When Pat Janes, a former Catholic, mentions how much this United Church differs from her former church, everyone nods. “It’s more community-oriented,” says Barb, Pat’s stepdaughter, visiting from Winnipeg for the weekend. “It’s not as strict,” adds Peters, Barb’s lesbian partner. But the quintet also acknowledges the Church’s biggest problem: churchgoers are dying faster than new ones can join, a common predicament at congregations across Canada. Like most of the people in the pews this week, all five diners at the table are over the age of 45.

In between sips of coffee and bites of cookies, the discussion shifts to The United Church Observer-both Bev and Barb are subscribers. Barb remembers how the Observer, under late editor Hugh McCullum, drew her back to the faith.

Stuck in “one of those phases” of rebelling against the church, a teenaged Barb stumbled upon stories about the Ethiopian famine crisis and left-wing Christianity. With her eyes wide and arms stretched in the posture of reading a double-page spread, she recalls thinking, “If this is what the Church is about, then I’m in.”

Religious publications such as the Observer are staples in the lives of Canadian churchgoers. “Sometimes people find much more meaningful stories in the Observer or in the Anglican Journal than they do in the mainstream media,” says Douglas Todd, a Vancouver Sun religion and ethics writer. By covering stories that secular media ignore and offering followers a place to debate and discuss church-related issues, religious publications maintain a respected position in Canadian journalism. “It’s not a substitute for a daily newspaper, but it’s a supplement,” says Glen Argan, president of the Canadian Church Press association. “Church publications bolster the faith and sometimes they challenge that faith too.”

Although it has gone through several transitions in its 180-year existence, the Observer stands as a shining example among the flock. Editorial independence allows it to run bold stories and free-thinking commentaries that stir the peace in congregations and sometimes influence United Church decisions. But with attendance for most denominations in decline, a pattern has emerged that threatens the relevance of the Observer and magazines like it: with fewer people in the pews, religious publications have fewer readers.

A parking lot separates the Bloor Street United Church from the three-storey Observer office. If not for a sign that screams the magazine’s name, the building could easily be mistaken for a residence. On the mantel above the fireplace in editor and publisher David Wilson’s large second-floor workspace, a bobble-head Jesus stands still. A figurine like this one popped up in a recent United Church recruitment campaign covered extensively (and critically) by the Observer. Sitting on a green couch, Wilson, who has been with the magazine for almost 22 years and at the top of the masthead since 2006, succinctly explains the essence of the Observer: “Independence has been the hallmark of this magazine.”

But the path to editorial freedom took more than a century. The Observer debuted in 1829 as the Christian Guardian. When the United Church of Canada formed in 1925, Methodist, Presbyterian and Congregationalist publications collaborated to produce The New Outlook; then, in 1939, Church leaders hired an editorial staff and changed the magazine’s name to The United Church Observer. The magazine calls itself the oldest continuously published magazine in North America. It’s had only five editors: A.J. Wilson (1939-55), A.C. Forrest (1955-79), McCullum (1980-90), Muriel Duncan (1990-2006) and Wilson. In 1986, the monthly loosened ties with the Church and became independently incorporated. The departure left a scar. “Some of the Church leaders felt we were withdrawing from them,” Duncan admits. “But we were always reporting as if we were independent.” She says the move toward separation began in the late 1960s under Forrest’s guidance. “He started being more critical and departing a bit from where the Church was standing.” When Forrest died, McCullum took things even further. During General Council meetings, for example, he would sit apart from Church leaders to symbolize the separation between the Observer and the Church.

This autonomy puts the Observer-and other indie church titles, such as Geez magazine-in a higher realm than the house organs that dominate most churches. Official periodicals are often fully funded by their denominations, making it difficult to run stories critical of the powers that be. The United Church of Canada, for example, produces two major periodicals: Mandate and the Observer. Daniel Benson, publisher ofMandate, a Church mission quarterly, admits the two magazines have different purposes. “Mandate is an instrument to help the Church,” he says. “The role of the Observer is really captured by its name and that is to offer an arm’s length critical eye and commentary on the world through the Church’s perspective.”

The Observer strikes a balance between covering Church affairs and contentious issues in society at large. It sets aside a section for the brethren’s updates called This United Church, which regularly includes event listings, death notices and classified ads for new ministers and church supplies-as well as touching on budget problems and failed missions. In May 2008, it ran a short piece about a study that showed how aging ministers were crippling the Church’s long-term disability fund. And in December 2008, it looked at how the United for Peace fund was struggling to meet its goal of raising $2 million.

The magazine is not immune to cheerleading, however. Last September’s cover story concerned seven young people “rising to the challenge of leadership” in the church-a soft, feel-good feature not unlike the ones that regularly appear in Mandate. But the same issue also included a feature that sharply compared the United Church’s aging population to the Pentecostal Church’s relatively youthful congregation.

Every now and then, the magazine runs a story that truly sets it apart from its counterparts. On August 28, 2007, the Toronto Sun ran a front-page story about Maggi Montgomery-Heersink, a former United Church minister charged with seven counts of unlawfully solemnizing marriages and seven counts of theft under $5,000. While the Sun article outlined the basics of the case and Montgomery-Heersink’s life, Sabitri Ghosh’s February 2008 piece in the Observer dug deeper, examining both the scandal and the church’s faulty system for screening ministers.

“Montgomery-Heersink’s brief, troubled ministry raises a host of questions,” Ghosh wrote. “Among them: Are the checks and balances for screening prospective ministers working? Are there different ways for different jurisdictions in the church to communicate better? But the most basic question has to be: Who really is the woman behind the smile?”

The story upset some readers. A letter published two months later stated: “It was a good article, but I feel I read it in a newspaper, not the Observer. I didn’t expect the Observer to be part of a process where a Christian is vilified.” With its willingness to assign investigative stories, the magazine has attracted award-winning writers such as Richard Wright, David Macfarlane and Larry Krotz.

Under Wilson’s direction, it typically carries features that look at both church and larger world issues. The November 2007 cover story analyzed a $10.5-million United Church campaign called “Emerging Spirit,” which attempted to entice 30- and 40-somethings to attend weekly services. Kylie Taggart assessed the campaign a year after it launched, touching on everything from the controversial bobble-head-Jesus ads to how the millions were spent. (The Observer also polled its readers: “Is Emerging Spirit working for your church?” Seventy-six percent said no.) In the same issue, Krotz penned an article about the lack of war reporting in countries such as Congo and Zimbabwe. “I write for the Observer because it’s interested in things beyond religion,” says Krotz, who has contributed little to other religious publications. “It’s been a good outlet for the kinds of stories that I like to write, even though by and large, they’re not church-specific stories.”

Running hard-hitting features by experienced journalists has brought acclaim. Over the years, the Observerhas garnered eight honourable mentions and three silver prizes at the National Magazine Awards (Wilson himself received two honourable mentions). At the 2008 Canadian Church Press awards, the Observersnagged 13 victories, including the A.C. Forrest Memorial Award, named after the former Observer editor. The prize goes to the best article about religious ethics and Krotz won for a piece entitled “Death by design” about euthanasia.

Despite this recognition, some critics remain unimpressed by the quality of religious periodicals and say the days when these publications deviated from church beliefs are now long gone. Tom Harpur, who covered religion at the Toronto Star for over a decade, says the Observer had more bite to it under Forrest’s leadership in the late 1960s and early ’70s. Although Harpur read some religious publications during his time at the Star, he has lost interest in most of them. “I follow them from time to time, but I find them rather dull,” he says. “They’re more conservative than they were before. It seems to me they’re more interested in preserving the status quo than taking on controversial issues.”

Aiden Enns, co-editor of national non-denominational magazine Geez, thinks the mainstream media perceive religious magazines as weak, but perhaps with good reason. “They are seen as self-serving and replete with the small agenda of a political institution.” A quarterly launched in 2005 and published out of Winnipeg, Geezhas a small circulation of 2,000 subscribers and targets readers who may be dissatisfied with their place of worship but are still committed to social justice. With stories ranging from an environmental take on a church’s monthly bills to a writer sharing her experience of dating a pastor, Geez has received ample praise and three Western Magazine Awards. Lee Simpson, director of operations for the Observer, calls its approach a “breath of fresh air” in religious publishing. But the feeling isn’t mutual. Enns feels some publications, including the Observer, need to take advantage of their autonomy by publishing more stories that challenge doctrinal beliefs and hold religious leaders accountable.

For his part, Wilson acknowledges there’s room for improvement. “A lot of church magazines don’t have the editorial budget or generate the kind of advertising that a Maclean’s or Chatelaine or Canadian Geographic or any number of publications have,” he says. Lack of funding can lead to fewer in-depth stories, especially when a publication doesn’t have complete control over its content. “If the denomination pays for the magazine, then the denomination gets to call the shots editorially,” Wilson says. “Those factors often add up to the sense that church publications don’t measure up to secular publications.” Still, he insists the Observertackles hot-button parochial issues, as any independent magazine should.

In the summer of 1988, after the United Church decided to include gays and lesbians in the ministry, theObserver tackled the biggest-and perhaps most damaging-controversy for both the Church and the magazine. Duncan says the General Council’s decision on ordination struck chords, both of gratitude and anger, in the hearts of many. “It did divide the Church. There’s no question about it.” Numerous ministers and churchgoers left; rallies and petitions soon followed. The Observer, then edited by McCullum, offered a six-page spread covering the aftermath of the vote. Though the magazine never explicitly took a stand, Duncan says the coverage showed it favoured gay and lesbian ordination. (Prior to the vote, the magazine ran a full-page memoir by an anonymous gay minister’s mother.) Some readers were not pleased, to say the least. One letter to the editor stated, “Your paper is being returned, and any further publications sent to me will be burned.” Wilson says the magazine was just caught in the crossfire. “We took a huge hit in our subscriber base as people who were angry at that decision saw us as the messenger.” Between 1988 and 1989 the Observer lost close to 18,000 subscribers and $41,031 in subscription revenue, though the magazine had been losing subscribers well before this episode.

According to Wilson, subscriptions have been declining for the past three decades. In 1980, the Observerhad over 300,000 subscribers; today, that number sits at around 60,000, and only one in five United Church households receives the magazine. Wilson says too many followers are dying or are no longer able to read due to their deteriorating eyesight or health. “There’s a correlation with declining subscriptions and the decline in the membership of the United Church of Canada.”

That membership began to decrease in the late ’60s. In 1966, the congregation count was at 1,062,006. Statistics from 2006-the most recent year available-show that number dropped by almost half. The aging, disappearing congregation, combined with a lack of interest from youth, has made life difficult for the magazine. After all, if the Church can’t keep a robust membership, what chance does the Observer have of surviving?

Wilson expects some religious publications will fold in the next five years. “Churches or denominations can’t afford to publish them anymore,” he says. “I think that’s unfortunate. I think that the fewer church publications there are, the less variety we have as Canadians.” But he is determined to make sure theObserver stays around. In his time as editor and publisher, he’s marked his territory by changing the look of the magazine. The paper became glossy, and service pieces directed at young families popped up to entice readers in their 30s. Wilson’s arrival in 2006 also coincided with the retirement of five staffers, which allowed him to hire a younger team. During the Christmas holidays in 2007, the circulation department identified 100 churches with low circulation rates and tailored ad campaigns to them. Still, Wilson realizes that solving the publication’s problems will take a lot of time and effort. “It’s not as if there’s one magic bullet,” he says, adding that the magazine must keep producing quality journalism and devising more creative marketing initiatives to slow down the loss of subscribers. While he can’t control the aging population of the Church, Wilson argues there will always be an appetite for Observer stories. “We know that people want the kind of stuff that we do and we just need to do it as well as we possibly can.”

