halloween orange, powder blue and lemon yellow flags. Groups of men beat marching-band drums. Others clap and chant waiting for Kirchner, who is the wife of current president Néstor Kirchner. The lonely microphone capturing the din is English Canada’s only media monitor, since Watson is the only full-time reporter assigned to the vast region of Latin America.

Many of the campaign rallies Watson has covered in Latin America work the same way: almost like film extras, masses of “supporters” are given soda, food and sometimes a bit of money to appear at the event. They fill the space and make the candidate look like a populist hero. She has seen it in Mexico, Venezuela and throughout the region. Watson isn’t taken in by appearances the way a reporter flown in to cover the event might be. As CBC’s Latin America correspondent, Watson does everything from filing radio and occasionally television stories from different corners of the region to all of the administrative duties that go into running the bureau based in Mexico City. She does the banking, accounting, returns the phone calls, sends out packages, calls the cabs, does all the research and hires additional staff when she goes on the road. Without the time and resources to comprehensively cover the region, Watson does what she can, but it is never enough. The region is immense and its presence in the Canadian media is either shallow and sporadic, or filtered through an American perspective.

The region south of Miami and the Rio Grande, known collectively as Latin America and the Caribbean, encompasses Mexico, the Caribbean, and Central and South America. In 1965, Southam News Services attempted systematic coverage of Latin America when Paul Kidd opened a bureau. The bureau lasted two years. More than 15 years later, The Globe and Mail sent Oakland Ross to open a one-person bureau in Mexico City. Ross arrived in 1981 when Central America was blazing. Civil war raged in Guatemala and El Salvador. The Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua was only a couple of years old. “Central America had just exploded with newsworthiness and geopolitical significance,” says Ross, who now covers the Middle East for the Toronto Star. Journalists from Europe and North America started covering the region. The bloody military dictatorships and brutal murders may have made all Latin American countries seem the same, but of course they weren’t.

By 1988, the Globe had two bureaus in the region: one in Mexico and the other in Brazil. But in 1990, the Mexico bureau was closed. In 1995, the Globe told Rio de Janeiro bureau chief Isabel Vincent it was “restructuring” and was shutting down its remaining bureau in Latin America. When the North American Free Trade Agreement came into effect in 1994, Radio-Canada and CBC opened their first joint Latin America bureau in Mexico City. But the CBC bureau lasted less than five years. In a series of massive cutbacks at the corporation, the Mexico City, Cape Town and Paris bureaus were closed in 1999. CTV opened a Mexico City bureau in 2001 only to close it in 2004.

The lack of a Canadian perspective in Latin America made Watson push to open a CBC Radio bureau in the region. “Most of the reports came through American journalists, which had nothing to do with the history Canada has with Latin America,” she says. “We have to leap over the U.S. because it has been so intricately involved in so many notorious things in Latin America, from what happened to Salvador Allende to what happened to nearly every Central American country.”

From 2001 to 2004, Watson was a national Alberta reporter based in Calgary for CBC Radio. In 2004, the network decided to make her a full-fledged foreign correspondent. At the time, CBC was thinking of expanding its foreign coverage. Jamie Purdon, then director of radio news programs, says that as soon as the possibility of a Latin America bureau came up, Watson came to mind. “It seems like a really good fit with Connie. She is very passionate about that part of the world.”

On a sunny Tuesday afternoon in Buenos Aires, two days before Kirchner’s speech, a lively crowd is starting to gather outside the offices at INDEC, a government-run statistical agency. Many of the people standing on the pavement hold lit cigarettes between their fingers and streams of thick smoke spin up over the crowd. Whistles shriek continuously. A woman beats a red tin cup with a spoon. Another drums an old cake pan. The mood is almost jovial. Most of them are INDEC employees protesting the Néstor Kirchner government’s manipulation of inflation statistics. The government has been telling employees to shuffle the numbers. Watson weaves in and out of the crowd—she appears to be the only foreign journalist at the rally. She stops. On the fringe of the crowd, she stands and holds her CBC microphone up in the air. She walks over to a group of women who seem to be waiting for her. “For instance, they say that the inflation will be nine and the inflation must be done nine,” says one of the women in staccato English. “So they must lie and we don’t want lie.” Watson then speaks to a woman who works for a consumer protection group. The woman has been receiving threatening phone calls warning her not to talk about inflation or the government’s problems with statisticians. She fears for the safety of herself and her children. More people are out on the sidewalk outside the building. The air grows smokier. The clank, clank, clank of the women striking metal on metal intensifies.

The tin cup isn’t a random noisemaker. Empty-pot-and-pan protests gained notoriety in the 1970s in Chile during a period when food scarcity was spawned by political and economic instability caused by the election of Salvador Allende. Today Argentina’s overheating economy is making it difficult for people to put food on their plates.

“If inflation were a disease, Argentina would have a chronic case of it, including a number of economic near-death experiences,” Watson reports. “Inflation was so bad during the 1980s that hungry Argentines rioted and looted stores searching for food.” With inflation rising, the economy again is the big issue. Although it has recovered since its last near-death experience in 2001 to ’02, the economy shows signs of struggling again. Steering the economy away from another collapse will be Cristina Kirchner’s greatest challenge.

Back at the La Matanza rally, Watson is quietly practising her script with her assistant, Buenos Aires-based Canadian journalist Dawn Makinson. The story is slated to air Friday on CBC-TV’s The National. Radio-Canada cameraman Benoit Roussel will shoot her standup at some point during the rally. The rain has stopped and her honey brown hair falls on her shoulders. A patch of silvery white occupies a place right above the centre of her forehead (in the same spot her mother first went grey). Watson is a slim woman with a placid presence. She has small brown eyes and a slightly gap-toothed smile. Since she works for CBC Radio, this TV piece will be an extra, one that Watson can barely fit into her demanding schedule. She appears tired and pasty. She files radio stories sometimes three or four times a day and she will sleep very little tonight. The night after, she won’t sleep at all.

But two days later, on election day, Watson walks around the brightly painted buildings in the Boca neighbourhood of Buenos Aires. Dressed in a fuchsia tank top and lime green floral pants, she looks healthy and rested. But her appearance belies her disappointment. “They spiked my piece,” she says as she looks through a row of paintings at an art shop. The National story that she worked so hard to fit into her schedule was scratched from the show’s Friday line-up. She received a note saying Saturday Report, a broadcast with about one-fifth as many viewers as The National, would use it.

As a high school student in the Peace River district in northern Alberta, Watson wanted to be a writer or reporter. The isolated stretch of land where she grew up was the last area to be homesteaded in Canada. Her parents raised cows, chickens and pigs. The six children lived on the cheese, meat and eggs that the farm yielded. The house had no running water. There was no telephone until Watson was in Grade 7.

In northern Alberta, where the daylight in summer can stretch out to almost 19 hours, Watson read as much as possible. She learned about the world through books and the radio. At night she would fall asleep listening to the radio, which would pick up distant signals from cities as far away as Vancouver, Seattle and Portland. It was her connection to the vast world that she someday wanted to explore.

Watson had a childhood fascination with Africa, but when she was about 16, she discovered Latin America in the pages of a book. She was captivated and struck by the way people in Latin America approached their lives. “I can’t really put my finger on it. They are able to accept the things in life that would throw us a curve if we were in North America, but they accept it in Latin America. They accept the whole idea of death as not being the final end of your life.”

After high school, Watson moved to southern Alberta to study journalism at Lethbridge College. While completing her degree, she worked as a country-music disc jockey at CJOC-FM. After graduating with honours in 1981, she started working full time at the radio station as a news anchor. She then worked as an anchor and reporter at all-news radio stations in Victoria and Vancouver.

In 1987, Watson quit Vancouver’s CKWX and moved to London, England. After knocking on a few doors and sending out tapes and resumés, she soon found herself working as a radio correspondent for NBC. But after about two-and-a-half years, Watson grew tired of working for the network. “I have to say, when I worked in London for the Americans, there were certain things they wanted to cover. And if it didn’t involve the Royal Family or something to do with the U.S. they didn’t really care about the news, and that got to me after a while.”

Before she left London, Watson moved in with a diplomatic family from France that was stationed in London. “I thought a good Canadian journalist should speak French,” she says. Her plan was to live with the family and then study at the Sorbonne for a year. She was intending to move to France directly from England but she got lured back to Canada to be a bureau chief for Standard Broadcast News. But before accepting the job, she told the news agency that she was only available for a year. “I intended to keep a promise to myself to study for a year in France by the time I was 30 years old.” In 1990, she fulfilled her goal of learning French at the Sorbonne. After a year, she moved to Ottawa, where she soon started her career at CBC as a freelancer. Her first full-time CBC radio job was as a parliamentary reporter for The House. In 1994, she won a Canadian Foundation for the Americas fellowship and spent four months in Chile. Before starting the CBC radio bureau in Mexico, she had reported from Pakistan, Iraq, Afghanistan and the Arctic.

For Watson, radio reporting is all about the texture. A typical feature, “Sell the Rain,” aired in 2003 on CBC Radio’s The Current. It looked at the water problems in Cochabamba, Bolivia, but Watson went to the streets to get the story. She opened with a depiction of a Friday night in Cochabamba with different gangs of musicians playing music on the street. Young men watched as clusters of girls passed by. Parents took a stroll down the street with their children. People ate and drank at the outdoor cafés that lined the street, but had a little trouble talking. “They’re being blasted by trumpets and trombones,” Watson said over the blare of horns, “so close the diners could reach over and drop their buns down the shiny tubes.” There is a loud burst of music “at the restaurant on the corner, as two miniature versions of marching bands close in on the patrons. They’re playing different songs, trying to drown each other out. It’s a battle,” she said. The music continued, the sounds layered on top of each other awkwardly. “The last real battle on these streets was played out to much more menacing sounds, the sounds of hissing tear gas canisters, rocks pinging off riot shields and the reloading of rifles.” This story is the perfect example of what Watson does best. She creates a vivid sonic backdrop that resonates.

Watson loves to work on feature-length stories. She is a frequent contributor to Dispatches, a weekly radio program that airs international documentaries from CBC foreign correspondents and freelance journalists. On an overcast October afternoon in Toronto, Dispatches senior producer Alan Guettel is waiting for Watson to file a story on the foreign takeover of the tequila industry in Mexico that will air on a special harvest edition ofDispatches. Sitting upright in his chair, Guettel opens his email and scans it quickly for a message from Watson. Nothing. He leans back resignedly, scratching his head, knowing that her piece will be worth the wait. And it is. “It was a whole side of the agribusiness that we hadn’t heard about,” he later says. Watson also made the most of her trip to Tequila Valley by spinning a few radio and online pieces on the plant. “She ended up with a whole series on something we hadn’t even talked about,” says Guettel, adding Watson always produces high-quality work that is rich and unique not only because of her talent for bringing people to life, but because she understands how to look at a news story. “Some of the biggest stories are about the regular things that people do and think. People don’t exist to be analyzed. They don’t exist to have their pulse taken.”

Watson lives in Condesa, a fashionable part of Mexico City filled with coffee shops and restaurants. Her office is in her beautiful apartment building designed in the style of one of Mexico’s most famous architects, Luis Barragán. The building is distinctively Mexican: “spartan, rustic and modern all at once,” says Watson. While she loves her job, it is physically and mentally exhausting. “Every day you are disappointed in what little you’re able to do, and it’s very hard to feel satisfied because of that.” She works hard, but despite all the hours she puts in, she can’t be everywhere. “There is still so much you don’t get on the air, because every time you’re not there when Chávez makes a move, you think, okay, how many days, weeks or months can I afford to be there? How much time can I afford to spend there when I go? How long does it take? How many letters before they let me into Cuba? A lot of effort goes into that.”

A lot of effort goes into reporting about the region for a Canadian audience. Radio-Canada’s Latin American reporter Jean-Michel Leprince is constantly fighting for more airtime for his Latin American pieces. “You can’t ask for foreign stories the same length because in Ottawa and Quebec people don’t have the context. I have to give them context,” he says, sounding frustrated. “It is a fight against my own colleagues.”

Leprince, who now covers Latin America from Montreal, has struggled with the foreign desk since his days as a correspondent in Mexico. His coverage of the 2007 Guatemalan election was only partially shown by the network. With polls closing late on a Sunday, Leprince had to file a story without the election results. He sent a story on Monday, and it was pulled. “There was not even a small text about the results of an election we have covered very much the last few days, so it’s this kind of nonsense. And of course, the others don’t have the story at all, and since you don’t see it elsewhere, well, it must not be important.” The same thing has happened to Leprince several times. “I am not the only one to complain, and there are apologies. It’s too late.”

