Bill Cameron is the anchor of The CBC at Six for CBLT. He is also a free-lance writer and contributor to CBC network programs. He has been with the CBC for 10 years.

Early last April, the Ryerson Review of Journalism hit the newsstands and the newsrooms of every major media company in Toronto. On the cover was a dramatic black-and-red illustration of a powerful hand squeezing blood out of a Maclean’s magazine. The headline read: “Strong-Arm Tactics: How the Life Gets Squeezed Out of Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine.” Inside, student writer Andrew Leitch attacked the magazine for prose he called homogenized, standardized and without viewpoint or voice, the product of a ruthless and often debilitating editing process.

The story caused immediate waves within Maclean’s. So much so that four senior editors decided to troop down from their offices on the seventh floor of the Maclean Hunter building to the nearby Ryerson School of Journalism. This unofficial delegation was made up of assistant managing editors Michael Benedict and Robert Marshall, national editor Ross Laver and foreign editor Bruce Wallace. They had arranged to air their grievances with Review instructor Don Obe and school chairman John Miller. As Obe recalls it, the visiting editors argued that the Review had unfairly criticized Maclean’s for failing to deliver a brand of creative writing that actually doesn’t belong in a newsmagazine. Though the tone of the 45-minute meeting was largely civil, says Obe, editor Laver was particularly upset and at times agitated. “He seemed to take what the article said as being directed at him personally.”

Laver, the only one of the four Maclean’s editors who will talk about the meeting, doesn’t hesitate in repeating his harsh opinion of the Review story. “It’s a shoddy piece of journalism,” he says. He charges that it was poorly researched, included much dated information and relied too heavily on unattributed sources to smear Maclean’s. Leitch counters that he would have preferred to name more names but that Kevin Doyle, then editor of Maclean’s, “has a reputation for not forgetting people who cross him, and the people I talked to didn’t want to burn any bridges.” Obe adds that he trusted Leitch’s sources because he knew their identities and they had all been taped. He concludes of the meeting: “We agreed to see them as a professional courtesy, but in the end we told them we liked the piece and stood behind our writer.”

The whole Maclean’s episode reflects the clout that the Ryerson Review of Journalism can have when it questions the journalistic establishment. This year the Review, written entirely by senior journalism students, is celebrating its 10th publishing year as a unique voice of press criticism in Canada. The response of the Maclean’s editors to their experience under its lens reflects an ongoing debate about whether its student writers are qualified to be effective and fair media critics. “The Ryerson Review of Journalism puts a lot of professional publications to shame,” says Stephen Kimber, a free-lance writer and journalism instructor at King’s College in Halifax. “It’s the only magazine in this country that looks at journalists critically-and God knows we’re not perfect.” On the other hand, Ian Urquhart, managing editor of The Toronto Star, feels that students don’t have enough expetience in the field to write analytically or to judge the media’s ethics, and says Review articles reflect that. “It’s admirable that Ryerson is trying to put out a magazine that attempts to analyze the actions of the media,” he says. “Canada needs a magazine like that. But in many respects the Ryerson Review of Journalism falls short of its mandate, and I feel it’s because the articles are written by students.”

It can’t be denied that the students lack experience, but that’s why they’re in the magazine program at Ryerson-to upgrade their skills for employment after school. Obe, who founded the Review in 1983, says he did partly aim to create a media watchdog (“There wasn’t any magazine in Canada that was an effective journalism review”). But he also wanted the Review to train students to think critically about their chosen profession. “I wanted students to develop a spirit of reform and not just accept things as they are,” he says. “We’re not interested in sending people out to be foot soldiers to the industry. If that’s all we did we’d be little more than a trade school. Working on the Review teaches them to challenge the status quo.” While their various challenges may have upset their targets, Review writers have gained many admirers among their peers in student journalism internationally. In 1987, the American-based Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication created a competition for student-produced magazines in North America. Competing against some of the top journalism schools in the United States, the Review won the award for best single issue of an ongoing magazine four years in a row, and placed third last year. What’s more, Review writers have twice won the AEJMC award for best consumer magazine article by an undergraduate: Mark Richardson in 1989 for “The McPapering of London, Ontatio,” and Anthony Seow in 1992 for “Whipping Boy,” about The Globe and Mail’s lone wolf sportswriter Marty York.

At 6 p.m. on a typical evening, when most Ryerson students are bustling off the campus after a long school day, the students and instructors working on the Ryerson Review of Journalism are just about to start work. It’s been that way since the premier edition when they met evenings and weekends to get the magazine out. The only space they could find was a former storeroom into which they could barely fit a bench, table and filing cabinet. “Sometimes there was so much smoke in the room you could hardly see the person sitting across the table from you,” recalls Kit Melamed, a features editor on the first issue. This year the journalism school has a new home in the Rogers Communications Centre, where Review students now work out of a space at least 20 times the size of the original, equipped with 10 Macintosh computers, a conference room and two private offices.