Sarah Fulford had too much to drink last night. Or so she says. Though she claims she’s a little hungover from her “celebration and debauchery,” she shows her usual poise. It’s early evening, November 5, less than 24 hours since Barack Obama made history and Toronto is still abuzz with excitement. But on the second floor of Deer Park Library, in a small room filled with about 30 people (mostly women, all magazine hopefuls) the focus is on Fulford. She’s leading an Ed2010 event on landing your dream job-fitting because last year, at the age of 33, she became editor of Toronto Life magazine.

Tonight, with furrowed brow, glasses and an aura of authority, she looks older. Listening with thoughtful concentration to questions from the audience, she thinks before responding, scrunching up her mouth and nose, half-adorable, half-awkward. She wants to give good advice, but despite the intimate surroundings, she doesn’t want to share too much. When a woman presses Fulford on her biggest mistake, she brushes the question off, admitting only to a recent typo. Unsatisfied, the woman keeps pushing: “There must besomething.” In response, the editor turns the question around. “Do you have an experience you want to share?” she asks the woman. “Is something on your mind?” It’s a joke, of course, but it’s also classic Fulford-clear, bright … and shrewdly evasive.

When the presentation ends, she approaches Marco Ursi, editor of Masthead, offering her condolences for his magazine’s imminent closure. When Ursi admits to telling the same anecdote again and again on a recent media blitz, Fulford responds confidently, “I think with those things it’s best to have your answers and go in there like a politician.” And with that, she bids Ursi farewell and slips out into the night.

In January 2008, nine years after joining the magazine as an associate editor, Fulford reached the top ofToronto Life. She knows what she wants-for herself and for the magazine-but she’s hit a few bumps in her first year on the job. Critics have accused her of sensationalism, of foolishly hiring an art director with no magazine experience and of skewing Toronto Life younger. A magazine whose best-selling covers promote service stories may not be ready for a young iconoclast as its editor, but years of ambition have brought Fulford to where she is today. And she isn’t going to let a few snags stop her from making her mark on the magazine. Ready or not, here comes Sarah Fulford.

With almost 80,000 paid subscribers and (according to MastheadOnline), just over $11 million in revenue last year, Toronto Life is Canada’s most financially successful paid-circulation city magazine. Though it avoids detailing a target demographic-instead describing its audience as “above average” people who “are engaged with the city”-research shows a third of its readers fall into the category of “owner/manager/professional,” and 41 percent hold a bachelor’s degree or higher. At an average age of 45 and with an average household income of $93,381, these people seem to have some discretionary income to toss around and want help spending it. Enter Toronto Life.

Those readers rely on the magazine’s service journalism, specifically its restaurant and wine reviews, and its three annual guides to real estate, eating and drinking, and shopping. Toronto Life‘s September 2007 real estate issue won Cover of the Year at the Canadian Newsstand Awards, selling almost 16,000 single copies for a final sell-through rate of 59 percent (most magazines sell about 35 percent).

The focus on service helps pay the bills, but the lifestyle it’s aimed at generates criticism. While Eye Weekly, Now magazine, Spacing and websites such as Torontoist target a less-affluent demographic,Toronto Life doesn’t shy away from the rich and aspirational. A long-time fascination with Rosedale society and high-priced luxury items leaves some readers feeling the magazine doesn’t represent the Toronto they live in; one whose median family income is just under $60,000, not the $100,000 to $250,000 four young professionals in last year’s money issue said a couple in the city needed to live comfortably.

Despite the alienation some readers feel from its service sections, the 42-year-old magazine is widely praised for its long-form journalism. Last June, it won Magazine of the Year at the National Magazine Awards, along with four gold and two silver medals. John Macfarlane, who manned the mag for 15 years before Fulford’s appointment and for another two years in the early 1970s, accepted the award on Toronto Life‘s behalf.

Although she and Macfarlane weren’t friends until several years ago, Fulford first met him when she was a child. Her father, Robert, was editor of Saturday Night, where Macfarlane was publisher; her mother, Geraldine Sherman, was a CBC Radio producer. This created a household dedicated to telling stories. The family dissected Sherman’s show, State of the Arts, during Sunday brunches, and Fulford remembers often accompanying her father to neighbourhood magazine stores and hauling back two full bags. Still, she never thought she’d be a journalist.

It wasn’t until the summer of 1996, when the recent University of King’s College graduate spent a year exploring her Jewish roots in Jerusalem, that Fulford realized she needed magazines in her life. English-language publications were expensive, but she scoured used-book stores for issues of Harper’s and People.

While Fulford willingly discusses her time abroad, her version lacks the vigour found in Raymond and Hannah, the novel written by her husband, Stephen Marche. Though the pair-who married in a small ceremony at Toronto’s City Hall in 2001-insists the book is fictional, comparisons are inevitable. In Raymond and Hannah, the protagonists hit it off at a party (as Marche and Fulford did) and enjoy a week of hot sex, food and conversation before Hannah leaves to study Judaism at a yeshiva in the Holy City. (“Raymond and Hannah spill it into each other and splash it against the walls of the apartment … with no comfort but flesh. Scream, scream. Scream.”) Back in Toronto, Raymond sends his lover boxes of English-language magazines before he, like Marche, joins her in Israel. When Fulford’s friends were asked about her relationship with Marche, several mentioned his book. Laughed one friend, “I hope they had as good a time as [the characters] did!” Fulford says speculation goes with the territory of being married to a novelist. Nevertheless, when writer Brett Grainger lamented to his friend about the difficulties of airing his personal life in his work, Fulford asked him wryly, “Well, how do you think I feel?”

Back in Canada, Fulford worked at a bookstore before she got her first full-time journalism gig in the fall of 1997. Together with Gabe Gonda, now Saturday Insight editor at the Toronto Star, Fulford edited a University of Toronto student weekly called The Newspaper before becoming an assistant editor at the now-defunctElm Street, doing fact-checking and light editing. A year later, after the launch of the National Post created a job shuffle, she moved to Toronto Life. There, she edited the front of the book for four years, commissioning short pieces, procuring writers and overseeing the magazine’s gossip column, which Fulford admits was a great education in the who’s who of Toronto society. When the magazine published an annotated helicopter photo of Heather Reisman and Gerry Schwartz’s monster-house renovations in 2002, Fulford felt extremely satisfied. “I had that experience of going to parties and having people say, ‘Oh my God, did you read that thing in Toronto Life?'”

In 2003, she won a silver National Magazine Award for the memoir she wrote about her high school music teacher, Graham Wishart. Before being arrested for sexual abuse-related offences in 1991, he taught Fulford, a promising cellist, the value of discipline. “I had never taken anything that serious before in my life,” she says. “And there I was waking up at six in the morning to practice arpeggios … he was behind all of that.” In the feature, her first for the magazine, Fulford detailed the difficulty of reconciling betrayal with gratitude. “Despite the anger, disgust and heartbreak,” she wrote, “I’m still grateful to have been his student.”

Macfarlane says he recognized Fulford’s potential during her first two years at Toronto Life. “I began to see in her a kind of ambition that made me think she may have what it takes to be the editor of This or some other magazine,” he says. Freelance writer Katrina Onstad also took notice. “I think there might be a misperception out there that ‘to the manor born and handed this’ because of her last name or something, but that woman works,” she says. “I would see her on weekends at a café, with all her stuff spread out in front of her and it never looked unhealthy to me. Because most people who work like that, I think they have some sort of deep-seeded sickness or something, but she really loves it.”

It wasn’t easy for those in Fulford’s shadow. “Toronto Life was hard to be at if you weren’t Sarah,” says a former staffer who likened her to a favourite child, and says it felt “like nothing you did was ever going to be recognized.” Fulford, meanwhile, made the most of it. She jokes about “bullying” her way into relationships with Macfarlane, current executive editor Angie Gardos, and former fellow associate editor Gary Ross. “I sat at their feet,” says Fulford. “I asked to see their scraps, I keyed in things for them if they were too busy.” The result was a promotion to senior editor in 2004.

A year later, during a redesign of Toronto Life, Fulford refused to be left out of the process and spent several weeks dissecting city magazines. She produced an eight-page memo of proposed improvements-more changes than Macfarlane had considered making at the time. “For a few minutes,” he says, “I thought, ‘My God, I should have written this memo.'”

In April 2005, Macfarlane told Fulford he was thinking of retiring and that, although he couldn’t guarantee it, he wanted her to become his successor. She would be smart to start imagining what she would do with the magazine.

In August 2006, Fulford and Marche moved to Brooklyn with their infant son after Marche accepted a teaching job at City College in New York City. Fulford continued her work with the magazine, but also seized the opportunity to network and learn from editors in the Big Apple-almost, her close friend Laura Penny suggests, getting a job with The New York Times. (Fulford says there were talks but won’t comment further.)

But she was back in the office soon enough. In 2007, Macfarlane informed the head honchos at Toronto Lifeof his retirement plans and they set out to secure a replacement. Several candidates-including someone from New York-were considered, but on June 15 at the National Magazine Awards, after months of scrutiny, memos and conversations about the magazine’s future, publisher Sharon McAuley offered Fulford the job.

Her first year in charge featured cover stories on stroller wars, house-poor couples, finding the right schools and renovations gone wrong, all prompting the media and readers to take notice: Toronto Life was skewing young.

Some change was inevitable. Instead of a now 67-year-old male at the helm, a woman half Macfarlane’s age was running the show. He hasn’t seen a lot of changes in the magazine, but suggests Fulford is more attuned to pop culture, from which he feels increasingly alienated: “I think she has a connection with, and understands, the thought processes of younger people better than me.” Fulford, however, denies she’s targeting a younger demographic, claiming it’s normal for city magazines to cover topics concerning people in their 30s and 40s. If you die at 80, she says, 40 is actually middle-aged.

But writer Richard Poplak thinks it’s no accident Toronto Life hired a 33-year-old. “If you’re the board, why are you bringing on someone young if you don’t want to skew the magazine? There are a number of highly qualified editors in their mid-50s … obviously they wanted something a bit different.” Onstad, who attacked hipster parents taking over the city in “Baby Wars” and detailed disastrous renovations in “Gutted,” says Fulford, whom she calls “ridiculously young,” wants to bring Toronto Life not just to Rosedale and high society but also to a previously-neglected downtown audience. “Magazines are a living entity and they have to change, they have to be alive to their readers,” the writer says. “North-of-Bloor people won’t be around forever, so she’s got to reflect the changing nature of the city.”

While shaking things up, Fulford rattled some nerves. The cover for December 2008’s “The Immigrant Experience” issue featured a softened Facebook photo of a teenage girl with brown skin and dark hair. Mouth slightly open, arm behind her head, she looks out with a half-demure, half-come-hither stare. It seemed an unusual cover choice because few people would immediately recognize her, but Aqsa Parvez was a 16-year-old Muslim allegedly murdered by her brother and father (the cover line reads, “She refused to wear a head scarf-and paid the ultimate price”).