Unlike Leprince, Watson does not struggle with CBC Radio’s foreign desk. It is interested in her stories, but Watson’s stories don’t appear that often on the flagship show World Report and the suppertime show theWorld at Six because of the extensive preparation time. Her bureau is seldom driven by breaking news, and she is usually on the road chasing stories. When she goes to Bolivia, for example, she pitches stories about apparent trends in the country. “When people haven’t been paying attention to Bolivia, you say who won the election and they’ll say, ‘So what?’ I think you have to get them engaged to the point where they will see the bigger context,” she says. “My goal to a certain degree is to get some stuff on the air, which beats what we were getting on the air, which was nothing.”

Another Canadian journalist writing stories about the region is ex-Globe Latin America bureau chief Isabel Vincent. She left Rio de Janeiro in 1995 when the Globe bureau closed. Now based in New York, last year she was back in Brazil writing a book about Brazilian-born philanthropist Lily Safra. Aside from working on her book, Vincent also freelanced for American and Canadian publications. She worked on a retainer basis withMaclean’s magazine, where her pieces appeared at least twice a month for more than two years. Vincent finds that her American clients, including Time and New York Times Magazine, are much more interested in her stories than the Canadians. “Canadians are kind of like, ‘Okay I guess, if we have to do it, we will do it.’ I don’t know. It’s just this parochial thing. New York is also very parochial. I mean, they don’t care what happens outside New York. But the magazines, I think because they have more money, have more readers too. They will more readily take a piece than the Canadians will,” she says. “I don’t know what goes on in editors’ heads, but I just know it’s easier dealing with New York than Toronto.”

In the week leading up to Kirchner’s victory at the polls, the Globe ran one story on the Argentine elections. No Globe reporter went to Argentina. Foreign editor Stephen Northfield says, “It’s an interesting story, but it’s the same thing. Am I going to spend 10,000 bucks to go to Argentina? Why?” The fact that her win was pre-ordained made the story “less interesting.” He also thought the story wouldn’t be of enough relevance toGlobe readers to warrant the expense. “It isn’t going to change the world,” Northfield says. “It’s not going to make the dollar go up or down or change oil prices. It’s not going to cause instability in the Middle East.”

Despite the fact that he doesn’t find the region as geo-politically significant as others, he hopes to open a bureau in Latin America someday. Northfield was recently given resources to open a new bureau and plans to open one in India, but he maintains Latin America is next. Opening a bureau in India was more pressing, he says, and the news from the Latin America region “tends to be internal and contained in a way that doesn’t reverberate in a significant way outside of Latin America.”

Canadian media are always finding a reason to avoid giving ink to the region, says Annette Hester, a Calgary-based economist and a foreign affairs and trade strategist. “The media, as far as I am concerned, are being incredibly lazy and condescending to the Canadian reader,” she says. “In spite of all this talk about the Middle East and 9/11, and the dependency on oil security and energy markets, the U.S. is dependent on over 50 per cent of its energy needs on the Americas, so it is a very short-sighted view.” At the moment, Venezuela is the world’s fifth-largest oil exporter, and Brazil is the world leader in alternative fuels. With the growing emphasis on alternative energy, Hester says, it is difficult to understand why Canadian publications think the region doesn’t resonate in the world.

Canadian mining companies also have major interests in Latin America and their operations are usually mired in conflict. “We are huge players in international mining. Huge players in investment all across the region,” says Maxwell Cameron, a professor of political science at the University of British Columbia who specializes in Latin American politics. “We’ve got mining companies in Guatemala that are dispossessing people off their land so that they can mine land with the local armed forces, and you can see it on YouTube. This stuff is absolutely at your fingertips if anybody wants to follow it, and again there is no coverage,” he says. “Our image in the world is connected to this. I think Canadians, if you ask them, are not remotely aware of our mining in the region. I think this is something people would care about.”

Haiti is another country neglected by the press. It is the leading beneficiary of Canada’s development assistance in the Americas; over the next few years Canada will contribute $520 million in foreign aid to Haiti. “I would say we are woefully, woefully, woefully short on coverage of Haiti,” says Carlo Dade, the executive director of the Canadian Foundation for the Americas. The Canadian coverage is “exceedingly negative,” Dade says. “Haiti as a basket case, Haiti as a long and continuing history of nothing but failure etc., etc., etc.—those are the tones of the stories that have been coming out. Elsewhere we have seen bits and pieces of positive coverage.” According to Dade, Haiti has witnessed some success, but only American newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post and The Miami Herald have reported on the positive “glimmers” from Haiti. The Canadian interest in the country is significant. “We spend so much money in Haiti, our number two foreign aid recipient after Afghanistan. Considering the amount of government ink, the amount of academic ink that lists Haiti as priority for us, you would think there would be a concomitant coverage in the press.”

As well, Latin American immigration to Canada has grown steadily since 1970. Because of Canada’s open-door immigration policy, 68,000 Latin Americans arrived in Canada between 1969 and 1973. Then, a wave of refugees escaping from brutal regimes in Chile, El Salvador and Guatemala arrived. At the moment, the Latin American community is also one of the fastest growing cultural groups in Canada; the number of people reporting Latin American heritage rose by 32 per cent between 1996 and 2001, while the overall Canadian population grew by only four per cent in the same period.

While many Latin Americans leave their homeland because of poverty, human rights issues and crime, the region is one of the world’s most ecologically prosperous. Latin America has the world’s largest reserves of arable land and is full of many important commodities such as oils, metals and foodstuffs. Brazil contains more fresh water than any other country in the world. Chile is among the world’s top fruit producers and exporters. In 2006, the region had an estimated eight per cent of the world’s proven oil reserves, and accounted for almost a quarter of U.S. oil imports.

Latin America’s natural jewels may be a factor in the Conservative government’s shift in Canada’s foreign policy. The story about that renewed interest has been almost non-existent in the Canadian media. Stephen Harper announced in July 2007 that Latin America will be one of his government’s priorities. Details have been scant. Why the new direction? Dade sees it as a major story. But it isn’t being articulated very well by the government, nor is it being covered by the Canadian media. He says, “Even if the government has not been very skilful or robust in getting its message out, then the role of the press is to say, ‘Hey, this is important’ and they are doing a poor job of getting it out, so that’s another story that has been missed.”

Watson thrives on human stories that engage and resonate with listeners. The focus on everyday human struggles and the lack of hardcore investigative journalism is what Annette Hester feels is problematic about her reporting. “Her soft humanitarian approach may be quite in line with the CBC and quite in line with very interesting reporting, but it doesn’t make her reporting from the region essential for the CBC,” she says. “I would hope if she is the only reporter she could be pushing the limit to show how this is important to Canada and why it is important, with hardcore stories that are relevant. I don’t see those stories.”

While she tries to do some Canadian stories, Watson admits, “I could do more stories of what Hester is talking about if we had a working and functioning bureau. If we had someone to make the calls, if you had somebody to sit in the background and do three or four days of research the way the fifth estate has, or some of the other shows, but those are the kind of things I just cannot invest enough time in.” Watson maintains that without a staffed bureau her journalism is vulnerable to criticism. “We could do a much better job, but so could everybody in every newspaper and television and radio station in Canada that is deciding that this region is not important enough to send anybody down to it.”

At 540 hectares, the group of tin sheds known as the Mercado Central de Buenos Aires in La Matanza is the biggest and most important indoor market in Argentina. In a few days, Kirchner will have her closing rally on the market’s grounds. But today Watson and Makinson are looking for potatoes. Last year’s bad harvest has led to a scarcity in potatoes not only in Argentina but also in the two countries (Brazil and Holland) that usually export to Argentina. Prince Edward Island potatoes are being shipped down to Argentina to keep up with demand. Because P.E.I. potatoes have not been seen on Argentine soil for 25 years, this is a significant import. In the midst of hundreds and hundreds of produce stands they quickly spot a single stand selling the burlapped potatoes. The 25-kilogram bags are stacked about three metres high, and “Product of Canada” is printed near the bottom of the bag in faded blue ink. Watson, takes her long black microphone from her leather tote bag. She holds it in front of the potato vendors and starts working on a story that no other journalist here will write.

Fred Kuntz specializes in landscapes. He’s always been serious about painting—to the point of mounting a two-week show in 1992 at Gallery 360 called “A Winter’s Walk.” The exhibit showcased a series of 24 Toronto streetscapes; 16 sold. The rest, along with some related lithographs, still sit in the basement of his Port Credit, Ontario home.

When it comes to putting paint to canvas, Kuntz prefers acrylic to oil. “It’s like me—abrupt,” he says. “Oil, you smoosh it around and a day later it might dry, and it can get very mucky along the way if you smoosh too much. Acrylic, you put it on and it dries. If you don’t like it, paint over it.”

The way Kuntz paints reflects his approach to life in general. “I’d rather decide quicker than mull over something for ages,” he says. “I like action—I get frustrated when things are noodled for months on end and don’t end in resolution.”

John Quinlan scowls as each section editor presents his or her top stories for tomorrow’s paper. Dumbledore is gay, California’s on fire and City Hall is hiking taxes. Quinlan, the Toronto Star’s assistant managing editor for nights, slouches in silence at the head of the crowded table, his arms crossed. Sitting to his right, beside managing editor Joe Hall, is editor-in-chief Fred Kuntz. He’s just as quiet. His chin, covered by a well-groomed goatee, rests on one hand as he flips through the lineup and makes notes on a legal pad. The editors finish and the crowded room is quiet. The only sound is Quinlan’s heavy breathing.

It’s 3:30 p.m. on October 22, 2007, and the next edition of the Star is taking shape. Quinlan finally says, “There’s only one story.” That’s the impending City Hall vote, on a proposal to fix its budget shortfall by adding a municipal vehicle tax and a surcharge on the sale of residential homes. Quinlan explains, in more words than he’s said in the entire meeting, how the front page will be split into three sections: Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. Editors scribble furiously. There will be pictures, graphs and charts to illustrate the changes, and along the bottom of the page, a column by Royson James to explain it all.

“Is there any chance the vote won’t be today?” Kuntz interrupts. They briefly discuss some alternatives for page one, then Quinlan continues, verbally laying out pages two through 16. The meeting concludes and the editors scurry to the newsroom.

In his corner office, down the hall from the meeting room, Kuntz, a short but solid man, says he wanted to pull his editors back a little, in case the vote gets delayed. He doesn’t want to be left without a front page, but he trusts his editors enough to stay away from the process until about 6:30 p.m. He hangs on the sidelines and lets journalism happen, sometimes checking only the front page before heading home. “I go off on vacation,” he adds, “and the paper still comes together.”

Although the Star’s newest editor-in-chief appears sanguine and delegates with confidence, it’s not his primary strength. Where Kuntz goes, change follows. In 2000, he left the Star and joined The Globe and Mail. Once there, amidst staff grumbling and major restructuring, he jammed through production changes. Two years later, he flipped The Record in Kitchener-Waterloo from an afternoon to a morning paper, something the previous publisher had talked about doing for years. Once back at the Star, he blasted through the paper’s latest redesign in record time and quickly moved editors around like chessboard pieces.

Kuntz is not afraid to take charge, and in this recent phase of his career as newspaper executive, he has excelled at leading change. But in the conservative Star workplace—steeped in history and tradition, and institutionally resistant to change—Kuntz’s brash tactics could earn him more enemies than allies and cripple his ability to improve Canada’s largest daily.

With 19 years of key positions at the Star behind him, including business editor, city editor and deputy managing editor, Kuntz says he’d be amazed to find a staff member he hasn’t tangled with. He started his professional career at the paper in 1979, while still a student at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute (now Ryerson University). John Miller, then editor of the Sunday Star, was looking for a part-time replacement copy editor and was impressed by Kuntz’s confidence, as well as the recommendation he’d received from a professor. The men also shared an interest in art, and hit it off. Miller hired him immediately.