The Review was conceived in the summer of 1983 when Don Obe became journalism school chairman. The former editor of Toronto Life and The Canadian magazines, Obe immediately recognized that the school offered inadequate training to students interested in entering the magazine profession. To fill the gap, he decided the students should produce a real consumer magazine, something that no other journalism school in Canada had ever done. Better yet, he reasoned, it could have a modest role in shaping journalism in Canada if it aimed to critically review the profession.

The Ryerson Review of Journalism was born in April 1984, exactly nine months after its conception, at Imprint Typesetting in Toronto. Obe and the 12 students who worked on the first issue set a standard for all the mastheads that followed. “We knew from the start,” recalls Obe, “that every aspect of the magazine, from writing to production values, had to be up to professional levels.”
In the first year, the magazine’s biggest problem was lack of money. Obe managed to scrape up $1,000 from the school’s budget, and negotiated to have a $3,000 Reader’ s Digest grant for student travel applied to the magazine instead. But this $4,000 paid only for a cheap printer and stock, leaving Obe to improvise and pressure colleagues for donations of time and skills: “I shamelessly exploited all of my friends in the business to make the magazine become a reality.”

James Ireland, a veteran art director who had worked with Obe at several magazines, was intrigued by the Review and agreed to design it for a mere $500. He’s stayed on ever since. “Working on the Review went beyond a friend coming out to help,” says Ireland, who now has his own design firm. “By investing in the stu3ents’ future, it turned out, I was investing in my own. Every year I make contact with people who will soon be professionals-that is to say, potential clients. I’ve got work from a number of them since they graduated.”

The Review’s launch issue featured a glossy cover containing a self-caricature by political cartoonist Ed Franklin. Inside were 48 newsprint pages, with no colour or advertising. Launch stories examined the controversy surrounding Shirley Sharzer being passed over for the job of managing editor at The Globe and Mail, the effect of upscale circulation on the editorial content of magazines and the changing voices of the ethnic press.

In the spring of 1984, Maclean Hunter, thinking the magazine program a worthy investment, gave the school $125,000, to be spread over five years. In 1990, it upped the grant to $35,000 annually and renewed it for two more years. The second issue was the first to carry adsthough there were only six pages of them. But as ad revenue grew, the magazine added colour, better paper stock and increased in size, from 52 pages in 1987 to 88 pages in 1989. With increased enrolment in 1990, the school decided to split the magazine students into two separate staffs and produce two issues. The additional issue is supervised by journalism instructor Paul A. Rush, the former publisher of Moneywise and The Financial Post 500 magazines.

Each year, seven or eight students at the Review get a chance to work closely with some of the country’s top magazine editors and writers, who act as handling editors on their stories. “It’s like a special apprenticeship,” says Obe. “They probably won’t get another opportunity to work that closely with a top editor until they’ve been out of here for some years.” Student Andrew Leitch had Joann Webb, former editor of Harrowsmith and Canadian Business, as his handling editor last year. He says the advice and guidance he got from her helped him through the tough times. “Joann did the real hand-holding. I’d be on the phone with her for an hour in the evening talking about my article, and I could hear her kids in the background, playing and making noise, and she would be on the phone calmly helping me work through the piece.”

Review instructors also help students with job tips and references after graduation. For instance, Angie Gardos, managing editor of the 1989 Review, got a summer job as a copy editor and fact checker at Toronto Life on Obe’s recommendation. She and Leanne Delap, who was also on the 1989 Review, are now both associate editors at Toronto Life. Other Review alumni appear on the mastheads of consumer and trade magazines ranging from enRoute to Canadian Grocer.

By the time their Review work is finished, many students have acquired some hard-won insights into their chosen profession. Many are most surprised to learn that working journalists are often reluctant to talk about what they do and are sensitive to criticism. When writing his profile of Marty York, Anthony Seow ran into dozens who neglected to return his calls or hung up on him. “It really pissed me off,” he recalls. “I mean, give me a break; they’re journalists too. They had to start somewhere. I guess they forget where they came from. There were times when I really wasn’t looking forward to making the next call.”

The subject himself also proved a challenge. “York was fine in my interviews with him when he thought I was on his side,” says Seow, “but when I started asking him tough questions he immediately changed his tone and began acting very cold.” When York sensed that the piece would be critical, he threatened to call up Seow’s sources, and eventually came down hard on the student. “He blasted me for 45 minutes one night, trying to scare me and make me feel guilty. He told me that he didn’t want the story published and was going to call his lawyers and complain to my instructors.” In 10 years the Review has never been sued, but Seow says that at the time he sensed York was serious, and the whole experience didn’t give him a very good taste of the business. In the end, after the Review came out, York called Obe and told him he thought the article was fair and balanced.