“Girl, Interrupted,” the story written by Mary Rogan, focused on information from two of Parvez’s best friends and describes Aqsa’s exploration of Western values-removing her hijab, wearing tight jeans, skipping class-as well as her fear of her brother and father. The piece places Aqsa’s murder in the context of the arrest of the Toronto 18 and debates about Shariah law, asking whether Toronto has “become too tolerant of cultural difference.”

From the beginning, the editors anticipated controversy-and they weren’t disappointed. Last fall, a Facebook group created by the Urban Alliance on Race Relations, among others, criticized Rogan’s feature, accusingToronto Life of perpetuating racism and Islamophobia while drawing attention away from domestic violence. By focusing on concerns that “recent waves of Muslim immigrants aren’t integrating, or embracing our liberal values,” the group says the article presumes two types of people: authentic Canadians and backward immigrants. And while Rogan focuses on Aqsa’s school, she neglects to consider its role in the teen’s death, says Farrah Khan, one of the women behind the Facebook group. Instead of following cultural procedures and calling an imam, she says, the school should have called the Children’s Aid Society. “Where was the intervention that would have actually saved this woman?” Why, she asks, wasn’t that addressed in the article? It’s an issue Rogan was particularly concerned about as well. “Personally, I would have liked to have seen the school board’s hand being held to the fire a little bit more,” she says, “and I certainly did that in my research.”

Then there was the cover, which both Khan and co-organizer Michelle Cho call disrespectful. “Do we put sexualized pictures of Jane Creba on the cover of the Toronto Star? Have you ever seen pictures like that?” asks Khan. “No. Why is it that a young woman of colour’s body is treated this way? Why isn’t her body, her death, her life respected?”

But Rogan challenges the rationale behind calling the cover offensive. “It makes me uncomfortable because the suggestion is that women shouldn’t flaunt their sexuality, that they shouldn’t look hot,” she says. “That’s not something I’m comfortable buying into.” When the group called for a day of protest, Fulford-who’s repeatedly said she’s proud of the package-estimated Toronto Life received 80 to 100 calls and e-mails, almost evenly split between positive and negative comments. Describing Aqsa’s story as an extreme example of the clash between Old World and New World that is common in immigrant households, Fulford told This Magazine that questioning the success of immigrant integration was important because “to deny that [Muhammad Parvez’s] religious view and cultural perspective influenced his behaviour is willfully blind.” Besides, she says, it was a question Torontonians were asking.

If they weren’t then, they are now. “We’ve had more page views in one day on our very controversial ‘Girl, Interrupted’ story than in a full month for some of the discontinued blogs,” wrote McAuley in an e-mail. The magazine also created an “Aqsa Parvez Forum.” But after Fulford failed to show up at the Facebook group’s press conference-she says she never attends press conferences and can’t respond to everyone who contacts the magazine-Cho accused the editor of being more interested in selling magazines than creating dialogue. “Clearly she’s unwilling to consider exploring our criticism,” she says. “And I understand, as an editor, she’s going to stand by her magazine. It’s just disappointing.”

When a story for the October issue fell through at the last minute, Fulford commissioned Poplak to write a feature on someone everyone was talking about: Igor Kenk, the bicycle thief. The catch was Poplak had only a week to do the story. Nevertheless, “it was an enormous opportunity and she couldn’t let it go stale,” says the writer, though he admits magazines can’t afford to take such chances too often. When asked if he’s impressed by the gamble, he responds, “Yes. I don’t know-how many editors in the country would do it?”

Not many. Most would prefer to wait until the trial ended and then write a comprehensive feature on the case, or not cover it at all. But through the Kenk and Parvez stories, Fulford has revealed a penchant for tapping into the zeitgeist-or at least trying to. This year, the magazine will change when each issue hits the streets. Instead of coming out the first week of the month before the cover date, it will land on newsstands seven days later (May, for example, will now come out the second week of April). The idea is that by reducing the time between release and cover dates, Toronto Life will be more current and readers will benefit. If the move proves successful, the publication may consider becoming a third-week-of-the-month magazine in 2010, further tightening the gap. But by focusing on timeliness, the magazine may be choosing currency over quality.

Rogan’s story contained few details about Muhammad and Waqas Parvez-she couldn’t speak with them or the family-and Poplak’s story said little the newspapers hadn’t said already. The latter feature was a risk, says Fulford. “Worst-case scenario was [it was] going to be a synopsis of what was already out there with added insight, good writing.” Nevertheless, she justifies the decision with a story: after speaking at a young persons’ development event, Fulford asked several participants who praised the Kenk article whether they’d seen the information before. No, they said, we hadn’t even heard about the guy. But, he was all over the newspapers, said Fulford. Their response? We don’t read newspapers. “And I thought, right. This is an interesting environment in which to be a magazine editor, because I’m producing a magazine for two kinds of readers,” she says, meaning some who subscribe to several newspapers and others who read news online or don’t read newspapers at all. These young people “just thought it was really interesting. And maybe they don’t have confidence that the Star or the Globe or whatever is always going to be really interesting.”

If you want interesting, consider Toronto Life‘s new art director, Jessica Rose. Unlike Fulford, Rose had no experience in magazines before 2008. Instead, at 29, her resumé included stints as art director and curator at The Drake Hotel, as one of the organizers of the inaugural Nuit Blanche and as a performance artist. But Carmen Dunjko, former art director of Saturday Night, recommended Rose to Fulford and the pair met several times as Rose completed various tests, including a redesign of some covers and sections of the magazine. The editor was impressed. “She was just this sort of sponge,” says Fulford. “From one meeting to the next she was closer to a magazine art director than she was the time we had met before. I just saw this increasing growth.”

Rose’s debut came with a bang. The cover of the August issue, which featured a story on gun violence, was adorned with several dozen bullets but devoid of sell lines. It was an unconventional move. “There’s no text saying, ‘These are the five hot new trends,'” says Ursi. “A circulator would see that as a risky proposition.” That Fulford and Rose went ahead with the cover anyway suggests they’re more interested in subscribers than newsstand sales.

Drawing on recent downtown shootings, the story was intended to be a wake-up call, says its writer John Lorinc. Next to the image of a single large bullet, the display copy read: “Violent crime is migrating downtown and innocent bystanders are getting caught in the crossfire. The most alarming thing is our slow but certain acclimatization to it all. How Toronto learned to live with the gun.” Juicy stuff, but not the whole story. In an article for J-Source, a website produced by the Canadian Journalism Project, former Toronto Life blogger Doug Bell criticized the magazine for failing to place these deaths within a larger trend. “The issue is violence, not guns,” wrote Bell. “By conflating the two, Toronto Life gets to leverage its readership by way of the oldest, most reliable editorial draw there is: fear.” It’s understandable but reprehensible, he wrote, that the publication ignored stats suggestingcrime and homicide rates were actually declining.

Lorinc, who’s written for the magazine for 15 years, admits the criticism was valid, but says his editors wanted to focus on random shootings, innocent bystanders and downtown Toronto. “People get worked up on things, not necessarily based on the correct facts,” he says. “So you’re tapping into sentiment and the zeitgeist, whatever that is. I think that a lot of people generally think a lot more about guns because of these incidences.”

She might be a risk-taker, but Fulford’s no fool. Rose offers her an easy way to shake up the magazine without causing too much of a stir. “If you’re at a magazine that’s doing well and that’s sort of a known quantity, and you don’t want to tamper too much with the editorial, then what can you play with?” asksNational Post writer Nathalie Atkinson, Fulford’s friend and production designer back at The Newspaper. “Maybe it’s still going to be Sylvia Fraser writing, but it’s going to be jazzy-looking.”

Years ago, while visiting Fulford at her home, Grainger noticed a photocopied article from The New Yorker, completely dissected and covered with marks. “It was like a clock,” he says, “and she took the whole thing apart and analyzed what made it successful as a piece. That was when I realized, ‘Okay, she’s serious about this. This is an art for her and it’s also a science.'” Several other writers also noted this professionalism. Atkinson says Fulford always made time for constructive criticism, so she could fix things herself. “Because you don’t really want to make the next sentence better,” says Atkinson, “but you want to make the next article you write better.” Onstad praises her friend’s invisible hand, saying, “Her final tweaks would be very, very quiet, but I always knew they were making my work better.”

But not everyone is impressed. After having Fulford as an editor, magazine veteran Wayne Grady says he’s not likely to write for Toronto Life again, adding, “I have never been so severely edited before in my 30 years.” For the June 2007 “Green Edition” issue, Macfarlane asked Grady to write about how global warming would change the city in 30 or 40 years. Fulford edited the piece from New York. At first, she told Grady to make it as long as it needed to be. However, after he gave her a 5,000- to 6,000-word draft, Fulford cut the piece in half, rewriting his lead and removing the quotes from the story. “I had spent a lot of time interviewing people like health authorities and global-warming specialists and she took all of my quotes out of quotation marks and made it sound like I was the one saying the things instead of an expert. It completely changed the story,” says Grady. Later, in an e-mail, he clarifies: “If she didn’t like the story, she could have sent it back with a request that I cut it down to 3,000 words or whatever and do a rewrite. Instead, she did that herself.”

The writer admits it’s possible, “in fact, probable, that I’m not a young writer, not a fresh new voice, and she just wanted to make the piece sound more brash or something. I was trying to back away from the authorial voice, and she wanted more in-your-face kind of writing.”

Grady, who calls himself “a dinosaur,” understands young editors want to develop their own stables of writers. “You get to my age and you’ve been working with certain editors all your life and you wonder ‘what’s going to happen to me now?'” Tellingly, he recounts the time Macfarlane told him he was doing great work in magazines. “Yeah?” replied Grady. “Well, as long as you stay as editor, I’ll stay as writer.” Several months later, Macfarlane announced his retirement.

When Fulford first became editor, she was worried because her contemporaries weren’t reading Toronto Life. “I don’t think the magazine should exist specifically for 30-something professionals,” she says, “but I think they ought to be engaged with the magazine,” as should 20-somethings and seniors. “We can’t afford not to cast the net wide, but I would like to see my peers read it, and I would like to hear them talk about it.”

Part of Fulford’s plan to get readers talking may include an increase in controversy, sex and scandal. Although Penny disputes the idea that the front of the book has changed-saying Fulford’s touch has been present since she first edited the section-online editor Matthew Fox now finds it “pluckier and funnier.” The This City section, now edited by Courtney Shea, has featured profiles on Martina Sorbara (daughter of MPP Greg Sorbara and front woman for the band Dragonette), who sings about sex, boys and infidelity while prancing around in leather, and Air India 182 filmmaker Sturla Gunnarsson, who suggested that if the victims had been “blond-haired and blue-eyed, the bombing would have transformed Canadian society.” In “Guitar Zero,” the author notes Bryan Adams’s run-in at a Toronto International Film Festival after-party when the door staff didn’t recognize him. The kicker is: “Cuts like a knife, don’t it, Bry?” That prompted one reader to call it a “pissy little piece.”

A comparison of two random, somewhat recent issues under Macfarlane-the September 2006 issue on the 10 Best Schools and the January 2007 one featuring George Stroumboulopoulos on the cover-reveals a different front-of-book. The older edition opens with a profile of opera production designer and director Michael Levine, photos from Honest Ed Mirvish’s 65th wedding anniversary and several light pieces on real estate and the film festival. Similarly, the 2007 issue begins with a puff piece on Sara Angel, then the editor of Chatelaine (she received a rougher treatment in February 2008), and includes bits on fashion e-newsletters, Rosedale properties, obese cities and a Q&A with TV pranksters Kenny and Spenny. Nowhere in Macfarlane’s issues is there the same piss and vinegar that now thrives in Toronto Life.