Journalism wasn’t Kuntz’s first calling, but a keen interest. He was editor-in-chief of his high school yearbook and worked on the school newsletter. It was his father, a commercial artist and printer, who was the strongest influence. Kuntz grew up around art and started painting at age six or seven. “I could barely hold up the paintbrush,” he says. “My father, being a printer, would bring paper home and we’d all just draw. Everybody in my family can draw.” He initially studied architecture at the University of Toronto. It was a mistake, but one quickly corrected. In the winter of 1977 (a year and a half into the five-year program), his roommate, frustrated with architecture school, announced he was going to check out Ryerson’s journalism program. Kuntz, also disturbed by the turmoil—“It was more like a school of philosophy; we couldn’t design a fire escape to save our lives”—decided to go with him. Kuntz visited The Ryersonian, a student newspaper, and recognized right away what the editors and layout people were doing. He thought, “This is where I belong.”

While completing the three-year journalism program, he became editor-in-chief of the Ryersonian, worked nights and weekends at both the Star and the Toronto Sun, and read news on the Ryerson-based community radio station, CKLN. In 1981, after a year-long stint as copy editor for the Brandon Sun in Manitoba, Kuntz found himself back at the Star, this time copy editing on the national desk. While there, he was accepted into York University’s Osgoode Hall Law School and got ready to change direction again. Soon after his good news arrived, the paper promoted him to assistant national editor.

“Well,” Kuntz decided, “maybe this Star thing is going to work out.”

Richard Addis from the Globe was on the line. “How would you like to come and work for ‘Canada’s National Newspaper?’” he asked.

Kuntz, Saturday editor at the Star, replied, “No thanks, I’m pretty happy here.”

Addis was miffed, but pressed on. “Don’t you think you should at least go to dinner with me to discuss it?”

“Well, maybe.”

Kuntz consulted with colleagues. They all agreed he should go for a bite with Addis, if only to find out what the Globe was up to. When he sat down and listened to Addis’s offer—a 50 per cent increase in pay, the title of associate editor and, most importantly, an opportunity to overhaul the paper’s production process—he was suddenly a former Star company man.

Addis’s version is a little more succinct: “I phoned him up, took him for a drink and then offered him lots of money.”

Kuntz’s new job wasn’t easy. It was February 2000: the National Post had been publishing for a year and a half, and Toronto was in the midst of an old-fashioned newspaper war. Globe publisher Philip Crawley needed fresh troops and installed Addis as his new editor-in-chief. Kuntz was one of Addis’s first big appointments. As associate editor, he was fourth in command (after executive news editor Edward Greenspon left for Ottawa six months later, Kuntz became third) under Addis and his deputy, Chrystia Freeland.

Globe designer David Pratt, who reported to Kuntz directly, describes him as “very demanding” and “someone you can’t ignore in the newsroom.” According to Pratt, “Fred’s game plan was to knock us all into shape by blasting his way through any resistance that emerged.” He says it was Addis who set Kuntz on the path “by telling him we all needed a rocket up our backsides.” But the ploy didn’t work that well, Pratt thinks, because Addis himself modified the tough-guy act over time.

Kuntz insists he wasn’t merely a puppet. “I went for the job because I liked the description of it,” he says, “but I wasn’t an empty vessel, some limp person that would do Addis’s bidding.” Kuntz says he was hired to introduce changes and implement a redesign. But he also wanted to build a better production team, create a new workspace and raise the level of copy editing. “When I arrived,” Kuntz says of a long-planned Globeredesign, “they were still in a fussing-about stage. They hadn’t set an implementation date.” He says certain employees—designers mostly—were frustrated by the endless fiddling with details.

“Addis asked me to make the rubber hit the road,” Kuntz says. “That’s what I do. I’m a man of action. I make decisions. I’m able to get something done.”

Not everyone was pleased with the new, hard-charging associate editor. Frank magazine latched onto Kuntz once he moved to the Globe, which has a newsroom notorious for feeding gossip to the scandal sheet. Frank reported that the Star received complaints from women about Kuntz’s “inelegant behaviour,” even though the magazine called them “absurd allegations.” It also referred to Kuntz as one of Addis’s “gorillas.” Kuntz’s response: “I’m offended by broad categorization,” he says. “Frank is trash—they print horrible things about people I respect.” Frank’s March 22, 2000 edition announces “legendary Toronto Star backstabber Fred Kuntz was handpicked to be associate editor” and chronicles Kuntz’s alleged mishaps in the newsroom—“Since jumping over from the Toronto Star last year, the Globe and Minion associate editor and goombah has managed to alienate the entire newsroom…”

Kuntz points out that he wasn’t the only Globe change agent Frank attacked that year. Addis and Freeland—both imported from the Financial Times in the United Kingdom—were also targeted. “There were people at the Globe—it may come down to one or two individuals—who had an agenda, were malicious and spent the whole time we were there running us down,” he says. “People talk about the politics at the Star, but I found the politics at the Globe to be a lot darker because of the way it would play out in public like that.”

According to Pratt, though, Kuntz knew coming in that it wouldn’t be all milk and cookies. “I think he expected he wouldn’t be walking into a quiet, happy, peaceful newsroom,” Pratt says. “There was change that had already been happening and there was more change that was going to happen, and he was being brought in to make it happen.”

Kuntz left the Globe after just 17 months. Jagoda Pike, then publisher of another Torstar-owned paper, The Hamilton Spectator, called Kuntz back to the Star family. In 1999, the company had bought Kitchener-Waterloo’s The Record, the Guelph Mercury, the Cambridge Reporter and the Spectator from Quebecor Inc. Pike wanted Kuntz to be group publisher of the newly formed Grand River Valley Newspapers (GRVN). Her choice wasn’t all that popular. “Lots of people said, ‘Have you lost your mind? He has no business experience.’ I said, ‘I’m pretty sure he can learn, and pretty fast.’ As it turned out,” Pike says, “I was right.”

Immediately after learning about the position, Kuntz “zoomed” to Kitchener-Waterloo to investigate. He spent the night in a hotel and the next day hired a real estate agent to show him around the area (Kuntz eventually bought a house in the Deer Ridge district). “I went into the news-paper office and asked for copies of theRecord for every day for the past week, and they said they could only sell them to me. That was a good sign,” Kuntz says. “I was eager.”

As publisher of the GRVN group (now part of Metroland Media Group), Kuntz began making changes. The Record had been without a publisher since March 2001, when Kuntz’s predecessor Wayne MacDonald retired after 10 years. It wasn’t in good shape—like most newspapers, its readership was in decline. But Kuntz had been business editor at the Star and excelled in business courses in high school and university. “I’ve always felt I had a head for numbers,” he says. “And strategy is something that for me is even a source of amusement.”

In June 2002, the afternoon newspaper began landing on doorsteps in the morning. “I started in 1991 and they were talking about ‘going mornings’ then,” says reporter Liz Monteiro. “The idea had been around for 10 years and no one was doing anything about it. Fred got here, and he made us go mornings. And it worked.”

Kuntz moved the newsroom from an old suburban building with asbestos-ridden walls and 30-year-old carpets to a bright new office space in downtown Kitchener. He also launched two bimonthly magazines,Grand and Rex, in 2005 and 2006 respectively. Grand is a lifestyle magazine with a circulation of around 17,000, while Rex focuses on business and goes to 15,000 companies in the region.

As publisher, Kuntz moved fast—perhaps too fast. According to Kevin Crowley, former business editor of theRecord and editor of Rex, Kuntz was good for the Record but difficult to work with. “He can be demanding and abrupt in the way he deals with people,” says Crowley, now Wilfred Laurier University’s associate director of news and editorial services. “He liked to keep people on edge and as a result I don’t think he fostered the most enjoyable environment.”

Pike called Kuntz again one afternoon in October 2006. The executive vice-president of regional daily newspapers for Torstar Corp., and Kuntz’s boss, said: “I want to talk to you.”

“What about?”

“Can’t right now,” she said, between meetings and with no time to explain. “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

Two days later the pair met at a pub in Flamborough, halfway between Toronto and Kitchener-Waterloo. Over red wine, Pike confided that she’d been promoted to publisher of the Star. She asked Kuntz if he’d like to return to the Star, this time as editor-in-chief. Pike says it was pretty much a done deal. “When I was appointed he was at the top of my list,” she says. “And it was a very short list.”

Despite their respective talents, Pike and Kuntz were tested immediately. They’d come to power at a particularly rough time in the Star’s history. On October 16, 2006, the same day Pike and Kuntz were appointed publisher and editor-in-chief, then-publisher Michael Goldbloom announced he was stepping down, along with his editor-in-chief, Giles Gherson. Although they resigned, a National Post headline that day read: “Turmoil at the top for struggling Toronto Star. Editor, publisher fired.” Goldbloom, now vice-principal of public affairs at McGill University, had become deputy publisher in 2003. He hired Gherson, who was then editor of the Globe’s Report on Business section and former editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal. Hall, the 32-year Star veteran, witnessed the changing of the guard. He says the newsroom split into two camps upon Gherson’s arrival. “Half of them thought, ‘Great, an outsider, a fresh perspective, someone who will clear out the cobwebs.’ Others said, ‘He doesn’t understand us—doesn’t know us.’”

“Chased out” is how John Miller, former deputy managing editor at the Star, describes Gherson’s quick exit. Now a deputy minister and associate secretary of the cabinet for the Ontario government, Gherson was an outsider and therefore automatically viewed with suspicion by Star lifers. To compound matters, he hired former associates to be his department editors. “Everybody hated his cronies and wouldn’t work with them,” says Miller. “You know that was a mistake—Gherson’s job was to make allies in the newsroom.” So, after a brief experiment with outside change agents, insiders returned to the top. “It was like the cavalry rode to the rescue,” Miller says. “Star culture won out again.”

According to a former employee, present during the changeover, some staff longed for change and supported the decision to bring Kuntz back to their beloved Star and start swinging. “I don’t want to give you the image of him walking in with an axe, but he did come in, we thought, with a commitment to getting the machine running more smoothly again.”

Hall, a tall man with a rosy complexion and a hint of a British accent, is hushed when asked about the reaction to Kuntz’s arrival. After a few seconds, the Star’s current managing editor takes a deep breath and laughs. “Fred obviously had a legacy of people who liked him, knew him, remembered him well—and others who said, ‘Oh God, I remember we had a huge row a few years ago,’” he says. “In fact, on his first day I was talking to him about reaction around the place and I mentioned this. I said, ‘You know, a few people have come to me and said, ‘Oh God, I’m in trouble. I remember 15 years ago telling Fred to fuck off. Will he remember?’

“Fred said, ‘I’d be amazed if there’s anybody here I haven’t told to fuck off at one time or another.’”

Wherever he’s been—Star, Globe, Record—Kuntz has swung for the head on his way to the top. Becoming editor-in-chief of Canada’s biggest newspaper makes for a feel-good ending, yet accusations about his tough management style linger. Kuntz addresses them calmly: “I’ve heard bull in a China shop, I’ve heard bulldozer, I’ve heard worse.” The phrase he’d prefer: “flawed human being.”

At length, Kuntz will say this: “I constantly live in a state of guilt and regret—mistakes I’ve made, feelings I’ve bruised—because I can be quite direct. I’ve tried over the years to soften the edges, but having a good purpose in life doesn’t make any of us a perfect human being—it just means that we at least have a few things that we can be proud of.”

Kuntz strides through the fifth-floor newsroom at 1 Yonge Street, near the Lake Ontario waterfront. He takes long, quick steps, his feet hammering against the carpeted floor. I struggle to keep up as he weaves through the maze of desks, most of them still empty this early in the morning. It’s 9:10 a.m. on October 22 and we’re on our way to the StarNext training room, a small square office at the back of the newsroom. This week’s students, Randy Starkman, Curtis Rush and Patrick Cain, sit around a table along with their peer-to-peer trainer, Marissa Nelson, now senior editor of digital news.

StarNext is a voluntary training program Kuntz introduced in July 2007. Participants get one week off from their regular jobs to immerse themselves in multimedia techniques. Its goal isn’t to turn newspaper journalists into broadcasters, but to teach skills that can be used to improve the Star’s website. Anyone who is interested can apply, but applicants must pitch an idea for a multimedia project. During the week, participants learn things such as search engine optimization, video editing and storyboarding. “It’s like we’re throwing them in the deep end,” says Nelson, a veteran of Metroland’s Internet training program, Web U. “They’re used to being fantastic at what they do, and we’re asking them to do something they don’t know how to do yet. There’s a lot of nerves.”