Another dilemma Review students face is whether writing a controversial piece about the media will affect their employment prospects. Joan Breckenridge wrote “The Patience of Shirley Sharzer” in the first issue of the Review. The story took a critical look at upper-management attitudes toward women at the Globe-where Breckenridge very much wanted to work.

“I did wonder at times if writing this sort of article might hurt my chances of getting a job later on,” she says. But the Globe was more impressed by her honest reporting than annoyed by her criticism. After graduation she was hired by the Globe and has worked there ever since.

As it faces its next 10 years, the Ryerson Review of Journalism is at an impasse. Obe would like to see it increase its frequency to quarterly so it could have a greater impact on the Canadian media. However, he fears that students could not produce that volume of work themselves without having to trade off the learning experience of working at their current, more studious, pace. “The magazine couldn’t remain student-produced unless we were willing to accept inferior work,” he says. Professional journalists could be invited to contribute to a quarterly, but that might harm students’ sense of their own contribution. While Obe hasn’t abandoned the latter idea, he’s still thinking it through.

A more pressing concern for the Review right now is whether it will continue to receive its annual $35,000 grant. “Technically, the grant has run out, but Maclean Hunter has seen fit to continue providing the funds,” Obe says. “While we’re grateful for that, it still means a year-to-year sweat over whether the money will be forthcoming.” The Review usually nets about $20,000 from advertising, which is split – between the two issues, but that money alone isn’t nearly enough to produce even one issue that would meet the magazine’s present standards. Leitch remembers one day last year he went into Obe’s office in the back of the old journalism building to talk. Obe, who was sitting at his desk, looked up at him and said, “I don’t just want the Review to be the best student magazine in North America, I want it to be the best magazine in Canada.”

This year will be Obe’s last as one of the Review’s instructors. He will continue his involvement with the magazine as the school’s director of magazine journalism and as the instructor of a third-year writing course. Obe feels the writing course will be vital in preparing students to write their Review articles in their final year. After 10 years, he feels he’s done all he can as the Review’s instructor and now it’s time to move on. “The magazine is like a child to me. You work with it and guide it to a certain point and then when it’s grown, you let go. I’ve decided it’s time to let go.”

Whatever changes are made to the magazine in the future, it will likely continue to be the controversial and critical journalism review that Obe and the students have created in the past decade. “The Review is a shit-disturbing publication by its own mandate,” says Obe. If the magazine stays true to that original mandate, Ryerson students will continue to write stories that rattle the cages of media industry giants.

When you enter the lobby of CFRB, the popular radio station that bills itself as “Toronto’s News Leader,” the first things you notice are the head shots of all the station’s on-air personalities. The second row on the right-hand wall includes a photograph of Anne Winstanley, who has been a newscaster with the station since 1989. But Winstanley’s 8- by-l 0 glossy seems slightly out of place. That’s because of the 35 staffers shown, only nine photos are of women.
If the photo gallery were just of news staff, Winstanley would still be outnumbered: there are nine regular newscasters at the station, only three of whom are womenand that’s the highest number of female news staff CFRB has ever had. In fact, the station’s first woman newscaster, Marlane Oliver, wasn’t hired until 1979.
The situation for women isn’t much better at the other private English-language stations serving the Metro area. A late-winter survey of the 14 outlets revealed that women make up just 35 per cent of the on-air newscasters. And as surprising as that statistic is, it’s actually on par with the national average.
George Pollard is a Carleton University social sciences professor who has studied employment trends in Canadian radio and other media since 1978. His 1990 study of newsworkers found that 35 per cent of those in radio are women. (In television the comparable figure is a relatively high 42 per cent; in newspapers it drops to 34 per cent.)