Gardos says Fulford’s first year has led to an increase in letters to the editor, an indicator that the buzz has grown. Lorinc has noticed a greater premium on controversy. “I think Sarah has more of a taste for it and I think she wants to get people reading the stories and talking about them and debating them.” Although indifference is the enemy, he says, controversy isn’t a danger-free strategy-editors have to get things right.

But at least it keeps things lively. Penny says Fulford is “really, really gossipy,” in the best possible way and that’s a great way for a magazine editor to be. “Gossip is social anthropology, and I think it gets a bum rap.”

Although 2008 was Fulford’s first year as boss, she’s wielded power there for years. Having played an integral role in the 2005 redesign, it’s not likely she’ll overhaul the entire publication. Last fall, Atkinson noticed slight changes but didn’t believe there was a huge difference editorially. “You have some of the same writers who’ve been stalwarts of the magazine for years, doing the same beats they’ve covered for years. You can’t throw everything out. The formula works.” However, by January of this year, she said Fulford’s vision was beginning to assert itself.

While a number of writers and editors have suggested it is too early to conclusively say how Fulford’s hand will shape Toronto Life, her grip is certainly becoming firmer. Before the new year, the editor repeated several times that she hadn’t yet been in charge for a full 12 months. But as Fulford enters her sophomore year, she’s ready for the scrutiny: “They can judge if they want to judge.”

Being new to the position, coming from within, never having run a magazine before, being Toronto Life‘s first female editor and one of its youngest ever all make for a tremendous amount of pressure on Fulford. “But,” says Gardos, “any new editor at the magazine would be watched like a hawk, by the media and by the magazine-reading community.” Although Fulford declares an ardent allegiance and responsibility to readers, she shuns pressure from elsewhere. “Barack Obama has a lot of pressure,” she says with a smile. “Louise Arbour at The Hague had a lot of pressure on her. Ben Bernanke has a lot of pressure on him. This is a significant job in the life of the city and it’s an important publication and it’s an honour and it’s a lot of fun.” But, she adds, “It’s also a magazine.” Notice she didn’t say “just a magazine.” Because, coming from Sarah Fulford, you wouldn’t believe her if she did.

$5 Million

40,000 Daily Copies

317 Editions

137 Locked-Out Employees

115 Striking Staffers

15 Months

12 Replacement Workers

1 Powerful Union Tactic

The inside story of the labour-management conflict at Le Journal de Québec

A burly security guard lifts a panel of metal fencing, carries it a couple of feet, and sets it down next to another panel. It’s Sunday, April 22, 2007, and he’s one of about 10 guards piecing together a barrier around a concrete and pink-brick building in an industrial Quebec City neighbourhood. A white sign mounted on the building’s facade reads “Le Journal de Québec: N° 1, Bravo et merci!” thanking the staff for making the daily the most popular paper in the city.

The guards, who wear coats with “Sécurité Kolossal” across the back, are almost finished laying out the line that Journal de Québec employees are not to cross. Attached to the fence is a lockout notice-as of 9 a.m., Sun Media Corporation, a subsidiary of Quebecor Inc., has prohibited 137 editorial and office staff from coming to work. Later that same day, the 115 members of the printing staff who have also been in negotiations will vote to join their colleagues and declare a strike, leaving three union groups-totalling 252 employees-on the street.

The next morning, the managers bus in past the metal fence and the security guards. Camera crews and reporters from other media organizations expected sign-wielding workers, but only Denis Bolduc, the spokesperson for the three union groups, shows up. A thickset and passionate man, Bolduc often seems to be on the verge of tears, either from anger or excitement. Addressing the cameras, he reproaches the employer.

“There’s no picket line today at LeJournal de Québec,” he says. “It’s a choice we made to show how ridiculous the situation is.”

Puzzled, the local media try to find the locked-out workers and spot them all over town-covering press conferences, taking pictures and asking questions as they normally would. Eric Thibault is at the courthouse following a story. He brushes off reporters’ inquiries about why he is there and not picketing. When a TV camera turns his way, he smiles enigmatically. Quebec City’s airwaves are awash with rumors about what the employees are up to. Could they be creating a blog? A weekly newsletter?

Two days after the lockout started, union members appear all over town handing out 40,000 copies of the city’s first free daily, MédiaMatin Québec, to commuters in their cars and on buses, as well as delivering copies to radio stations, getting airtime on all of the morning shows. MédiaMatin is a 24-page tabloid with big colour pictures and local stories. The front page of the first issue boasts an attention-grabbing photo of a tattooed guy in a white undershirt, holding his clenched fist to the camera, his knuckles scarred with red wounds and stitch marks. He’s wearing a gold and silver ring, and chains around his wrist and neck. The headline reads: “Quebec street gangs-enemy number one.”

The story, written by Thibault, highlights the creation of a special police squad to deal with street gangs. It’s an appropriate symbol. This first edition marked a standoff that would last longer than anyone expected, a bare-knuckled brawl between Sun Media’s Le Journal de Québec-number one,bravo et merci-andMédiaMatin, the upstart paper that became Sun Media’s, and Quebecor’s, bête noir.

By adamantly refusing to stop doing their jobs, the employees made a lot more noise than they would have marching around the building with signs and loudspeakers. New communications technology has reduced picket lines into little more than symbolic gestures because replacement workers no longer need to physically cross them. MédiaMatin was a creative and intelligent response. It challenged Quebecor by remaining on the beat and maintaining the strong connection to the city that newspaper journalists forge. The employees didn’t deprive their readers by cutting off services-instead they gave them more to read since Le Journal also kept publishing during the strike. The reporters maintained relationships with sources and continued to cover local stories. Finally, they kept tabs on the people who were doing their jobs but who never needed to set foot in the concrete and pink-brick building in that industrial neighbourhood of Quebec City. Facing a threat to their livelihoods and their craft, the employees showed everyone just how vital their work was to the city.

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

From her desk overlooking the Parliament Buildings and beyond to Gatineau, Anne McIlroy is secretly collecting shiny objects. Little pieces of information that, by themselves, are not particularly significant. They slide innocuously into plain brown folders and remain hidden from the world until she can find the unifying concept that will consolidate them into a story worth telling. The brown folders pile up to her left, paper peeking out haphazardly. It’s a slow process-this file has been growing for almost a year. McIlroy isThe Globe and Mail‘s science reporter, and right now she’s fascinated by evolutionary developmental biology, or evo-devo, the study of how the genes that control an embryo’s development have changed or retained their function over time. But she can’t quite make a compelling case for the feature-length article she so badly wants to write. Years on the science beat have taught her there’s no point mentioning an underdeveloped story to her editors-without a hook to lure readers, they’re not interested. So she’s waiting, squirreling knowledge away, until she comes across the hook that will enable her to pitch the idea.

With print space at a premium, devoting precious column inches to “hard” science stories is a luxury few newspapers enjoy. The Globeis unusual in retaining a science writer: most papers rely on wire copy from Reuters or AP, or delegate to a general assignment reporter. Unlike its U.S. counterparts, The Canadian Press employs no dedicated science writers. Editor-in-chief Scott White would like to have a reporter on the beat full-time, but that would mean scaling back coverage in other areas. Big-picture and ideas-based science is a hard sell to an audience that, for the most part, hasn’t had any science education since Grade 12. Still, these kinds of pieces appear regularly. It’s just that they’re disguised. If you look for it, you’ll find science behind stories about current events such as a tsunami, tainted-food crisis or Canada’s asbestos policy. “They don’t call it science journalism, but it’s dealing with scientific issues,” says Margaret Munro, a science writer with close to 30 years experience who now works for Canwest News Service. At the same time, health and environment stories covered by reporters on those beats are on the rise, popular because they translate science into information readers can use, science that directly applies to their lives.

“So what?” you might ask. Does it matter that readers aren’t getting much “straight science”? The science they do get is woven into the background of other stories or covered only when there’s a direct “What’s in it for me?” health or environment hook. But it doesmatter, because approaching science this way is a bit like covering the economy only in personal finance stories: frame the big picture issues as too hard to understand, too complex to report, and you end up with a lot of small stories that, while not entirely without merit, don’t really add up to much. As we slide further into the 21st century, science underlies decisions made at every level, from choosing between vitamin brands to allocating federal funds. But, science’s advocates say, if journalists and editors persist in ignoring the big issues until there’s a “news you can use” hook for individual readers, we may end up missing the chance to influence policy and behaviour on issues that can affect not only individuals, but all of humanity.

Case in point: climate change. Seventeen years ago, international scientists-including 99 Nobel Prize winners-issued the “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” outlining the impending dire environmental crisis. “This was a frightening document,” says renowned Canadian scientist David Suzuki. “But if this was a frightening document, the response of the media around the world was terrifying. There was no response. In Canada, our so-called national newspaper, The Globe and Mail, didn’t bother to report it. The CBC, our national broadcaster, didn’t think it was important enough to bother talking about. Excuse me, over half of all Nobel prize winners telling us we could have as little as 10 years to avoid a total catastrophe, and this is not newsworthy?” No coverage equalled no public consciousness on climate change until a decade later when melting ice caps and drowning polar bears came to the fore. In the meantime, we had severely diminished our collective ability to mitigate global warming.

Evo-devo is heavily rooted in genetics, developmental biology and evolutionary theory-not exactly light fare to present to readers with their morning coffee. McIlroy wants to make sure her story will interest her readers, but if her editors don’t see the value, she’ll never get the chance to tell them about amazing advances and discoveries. As one researcher told her, we have the potential to someday create “a human with 60 back vertebrae or six limbs.” Understanding how an organism’s body forms the right parts at the right time has significance beyond medical applications such as preventing developmental disorders; it could even tell us how one species became another. Explaining the experimental process of executing such mind-boggling feats excites McIlroy, but she sometimes worries she’s become too involved with a topic, that she’s the only one who thinks the story is appealing.

“You can’t make people eat peas,” says Peter Calamai, long-time Toronto Starscience reporter and a founder of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association. “You can’t make people read about something just because it’s good for them.” But is a lack of interest in peas the fault of the cook or the diner? Bonnie Schmidt, president of Let’s Talk Science, a scientific educational agency, says that in our culture it can be a point of pride to be science-phobic. “There’s almost this coolness around math and science phobia,” she says. “You wouldn’t want to come out publicly and say ‘I don’t want to read’ or ‘I can’t read.’ There’s a stigma to that, but there’s almost a coolness to saying, ‘Ugh, didn’t do well in science, just don’t get it, can’t do math to save my life.'” Stephen Strauss, former Globescience writer and current author of cbc.ca‘s “Science Friction” column, says that understanding science is fundamental to fostering an informed society. But the news media neglect it in favour of politics, economics and gossip, adding that our current world view and attitude towards science makes us “cavemen in the 21st century.”

Even some people you’d expect to be advocates for science coverage see the merit of the “news you can use” approach. Tom Spears, who covers the beat for the Ottawa Citizen, says he doesn’t believe in scientific journalism, which might seem strange, given the kinds of stories he writes. He’s been sealed in a DC-9 flying 10,000 metres over northern Michigan, one of two journalists invited on a NASAtraining flight that simulates weightlessness. He’s written about ancient oceans on Mars, and he’s reported on the squirrelpox virus in the U.K. Still, he thinks science journalism is just reporting and storytelling, like any other beat. So when that DC-9 landed in Cleveland, he filed a story describing the experience and explaining why NASAdoes it, instead of shoehorning in details about the physics of zero G or projectile kinetics of the flight path. He wrote that “the reasons for the shuttle missions can make eyes glaze over … testing new ways of growing crystals for the semiconductor industry in space just doesn’t grab headlines.”