By the end of March, 74 people had completed the training program, including Kuntz, who was part of the second group. According to Nelson, “Everybody giggled, like ‘Fred’s in there.’ And that was the point—for everybody to see he was walking the walk.”

On November 18, 2006, Kuntz’s announcement, “Hold these Star editors to account,” appeared in the paper. After just over a month as editor-in-chief, Kuntz boasted about change—a major management restructure of the newsroom, the shuffling of 12 current managers and the return of Quinlan from the Globe.

Kuntz also folded the GTA section into the A section, with a renewed focus on local news and politics. He made several key editorial changes, including moving feature writers into the city department and making investigations “clearly a part of city.” He also split the foreign/national editor positions in two. Many of the moves presaged his redesign. “Some decisions had been stalled for a while,” he says, thinking about how his two-decade-long history at the Star helped him to introduce changes quickly. “I had an opportunity to break the logjam and execute changes that likely made people happier.”

Not long after scooping up Quinlan, Kuntz found himself losing staff to the Globe. In fact, so many staff members were leaving that the Star was fast becoming the Globe’s farm team. Kuntz admits his paper lost nine journalists to its Front Street rival, but notes that the other 21 of the Globe’s 30 new hires came from other places. “You don’t fight for every person who leaves. Sometimes people come and say, ‘I’m going to theGlobe,’ and you say, ‘Good luck.’ Other people you fight to try and keep. There were some people they wanted to hire in their hiring binge who they didn’t because we kept them.” Peter Scowen, former Ideas editor at the Sunday Star, left the paper in December 2006. Now the Globe’s deputy features editor, Scowen says he left because “it was just a very good opportunity.” At least one other former Star employee echoed this claim. Several others declined interview requests.

Kuntz executed his major redesign in six months flat. The new look hit the streets in May 2007. “It’s stunning—nobody around here has ever seen a complete redesign in six months,” says Hall. “And it’s simply because of Fred. He’s just so organized and disciplined.” With the experience of implementing a redesign at the Globeand moving the Record acting as his tailwind, Kuntz was able to shepherd the process at an accelerated clip. “I drink a lot of Red Bull and encourage other people to,” he deadpans. More seriously, the process was streamlined because he and lead designer Charlie Kopun, now assistant managing editor of design, shared many of the same opinions, and perhaps crucially, didn’t burden themselves with an outside consultant.

True to Kuntz’s initial steps, Toronto news moved to the front and he eliminated the GTA section. “I don’t know why nobody did it before,” says Miller, “it’s just so natural.” Opinion and world news are now part of the World and Comment section, which follows the local news. The paper was also resized to resemble a Berliner, embracing the industry-wide trend. Most controversial were cuts to length. Columnists had just 600 words, though they were then invited to write longer pieces on off days under the Analysis header. Kuntz’s reasoning: most readers stop reading after the 600 word mark.

To back up his decree, Kuntz relied on the recent Poynter Institute EyeTrack07 study, which said, “Alternative story forms also drew a higher amount of visual attention, compared to regular text in print.” The research showed that these so-called alternative forms—bulleted information, numbers in large type to express headline-like information and sidebars designed to look like pull quotes—actually improved reader comprehension.

So now, inevitably, there’s an increased emphasis on alternative story forms or “layers,” such as graphs and sidebars. Investigative editor Kevin Donovan says this new trend isn’t such a big deal. He finds it amusing that there have been seminars about them. “They talk about layers,” he says. “Well, I call a layer a sidebar and I always have.” Donovan’s not laughing about the cuts, though, saying, “We’re all competing for a smaller piece of real estate.”

Just after 5 p.m. on a blustery January evening, I’m sitting at a large table in Kuntz’s office, surrounded by four empty, high-backed chairs. I’ve asked him if he’s worried the paper will win fewer awards because of the decreased story lengths. No way, he says, pointing to today’s paper folded on the tabletop between us. “See, look at our page one today.” The main headline blares “$8,186,920,000” in big, bold type. It stretches across a graphic of City Hall, and with a subhead that reads, “That’s what the city proposes to spend in its ‘modest’ 2008 budget.” Underneath, there’s a brightly coloured pie graph, showing where all this money comes from. Under that are some quotes from Mayor David Miller discussing the recent property tax hike. Beside these, a small box breaks down what Torontonians will pay, depending on their income. To its right, there’s a list, along with graphics (a stingray here, a TTC bus there) outlining where the money goes. This is just the main story. To the right of the alternative news clutter are headlines and opening paragraphs for two other unrelated stories. “This is very engaging,” says Kuntz. “Where’s the 30-inch read? Not on the front page.”

In spite of Kuntz’s confidence, changes to length make some writers uneasy. Long-time Star reporter Michelle Shephard applauds the redesign for its recognition that 300 words sometimes is all a writer really needs to tell the story. But she’s wary of the sudden dearth of longer pieces. “What I’m worried about, and I don’t think I’m alone, is if we lose sight of what we do best,” she says. “Newspapers provide context—why something has happened and what it means—not just tell you what’s happening. You can get that in 15-second television hits. Sometimes you have to use words, and sometimes it takes lots of them.”

Joe Fiorito, who has 15 years experience as a newspaper columnist, admits the change was unnerving. “I’m also a pro and I know how to adapt—there’s very little I’ve written that wouldn’t be better shorter. My worry was it was going to lose larger stories, or stories that required nuance.” Fiorito says if a subject merits the extra space he’ll “bust it up and run it over two or three days.” In terms of pitching those longer Analysis pieces: “As a columnist I’m unused to fighting for longer space—I’m not interested in that.”

Another regular, Jim Coyle, had a similar reaction. He says the hard part is covering “complexity or competing versions of events” such as trials, typically one of his favourite areas. While he was covering a trial recently, the challenge of the new word limit became clear to him. “Even as I was listening to the testimony and filling three notebooks,” he says, “my head was already turning: ‘How are you going to tell this tale in 600 words?’”

The old pros might have to get used to it. The even older pro, long-time columnist Richard Gwyn, acknowledges that this is a trying time for newspapers, saying, “Everybody is struggling to find a niche.” But, he argues, the paper’s new orientation is now more Toronto-centric and “less intellectually ambitious than it used to be.”

The overall reaction has been positive, says Kuntz. “I’m not going to bullshit you, but it’s true to say that the majority of the newsroom liked the redesign.”

Word count isn’t the only area where Kuntz has made cuts. One of the paper’s recent initiatives, the PDF format StarP.M.—touted upon arrival as “North America’s first free downloadable afternoon newspaper”—ended October 17, 2007, just over one year after its launch. Approximately 4,000 readers downloaded it on a regular basis—not a sufficient number to justify dedicating three staffers to the project.

Kuntz has grown enough of a publisher’s brain to realize that some ideas just don’t make good business sense, and he isn’t afraid to pull the plug. But one crucial aspect of the Star—its culture—is something he hasn’t touched. “You have a sense that you’re practicing journalism at the frontlines,” Miller says of the paper he worked for in the 1980s. “You have this feeling there’s no story in the world you can’t go out and get. And of course you’re wrong because you’re not that good, and the paper isn’t that good. But there’s this atmosphere that we’re the best, right?”

Another former Star employee describes the cognitive dissonance of the paper’s newsroom culture. “It’s close-knit and friendly and people want you to succeed, but it’s really cutthroat. It has such a fabulous past and a great slate of writers, but I’m not sure there’s a realization today that maybe that won’t sustain them forever.”

Having been at the Star for so long himself, Kuntz is part of this culture. According to Donovan, “You may have heard of the Star family. It’s a crazy sort of thing and you only really get it if you’ve grown up at the Star. Fred is of that mould.”

Another unusual aspect of Star culture is the use of the much-hyped Atkinson Principles—a set of values used to guide the paper’s editorial content and purpose—that have supposedly guided the conscience of Starbrass for years. The company admits on its website that the six principles weren’t formally written down until recently, yet they’re now printed in the employee handbook and part of routine intern training. Among the luxuriously open-ended principles are “a strong, united and independent Canada” and “the rights of working people.” Star employees, both current and former, have a variety of takes on their actual importance. “The Atkinson Principles, I’m not afraid to say, are a joke,” says former employee Scowen. “They were used by upper management and the family trust to control the paper. Any time they weren’t happy with management they would trot them out as a weapon against the person they wanted removed.” Scowen cites Gherson and Goldbloom as two victims of this tactic.

“Most people I dealt with felt uncomfortable about them,” Scowen continues. “They felt they were simplistic and that the paper’s fidelity to them was superficial.”

While the Atkinson Principles support “the rights of working people,” the Star has an infamous union of its own. When its contract expired in December 2007, the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild had the opportunity to extend it for a year. The union declined because, according to editorial union steward Dan Smith, “All the year would have done was to allow the company to actually figure out what its evil plan was going to be and be far more ready to take on the union.” A strike date was set for January 19, but after an extra half-day of bargaining, the union settled.

From an editorial point of view, the most alarming change was job reclassification. A “journalist” now includes anyone who “generates content,” and will be expected to write stories, produce videos, take photos and even produce graphics for the web. The new contract outlines that this new classification will take effect in four years, although changes can’t be made for two years. After that, employees have the right to stay in their current jobs but they cannot refuse training.

Smith, the Star’s book editor when he’s not butting heads with management, says the worry is that everyone will be trained to be “crappy at everything… There’s been no apparent guidance or thought,” he says, “about how we actually retool the newsroom to be smart about how we do this.”

Kuntz doesn’t see it that way. “People try to raise a scare scenario of where, in one day, one person goes out and shoots a video, writes a story, comes back, edits it and then prints the paper and delivers it to the home.” He says the point of reclassification is for management to have the “freedom” to assign all journalists to any task.

“You don’t need to do everything you have a right to do,” he says, “but at least we have the flexibility in our contract to respond to be ready for anything.”

And that’s where Kuntz stands now—ready for anything. Both he and Pike know newspapers must change and that goes for the Star’s newspaper culture, too. Kuntz hasn’t put his bulldozer away just yet.

It’s two days after Christmas and I’m trudging through wet snow down a pleasantly quiet, tree-lined street in Port Credit. I ring the doorbell to Kuntz’s house and two yellow labs, River and Birch, jump and bark at the door. Kuntz invites me inside, clad, as usual, in a suit jacket and slacks. I’m here for what turns out to be a treasure hunt, or, as Kuntz calls it, an “art tour.”

“Can I come?” asks Elizabeth Kuntz, hearing mention of said tour.

“Sure,” Kuntz answers. “It’ll cost you 25 cents.”

Elizabeth Kuntz, a tiny woman with short blond hair that curls around her ears, is Kuntz’s spouse. They’re not officially married, but plan to be. When they declare “I do,” it will be Kuntz’s third and Elizabeth’s second marriage. She picked out the house, not Kuntz. “I’m a condo boy,” he says, but that wouldn’t have accommodated Elizabeth’s 11-year-old son Robbie and her 19-year-old daughter Jillian. They moved in shortly after Kuntz took over as editor-in-chief.

The first tour stop is a newly renovated living room just off the kitchen. A vibrant sunset is paired with a more muted scene, a misty lake and the forest behind it. Next, we squeeze into Elizabeth’s office, where another painting is her computer desktop’s background. The original hangs at the cottage, like many of Kuntz’s paintings. That’s where he puts the finishing touches on most of his paintings. The cottage, located at Port Elgin on Lake Huron, happens to be not only one of his favourite subjects—it’s a big part of who he is. “If we’re at the cottage and people want to play poker,” he tells me, “I’ll deal.”

Downstairs, across from the unfinished bar in another sitting area, streetscapes left over from Kuntz’s 1992 show at Gallery 360 line the walls. “Oh, there’s another one!” Elizabeth pipes up as we pass a downstairs bathroom.

On the way upstairs, we pause to admire a self-portrait Kuntz painted from a photograph of himself as a child. His younger self smiles as he gazes through pop-bottle glasses at the budgie (his first pet) perched on his shoulder. After looking at a few things in his bookshelf-lined office—his honorary doctorate from the Wilfred Laurier University, a tiny scene his father painted while attending the University of Amsterdam—the tour is over. “I don’t know what else to show you,” Kuntz says. “That’s my art.”

Neil Macdonald and Patrick Brown, two of CBC’s most distinguished foreign correspondents, are acting up:

“This is ridiculous!”

“It’s all psychobabble!”