As Winstanley says, in classic understatement: “There is a strong male presence throughout this industry.” Gloria Bishop, who’s been in the industry for more than 20 years and is currently director of special projects for CBC Radio, is more blunt: “There isn’t equality of opportunity.”
What accounts for this abysmal record for women? In other male-dominated fieldsengineering, say-one common excuse is that women just aren’t attracted to the business. But this doesn’t hold true for radio news. Women currently make up the majority of students specializing in radio or broadcasting at schools such as London’s Western University, King’s College in Halifax and Toronto’s Humber and Seneca colleges and Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. And this isn’t a recent phenomenon -the population of most Jschools has been at least 50 per cent female for a decade.
Some blame conservative listeners for the preponderance of male news staff, the notion being that audiences don’t think women sound authoritative enough to read the news. While this may have been a common view at one time-largely because listeners had no opportunity to get used to female voices on airit’s abating now. Dave Agar, news director at CFRB, says he only occasionally hears from people objecting to female newscasters. And as he points out, “Generally it’s the older listeners who complain.”
But if this prejudice against female on-air news staff is uncommon among listeners these days, there are still a lot of dinosaurs in management. “It wasn’t that many years ago that management would not allow a woman on in the morning,” Agar recalls. “There was a perception back then that people didn’t like the sound of women’s voices, and there are still some people in this industry who think that.” And those people include the almost exclusively male managers who make hiring decisions. The survey of the 14 Toronto stations found only four female program directors and one female news director-and she works at CFNY, which has a medium-sized audience of 418,000.
Still, it’s not strictly true to say that women haven’t found a niche in radio, though the highest percentage of women are announcing weather and traffic conditions. Andrea Rooz, who graduated from Seneca College’s radio and television arts program in 1990, thinks she knows why. “We’re just there to sound sexy and appealing,” she says. Rooz currently works a split shift at Toronto’s light favourites station, CJEZ, mostly what else? -reporting traffic, although she also does some news reporting and reading. She doesn’t want to be a traffic reporter forever, nor does she want to continue working a split shift for much longer. But she’s not very hopeful of either situation changing soon. Why? “This whole industry seems to be dominated by the male.”
Vince Delilla, director of operations at CJEZ, disputes Rooz’s contention that she was hired to do traffic because she is female. The station wanted her because she “had the right sound,” he explains. He also says that the reason that all three of CJEZ’s newscasters are men-while the only traffic and weather announcer is a woman-is that the recession meant layoffs, and the staff with the most seniority just happened to be male.
Ingrid Tammen, a newscaster at Vancouver’s CKLG, is concerned that women continue to be typecast as weather and traffic reporters. “You can get used to hearing a woman just reading traffic,” she points out. She also recalls an incident last autumn, when the station needed a short-term replacement for its female traffic and weather announcer. She suggested that one of the men at the station fill in. Most of her colleagues were shocked. Her story suggests that not much has changed since two decades ago when Jeffrey Dvorkin, how managing editor and chief journalist for CBC Radio News, entered the business. He tells of a private radio station in Montreal in 1974 where the handful of female broadcasters were referred to as “newsgals”-on the air. “We’ve come a long way since then,” Dvorkin says. Then he concedes that for women in broadcasting “opportunities are still largely that-just opportunities.”

The one exception to this depressing truth is Dvorkin’s own network, where half the newscasters are women. The CBC is different from its private counterparts in another respect: pay levels, which are much higher, largely because most employees are unionized. George Pollard, the Carleton social scientist, researched salaries as part of his newsworker study, and found that the average annual income across all three media surveyed was $36,539. For men in radio news, the figure was $33,352; for women, it was almost $10,000 less. No wonder most of the women I interviewed for this piece suspected that their male colleagues were being paid more than they were.
As lousy as the pay is, at least the women surveyed had jobs. If the Radio-Television News Directors Association is right, even those are in jeopardy. Last September, the association sent an open letter to all broadcasting teachers in the country. In it, the RTNDA’s president, Gary Ennett, cited a recent study the association had carried out, which indicated that fully 45 per cent of radio and TV newsrooms surveyed had trimmed staff in the previous 18 months. “While a full economic recovery may allow for some new jobs to be created,” the letter went on, “the RTNDA is convinced that the current excess supply of journalistic talent will adequately meet most additional demand, at least in the forseeable future.”
Ennett, who is the news director at CFPL in London, isn’t much more upbeat in person. “What we’re seeing in radio is newsrooms being gutted and downsized drastically,” he says. If there’s any good news, it’s that he doesn’t believe it will be any more difficult for women than men to get jobs. In the last three years he’s hired only women for on air positions.
Shari Adamek is the acting executive director of Canadian Women in Radio and Television, a group helping to advance professional women in broadcasting and related fields. She too has a positive outlook. She notes that just trying to find women to interview for this kind of article would have been close to impossible even 10 years ago.
Back at CFRB, there’s hope that Anne Winstanley and her female colleagues may not be so outnumbered forever. Dave Agar recounts how he recently received about 50 audition tapes in response to ads placed in trade publications. He considered only three of them to be good. They all belonged to women.

In that same issue an editorial appeared by then-editor Michael Webster. Like the ad, it spelled the beginning of the end of Harrowsmith as its readers knew it. Anticipating the outcry from the magazine’s ever-vigilant, largely anti-nuclear audience, Webster explained that AECL had at least been forced to qualify its claims (by adding the word “proposed” to its “solution”), and that he, as editor, no longer had final say over which ads were accepted or rejected.

No one had to read between the lines to understand Webster’s real message: only a few years after being sold to publishing giant Telemedia on the promise that its involvement would be “hands-off,” Harrowsmith had been sold out. Acceptance of AECL’s ad by publisher Fred Laflamme, a Telemedia import, was a violation of the standards set when Harrowsmith’s publisher and editor were one person, with one mandate: to produce an environmentally courageous, editorially uncompromised magazine. It was clear now that Telemedia had something else in mind.