Spears prefers to talk about the scientists themselves, rather than detail their work. He says that if he’s not particularly fascinated by the technicalities, his editors are even less so. Other reporters at the Citizenare so math and science illiterate, Spears says, they come to him with questions about how to calculate basic percentages. His blog, Dark Matter, suggests that we “skip the heavy lifting in science” and just focus on what’s cool, what grabs attention, and what affects us directly. “People want to hear who got murdered and are taxes going to go up,” he says. “If you go too heavily into the details, readers aren’t going to remember it.”

As McIlroy builds her evo-devo file, she works on other stories. Today, it’s a shorter piece about researchers in the U.S. who’ve found a Tyrannosaurus rexskull with some of its ancient tissue still intact. Dino stories always play well, and this is a prime opportunity to get on page A3. In search of an outside voice on the discovery, she extracts her phone from under a drift of paper and calls Hans Larsson, a McGill-based paleontologist. He’s a terrific media personality, able to relate the most complex ideas in layman’s terms with perfect analogies. She gets her answers and asks her standard parting question: “What else are you working on?” He’s been examining sets of genes that determine how different species develop over evolutionary time. Experimentally, he’s monkeying around with gene expression in chicken embryos in an effort to make them grow dinosaur-like tails. It’s not what she’d call an instantaneous “eureka moment,” but in the following days McIlroy can’t get Larsson’s words out of her head. And finally it gels: she’s found the hook for her evo-devo story, and with a Canadian connection to boot.

It’s not the typical way a science story develops-at least not for many on the science beat. These days, reporters are far more likely to be trolling the internet and scanning peer-reviewed journals such as Science,Natureor PNASas well as hundreds of electronic articles from lesser-known journals. Then there’s EurekAlert, a news aggregation service that compiles scientific press releases from universities and research centres, journals and government agencies and dumps them in the media’s electronic lap. Canwest’s Munro blames this pipeline for making science reporting predictable and focused solely on discoveries. In a recent talk she gave, she counted instances of the word “breakthrough” in EurekAlert headlines and found over 3,200 in just two years; she had also counted more than 2,000 mentions of “landmark studies” in “prestigious journals.” “The media play the game,” she says. “We pick up this stuff. But who’s wagging who here?” Current coverage emphasizes reporting on important findings, often to the detriment of explaining the results and providing context. “I sort of think of them as pointillism, the style of painting where they paint with dots, like Seurat,” says Helen Branswell, one of CP’s two medical writers. “I think that a study is like a dot. It’s a piece of information. We paint the dot-but what we’re not really good at is painting the picture.”

That’s a point of view confirmed in the research of Stephen Ward, former director of the University of British Columbia’s graduate school of journalism. Ward’s work shows that the vast majority of science story ideas come from the press-release pipeline, and this means less and less first-hand reporting on local scientists. It doesn’t help that many scientists don’t show much interest in having their work publicized by the mainstream media. Eric Taylor, a professor of zoology at UBC, researches speciation and hybridization of native fish populations, and conservation of biodiversity. He says although conservation is a hot topic right now, he doesn’t actively promote his findings to journalists. He makes himself available if reporters are interested in his work, but rarely issues press releases. “There’s a certain reticence in science to do that because it sounds a bit like self-promotion,” he says. Scientists tend to look down on colleagues they see “blowing their own horn.”

This may be a uniquely Canadian attitude. An international study published in the July 2008 issue ofScienceconcluded that despite “perceptions of ‘barriers’ to a more active involvement of scientists in public communication or of a ‘gap’ between science and journalism … interactions between scientists and journalists are more frequent and smooth than previously thought.” Sixty-four percent of scientists surveyed from France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States responded that they had been interviewed by journalists at least once in the past three years. However, Seed‘s December issue featuring “The State of Science 2008” found that, when asked how they would describe their interactions with the media, 65 percent of scientists responded they have no interaction. Twenty-six percent answered that their interactions were positive, and nine percent negative. The conflicting results are further proof of the journalistic truism that you can find a study to support anything.

I want to do a story on a guy who’s turning chickens into dinosaurs,” says the disembodied voice from the black teleconferencing unit in the middle of the table. The Globe‘s Focus section editors and writers gathered in the Toronto meeting room are silent. Few of them have a science background-like most journalists, their educations focused on English, history or journalism-but that makes them good representatives of their non-scientific readership. McIlroy waits, then keeps talking, trying to make her case from Ottawa with no idea if she’s bombing or not. Do they think I’m crazy? she thinks. Are they making faces at me? When the conference call concludes, she speaks to her handling editor, Julie Traves, to find out whether the editors genuinely like the idea. Traves assures her that they’re keen, and McIlroy’s relieved, because after a year of planning, “if they’re not interested, they’re not interested. What can you do?”

McIlroy’s colleagues aren’t unique in their lack of scientific training-even science journalists typically don’t have a science background. Ward and his team at UBC interviewed 25 print reporters and editors in an effort to determine how they’ve been trained, whether they have a science education, how they find their stories and what sources they rely on. The group found that 80 percent of science journalists (whether or not they’re labelled as such) did not have a degree in science. Ward says this lack of education means reporters don’t feel qualified to ask tough questions of scientists or to be critical of their work. The result is a reluctance to evaluate the importance of scientific findings, which leads to what Ward calls “stenography journalism,” where reporters merely regurgitate what they’ve been told or pick lighter stories over more complex ones. “You do too many quirky stories because you don’t feel you can do the serious stories,” says Ward. “We need to critically question scientific information today as much as we question political information or any other form of information.”

McIlroy came from a math- and science-focused high school and took courses in biology, ecology, sociobiology and genetics along with journalism at Carleton University. Initially hoping to do a double major in biology and journalism, she started at the Citizenin her third year, leaving only enough time to finish the journalism degree. Entering university during the economic recession of the early 1980s, she was hoping her knowledge of science would make her a valuable commodity within the journalism industry. She was right. Her familiarity with the scientific world enables her to fearlessly pick up the phone and ask the nuanced questions that make her pieces rich. She is exceptional in her ability to get the details in the story-including how her subject did what they did-and not just the attention-grabbing results. Peter Calamai says the “how” is one of the first things to go when trimming a story, along with names of coauthors and information on who funded the work. “That accounts for a lot of the reason people are unsatisfied after they’ve munched a science story or eaten their science goody for the day,” he says. “It’s all presented as something magical.”

McIlroy’s brand of ambitious, detail-oriented and engrossing real-time coverage is the kind of reporting Adam Bly wants to encourage. Bly is a man on a mission to convince the world that “science is culture.” The Montreal-born Bly-founder, editor-in-chief and CEOof Seedmagazine and Seed Media Group-is often airborne, bringing his vision to Washington, Dubai, Mexico City, Beijing, Cape Town, Sharm El Sheikh and New York. Today he’s descended to address the Science and Technology Awareness Network (STAN) conference in Ottawa. It’s a densely foggy morning in early November; provincial flags hang limp and dripping on their poles outside the windows of the National Arts Centre. The 120 attendees duly don nametags and sip conference coffee as they settle into chairs at round banquet tables, the fog somehow dampening the atmosphere in the entire room. Introductions are made and Bly, in a perfectly tailored, narrow-fitting black suit and sharp-looking white shirt, no tie, takes the dais.

He speaks of a worldwide revolution with science as the engine driving cultural, economic and developmental change. A 21st century renaissance. People perk up. He reminds them that every aspect of their lives relies on the products, both tangible and theoretical, of the scientific method. “And yet,” he warns, “the promise of science cannot be met unless we find ways of engaging 6.7 billion people, and not one person less, in the cause of science, in the convictions of science, in the methodologies and philosophies of science.” As he speaks, the fog lifts both outside and in. But, he continues, we’re not there yet. When asked if journalists are performing satisfactorily, he is unequivocal: “No. No. No. No. No, or I wouldn’t have done this. No, and it’s not because there are bad people doing it, and it’s not because they don’t get it. It’s because they’ve been doing it a certain way for a long time and that works,” he says. “It’s not as if there’s been a total failure of the science media establishment in the last 60 years. We’ve seen great output. I’m just saying that today, in that world that I see, I think it requires a new approach to media.”

This approach involves awakening to science’s integral role in how we live and appreciating it as the only way forward. It means unabashedly covering science in a manner that educates readers to its potential. And readers are getting it. Seedenjoys about 130,000 subscriptions and bimonthly newsstand purchases, and in two years its online affiliate scienceblogs.com has grown to 120 blogs read by over two million people monthly. Claims Bly: “It’s the largest conversation about science on the web.”

And that scientific curiosity isn’t limited to geeks, argues Clive Thompson, a Canadian magazine writer based in New York, who’s written about science for Wired, The New York Times Magazine and New York. “The amount of really dense science in pop culture is freaking astounding,” he says, referring to the popularity of shows such as CSI: Crime Scene Investigation and its spinoffs, in which investigators rely on science to break absurdly convoluted cases. “People are excited about some of this stuff.” And there’s a market for science as entertainment. Stephen Hawking appears on The Simpsonsand is part of the show’s line of action figures. Discovery Channel programs like MythBustersthat use science to debunk or support urban legends are popular. Even New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art is hip to science: a 2008 exhibit called Design and the Elastic Mind featured art, furniture and architecture designed to reflect recent advances in science and technology. “These guys are not doing this because it’s good for humanity. This is because it’s hot. This is simply because it sells,” says Bly. (Not everyone agrees; David Suzuki sees it as a disservice to serious science. “It was hopeful when channels like Discovery, Animal Planet and National Geographic started, since they covered natural history very well, but each has ended up with those incredible animals or the deadliest snakes or the biggest trucks,” he complains in an e-mail. “All spectacular stuff serving testosterone-driven young males.”)

But as “real” science attracts a following online and in the pages of Seed, and pop science is a hit on television, neither seems able to gain a foothold in mainstream news. Not so long ago, both the Toronto Starand National Postdedicated pages primarily, if not entirely, to science. At the Post, the Discovery pages featured ideas from across academia that could change the way Canadians thought about the world. Initially the section had only a few dedicated writers-notably Margaret Munro writing about science, and Andy Lamey writing about everything else. Toward the end of Discovery’s life, the science component increased to more than 50 percent. Like a phoenix, the pages died and re-emerged several times between 1998, when the paper launched, and the pages’ ultimate disappearance in 2005. “Scientists would tell me, ‘My God, you guys are so on top of it! I can actually go to the Postto get science news!'” says Munro. Karen Zagor created Discovery from a blank sheet and edited it on and off until 2004. When it finally died in a round of cutbacks, only she and Munro mourned. There was little protest from the general reader-ship or the scientific community.

The Star‘s managing editor, Joe Hall, says science stories always score well on reader surveys, but he doesn’t place much stock in such responses. Peter Calamai calls it the “halo effect” when readers give
responses they think make them look good, or in this case, smart. “Certain subjects score relatively high because readers believe that a newspaper should cover the subject-whether they actually read them or not,” says Hall. But whether readers believe their papers should cover science or whether they just think that wanting science coverage makes them look smart, they’re acknowledging the importance an under-
standing of science has in making them informed citizens. Though it’s hard for skeptical editors to imagine, readers may genuinely want to read about what’s happening in organic chemistry or astrophysics.