The pair has briefly returned to Canada to attend the annual CBC correspondents’ conference. The year is 2002 and they, along with at least 50 English-and French-speaking CBC reporters and their producers, are sitting in a function room at Ottawa’s Fairmont Château Laurier Hotel watching a series of PowerPoint slides. The presenter is Anthony Feinstein, director of the neuropsychiatry program at Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in Toronto and professor of psychiatry at the University ofToronto. He’s been brought in by then-CBC news chief Tony Burman to talk about the effect on journalists who have witnessed scenes of barbarity and horror. “

Twenty-two per cent of war journalists suffer fromclinical depression and 29 per cent suffer from lifelong post-traumatic stress disorder [PTSD],” states one slide.

“To suffer from PTSD, an individual must have experienced or witnessed an event that involved actual or threatened death, or serious injury,” states another.

“Even journalists without PTSD experienced isolated, persistent, and at times disturbing, intrusive symptoms,” says one more. But Macdonald and Brown, rooted in the macho culture of war reporters, aren’t buying it. They’re skeptical—rude even.

Remembering the session five years later, Feinstein refers to their “objectionable schoolboy” behaviour,which he believes “basically shamed the entire room to silence” at the Q&A session he had scheduled.

Only after people began filing out did some CBC-ers approach Feinstein. “This is good stuff you’re doing—keep it up,” he recalls one man telling him as they shook hands.

While much research has been done on the trauma experienced by ordinary citizens, soldiers and first responders, such as medical personnel and police officers, only Feinstein and a few others have looked deeply into whether journalists are just as prone to trauma’s aftershocks as everyone else.

And if they are, what then? Are individual reporters, producers and camera operators currently doing enough to protect themselves? And are the major news organizations in Canada and the United States that dispatch them guilty of shirking their responsibility to help the very people who, in the cause of doing good journalism and helping ratings and readership stay up, head off willingly to bloody places and witness almost unimaginable scenes of cruelty and gruesomeness?

John Scully, once one of Canada’s leading TV war correspondents, hunches over a tiny, round table at a quiet Second Cup in Toronto.With Scully, age 67, is Toni, his wife of 42 years. They now live in the small town of Dwight, Ontario, near Huntsville and Algonquin Provincial Park, where Scully operates as a journalist and author. As he sips a coffee and carefully picks up a wrap sandwich, Scully explains that though it’s been 13 years since he’s been in a war zone, he still flinches whenever the fire of a deer hunter’s shotgun pierces the crisp morning air.

During his 50-year journalism career, which included stints at CBC and Global TV, Scully reported from more than 70 countries and 36 war zones. The native New Zealander became an “expert in getting stories in shitholes.” Like the time he first came under direct fire, in1975, dodging Viet Cong mortars in Vietnam: “I was panic-stricken with fear. I didn’t know what to think.”Or the time in 1981 at a morgue in El Salvador,when he discovered that what looked like a “skinned baby duck” was actually a fetus carved from its mother’s stomach. Or the time in1982, when he huddled behind sandbags during Lebanon’s civil war during a “long, sickening” day of protecting himself from mortars, grenades, rifles, machine guns—and an aide to Yasser Arafat, then leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). Holding Scully at gunpoint, the aide demanded he hand over camera footage that he mistakenly thought showed Arafat’s photograph burning. “A sane person would have complied… I went nuts,” Scully wrote afterwards in his book, Am I Dead Yet? He was so enraged by this “swaggering bully” that he roared: “Who the fuck do you think you are? …Now put the gun away.”

But it wasn’t until April 1986 that Scully, so accustomed to looking outwards, briefly looked inwards, at himself, and at the risks he had continually ignored—until this day. Standing in the lobby of the Libyan Al-Kabir Hotel, he listened to the thunder of American Air Force F-111Fs launch an air strike targeting Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Al-Qaddafi’s nearby compound. Hearing the roar and crack of the bombs dropping in the distance, Scully thought, “Ah, what the fuck, I don’t care. They’re just bombs.” That’s when, shaken by his indifference to a dangerous situation, he finally realized: “I won’t just get myself killed—I’ll get the crew killed.”

Sipping his coffee, Scully explains that after Libya he started to look for an alternative to reporting on guns, blood and carnage, and eventually, in 1986, he returned to his native country for an office job—as head of current affairs for Television New Zealand (TVNZ). The move didn’t go as well as he and his wife had hoped. Already dealing with depression as a result of what he’d witnessed and unhappy with his new job, Scully drank and went from taking two Rohypnol pills (roofies) a day to 14.

As her husband finishes, Toni looks up from the wrap she’s eating, and in a quiet voice, says she couldn’t deal with the downward spiral anymore. She was fed up dealing with his foul moods and bursts of anger, and worrying that he really would follow through on his suicidal thoughts. Such erratic behaviour strained their marriage, and the kids, Jerome and Emma, started to resent him. Did Toni consider divorce? “Oh yes,” she says with a nod, and explains that eventually she and his mother pleaded with him to really take a look at himself. Scully’s speech was slurred. He lost all ability to think properly. The two women had him committed to a psychiatric hospital in New Zealand.

“I had lost my journalism,”he says sadly, staring at Toni, going on to admit he still suffers from severe depression and PTSD.While the depressionis likely genetic, he adds, his condition has been exacerbated by what he’s seen and experienced through work.He receives a combination of medicine and weekly therapy at the Centre forAddiction and Mental Health in Toronto.

Why is Scully talking so openly now? “Because no one else will,” he says with conviction. “It’s not a manly thing to admit you are depressed. It’s not a manly thing to say you need treatment. It’s not a manly thing to say you are mentally ill.”For “war-strutting journalists,”he concludes, “it’s not even acceptable to admit there’s a problem.”

At Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre in northeast Toronto, follow the brightly lit main corridor east until you reach the FWing and then swing right, into the psychiatric wing. There you’ll find Feinstein’s office, a soothing sanctuary compared to the sterile, clinical environment found on the other side of the door. It’s a dimly lit room furnished with darkwood bookcases and desks, and a rich brown leather couch.On the window, the blinds are closed; on one of the shelves sits a stack of books, including Ben Shephard’s A War of Nerves, Jon Steele’sWar Junkie and Stephen Hess’s The Media and theWar on Terrorism.

Feinstein is no stranger to gore and war, having experienced it first-hand when he was conscripted into the South African Defense Force in the 1980s as a medical officer and posted in Namibia. His diary of his war experiences is titled, appropriately, In Conflict, and was published in 1998. He had come to Canada five years earlier.

After completing a three-month tour, Feinstein realized that something was wrong on his first night back home in Johannesburg. He wrote that his enthusiasm for the symphony he attended, a pastime he usually enjoyed, had been replaced with a “deadness that was crushing.” He felt numb, detached and filled with worry, and he found it impossible to relax. Later that evening Feinstein fell ill: “I spent the night bent over the toilet or sitting in the darkened lounge, feeling utterly wretched and completely alone.”

Feinstein feels war journalists are a self-selected group: “They go into it because they like it and they have the stomach for it.”For the most part, he explains, they can withstand the pressures and the dangers as well as the travelling and long periods of time away from home.What’s more, “neither risk, normorality, is highly relevant” to them. Feinstein’s research was sparked by a referral from Sunnybrook’s department of neurology in 1999.The patient was suffering from anxiety, uncontrollable sweating, shaking and muddled speech.At the end of the note to Feinstein, the referring doctor wrote: “I wonder if this has anything to do with her work? You may recognize the name. She is a war reporter.”

“She,” an unnamed Canadian journalist, met with Feinstein and told him about her time in the MiddleEast, the Balkans and Sudan, and how she witnessed the death and wounding of many colleagues and innocent citizens. Recognizing the symptoms, he diagnosed her with PTSD. Wanting to know more about the journalists who “chased wars, revolutions and famines” and their experiences with psychiatric distress, he then looked for the research. Nothing. “It’s really strange,” he says. “There is such enormous literature on trauma, but no one had looked at journalists.”

Feinstein applied for a grant from the Freedom Forum in Washington in 1999 and received US$15,000 to collect data on the emotional health of war correspondents. With the help of CBC, BBC, Reuters, CNN, The Associated Press, ITN and the Rory Peck Trust—an organization that supports freelance journalists, named after freelance cameraman Peck, who was killed in the crossfire while covering the October 1993 coup in Moscow—he sent questionnaires to 170 journalists who reported from conflict regions and had been doing so for 15years or more; 140 responded. His findings, based in part on interviews with 28 of them, indicated many used war as a stimulant, admitting the rush of excitement propelled them throughout their coverage. Feinstein found evidence of unhappy childhoods, broken families and “aloof, dysfunctional” military fathers. His research also indicated that PTSD symptoms were “more frequent and intense in still photographers, followed by cameramen, and then print reporters and producers.”

To help explain why photographers were more susceptible to PTSD, Feinstein offers a quote by famous war photographer Robert Capa: “If your photographs are not good enough, you are not close enough.” In other words, says Feinstein, one of the theories is that photographers and cameramen top the list because they must be closer to danger and risk to get the great shot.

Overall, according to Feinstein’s research, the lifetime PTSD rate among war journalists is 29percent, almost identical to the 30per cent rate for combat veterans. By contrast, the PTSD rate for “traumatized” police officers is seven to 13 per cent and five per cent for the general population.

Feinstein presented his initial findings at a NewsWorld (the Europe-based international broadcast news conference, now NewsXchange) meeting in Barcelona, Spain in November 2000, where he says, “the journalism profession was absolutely fascinated by it. There were lots and lots of questions.” Three years later, he published Dangerous Lives:War and the Men and WomenWho Report It, which includes the findings of his initial study, as well as excerpts from his interviews. Also in 2003, CNN funded another study, in which he looked at 85 journalists in Iraq, about half of whom were embedded and half of whom were not. Feinstein wanted to know if one group was more prone to emotional distress than the other. The result: no difference. “The psychological risk appeared to be identical for the simple reason that if the journalist was not embedded with the military, he/she still managed to get to the frontlines and to the story,” states Feinstein. Those not embedded, he adds, were “wonderfully ingenious” at working around the military and getting to where the story was. This research, including a study done after the September 11 attacks, was included in Feinstein’s second book, Journalists Under Fire: The Psychological Hazards of Covering War.

As our interview comes to a close, Feinstein looks at me, pauses and asks, “Now, I don’t know if I asked you this already… are you interested in this kind of reporting?”

“Yes,” I reply.

“Oh,” he replies ominously, and wishes me luck.

I close his door, wondering if one day I might be back here, with my own aftershocks.

During the interview I did with Scully at Second Cup, he mentioned he’d received several notes along the lines of what one producer wrote: “John, thank God you’ve spoken up—I’m going through the same thing.” Scully, who actually went back to Beirut and other conflict riddled areas after his release from the New Zealand mental health hospital and his return to Canada, believes most hard-boiled journalists would rather suffer with depression, lack of concentration, constant weeping, sleepless nights and other PTSD symptoms than go to their news organizations and admit something is wrong. Many of them are just like he was, consistently going back to the mayhem in war zones or conflict regions for the sheer purpose of smothering any sign or feeling of despair and helplessness. To deal with it, he explained, they often self-medicate with alcohol and drugs. But when they come back home, “they are totally fucked up. They can’t face reality. They can’t face the down of not having the adrenaline pump.”

That adrenaline pump actually consists of a number of different areas in the brain. This circuitry includes the almond-shaped amygdala that scientistsbelieve is tied to emotionalmemory. The amygdala is also the fear centre of the brain. Another aspect of the brain’s reaction to fear is the secretion of neuro transmitters such as adrenaline and noradrenaline. These hormones can influence the way information is processed by the brain during stressful periods. While scientists don’t have a definitive explanation about the mechanics of memory, they have identified nightmares, flashbacks andre-experiencing the trauma through unwanted images and memories as symptoms of PTSD.

Sharing the pathway with other stress hormones is dopamine, a chemical that influences behaviour. Feinstein has based some ofhis research on Zuckerman’s Sensation Seeking Scale, a rating system used to measure the willingness to take risks. According to Feinstein, lower levels of dopamine are linked to more cautious behaviour while higher levels contribute to more adventurous actions, including war reporting.

Nancy Durham is a correspondent at CBC’s London, England bureau and one of the 28 journalists interviewed for Feinstein’s first study. “I’m not a thrill-seeker,” says Durham, “but I love great stories.” She left Canada in her 30s, keen on seeing the world. She moved to Oxford, having already been greatly influenced by her future husband’s involvement in the underground culture during the early days of upheaval in the former Soviet Bloc: “That’s where my appetite was whetted and it just grew from there. It was very, very exciting.”