The masthead in that issue was a bit short, as senior contributing editor Merilyn Mohr, former editor Wayne Grady and writer Andrew Nikiforuk had all asked that their names be removed. When asked about the incident, Grady’s anger still speaks. “Nobody could say that ad was remotely true; no scientist in the world could say they had found a safe solution for nuclear waste. Telemedia was saying that anyone with 5,000 bucks can say anything they want in Harrowsmith magazine.” Grady remembers the article “Forever Ours” in Harrowsmith number 65, which blew holes in the same “solution” pushed by AECL in number 95. And apparently so did readers. A couple of them even offered Mohr a free weekend in British Columbia in praise of her objection to the ad.
Despite the opposition from his entire editorial staff and a generous helping of not-so-flattering media coverage, Laflamme didn’t regret his decision then, nor does he now. He insists that “advertising does not speak to editorial,” and that “readers should be trusted to make their own decisions.” But his most passionate defence rests not on advertising principles or reader intelligence, but his own view of nuclear power-which was heretical to Harrowsmith thinking at the time. “As publisher, I don’t know that my kids’ kids will still have a sun up in the sky that will keep them warm,” he says. “I don’t know that electricity will still be viable. I don’t know that wood-stove heating will still be on the face of this earth. I don’t know what the future holds and maybe nuclear power will be the answer one hundred years from now.”