It’s fall 2007 and Anne McIlroy is standing in Larsson’s lab at McGill watching him operate on chick embryos. He implants them with a tiny bead coated in proteins in the hopes that they will grow big, primitive-looking tails. Having conducted two preliminary interviews with Larsson by phone, she knew she needed to travel to Montreal to get this scene. It’s a concrete image, something real that will hook readers and entice them to continue reading through the fascinating but complex details of evo-devo. After a year’s work, she’s finally got the full package to deliver to her editors-captivating topic, news element, Canadian character and sheer wow factor. On November 3, 2007, the story runs to 3,000 words on the front page of the Globe‘s Focus section. Over at the Star, Peter Calamai is amazed-he would never have tackled anything that complex or tried to get so much scientific detail past his editors. “You don’t have the luxury anymore of just putting something in the paper about some rarefied aspect of science for the 20 percent of the people who might read it,” he says. But McIlroy sees it as part of the job, and proves that with the right recipe, even peas can be tasty. “If you ask people if they want to read a story about physics, they’re going to say no,” she says. “But if you write about how there’s this big collider that could theoretically create tiny black holes that might swallow the world, they’re going to read it. You just have to make it interesting and you’ll get them.”

“The facts are just lying there, without a life of their own, without some kind of interpretation,” he tells me. “That’s what writers do.” And he’s getting ready to do it. Corcoran spins his particular brand of pro-market interpretation into three columns a week for the Financial Post‘s FP Comment page. But today he’s behind schedule. “I have the worst deadline discipline of anyone,” he says. With three hours to deadline, he’s staring at a blank screen.

Which is not to say his mind’s blank. No reader could doubt the vigour of Corcoran’s opinions. He shares views on business and policy with small-government conservatives-not even the recent economic meltdown has shaken his faith-but he’s no one’s toady. He has attacked Alberta’s Conservative government on oil royalties and Prime Minister Stephen Harper for “incremental conservatism.” Corcoran’s unapologetic stance and bombastic style make me wonder if any person could really be as bellicose in real life, or are his friends right when they tell me he’s actually an unassuming man? His rock ’em-sock ’em style of punditry doesn’t exactly set him apart-there are plenty of bombasts out there. He is, however, an excellent example of a small cohort of columnists whose work rests neither on their various biases nor on their fluent wordsmithery, but on the strength of their commitment to research. The question becomes, is Corcoran a fire-breathing ideologue or a mild-mannered gentleman? The answer is, yes.

We expect columnists to be provocative and contrarian while giving their readers a particular take on the news. What’s not always clear is how much work lies behind the page. “I’m not saying it’s as hard as working in a coal mine,” says The Globe and Mail‘s National Affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson. But according to Corcoran, even a piece that reads as a rant may have required days of interviewing, background reading and web-crawling.

“Have you been in his office? You’ve seen all the files?” asks Derek DeCloet, a Globe business columnist. “He’s been doing this for so long that he has this incredible institutional memory. Here’s a guy who’s really not pulling it out of his ass.”

Yes, I’ve been to his office, on the December day when Harper appealed to Canadians for support, his government hanging in the balance following an economic update almost universally acknowledged as a massive mistake. Not so acknowledged in this office, though, because Corcoran’s advice will be titled “Why the PM must persist.”

At 3:15 p.m., Corcoran’s phone rings. It’s an Ottawa source-we’ll call him Ken-at the Ministry of Finance. Studying Minister Jim Flaherty’s fiscal update, Corcoran has been bothered by what looks like an accounting trick used to exaggerate the surplus. Seems future sales of assets are shown as current income. Ken, Corcoran thinks, will explain all: “He knows all the numbers backwards and forwards.”

The conversation is short, but not shallow.

“Okay, but why are you using this accounting? It’s not normal practice, is it?”

Ken takes a moment to explain. Corcoran’s eyes narrow just a bit behind unfashionably large square-rimmed glasses. There’s the slightest hint of a sigh. “I was hoping there would be a better explanation for it than that.”

Ken will get back to him.

Okay. As he waits, Corcoran browses the websites of the major parties for their perspectives on the update. The printer whirs to life, and I pass printouts across the desk. Odd: I’m watching one of Canada’s foremost advocates of small government surf the NDP’s homepage.

* * *

A bit after four, Corcoran still waits for Ken’s second call, but his fingers start pecking at the keyboard:

Let me explain. Into the grand fable of their attempt to take control of Ottawa, the opposition coalition and its backers have woven an imaginary tale of Tory economic negligence. They were at it again yesterday ….

* * *

Corcoran began his career at the now-extinct Ottawa Journal in 1968 and has been a business reporter or columnist ever since joining The Canadian Press in 1971. Corcoran moved through TheGazette, Financial Times of Canada, the Financial Post and the Globe, where for 10 years he had a column four times a week in the Report on Business section. When the National Post launched in 1998, he was recruited as editor of the Financial Post section, where he runs the FP Comment page. All that time, he’s been one of the country’s most prominent libertarians, advocating for the abolition of the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC), criticizing government policies that tried to make Nortel a “national champion,” attacking dairy price supports as a “heist” and famously denouncing both scientists and policy makers as a skeptic of climate change.

All this in a bracing style that separates him from the abundant supply of pro-market pundits mostly spawned well after he started writing. Corcoran’s career began before the post-war liberal hegemony ended with the elections of Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States. Like one of Darwin’s finches, Corcoran carved out a niche early and found that success followed.

There are plenty of other finches out there, of course, and the species Columnist canadensis has plenty of room for diversity. Toronto Star editorial page editor Ian Urquhart says, “There are whimsical columns, personal columns, humour columns, all of them have different demands.” Current-events columnists need research, he says, to gain authority. “Otherwise your writing is all ‘it seems’ and filled with hedging.” Corcoran, who describes his own style as “categorical,” isn’t much for hedging.

“Categorical” often riles readers, and feedback is immediate in the internet age. Heather Mallick’s cbc.cacolumn about U.S. vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin last September unleashed a flood of vicious abuse: “I summed it up, ‘you fucking Muslim-Jewish-whore-bitch,'” she says. Corcoran’s critics, including Richard Littlemore of the environmentalist website desmogblog.com, use less graphic language, but are no less committed as debunkers of the columnist’s fellow travellers-gadflies such as rogue atmospheric physicist S. Fred Singer and science skeptic Steven Milloy. As the editor of the Financial Post, Corcoran has even run their op-ed pieces. “These are villains of the worst order,” says Littlemore. “Fred Singer will deny anything you like.”

Littlemore isn’t alone when he labels Corcoran’s work on the topic “highly irresponsible.” Physicist Richard Peltier, director of the Centre for Global Change Science and a lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s “2007 Assessment Report,” considers Corcoran’s repeated references to recent cold temperatures simply stupid: “He doesn’t seem to realize that the reason this winter has been so cold is because we’re in La Niña right now.” Though Corcoran has, in fact, written about La Niña, Peltier considers him “not a knowledgeable person. But he insists on giving his opinion, and ignorant opinion is of no value at all.”

* * *

Ken still hasn’t called, but Corcoran’s fingers tap away steadily now:

… Nor is there much truth in the media’s caricature of Stephen Harper as an arrogant strategic dolt whose monumental economic and political blunder has plunged his government, the country and the economy into a crisis.

* * *

Doug Kelly, the Post‘s editor-in-chief, strides through the door and bellows, “That’s it, Terry, I want you to pull out all the stops and really stick it to the pinkos! Like we always do!” It takes me a half-second too long to realize Kelly has staged this display as fun for my benefit. What’s actually happening is that Kelly is moving Corcoran’s column from FP Comment to the paper’s front page. This means at least two things. First, a hard limit of 850 words. Second, an extra hour to finish this thing.

People who have worked with Corcoran tell me that his public writings don’t match the private man. As theGlobe‘s Margaret Wente puts it: “In print, he’s absolutely fierce and uncompromising. But in person, like many columnists, he’s an introvert. He’s kind of shy and self-deprecating. Gentlemanly, even.”

I can see a clear difference between the man across the desk who has difficulty writing while I watch him and the persona on the page who’s so busy excoriating the left. Behind those glasses, his eyes dart from the screen to me and back, and his shyness has been clear since that moment of hesitation when I first asked how he writes columns that drive those on the left and in the scientific community to distraction. Through months of phone calls, e-mails, and in-person interviews, I’ve begun to realize he’s not worried about criticism, but cherishes his privacy, and a modicum of control over exposure. Yesterday evening, he left a voicemail message attempting to place “conditions” on my watching him at work (he wanted me to quote at least half of his column) but this morning, he tells me he didn’t mean it the way it sounded. He just thought it would make sense to include half of the column I planned to watch him write.

Most of this is probably a matter of comfort level. He’s a writer, not a performer. On camera, Corcoran could be a more erudite Bill O’Reilly, or Sean Hannity with a greater vocabulary, but without the shamelessness and with more daylight between him and the nearest conservative party. That’s not to say he lacks hubris: where many columnists publish regular mea culpa collections admitting mistakes, Corcoran says he has done it just once in his 10 years at the Post-to mark the paper’s anniversary last October, when the apologies included one to Wente for having mocked her critiques of Palin. In an era of growing government activism to cool the climate and thaw frozen markets, Corcoran doesn’t worry about history passing him by: “It could certainly head in the wrong direction, though.”

* * *

Finance finally calls back at 4:30: a second source on the fiscal update. Corcoran remains skeptical of the official’s explanation of what exactly is included in the revenue item for asset sales. “I still don’t understand what this means,” he says. He listens. Then: “Okay, so it isn’t ‘normal’ after all,” and listens again in silence, nodding and taking notes. Finally: “Okay. I get it. Thanks.”

Corcoran hangs up. “A total waste of time,” he tells me. “They used numbers in a way they shouldn’t have, but they add up. I don’t know if it will be useful, but it becomes a kind of obsession, just wanting to know what’s going on.”

* * *

He returns to his keyboard:

The whole production is a page from the work of the greatest academic authority on the subject, Princeton philosopher Harry Frankfurt, author of the 2005 bestseller, On
Bullshit. Liars, says Prof. Frankfurt, need to know the truth. Bullshitters, interested solely in advancing their own agenda, have no use for the truth. They just make things up so as to win over their audience ….

* * *

It’s now 7:30 and, at this point, Corcoran would already be late for his own section. But he’s watching the TV addresses by the PM and the opposition leaders just in case any of them say anything notable. They don’t. So he hits send, e-mailing the column to deputy editor Stephen Meurice. The reference to asset sales is brief and uncritical. Doesn’t he find it significant that Harper’s government is using numbers in a way it “shouldn’t” have? It just wasn’t relevant, he will tell me later, and there wasn’t space.

Meurice doesn’t question the piece’s reporting or conclusions. No one else does either. And the copy editor barely touches it. This is Terence Corcoran after all. Nobody bats an eye at the use, in a front-page column-twice, in paragraph four-of the word “bullshit.”

By August 21, the quiet recall takes an alarming turn. “Listeria-a nightmare in a processing plant” squealsThe Globe and Mail. Its article claims that listeria is a bacterium more fatal than salmonella. Stories seem divided on whether the number of ill people is “16” or “dozens,” but reports ominously agree “more cases are expected.” By August 23, no one is safe. “Man, 64, was served tainted food in hospital,” alerts page A1 of the Calgary Herald. The finger pointing also begins that day. “Health worries surfaced long before any meat was recalled,” reports the Prince George Citizen, suggesting faulty food-safety systems are the culprit.