And, over the years, very disturbing. Like the time when, during the Kosovo conflict in the late ’90s, Durham met Rajmonda Rreci, a teen who claimed her young sister was killed by Serb forces and was motivated to seek revenge by joining the Kosovo Liberation Army. After the war, Durham returned to Rreci’s village. But after knocking on her door, Durham was jolted: the beautiful little girl who was supposedly dead answered the door. “It was sickening. I felt physically weakened,” she pauses uncomfortably. “I felt like I lost my journalistic compass,” she says, almost ashamed.

Or the time in August 1995, during the Bosnian war, when she rode with a family in a hay wagon with all of their belongings. They were just one of thousands of Serb families fleeing the area. “It’s so sad, so senseless, so horrible,” she says. “How do you start over when you’re 40?” That event, she explains, more than any other, still haunts her, bringing on bouts of sadness and depression.

Another notable war reporter is Ann Medina,who reported from such war zones as Lebanon, Nicaragua and Uganda for CBC’s The Journal from 1981 to 1986. Medina, writing about Feinstein’s book in 2003 for The Globe and Mail, was not impressed with his methodology: “Well,we’re told they [the findings] come from a questionnaire he sent out and interviews with 28 of the 140 who responded. Not exactly a statistically large sample, but given the small universe it’s an important start and I was curious what the research might tell me.” In addition, she thought Feinstein should also have focused on the 70 per cent who showed no signs of PTSD: “I wanted to know more about them.”

Andas for the two CBC veterans,Macdonald and Brown, the men who said Feinstein offers little more than psychobabble, Macdonald acknowledges he has “no real authority to dispute Dr. Feinstein’s findings.” However, he says in an email: “My view is that if you haven’t the stomach for violence or death, don’t go to awar zone.”

The fascination with Feinstein’s results, as well as the acceptance of them, is growing. “It was an idea whose time had finally come. It’s a breakthrough,” says Burman, adding that because of the Lebanese civil war and the conflicts in Chechnya, Bosnia and Kosovo that followed, there was increasing awareness at CBC that returning journalists and their crews might need help, particularly those who had “repeated exposure to this kind of reporting.”

Also playing an early role in raising awareness of the potential for PTSDamong journalists, according to Scully, were the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ), based in New York, and Reporters Withou tBorders, which has its headquarters in Paris.

Elisabeth Witchel, the coordinator of the impunity campaign and journalist assistance program for CPJ, has seen the progress made by newsrooms. While most media organizations have always made counselling available, she explains, only a few provided any sort of trauma support for their correspondents and domestic reporters until recently. In February 2005, though, The New York Times introduced a program that includes pre-assignment counselling for reporters assigned to a conflict zone. Reuters and BBC,Witchel adds, had already launched their own programs.

In Canada, news organizations such as CBC and the Toronto Star have Hostile Environment courses, which their correspondents are supposed to take before heading over to awar-torn country. These courses are designed to provide journalists with the skills required to deal with risk assessment, risk management and first aid. Durham says the training came in handy when she was on the edge of the Albania-Kosovo border during the NATO bombardment. The course taught her to maintain as much control as she could, stay calm and smartly think of a plan that would get the crew out of danger. While these courses educate and train journalists how to deal with a physical threat, there is no preparation or training for the psychological threat a war journalist may face, and, says John Owen, former chief news editor of CBCNews, there needs to be. “There’s no excuse for any news executive not to be aware ofwhat’s happening.”

In a 2002 article for The Thunderbird, the University of British Columbia’s online student magazine, reporter Hilary MacKenzie said that what Canadian newsrooms offer reporters whomay have been psychologically hurt by their coverage is “pathetic.”But Martin Regg Cohn, the Star’s foreign editor and former Asia and Middle East correspondent, disagrees, at least as far as his paper is concerned. He emphasizes that “safety is paramount” when it comes to the Star’s foreign correspondents and that the paper provides several standard counselling and psychological services—“war zone or no war zone.”

It’s early February in London, Ontario, and Cliff Lonsdale, chair of the committee for the graduate program in journalism at the University of Western Ontario, is welcoming 128 delegates to the inaugural Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma. It’s an event put together by Lonsdale, who co-founded the forum with his wife, Jane Hawkes, an independent television documentary producer. It is supported by the Seattle,Washington-based Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma, the International News Safety Institute (located in Brussels, Belgium), and the Canadian Association of Journalists.

Lonsdale discusses his own background: he was raised in southern Africa and went off to war at an early age, hitchhiking his way there to report on it when he was 16. His destination: Congo, during the war that followed the country’s fight for independence. “There was a bloodbath going on,” he said. “Everybody was fighting everybody else; it seemed like too good an opportunity to miss.” It landed him his first full-time job as a journalist at the Times of Zambia. Still, despite the horrors he witnessed in the Congo, Lonsdale believes war is not the sole place where a journalist may experience PTSD while working: “War is just the more obvious, sexy end of it.” He then goes on to say that many domestic reporters also suffer in silence. He cites local murders, car accidents and high-profile cases like the Paul Bernardo and Robert Pickton trials as situations where the images and information journalists confront can be psychologically harmful.

Later in the day, Feinstein highlights several findings from his research and emphasizes a point in which he differs from Lonsdale. Being exposed to war and the dangers of war is a more significant risk factor than being exposed to a scene of domestic violence: “The big difference between the situations Lonsdale describes and the war journalist is the absence of personal threat.” And a physical personal threat, he explains, is an extremely significant variable in determining a person’s psychological health.

Another significant variable, he says, is the death of a colleague, and as the forum continues we hear several examples. CBC cameraman Brian Kelly, for instance, tells us about the death of Clark Todd, a CTV reporter who was killed in Lebanon in 1983. Even though it’s been 25 years, Kelly says, he still can’t “say ‘Lebanon’ without crying.” Like Scully, Kelly grew moody and angry without warning.

Another story of loss—and the associated trauma— comes from Ian Stewart, former West Africa bureau chief for the Associated Press. “A bottle of scotch and an extra two weeks off is not enough,” he says, describing his personal experience with PTSD. He covered conflict in South Asia and reported from Uganda, Congo and Liberia. Stewart speaks in particular about reporting on the gruesome details of the carnage caused by the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) in Sierra Leone.There, hemet a child named Maria,who was wiping her tears away with gauze covered wrists and then asked, “Mama, will my hands growback?”

Her mother’s answer: “We’ll have to see what the doctor says.” After which she explained to Stewart that the RUF hacked off her daughter’s hands because she would not give up the location of her family’s whereabouts.

Days later, Stewart,who admits to losing himself “in the misery of conflict,” saw his war correspondent career come to an abrupt end when, while riding with a convoy in Sierra Leone, he came under gunfire and was struck in the head by an AK-47 bullet. The bullet lodged itself in the back of his head after passing between two hemispheres of his brain, leaving him paralyzed on his left side.Next to him, Myles Tierney, anAP television producer, slouched over. He’d been hit and killed immediately.

In the hushed lecture hall,Stewart explains that in addition the paralysis, his PTSD runs deep. He describes the moodiness, the chain-smoking and the nightmares. In one, he’s trying to give poor children coins, but they have no hands.

And the heartbreaking stories don’t stop with Stewart. For two days, participants at the inaugural Canadian Journalism Forum on Violence and Trauma discussed the possible psychological effects of covering murder trials, child abuse, shooting massacres, terrorists attacks and war,whichat onepoint in the proceedings prompted Chris Cramer, former head of CNN International, to lean into a microphone and say: “If you join this profession, it’s going to hit you one way or another.”

Jen McDonnell was unaware that alerts were bombarding her BlackBerry one Friday night last February. She was with friends at a bar on College Street when she got the call from a colleague. CNN had already caught wind of the news. McDonnell rushed home to cover the story, drafting a news brief on her BlackBerry during the cab ride. As senior web editor for Dose.ca, an online entertainment news website focusing on celebrities, movies, television and music, McDonnell’s next priorities were links to video feeds and numerous photo galleries. By the next day the story had exploded into a scandal involving violence, substance abuse and tattooing. It all started when Britney Spears shaved her head.

Is this what celebrity journalism has come down to? In April 1966, Esquire published “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” a 15,000-word profile of Ol’ Blue Eyes, written by Gay Talese. As he writes near the start of the story, “a Sinatra with a cold can, in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond as surely as a President of the United States, suddenly sick, can shake the national economy.” But does Spears’s haircut really shake the pop music world in the same way as Sinatra’s nasal congestion? What is it about Spears that McDonnell and the Dose team can’t resist? In his 2006 book Celebrity/Culture, Ellis Cashmore argues that celebrities no longer earn their fame through achievement, but by constantly being in the media’s eye. This would explain why in September 2007 audiences heard more about Spears’s awkward performance at the MTV Video Music Awards than the award winners themselves. Celebrity news engages audiences in what David Gritten, author of 2002’s Fame: Stripping Celebrity Bare, refers to as an ongoing narrative. Celebrity coverage is a continuous drama, similar to a popular soap opera show—never-ending, shocking, overdramatic and addictive, and yet, something audiences can relate to.

Of course, not all celebrity coverage is fluff, as Talese’s Esquire feature demonstrated. Matthew Hays is an arts journalist and instructor at Concordia University who believes that the two key aspects of strong arts journalism are criticism and analysis. He says good celebrity coverage should follow the same model and argues that if you’re going to submit to the celebrity demand, “you’d better either be able to write something really analytical and interesting about the celebrity, or you’d better be able to throw a wrench into it—make it a little bit more extreme, or funny, or crazy.” Relevant celebrity coverage communicates to readers something important about a famous person, shedding light on the character behind the fame. It involves in-depth reporting and a lot of legwork, while celebrity gossip involves rumours, assumptions and speculation spurred on by the celeb taking part in some idiotic or shocking event. Basically, the difference between Frank Sinatra having a cold and Britney Spears demanding a head shave.

“It used to be that it was a joy to go out and pick up a daily newspaper on a Saturday or Sunday to get all the weekly arts coverage,” says Hays. “Now there’s so much less of it in there.” He’s right. Comparing arts and entertainment coverage in one month during 2002 and 2007, both The Globe and Mail and National Postincreased the number of celebrity stories in their respective Saturday sections (see sidebar page 63). Arts and entertainment editors at the Globe and Post argue that readers welcome celebrity news with their daily intake of hard news. But at what cost? Wire stories are a cheap and easy way to get celebrity coverage into the arts and entertainment sections of a newspaper publication, leaving less need for actual arts reporters. But regurgitated celebrity stories leave Canadian papers at risk of relinquishing their own voice when it comes to the arts, damaging their brand image in the process. In March 2002, the Globe used an average of only 3.75 wire stories in its Review section. That number jumped to an average of 6.25 stories in March 2007.The Post published an average of one wire story in its Weekend Post and Toronto sections in March 2002. In March 2007, that number reached 19.5 wire stories, on average.

When online publications such as Dose.ca or celebrity magazines such as People or Hello! cover the same stories (and do so more efficiently and effectively), questions surface about whether or not newspaper publications should be devoting time and space to this type of depthless coverage. The stench of stale celebrity coverage wafts through column inches that could otherwise be used for the kind of in-depth, analytical and critical articles on local arts, entertainment and culture that Hays says are missing.

Besides sacrificing space, authoritative voice and arts reporters, there is also the issue of tone. Most Canadian newspapers appear unable to find an appropriate approach to celebrity gossip. British publications such as The Times and ananova.com have mastered covering celebrities by using simple, yet entertaining reporting, something that Canadian papers such as the Globe struggle with.

“It’s like having Anglican clerics tell dirty jokes,” says Kate Taylor, one of the Globe’s arts columnists. “They’re just not very good at it or very comfortable with it.”