Founder James Lawrence’s magazine would never have looked to nuclear power for the answer. Harrowsmith was created in 1976, around the kitchen table of a rented farmhouse by a handful of friends with a bank loan for $3,500, a Charge x card with a $2,000 limit and a priceless vision: to provide Canadians with their first forum on alternative living-alternative, that is, to the “big city” and the destructive, wasteful materialism it stood for. Dubbed Harrowsmith after a tiny country town in eastern Ontario because Lawrence liked the spirit of the name, and published out of Camden East, another village near Kingston, it was a rural magazine dedicated to self-sufficiency and respect for the environment and the healthier, more conscientious society that both produced.
Former gardening editor Jennifer Bennett explains, “Our readers came to Harrowsmith because they weren’t just getting articles on how to build a house or grow a garden, but how to build an energy-efficient house or grow an organic garden. We were looking at the larger society, the effect your actions have on other people.” Bennett speaks in the past tense not just because she left Harrowsmith last fall after 14 years, but also because she is speaking of a magazine whose heart no longer beats in the one sold on today’s newsstands. To compare numbers 31 and 106, from 1980 and 1992 respectively, is to see two different moods, two different directions, two different publications.
On the cover of 31 is the image of a skull. It is surrounded by the dark shapes of endangered species circling toward the midnight hour of a clock. Above them is the headline “The Sinking Ark: Navigating the Swelling Tides of Species Extinction.” The colours are soft, the story is strong. On the cover of 106 is the branch of an orange tree in fruit, and above it the sell line “Orange Blossom Special: Get in the Grove with Indoor Citrus.” The colours are strong, the story is …soft.
Number 106 calls itself “Canada’s Magazine of Country Living” and writes about shrubs, pound cake and timberframe bridges. The “how-to” element remains, but gone is the feeling of urgency and concern and commitment to the environmental cause that carried the reader from front to back of the issue 12 years its senior. Former editors and staff-all of whom have left in one way or another since the takeover-charge that Telemedia has turned their thought-provoking, trail breaking magazine into what Wayne Grady calls “a countrified Canadian Living [another Telemedia publication], a magazine about frilly, quilted curtains and the best darn apple pie mom ever made.” Fred Laflamme, who is not about to admit to the deliberate declawing of hard hitting, potentially ad-losing editorial policy, claims the magazine is simply “evolving with its readers.” He says it will continue to grow as a “more friendly, more open magazine than it was.” And he’s right-the tone is less confrontational, the mandate is less controversial and the magazine is less relevant than it was.
How did it happen? Ironically, because James Lawrence wanted his Harrowsmith to survive. In 1987, he found himself publisher of not just one magazine, but three-Harrowsmith, Equinox, and the American Harrowsmith Country Life-as well as the boss of a book-publishing company; All of them needed more time and more money than he could afford.
Because Lawrence hadn’t venture into publishing for profit but to sell a me~ sage, any earnings had always bee] ploughed back into Harrowsmith (adding more colour, more pages, more staff) 0 into new publications. His printer and distributor, also supporters of the cause, hal allowed him to accumulate unpaid bill~ But in 1986, both were bought out-jus as the bank called his line of credit Lawrence had no choice but to close down or sell.
Barry Estabrook, who held various editorial positions during those Harrowsmiti years, recalls the predicament: “James was finding he had to be at all the magazine eight days a week; he was in a whirlwind running back and forth putting out little brushfires. We also found we had to get int( bed with someone who had much deeper pockets. That someone was Telemedia.” The deal was that Lawrence would continue to publish and edit the American Harrowsmith Country Life while Telemedia paid the bills for both the Canadiar and American magazines. Wayne Grady became editor of the Canadian Harrow smith and all full-time staff kept their positions. The editors were pleased that they would be able to put out the magazines that they believed in without the worry of going under. Grady remembers, “Telemedia came out making all the right noises. They said they would not touch the editorial product, would work on the business side, would leave us to put out these great magazines.”
Naively perhaps, Lawrence thought it would be so. He assured readers in an editorial that, although the times they were a-changing, the new owners weren’t going to change them that much. What’s more, the president, Jeffrey Shearer, was a country dweller and Harrowsmith reader himself, and would “ensure” the stability of the magazine.
For the first few years Harrowsmith did remain essentially unchanged. “Telemedia was as good a corporate stepparent as we could have asked for,” concedes Estabrook. “There was friction, but it was not unhealthy, and any pressure to change was fended off.” Jeffrey Shearer was largely responsible for this benevolence, says Estabrook, because he “understood the value of letting editors do what they do. A few times when conflicts between advertising and editorial were taken to the highest court, the highest court being Jeff, he sided with the editors.”
In one such incident, in 1989, an ad for a chemical insecticide had accidentally squeaked into the magazine. Because the company that made the insecticide also made garden equipment, the editors had thought they were running an ad for the more benign product. Naturally, it caused an uproar among readers, who were, as Michael Webster explains, “accustomed to seeing a consistent philosophy throughout the magazine.”
The philosophy, legendary among magazines at the time, had been consistent from day one: no snowmobiles, no guns, no three-wheel off-roads, no pesticides, no alcohol, no gas-guzzling cars, no CFC-creating products. Though Lawrence eventually relented on some restrictions, like alcohol, he refused to carry ads that “by their own nature were harmful to the environment,” says Grady. It wasn’t that Harrowsmith didn’t need the ad revenue; it was that Lawrence needed a magazine with principles more.
But Lawrence was no longer in charge. When Grady prepared an editorial to run in the next issue, apologizing for the insecticide ad mix-up and reaffirming the editorial philosophy, Tim McNicoll, who was the first Telemedia-picked publisher, objected. Shearer stepped in, and the editorial was printed. But Shearer’s support for Harrowsmith’s policy and principles was not always so staunch, says Wayne Grady. Advertisers, especially industrial advertisers, were now jumping on the environmental bandwagon, keen to get the “green stamp of approval,” as Merilyn Mohr puts it, by running their ads in Harrowsmith. In 1988, nickel producer Inco came knocking with an ad describing its contribution to reducing acid rain. Shearer, who at the time was the volunteer president of the Canadian Coalition on Acid Rain, says he could not deny the accuracy of the ad: “Inco was, in fact, cutting down on acid-rain emissions.” But Grady doesn’t think that should have entitled a major polluter to place an ad in a magazine that demanded a far deeper environmental commitment. “We had published stoties saying they played a large role in the creation of acid rain,” he explains. “The fact is, they were the largest producer of acid rain and they were only making changes because they’d been forced to by the government.” Inco got the green stamp anyway.
A year later, when their magazine carried an ad advocating nuclear power, staffers knew the long arm of Telemedia was taking Harrowsmith someplace it didn’t want to go. Wayne Grady, for one, had already decided he didn’t want to be along for the ride. He got out the year of the Inco incident, he says, “while Telemedia was spreading itself like a cancer through the whole organization.” Michael Webster was moved into the editor’s chair, Fred Laflamme was brought in to replace Tim McNicoll, and Jeff Shearer left Telemedia after a management shuffle. Though Webster emerged from the ranks of Harrowsmith, he was not one of the old guard. Having overseen the gradual softening of the magazine’s content he not surprisingly defends it, agreeing with Laflamme that Harrowsmith needed to change with the times. “Dozens of magazines report on the environment; it’s no longer unusual,” he says (as if Harrowsmith’s coverage had been based more on fad than conviction). “It’s time for Harrowsmith to be a leader in something else.” But did Harrowsmith’s readers want “something else”? Well, it depends how you define their reasons for reading the magazine. Telemedia’s version, which Webster supports, is that there were two types of reader: the back-to-the-land country dweller interested in survival issues and the city dweller who merely dreamed of a cosy, simple country life (the kind of reader the publishers of Canadian Living could relate to).