Maple Leaf goes from the frying pan to the fire on August 24, when the CFIA’s test results trace the outbreak to a Toronto processing plant. The recall widens from 23 items to include all 220 of Maple Leaf’s products. Microscope images of slime-green bacteria swim gloomily in the window of every National Post newspaper box, part of its enormous cover story. It’s next to impossible to open a paper or watch the news without seeing hazmat-clad workers hosing down equipment like a deleted scene from 2001: A Space Odyssey. TheGlobe publishes an article entitled “Infection incubates for up to 90 days” on August 25. If readers aren’t already sick with fear, they still have three months to fret about deadly bacteria colonizing their entrails. TheEdmonton Journal offers a listeria prediction the next day: “Bug may have adapted to evade checks; deadly bacterium could escape best sanitation effort.”

On August 27, headlines claim the public wasn’t properly warned about the possible outbreak and listeriosis dangers; some publications infuse their headlines with a tone of desperation. Fredericton’s Daily Gleanerpublishes “More products on recall list; it’s probably the worst thing to happen in a really long time,” on page A1.

By October 9, Maple Leaf president and CEO Michael McCain seemed fed up with six weeks of media scrutiny. After all, the company had always intended to be honest, open and truthful with the public from the onset of the contamination. At McCain’s news conference that day, reporters learned that tests from Maple Leaf Foods’ closed processing plant were still coming back listeria-positive. McCain tossed the issue back at the press: “To suggest shock at a positive environmental test [for listeria] is at best misguided, and at worst, fear-mongering.” But journalists viewed his reaction as desperate and his criticism as ad hominem.

Coverage of the Maple Leaf Foods listeria contamination at the end of last summer provoked a huge scandal and changed the eating patterns of families across the country. A year ago, the media rarely mentioned listeria. There were (and still are) plenty of stories about bovine spongiform encephalopathy-otherwise known as mad cow disease-making headlines, even though as far as Health Canada knows, no one has died from eating Canadian bse-contaminated beef.

The listeriosis outbreak took 20 lives and soon the media were using it as an excuse to examine myriad problems in the Canadian food industry, from substandard safety regulations, to the dangers of eating mass-produced foods served up by huge conglomerates instead of family farms. But the message to the consumer was clear: listeria is public enemy number one.

Grocery shopping is to food poisoning what driving a car is to a smash-up. The cfia predicts that Canadians will suffer from 11 to 13 million cases of food-borne illness this year, and the government estimates that 2,900 people will die on the road. Yet society keeps driving and eating, generally unmindful of the peril lurking at every stop sign and in every bite. That is, until a catastrophe such as the listeria outbreak, which the media treat more like a plane crash than a five-car pile-up. The chances of perishing in a plane are astronomically low-such an anomaly, in fact, that any jet going down is a lot more newsworthy than any car crash not involving a member of the British royal family. Large-scale collisions are often media feeding frenzies, and the public can develop a warped perception of reality-a misplaced anxiety about the dangers that surround them.

The hysteria over listeria made Maple Leaf Foods, the largest food processor in the country, crash like a Boeing 747. McCain took responsibility for the outbreak in a way that faceless crops of salmonella-laden spinach do not. The company had wings that spanned the entire country, so the tainted-meat products-processed meat being a commodity consumed daily by many families and a staple in institutions and group homes-affected Canadians in a far greater way than more typical recalls.

The Toronto Star‘s Robert Cribb, who covered the listeria story in a series of in-depth investigations, disagrees with McCain’s claim that the media sensationalized the issue. “Here’s what I don’t get about that argument: There are 20 dead people. Is that fear-mongering? Are we making it up? If we agree that 20 dead people is perfectly acceptable and standard operating procedure, then I’m fear-mongering,” he says. “But if we agree that this is unacceptable, then perhaps we have something to report. Perhaps there should be some vigorous public discussion about a nationwide public health crisis.” Cribb believes in making liberal amounts of information available to those who seek it, which he says summarizes the public responsibility of a journalist nicely.

That is unless the journalist places more weight on context than the volume of information available, which is the opinion of Jennifer Tryon, a reporter in her third year as health specialist at Global National. She can understand the epidemiological concerns involved here, and has a few of her own. She covered listeria from its outbreak until its slow fade from view. This meant digging for leads when the listeriosis story ran in the top spot on the national news program for 12 days straight. And in a medium that relies so heavily on images, the listeria case wasn’t easy to cover.

Tryon was frustrated by the way the listeria outbreak was handled by other reporters-listeria is ubiquitous in our environment, so how had the story grown so large? “I wish people knew more about how common listeria already is and how often the CFIA posts listeria contamination in other products on their website,” says Tryon, who adds that she’s worried people could be so alarmed by the outbreak that the mere mention of the bacteria would have them calling for its eradication. But in this case, she thinks the public had a right to be concerned. Unfortunately, the listeria bacterium is, as it always has been, cheerfully at home in Canadian soil, vegetation, water, sewage, silage and the excrement of humans and animals.

Stephanie Wolfe, an epidemiologist specializing in communicable diseases who works in Barrie, Ontario, agrees with Tryon: journalists need to show people that bacteria exist in the world, but should emphasize risk management over fear. Wolfe uses the E. coli outbreak at Walkerton in 2000 as an example. “Most of us have E. coli in our gut,” she says. “It exists in nature, in human beings and in a lot of things you come in contact with.” In the Maple Leaf case it was lunch meat, but bacterial growth can also crop up in produce such as sprouts and tomatoes, which were recently linked to salmonella; or spinach, which was linked to both salmonella and E. coli. Instead of hand-wringing and body counting, for future tainted-food crises Wolfe suggests providing the public with an out-line of proper food-handling techniques that will help prevent illness. “There is a danger of complacency when the media covers tainted food other than for reasons of bringing out public-health messaging, which is what I wish they would do. We want to get the message out, not just sell newspapers or make people fearful.”

But as much as journalists may agree with Wolfe, pushing her agenda is not always feasible. “No one’s going to give me airtime to talk about how safe listeria really is,” says Tryon, adding that for her, it was especially crucial to include context in this story. “It’s a challenge talking to editors, convincing them that there’s always some contamination, that people’s bodies can handle it.”

It’s also a challenge to keep reporters and editors out of the buzzword quagmire. In October 2008, theCanadian Medical Association Journal printed an editorial that said, “In August, Canada experienced the worst epidemic of listeriosis in the world.” Papers and broadcasters across the country then picked up the remark.

But epidemic is a scary word. “An outbreak is defined by the number of cases above the baseline in a localized population,” says Wolfe. “And an epidemic is a more widespread outbreak-it’s over a larger population and over a longer time.” What happened with listeria could be classified as either one. Wolfe says she’d call it a national outbreak, but wouldn’t disagree with the term epidemic, although it’s more provocative. “I think sometimes the words are used to sensationalize things or politically push buttons.”

This button-pushing is something Maclean’s writer Michael Friscolanti alludes to in his thoroughly researched article entitled “How safe is your food?” published October 30. The piece specifically addresses one central issue defining the coverage of listeria: that the bacterium is everywhere and, according to Friscolanti, the average human consumes it 100 times per year. “You’ve eaten it before and you will again. And-as heart-less as this may sound-the risk of death truly is astronomically low. You are much more likely to choke on your lunch than catch listeriosis from it.”

Since the outbreak, some newspapers have picked up on new listeria contaminations and mused on the social aftermath of the outbreak. But just because listeria garnered plenty of coverage after the 2008 outbreak, that doesn’t mean other recalls are getting more attention. Most of the CFIA’s warnings still sit lazily on its webpage, largely unreported by major news outlets. In October, the CFIA announced an outbreak of E. coli in iceberg lettuce. According to the notice, symptoms can include “abdominal pain and bloody diarrhea. Some people may have seizures or strokes and some may need blood transfusions and kidney dialysis.” While the case wasn’t ignored, it received far less coverage than the listeria scare. Little wonder then, that some exasperated journalists felt the coverage of the Maple Leaf outbreak deserved the moniker “listeria hysteria.”

A health story such as listeria exposes the divide between journalism’s paratroopers, who drop in to cover tainted-food stories with no experience in health reporting, and the veterans on the beat. Tryon is often frustrated by this separation. While she recognizes that it’s hard to gather all the necessary background and contextual information needed to accurately report a health story, especially on tight deadlines, she can’t help but notice it’s the beat reporters who do the more accurate reporting.

Cribb agrees and says Canada’s complicated regulatory systems make it even more difficult for reporters. “You’ve got three different levels of government overseeing food,” he says. “They have completely different responsibilities. At least five different agencies have their hands in this; to understand just the basic regulatory system, how it works and who to ask specific questions takes a long time.”

Beat reporting comes with its own unique set of cautions. Tryon admits her first reaction to the tainted-meat recall was that it wasn’t a story-after all, the CFIA posts warnings regularly. Before leaping, she waited to see what was unusual about this case. “Maybe I was becoming more desensitized because I know more about it.” This hesitation seems to suggest the numbing of health reporters toward tainted-food stories across the country-or else the major media outlets would have reported on the original Maple Leaf recall. Tryon remembers the e-mails that flooded in after the story broke and the real consumer fear she saw in them. “I don’t know if we’re to blame for that fear,” she says, considering the good and bad reporting done on the outbreak. “I know I’ve told them what I know to be true.”

The truth is of little assistance if it arrives too late. Among the media outlets that first reported the recall before it became a national outbreak was the Alaska Highway News. (Fort St. John is northeastern B.C.’s largest hub and over 25,000 people from the surrounding area go there to stock up on groceries and supplies.) Another was the Victoria Times Colonist, which is in a city that ties St. Catharines-Niagara for the highest percentage of octogenarians in any of Canada’s metropolitan areas. By staying on top of the recalls, the Times Colonist showed that it knows its audience. The majority of fatalities were seniors over the age of 80-most of them living in nursing homes. In fact, most major food-related pathogenic bacteria, including salmonella, E. coli and campylobacter, primarily affect the same three groups: pregnant women, infants and the elderly. And Canada’s population is aging. Seniors could outnumber children within 10 years, and the proportion of elderly people will accelerate once the baby boomers hit 65. As seniors become unable to cook for themselves, they will rely more heavily on processed foods like the meats that led to the listeriosis outbreak. To supply the country with responsible journalism, media outlets will have to decide how best to inform the aging population about food contamination.

With Canada’s increased number of elderly citizens comes an increased susceptibility to food-related illness. Regular public access to CFIA warnings through the media would help avoid another Maple Leaf-style meltdown-or at least reduce the blame game that followed. Newspapers and broadcasters can do a better job of informing people about food recalls while eliminating the plane-crash reporting that followed the Maple Leaf outbreak. And since eating is one lifelong hazard to our health that’s not going away, journalists ought to start incorporating some perspective into daily reporting.

André Picard, who has a decade of experience as a public health reporter, is interested in the bigger picture of food coverage in Canada. “We do these little snapshots,” he says of the spontaneous eruptions of tainted-food stories in the news, “but I don’t think we do the context very well. We don’t show the way that food poisoning happens constantly.” He would like health and food reporting to present a balanced and consistent commentary on the constant food challenges and recalls posted by the CFIA. This way, the gaps in our government’s management and regulation of national food-safety standards would become more apparent, and recognizing them would help us learn from our mistakes.