The Globe building just west of downtown Toronto is especially grey and cold one afternoon in October 2007 when I arrive to interview television critic and columnist John Doyle. The front lobby is made up of mostly dull-coloured marble. I walk through the revolving door and step into what feels like a prestigious building in Gotham City on the set of a Batman movie. Here, it’s all business. The structure, as it happens, accurately reflects the tone and style of the newspaper itself. Globelink.ca (a site for advertisers) states that the Globe’s “brand” includes the paper’s image of being “Canada’s leading national newspaper” and promises to deliver “trusted and authoritative content, and products that are relevant, meaningful and engaging for Canada’s most educated, affluent and influential consumers.” It’s not surprising the Globe has struggled to weave celebrity coverage into its serious and responsible brand image but it is unclear where a story published last September, reflecting on the comparison of Britney Spears to “fat Elvis,” fits into the mandate of publishing content that is “relevant, meaningful and engaging.” The article entitled “Performance was ‘like watching the fat Elvis’” contains numerous recycled quotations from various celebrity blog sites, such as PerezHilton.comand Jossip.com, that comment on Spears’s “train wreck” performance at last year’s VMAs. But what’s relevant or engaging about recycled information that can easily be accessed from the Internet long before it can show up in a print publication?

Doyle says Globe readers want to see celebrity coverage done intelligently and in small amounts. “It’s perfectly understandable,” he says, “that people are interested in celebrities and celebrity gossip.” But he himself seems to argue that Globe readers are inclined to schadenfreude in a September 2007 column about Posh Spice: “These days, most people have a favourite celebrity, not because the person is talented, charming, charismatic and complex. No, they have a favourite celeb who is dumb and whose personal life is a mess.” Canadian newspaper readers are treated to constant updates about American celebs such as Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, Michael Jackson and Nicole Richie, a trend that the Globe’s Taylor finds disheartening: “We are then kind of pressing our noses up against the glass of somebody else’s culture.”

If the Globe does a poor job of playing dumb ’n’ trashy when covering Britney, it doesn’t always do much better when attempting to be intellectual. Lynn Crosbie’s Globe column aims to provide a critical reflection on happenings in contemporary culture. Her February 20, 2007 Review column, “Britney’s baldness: A cry for help?” muses on the pop princess’s “final act of rebellion” when she left rehab and proceeded to a salon where she requested that her head be shaved. Crosbie writes, “If cutters like to open their flesh to feel authentic, what are we to make of Britney Spears’s latest fashion statement?” and goes on to observe that Britney is “honing her public image the way a death row inmate prepares for an execution.” While Crosbie also calls Spears a “genuine kinder-whore,” the overall tone of the article seems far too serious for a celebrity’s latest trip to rock bottom. Spears’s actions may be a cry for help, as the article suggests, but combining celebrities with dissertation diction and analysis causes confusion. “I mean fine, tell me about Lindsay Lohan’s rehab,” Taylor says. “But God, at least you might do it with some sense that this is not the most momentous thing in the world!”

Meanwhile, events and achievements that deserve recognition in the arts and entertainment industries shrink into the background as celebrities who are famous for being famous steal the spotlight. On February 22, 2007, Doyle’s column argued that we should pay more attention to Oscar week and less to Britney’s extreme haircut. He also used his column to explore the difference between a movie star and a celebrity, arguing that Spears is the latter, just as Cashmore argues that celebrities no longer earn their fame through achievement. “A peculiarity of celebrity culture is the shift of emphasis from achievement-based fame to media-driven renown,” he argues. “Now, many of us probably spend more time following the lives of celebrities than we do familiarizing ourselves with ‘legitimate’ news.”

An elevator in the CanWest Media building, located in suburban Toronto, is decorated with a mural that includes the Post’s logo and is meant to reflect the paper’s latest redesign. As I exit onto the third floor and round the corner, I see most of the Post team thanks to the open-concept set-up and bright lights. Editor-in-chief Douglas Kelly, whose office is surrounded by glass walls and a wooden door, sits at a circular glass table beside Benjamin Errett, his 29-year-old Arts & Life editor. Errett is lucky to have a job today because in 2001 Post management drastically underestimated the importance of arts and life coverage to readers. Cutbacks forced the paper to make sacrifices, most notably the layoff of about 130 employees and elimination of Arts & Life, Sports and Toronto as distinct sections, with some content kept alive in the Post’s A section. Once the paper had been gutted, executives assumed it would carry on just fine with most of the emphasis now on its News and Financial Post sections. Readers thought otherwise, and the abolished sections were brought back six weeks later.

In December 2004, the Post welcomed Les Pyette, its seventh publisher in seven years. Pyette, who hoped to bring the paper back to life, had an edgy and upbeat vision. Splashy headlines and provocative images are trademarks of the Post’s personality. “Some people like it, some people don’t and that’s fine,” says Kelly. According to Errett, the clearest representation of the paper’s attitude is in the Arts & Life section. Including celebrity stories in the section provides Errett and his writers an opportunity to inject more voice and creativity into their reporting. “I don’t want to mention names,” Kelly says, “but I find some competing arts and life sections very predictable.” Cheeky headlines such as “Mr. Crankypants”—used during the 2007 Toronto International Film Festival to describe an interview with visiting actor Tommy Lee Jones—is one example of the lighter approach the Post takes. Errett says its coverage aims to be smart and sassy. He models the Arts & Life section after The New York Observer, while previous incarnations of the section, he says, were more reflective of the coverage found in British papers such as The Daily Telegraph.

Errett says you can’t over-think celebrity coverage because most of the stories lack substance. Conversely, stories with more depth are carefully scrutinized to ensure they’re not too serious. Finding a compromise between being trashy and snooty, Errett tries to take a highbrow approach to low culture and a lowbrow approach to high culture in hopes of landing on an intelligent middle ground. But varying interests amongPost readers can pose difficulties when trying to stay away from reporting that may seem either too pretentious or too unrefined. Errett hopes for some relief from the celebrity addiction, saying, “I don’t know where else you can go with it.”

In the meantime, the Post provides readers with celebrity updates in its weekday edition of the paper through a component of the Arts & Life section called “Stop the Presses!” which lists quick hits of celebrity news gathered from wire services. From career updates to run-ins with the law, “Stop the Presses!” mimics the type of swift delivery found on the web. Wire stories provide readers with the quick, uncomplicated information they’re accustomed to getting from sites such as PerezHilton.com or TMZ.com. Instead of embracing the ability print media have to provide in-depth analysis, newspapers use quick hits to keep Internet-savvy readers interested. According to Neil Randall, an associate professor of English at the University of Waterloo, dumbing down to the reader has altered newspapers in a negative way, cheapening their product to a considerable extent. “Newspapers will strive for things that just look better. They’ll strive for things that are dismissing any sense of complexity in stories,” he says. “You very rarely get complexity in flash media.”

But the growth and influence of the Internet as a news outlet is inevitable. On the third floor of the CanWest Media building, a sign on a closed door reads, “The Shamrock Room.” Inside, there is a green screen, a video camera and a chair. This is where the Post experiments with video blogging, an aspect of Internet broadcasting it is now often incorporating into the paper’s website. Leslie Chan, a professor of new media at the University of Toronto, says traditional media and new media are not at war with each other but influencing each other. “They kind of co-adapt and co-evolve.” Kelly seems to agree, saying the relationship between the newspaper he runs and the Internet is something he and his team have to consider everyday: “It’s revolutionizing what we do in here.”

One floor below the Post newsroom is the Dose.ca office. Its light blue walls are plastered with celebrity paraphernalia, including a poster of drug-addled English rock star Pete Doherty with a pair of men’s underwear tacked over his crotch. A black newspaper box with the Dose logo is parked against the wall, a reminder of its early days as a print publication. Canadian newspapers, says CBC online producer and formerDose.ca web editor Heather Adler, can’t promise the same immediacy as online entertainment news sites: “It’s yesterday’s news tomorrow.” Nor do they seem able to offer the cheeky, edgy style and tone that Dose.caor British newspapers provide.

Instead of sticking to thoughtful arts journalism, Canadian newspapers try to compete against celebrity experts who have perfected the art of reporting up-to-the-minute gossip. In the process, they compromise their brand image and leave readers disappointed. When it comes to celebrities, some journalists hate to love them but won’t stop reporting on them, leaving more valuable arts and entertainment coverage ignored and overlooked. That’s far more shocking than Britney’s shiny bald head.

The archives on the third floor of York University’s Scott Library aren’t exactly welcoming. The buzzer-only admittance, white tables and fluorescent lighting suggest a trip through the Cuckoo’s Nest rather than any hallowed halls of academia.

“I’m looking for the Harry Rasky archives,” I tell an archivist.

“Sure,” she says. “What did you want to see?”

“Um, everything?”

She tries to hide her amusement and tells me that it’s 2:30 p.m. The archives close in two hours. During my initial phone research, “Harry Rasky” had become synonymous with “never heard of him” and “unfamiliar with his work.” I figured a few hours at the archives would be enough to sift through whatever it was this Rasky character had to offer. The archivist returns with a list of his files—correspondence, transcripts, writings and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of film—collected from 1953 to 2005. Still resisting the urge to laugh, she suggests I start with one file. Maybe I can make it through that. Maybe.

The amount of material donated by Rasky to the archives is overwhelming. When the documentarian and journalist died at the age of 78 on April 9, 2007, he left behind a catalogue of more than 50 films—mostly telling the stories of visual artists, writers and performers, personalities such as Marc Chagall, Leonard Cohen and Robertson Davies—and a history of contributions to both print and broadcast journalism. Rasky’s home in Toronto’s Rosedale is a modest size with a one-car garage, yet it’s a far cry from the poor Jewish neighbourhood where Rasky grew up. The living room boasts one of Rasky’s overflowing desks and a mantel holding many—but not all—of his 200-plus awards. The multiple medals, trophies and certificates are bookended by his two Emmys. A name tag from York University hangs from a light on the kitchen table and a blue canvas director’s chair from the University of Toronto occasionally sits in the main hallway. His wife of 42 years, Arlene, assures me there is a lot more where that came from.

“He was a persistent, continual filmmaker that made films that he wanted to make,” says Lois Siegel, a photographer and video production professor at the University of Ottawa. While it isn’t a stretch to call Rasky a revolutionary in the documentary world for his distinct style and notable subjects, it isn’t a stretch to call him a relic either. A year after his death, many of Rasky’s films remain under archivist lock and key. Finding a Canadian broadcaster to air documentaries on the arts is difficult today—especially for films featuring Rasky’s focus on high art, including drama and literature. Although he’s considered a pioneer Canadian newsman, it’s not surprising that regardless of his well-stocked archive and mantel, Rasky’s name rarely rings familiar. Much of what is remembered about him seems to be of his own creation. As nearly everyone I speak with tells me, Harry Rasky was always Harry Rasky’s greatest promoter. Without the creator himself around to support his work, Rasky may be forgotten, his passing representing the way the documentary film industry has changed in Canada.

Immediately following Rasky’s death, he was memorialized as Canada’s “poet with a camera,” noted for the famous names he made movies about and the way he made them, blending elements of biography and drama. While working on Hall of Kings, a 1967 film about Westminster Abbey, Rasky began developing the formula that would structure most of his future films. He worked with a small crew and called the shots. While he interviewed those involved with preserving the Abbey, Rasky also assembled a team of actors and chose a narrator to recite poetry in and around the building. He merged the readings with his journalistic interviews, and shot scenery and art with a moving camera. A television and film critic for the Los Angeles Timesinvented the term “Raskymentary” in the 1980s, referring to this distinctive approach to storytelling. According to Arlene, Rasky believed that making films on the arts, culture and religion should serve a positive purpose for himself. “You have an obligation, he felt, and he felt deeply, to improve the world,” she says. “And he felt that if you’re going to dwell on everything that’s ugly, he didn’t see how he could make a contribution there.”

Rasky often had difficulty dealing with the “ugly.” Arlene believes Rasky had a strong social conscience, but he often stayed away from covering hard news subjects that took too much of an emotional toll on him. “Harry couldn’t sleep at night, he would be so disturbed by things,” she says. “He couldn’t watch the news. He would leave the room. There was a time where he had to see everything, but he couldn’t stand it.”

Now the ugly side sells. Documentaries are issue-based, and the news media seek conflict and real-life drama, largely ignoring Rasky’s humanist approach. When it comes to arts coverage, today’s viewers are apt to tune into E!’s True Hollywood Story or VH1’s Behind The Music, shows that revel in melodrama. In contrast, Rasky mentioned his subject’s dark side only in passing. Rasky’s films, often celebratory in tone, can come off as arcane and pretentious, especially to an audience content to recognize Mikhail Baryshnikov as Carrie Bradshaw’s Russian boyfriend on Sex and the City, rather than the ballet dancer who sought political asylum in Toronto in Rasky’s 1974 Baryshnikov.