Grady, Mohr, Bennett and others of the old guard said then, and say now, that Telemedia’s definition was wrong. It wasn’t that there weren’t both country and city-dwelling readers-the split has always been about 50-50. But to characterize the city readers as armchair dreamers who weren’t interested in issues of survival was to question the commitment of half of Harrowsmith’s audience-which, Grady and the rest believed, was exactly Telemedia’s intention.
When asked to define his Harrowsmith reader, Wayne Grady sighs the deep sigh of one who has told his tale too many times. He even devoted one of his editorials to the concept. In it, he tells his readers who they are better than he ever could in a telephone interview: “They care about the kind of food they eat and the quality of the air they breathe and the degree to which their houses are destroying the earth’s resources,” Grady wrote. “When they look at a green pepper in a grocery store or at a batt of fibre glass in the local hardware, they know what they are looking at, where it came from and what it will do to or for them if they bring it home.” In other words, Grady insists, the city-dwelling readers felt that food, the environment, air and water quality were important issues for them as well.
Nevertheless, in order to increase readership, Telemedia began to push the cozy country line to Canadian Living subscribers. And naturally, says Merilyn Mohr, when you offer up a magazine of “gingham and lace and fire in the fireplace,” and the readers get “serious, indepth, disturbing articles about the health of the wotld, they aren’t getting what they thought they bought,” she explains.
But according to Laflamme, the problem wasn’t that Telemedia had pitched the right magazine to the wrong audience, but that the Harrowsmith audience no longer wanted to hear what Harrowsmith had to say. As proof, he points to the reader discussion groups he conducted across the country a couple of years ago, polling old and new subscribers, city and country dwellers, on what Harrowsmith should change and what it should keep. The upshot, says Laflamme, is that readers no longer wanted “to be preached at about the environment and what’s supposedly good for them.”
Laflamme says the actual survey results are confidential, but is willing to share some of the readers’ comments. One that he briefly mentions is that “some participants felt Harrowsmith had moved away from its roots,” but he’s quick to add that this was by no means felt by the majority. The one he brings up numerous times is that readers insist the magazine “not be a banner carrier for Greenpeace; that it be supportive of the environmental movement, not an advocate.”
Laflamme likes the comment, clearly finding it justification for his de-greening of Harrowsmith. But it’s also clear he misconstrues both its meaning and the magazine’s. Harrowsmith was never an advocate for anybody’s movement but its own, a movement of informed, intelligent people who care about the environment, how their actions affect it and how they can better the quality of their lives. Harrowsmith looked at the environment on its own terms, terms that were unconditional, terms that might offend.
There is no way a magazine of “country living,” a magazine that plays it safe and steers clear of hard issues, is being “supportive” of the environmental movement. But that’s what Laflamme would have readers believe. He wants to “empower” them, he says, by “letting them know what’s happening [in the environmental movement], but still leaving them with a positive feeling. After all, Harrowsmith is supposed to be a magazine to celebrate country living.”
This is news to some of his own writers, who don’t see themselves as professional cheerleaders. Andrew Nikiforuk, who’s been writing for the magazine for 10 years, says Harrowsmith “has never been a downer magazine. It’s been serious journalism that made people think twicenot a magazine of happy-faced journalism.” Nikiforuk hasn’t yet been told to write a happy ending, but anything is possible now that Telemedia has begun to dictate free-lancer policy. Last summer, when Laflamme found out that free-lance contributors Wayne Grady and Merilyn Mohr were also working full time for This Country Canada, a new magazine that Laflamme felt directly competed with Equinox, he banned them (and any others) from appearing in Harrowsmith until they dropped the other job. “I’ll be damned if they’re going to write for our magazine while they’re working for another magazine that’s trying to put our magazine out of business,” says Laflamme. “Equinox and Harrowsmith are sister magazines and anything that hurts one, hurts the other.”
But Laflamme’s interference hurt Michael Webster, who believed the hiring and firing of free-lancers to be the sole jurisdiction of the editor. He felt compelled to resign. With him went Jennifer Bennett, partly out of loyalty and partly because she didn’t like what was happening. “The publisher was flexing his muscles and making editorial decisions. It’s a wasteful way of doing things.” They were the last two staff members left from the time of James Lawrence. In Webster’s place, Telemedia appointed Arlene Stacey, former managing editor of Canadian Living.
A short week after her arrival in Camden East this past December, Stacey walks around the double-bay-window office as if unsure what to do with the space, or herself for that matter, now that she’s been transplanted to the country. Used to a tiny office at Telemedia in Toronto, she clearly appreciates the beauty of the river that flows through her view, and says she’s “committed to keeping the environment as an underlying theme” in every article of Harrowsmith. But the editor who came from Canadian Living has no current plans for a tough, investigative environmental piece; she prefers issues such as the examination of rural schools that ran in number 105.
Although Stacey doesn’t seem quite at home at Camden House, it won’t be home for long. Just as soon as Laflamme can find a buyer, he wants to move the magazines out of the “17 -room mansion in the middle of nowhere” to Kingston. “The place might seem almost romantic to some,” says Laflamme, pulling on his suspenders in exasperation, “but I can’t even run a simple errand like going to the bank, because it’s a 30-minute drive to Kingston.”
The bank, of course, is ever on his mind. After all, as publisher of Harrowsmith, Laflamme says, “I’m responsible for profit and loss. I keep my eye on trying to make a profit.” And for the past three years, Harrowsmith has made money, something James Lawrence never managed to do. But then, as Barry Estabrook says, Lawrence wasn’t “driven by a quarterly financial report.” He was driven by the dream of building Harrowsmith. While Lawrence’s magazine created 50 to 60 fulltime jobs from scratch, Telemedia’s magazine has lost any sign of growth, while managing to steadily shed Lawrence’s passionate editorial staff.
Nor has circulation improved in the six years since the sale to Telemedia-it’s stayed at about 156,000, despite the promises that former staffers recall, and which Laflamme denies, to raise readership to 200,000. He says Harrowsmith’s subscriber renewal rate is second only to Canadian Living’s, at 65 per cent. But that’s still 10-20 per cent below the renewal rates of Lawrence’s time, showing that a good chunk of the original readers has given up on the magazine of country living.
If they came looking for their old Harrowsmith now, they wouldn’t find a trace. These days, the receptionist at the magazine answers the phone “Telemedia,” so for all the caller knows, Camden House could be home to anyone of the media giant’s 18 magazines, or even one of various radio or television stations, or book publishing companies.
The only sign of James Lawrence ever having touched the magazine is the presence of his name at the very top of the masthead, under the title “Founder.” He said his good-bye to readers in a guest editorial in number 100 (November/December 1991), explaining neither his departure nor his plans, but wishing his readers and his magazine well and signing off with the note: “He leaves with ambitions to do something ‘smaller and simpler.'”
That he did, opening a small book publishing company in Vermont, a few miles up the road from the headquarters of the American Harrowsmith, and taking right-hand man Barry Estabrook with him. Lawrence still won’t discuss his departure, saying he is involved in a legal dispute with the company. Whatever Lawrence’s case, Fran~ois de Gaspe Beaubien, the son of Telemedia’s owner, sits as publisher in Lawrence’s old office.
In fact, all that survives of the magazine that Lawrence sold to save is its name, and that may be the final irony of all. Perhaps in naming the magazine after a small town that most people had never seen or heard of, James Lawrence was creating something that, ultimately, only he and his committed Harrowsmith kin would completely understand, something that wasn’t meant to be understood, or undertaken, by anything larger than the place that inspired it.