If reporters took a step back from the airplane crashes of the food world and reflected on the car collisions that are the small-scale recalls, it might give readers and viewers a chance to make dietary changes before it’s too late. It might also lead to a more informed and influential public voice advocating for change in food-safety standards. Following this model, people could get their news without a dose of fridge-padlocking food drama. As Picard says, “The important story is very rarely right in front of you.”

Five 16-year-olds cram around a table at their usual after-school hangout, a deli in west-end Toronto. Munching the last bites of their bagels, Marina, Carly, Ellen, Sophija and Nevena discuss headlines about their apparent sex lives. They don’t snicker about anal sex or become awkward at the mention of contraception. Instead, these youths embrace frank talk about teen sexuality, something even they recognize is lacking in Canadian journalism.

More often than not, claims Ellen, journalists portray the issue of teen sex in a negative light. Consider some “facts” about teens and sex: Chlamydia increased 50 percent in a decade. Fellatio parties are regular events. Parenthood is rampant and the birth rate is climbing. Shocking, isn’t it? The thing is, it’s not as bad as it seems.

Publications appear comfortable running sex-related stories, but many continue to cover the sexual behaviour of teens poorly and prudishly, taking the typical alarmist route, peppering stories with inaccuracies and avoiding or burying positive news about teens and sex. Statistics, as solid as they seem at first, are malleable and can be shaped and twisted-or innocently misinterpreted-to support almost any opinion. Sure, there are plenty of articles on the subject of teen sexuality, but not all offer quality reporting and analysis. Instead, they present the sexual activity of young people as more of a problem than ever, even though there is little evidence to support that. So why are journalists screwing around with the truth?

A 2008 study entitled “Trends in sexual health and risk behaviours among adolescent students in British Columbia” confirms that for that province’s teens, condom use is up while pregnancies and births are down. Even the percentage of teens who’ve had intercourse, even just once, is down. Elizabeth M. Saewyc, an associate professor at the University of British Columbia’s school of nursing and the lead researcher behind the study, says that although they only looked at B.C. teenagers, given the size and diversity of the sample and trends in other regions of Canada, she is confident the findings apply to the entire country.

But an article in the January 28, 2008, issue of Maclean’s takes a different perspective. The head is “Suddenly teen pregnancy is cool?” and the deck reads, “For the first time in years, more kids are having kids-and not just in movies.” Back at the deli, Carly flips through the story over her smuggled-in Starbucks, peering through her black-framed glasses. She cited the piece in a Grade 10 speech on the pros and cons of abortion and says articles such as this one suggest that “because we see people like Britney Spears and Jamie Lynn Spears pregnant, suddenly it’s like, ‘Oh, that’s cool. They’re pregnant. Why don’t we follow that trend?'” Carly is skeptical of the celebrity pregnancy “trend” having much influence. Her friend Marina adds, “I don’t think teen pregnancy is cool.”

So these teens and their peers aren’t following the Hollywood stars as Maclean’s implies. While the story written by associate editor Cathy Gulli notes that statistics show pregnancy and birth rates for teens are in decline and have been for years, it claims that stats about the teen-pregnancy rate are out of date, and therefore aren’t useful. It also claims the teen birth rate in the U.S. is on the rise, and because the two countries are similar, the trend could trickle over to Canada. Finally, it claims that celebrity conduct mightencourage teens to start baby-making.

“The whole article is entirely speculative,” says Megan Griffith-Greene, editor of Shameless, a five-year-old alternative magazine for young women. “It acknowledges that there are no statistics in Canada whatsoever that prove the thesis.” Nevertheless, in an interview Gulli counters that there was research showing “some increases or potential increases in teen pregnancy rates or birth rates.” But “potential increases” means little, and by hinting that “having a baby is the new handbag,” as one teen mother says in the piece,Maclean’s is suggesting that teen pregnancy and parenthood are indeed phenomena-when they aren’t. Sure, young people still get pregnant, but, says Saewyc, “If you look at the numbers, it’s actually a fairly small problem.” A 2007 report released in the Canadian Medical Association Journal found that fewer Canadian females aged 15 to 19 became pregnant during the eight years studied.

Parents rarely read such encouraging information because, as Saewyc says, “Stories regularly seem to imply young people are beginning sexual activity at younger ages, more casually and with riskier behaviour than previous generations.”

Alex McKay tugs on a filing-cabinet drawer in the cluttered office of the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada (SIECCAN). He finally yanks it open and pulls out clipping after clipping of sensationalist journalism about teen sexual activity and health. He drops the stack in a mess on the floor and starts sifting through it, listing headlines, publication names and dates.

The SIECCAN research coordinator is critical of the way many journalists cover the subject. McKay says they’re “still stuck on the idea that we need to look at adolescent sexuality as something that’s dangerous, and we’re always on the cusp of disaster.” In February 2008, for example, The Globe and Mail ran a headline that was sure to shock: “Chlamydia in teens jumps 50%.” But wait-even though the story reads as if 50 percent more Canadian teens contracted sexually transmitted infections (STIs), it may just have been that more cases were detected.

McKay says the article was “dead wrong.” Along with colleague Michael Barrett, he wrote a 2008 research paper for the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality exploring the reasons behind “the rise in reported chlamydia rates among young women.” McKay says the increase may be because the testing is considerably more sensitive and, since it is more readily available and less invasive, more people are getting tested.

The Globe story by Tralee Pearce, who declined to be interviewed for this article, briefly noted that chlamydia rates had risen for all age groups-not just teens-over a 10-year period. Still, most of the story was about the use of contraception among teens and claimed that “experts agree” all teen STI rates are rising due to the unpopularity of condoms. However, in September 2008, Statistics Canada released a report stating that 81 percent of sexually active 15- to-17-year-olds used a condom the last time they had sexual intercourse. Teens are, for the most part, safe about getting it on.

Meanwhile, last April The Ottawa Citizen reported that the rate of chlamydia in 15-to-24-year-old females in the city increased almost 90 percent and doubled for males over 10 years. As Marina said to her friends around the table, it sounds like most young women in that age group in Ottawa are “walking STIs.” The headline was “Safe-sex ‘complacency’ boosts STDs; Gonorrhea, chlamydia, syphilis rates among young up dramatically.” Unlike the Globe article, much of the Citizen piece discusses how great it is that teens are taking control of their sexual health by getting tested. Once again, the headline was misleading.

Jake Rupert, who wrote the story, compares the anxiety-ridden coverage of teens and sex to reporting on youth crime. “You get the impression that youth crime is out of control,” he says. “But if you look at the stats, youth crime is going down. It’s been going down for more than 10 years.” He adds that when it comes to teens, it’s almost a “knee-jerk reaction” to say they’re up to no good.

Globe columnist Margaret Wente might as well be urging parents to lock up their teens-particularly their daughters. “What are kids up to? Don’t ask” was the headline of a 2005 column that began with a warning that the information she was about to reveal was so shocking parents risked choking on their breakfast cereal. But her “shocking” data on oral sex came from an American study. Earlier, in a 2004 column-“Schoolgirls want to be the sexiest boy-toy on the block: Why?”-Wente wrote, “Dads across North America are going ballistic when they discover that their darling daughters have joined the Rainbow Club.” This putative club, which refers to gatherings where girls perform fellatio while wearing different coloured lipsticks to leave their marks, is simply a rumour in Canada, according to a piece in the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality. In her “Schoolgirls” piece, Wente, who declined to be interviewed for this article, cites a Globestory called “Good girls do” by Sarah Wilson to support her concerns. Though Wilson’s piece discusses teens engaging in oral sex, it doesn’t mention Rainbow Clubs, coloured lipstick or ballistic dads.

Sensationalist coverage of teens and sex makes it easier to sell newspapers, Katie Mercer says wryly. The reporter at The Province in Vancouver says, “It’s like the old adage ‘If it bleeds, it leads.'” But a 2008 story she wrote about Saewyc’s findings-headlined “Survey says B.C. teens aren’t as libidinous as adults think”-didn’t take that approach. The Province buried the article on page 23. Maclean’s, on the other hand, ran “Suddenly teen pregnancy is cool?” on its cover.

Shameless, with its tagline “For girls who get it,” approaches adolescent sexual activity and health with more insight than many newspapers and newsweeklies. “We’re pro-sex,” says Griffith-Greene in her midtown Toronto home, which doubles as the magazine’s headquarters during production. “There’s nothing wrong with teens having sex and making decisions about their own health and well-being.”

That doesn’t mean she takes the subject lightly. The magazine recognized the seriousness of HIV/ADS with a 2006 piece called “The power of prevention,” and human papilloma virus with “Preventing HPV” the same year. But it doesn’t have that teen-sex-is-scary vibe. For instance, “Not your average health class” was a 2007 profile on Insight Theatre, a Planned Parenthood Ottawa initiative that trains teens to develop and perform plays that educate other young people about all things sexual. And Shameless does what should be an obvious part of researching any story on teens and sex: it asks them about sex, something many reporters don’t do enough.

Griffith-Greene thinks a disproportionate number of articles highlight the sexual activity of adolescent girls as opposed to boys. “I can’t think of any stories where young men having sex has been a really big story in the media,” she says. But for heterosexual teen girls to be sexually active, there must be boys around somewhere. In “What are kids up to?” and “Schoolgirls,” Wente comments almost exclusively on the scandalous stuff girls do. And the boys contributing to the girls’ pregnancies are practically non-existent in the Maclean’s story.

Will readers find a Shameless-style story in the daily news? Probably not. But there are stories that at least try to be balanced. Allison Hanes of the National Post attempts to do just that in a 2007 article called “Teen pregnancy rates lowest yet, study finds; Better informed, but not any less sexually active.” A 2006 editorial in the Toronto Star states, “The fear that today’s teens are somehow more sexually depraved and more deviant is unfounded.” In a 2008 Citizen op-ed piece, “Let boys be boys,” Alex Sanchez writes about homosexual teenage boys and criticizes the hype that surrounds teen sexuality. And Jake Rupert’s article, despite its distorted chlamydia stat, does report that more young people are getting tested for STIs.

It’s also true that reporting on sexual health can be confusing, especially since many academics keep using jargon-laden language. And stories often go though several editors who may inadvertently change the facts. As Mercer says, “It’s like broken telephone.”

Many newspapers and magazines seem to lack the resources necessary to cover the topic of teen sexuality thoroughly. And sometimes reporters who aren’t regularly on the health beat, such as Hanes and Rupert, end up writing one-off articles about teen sexual health.

But that’s no excuse for confusing the data. McKay says journalists who report on the latest stats sometimes don’t realize those figures may refer only to sexually active teens, not all teens across Canada. And according to Saewyc, many claims aren’t based on statistics from primary sources, or they’re based on statistics from other countries.

Inaccurate and alarmist reporting on teenage sexual behaviour has its consequences: it misinforms readers, who go on to perpetuate the uncalled-for hype, heightening the fear of teen sexuality. “What this does is contribute to a culture that makes assumptions about young people,” says Griffith-Greene. “This idea that young people can’t take care of themselves, that they can’t make intelligent decisions about anything.”

Maybe journalists should go for bagels after school with Marina, Carly, Ellen, Sophija and Nevena, and find out from teens what they’re really up to when it comes to sex. “Put yourself in my shoes,” suggests Marina, “then talk about it.”