Although his films did not entirely avoid the tough aspects of his subjects’ lives, and his non-art films took on stories that were often related to injustices and man-made disasters, Rasky’s take was reflective of the eternally optimistic aspect of his personality. Praise for his subjects is easily found in both Rasky’s interviews and narration. He explored sore subjects in what has been called a “gentle, yet probing” manner, avoiding what Ian Campbell, assistant to the director for some of Rasky’s films, says pure journalists use—the “go for the jugular” approach. However, these portraits were also criticized for being fawning, simplistic and predictable. Mike Boone at Montreal’s The Gazette noted in a 1999 write-up on Christopher Plummer: King of Players—Plummer’s moment to “bask in Rasky’s hagiographic spotlight”—that Rasky “could be relied upon for praise rather than burial.”

These days, however, Rasky doesn’t seem to have many enemies left. Some of those who have criticized his work in the past have forgotten about the films entirely. Anne Rochon Ford once criticized Rasky’s The War Against the Indians in a letter to the editor of the The Globe and Mail. While she then challenged the lack of female perspective in the film’s attempt to chronicle Aboriginal history, Ford no longer remembers the film, or much of her critique.

In 1946, three years before Rasky found his first journalism job as a stringer at the Northern Daily News in Kirkland Lake, Ont., Edward R. Murrow established the first American television documentary unit at CBS in New York. Networks and viewers had great expectations for television, and Rasky, like so many other young newsmen, wanted in. While working in radio in 1950, Rasky learned of CBC’s intention to launch a television station, and was soon hired in the news department in 1952. He broadcast the network’s first live news story, and helped to develop CBC Newsmagazine, a weekly show that allowed him to make his first documentaries. Director Norman Jewison, whose early work at CBC concentrated on the music category of arts programming, remembers working in the basement of CBC’s former building on Jarvis Street. Television was an exciting new medium, he recalls, and few were sure of what they were doing. “People were trying to give us some insight into what we were going to do because we didn’t know anything! Nobody knew about television at that time.” The network aimed to deliver content that bridged the territory between information and entertainment, and expected Canadians to seek out intentionally demanding programming. However, this great dream of television as a medium for education and the exploration of Canadian culture was quickly interrupted by the reality of an audience already weaned on American programming, which provided information with a lighter hand. Soon after launching, CBC began looking for ways to make its programming more entertaining and engaging. In addition to playing with quicker cuts in the editing room, to mixed results, the public affairs producers tailored Newsmagazine to cover more diverse stories and show shorter documentaries. Although the network launched with the intention of showing real Canada to Canadians, the take on public service television changed almost as soon as it was developed.

By the ’50s, the thinking at CBC was to offer Rasky a more senior position, but at age 26 he was reluctant to settle in. He wasn’t interested, so he freelanced in Europe and Toronto before heading to the United States to find more opportunities in the documentary field. He was employed by CBS under Murrow in 1956, but was soon fired because of company downsizing. For several years, he freelanced in the U.S., but by the ’60s independently produced, one-off films were eclipsing documentary serials in popularity and network presence, and viewers wanted the medium to explore contentious current events. The idea that documentaries could advocate for awareness and change was becoming a mainstream notion. While Rasky was able to sell short news documentaries to most of the major American networks and, occasionally, to PBS and CBC, he tried to branch out from the issue-based ghetto. He’d pitched plays and arts documentaries to networks all through the late ’50s and ’60s with little success. In the winter of 1966, months after the birth of his first child, Holly, Rasky had the chance to go to Vietnam to shoot war footage for ABC. According to Arlene, ABC accepted Rasky’s films but changed the scripts, as the network was adamant about remaining uncritical of the war. As he wrote in his 1980 autobiography, Nobody Swings on Sunday, seeing a grenade roll by his feet while waiting for his luggage at the Saigon airport was the breaking point.

From then on, arts and culture became Rasky’s primary subjects. Former CBC program director Thom Benson brought Rasky back to the network in the early ’70s, accepting a film project about George Bernard Shaw. Writer Eric Koch, who was involved in public affairs, arts and sciences during several of Rasky’s years at CBC, says Rasky’s reputation as a consistent, talented filmmaker helped establish his lasting relationship with the broadcaster. He bargained for and won his dream arrangement—a filmmaker working within CBC, with creative independence and a small, consistent crew. Rasky’s contract essentially guaranteed him a yearly salary of $50,000 in exchange for a film. He was allotted a portion of CBC’s budget—usually $100,000 to $250,000—to make a film on a subject of his choosing. Rasky still had to seek approval, but his ideas were rarely rejected. He was free to choose the format his films would follow, many of them nearing the two-hour mark, and often had a say over the number of commercial interruptions in a film. Howard Aster, Rasky’s publisher at Mosaic Press, says Rasky was obviously in charge of every film. “It was his project,” says Aster. “He did the research, he did the interviewing, he did the filming, he did the editing. He did it all.”

Rasky’s ability to get things done his way was a product of his tenacity and a belief in his own ability. His attention to the “I”—or his “ego,” as many refer to it—is remembered with fondness, amusement and the occasional hint of annoyance. “A lot of people didn’t like him because they thought he was pompous and an egotist,” Aster says. “Which I think was probably true. If you didn’t have a strong ego, you couldn’t sit in front of a Tennessee Williams, an Arthur Miller or a Leonard Cohen and try to get into them. You have to have a strength of personality to do what he did, and having succeeded—that drove his confidence even further.”

Rasky took involvement in his films to mean getting out from behind the camera, particularly in later years. He began to see the budgetary benefits of hiring himself as narrator and took to appearing as interviewer. “It’s a different mode of storytelling,” says Campbell, “much more personal rather than coldly objective.” Rasky also wasn’t in the habit of using quick cuts and brief sound bites. He conducted interviews in locations where subjects felt comfortable, putting them enough at ease to speak at length. Christopher Plummer, an old friend and colleague of Rasky’s, remembers he was both a proficient writer and interviewer. “He tried to surprise you and keep you fresh,” Plummer says of being interviewed for King of Players. “It was a tough journalistic technique of interviewing which he brought onto film.” Rasky’s onscreen presence was occasionally part of the story, as it was in the Plummer film, but it also served to remind audiences that this was, without a doubt, a Harry Rasky film. It’s a technique that has been used, for better or worse, by Michael Moore. Coincidentally, Rasky is often seen looking a bit like Moore’s long-lost intellectual uncle in his trademark hats, wiry hair, glasses and the occasional ascot, narrating from a variety of moving shots. But while Moore’s films are over-the-top, controversial looks at issues of social and political concern, Rasky instead serves as a comforting, familiar presence—more tour guide than instigator. In the current documentary market, Moore’s style is synonymous with success, and there is as little room for Rasky’s style as there is for his subjects.

Rasky worked consistently through the ’70s and ’80s, but eventually networks began to ration their dollars to documentary programming. Canada is particularly tough terrain for those looking to sell arts documentaries. Eileen Thalenberg, a partner at Stormy Nights Productions, one of only a few companies producing any arts documentaries, says Bravo is a rare broadcaster open to producing and accepting innovative films about the arts in Canada. She says that while Stormy Nights receives support from CBC for other projects, it rarely receives support for its arts documentaries.

Audience support can also be a problem for arts documentaries. Viewers of films like Rasky’s, which are more traditional in their high art approach, aren’t getting any younger, and according to Thalenberg, broadcasters argue that this audience isn’t being replaced. New viewers aren’t raised with the kind of arts background that was instilled in previous generations. The documentary form began to shift drastically in the ’80s as the storytelling took on elements of drama and other television genres in order to adapt to the commercial environment. According to Canadian documentary film historian Kirwan Cox, changes to the form—much like changes to television in general—were the result of technological advances and even the birth of MTV, which helped create and foster audience expectations for quick cuts.

Rasky’s films weren’t made for audiences who learned about colour from Boy George’s makeup palette rather than Degas’s paintbrush, and about drama from Stephen Patrick Morrissey rather than George Bernard Shaw. CBC’s never-ending plight to reach younger viewers didn’t mesh with the sorts of films Rasky made throughout the ’80s and ’90s. Although Rasky released two of his biggest issue-based films, The War Against the Indians (1992) and Prophecy (1994), during that decade, they still contrasted starkly to the television programming of the day. It had become a Reality Bites world.

Rasky stayed the course, but eventually CBC wanted change. Plummer acknowledges that Rasky’s relationship with the network wasn’t always good. “He was always locking heads,” he says, “always bitching about them because they were never coming up with enough money for what he thought he not only required, but deserved.” The network demanded shorter running times, and Rasky found it harder to have his ideas accepted. Aster says CBC was still showing interest in documentaries, but demanded that Rasky work within an hour-long time frame. “It had to fit into a 48-minute format, and the format defined the extent of what you could do,” he says. “Harry wouldn’t do it.”

The last film Rasky made under CBC’s contract, Prophecy, at two hours and 15 minutes, proved he couldn’t adapt. His attempt to explain the stories of the world’s major spiritual prophets and their influence on society meanders. The visuals are strong, but even Arlene admits the film was too long and not necessarily successful in getting Rasky’s theme and purpose across.

In the spring of 1995, Rasky returned to Toronto after a trip to Algonquin Provincial Park. As he did any other day, he called CBC to check up on his latest project. He was told he didn’t need to come into the office that day, as he was no longer an employee. Budget cuts, he was told, resulted in his removal from the payroll. Although Rasky was free to pitch films to CBC, both he and Norman Campbell, two of the only remaining network veterans, were no longer staffers. “It was just such a horrible killing of a person, really, is what it was,” Arlene remembers. “I don’t think they know what they did.” Ultimately, the bureaucratic structure made it difficult for Rasky to blame anyone. “Harry definitely felt wronged and was devastated,” she says, “but like he said, ‘How can you get mad at the post office?’”

Before his layoff, Rasky was one of only a few filmmakers able to control the content and production of his films while still having network support. Recently, documentary film has become recognized as a form that can present information in a fast-paced, entertaining and commercially viable way on the big screen. Documentaries are popular, as the success of Toronto’s Hot Docs festival, the presence of documentary-focused cable channels and the amount of young filmmakers appearing on the scene suggest. Filmmakers now have more opportunities to make and broadcast films independently, thanks to advances in digital film and Internet technology, says Kass Banning, a cinema studies instructor at University of Toronto. Working independently as part of a television institution, however, is increasingly impossible. Documentaries on television are often outsourced, and, according to Siegel, those made in-house are now subject to increased creative control and tighter budgets. Most independent filmmakers in Canada are required to seek sponsorship and sell their films internationally, or sell to niche television networks that are dedicated to documentary programming, but not available to most cable viewers.

Rasky’s work changed slightly after he was no longer on contract. According to Campbell, who worked on two of Rasky’s last projects, the post-CBC-contract work was not of the same quality. When Rasky first began making movies, documentaries would often be assured inclusion in next season’s schedule under the ideals of a public service mandate. Now those trying to sell films have to compete with commercial programming based on which show can garner the most profit. Although Rasky did sell more projects to CBC, he was given smaller budgets. In 1997 he quipped to Boone at the Gazette that the process of making a movie now meant “getting in line with the kids from Ryerson film school to plead his case to the brilliant people in charge.”

Rasky made his final film in 2005, Modigliani: Body and Soul, a big-budget project partially funded by philanthropists Joey and Toby Tanenbaum, which aired on TVOntario. His creative pace had slowed, and in 2006, he was entertaining an offer from CBS while working on a project called Pianos Six with his former cameraman, Phil Pendry. Pendry has been trying to secure additional funding from CBC to update Pianos Six, and to get a Rasky retrospective film made, but so far CBC isn’t interested. Rasky’s wife, too, has been struggling to get the pieces of his creative estate together, and eventually wants to donate the material.

One year after his death, it’s still hard to tell what the name Harry Rasky will ultimately mean to Canadian television. Although it isn’t difficult to make an argument for Rasky’s importance in terms of his individuality and his inexhaustible, acclaimed output, the state of modern documentary films and audiences implies that Rasky’s influence may have to be remembered by those who were there to see it happen.

“Harry wanted you to see the subject and tell you as much as he could, and make it interesting,” Arlene says about her husband’s impact on Canadian film and journalism. “He hated that word, ‘documentary’—he said they were generally programs about how to cure syphilis.”

Reality bites, indeed.