That population becomes more varied every year. Recent influxes of immigrants from East Africa have enhanced the multicultural mix of a community of predominantly Caribbean origin. The black press started in Toronto as a pipeline to life back home in the Caribbean. Today it concentrates on black life in Canada.
Contrast grew out of a paper called The West Indian News Observer which was published from 1967 to 1969. After it folded, the paper’s general manager, Alfred W. Hamilton, launched Contrast as a biweekly in 1969 and increased its frequency to weekly in 1972. Its circulation of around 10,000 was aimed at blacks of all backgrounds, not just West Indians. It was also intended to appeal to blacks across Canada.
Horace Gooden, who had made money from nursing homes and real estate, bought the paper in 1983 and brought Simms on board as editor. The paper eventually expanded from 12 pages a week to 36, but Gooden maintained the circulation at 10,000 to 15,000 copies, mostly given away in black businesses around Metro. “Gooden was always economizing,” says Simms, “even though readers were always complaining about the lack of papers.”
From its first issue, Contrast took a hard line on racism, policing, and immigration. The radicalism persisted throughout the paper’s life. “It is a fact that blacks do suffer great discrimination,” an editorial from early 1989 stated, “not just through racial thoughts or words, but through practice: in housing, employment, education, and civil rights.”
In fighting racism, however, Contrast was sometimes guilty of its own excesses. Simms remembers a morning in 1986 when a middle aged black man walked into the Contrast offices. He claimed that the police were harassing him. Simms asked him for his address and the names of the police officers. The man grew angry and retorted, “Why you asking me all these questions, and why you want to talk to the police? I was on the Contrast front page before, and they never asked me all that.”
About nine months later, Simms was reading through The Toronto Star and saw the story of a black man, with a history of assaulting his wife, who had murdered his wife and two children. She looked closely at the photograph and said “Oh God.” It was the same man. Soon after, Simms sent a reporter to the downtown women’s shelter that was holding a memorial for the slain woman. The workers at the shelter blamed Contrast for reporting that the man had been harassed by police. When the man beat his wife and police responded to the complaint, he would contact Contrast and say that officers had dragged him out of bed in the middle of the night for no reason. This kind of irresponsible journalism was common at Contrast, Simms says. She admits to going ahead with stories that had not been properly investigated because there was only one fulltime reporter on staff.
Contrast’s militancy was a product of the times, says Cecil Foster, editor of the paper from 1979 to 1981. Now a Financial Post reporter, Foster notes how the aggressive mood of the civil rights movement in the United States, especially Black Power, influenced Toronto’s black community. “Protest was the order of the day,” he says, citing the angry reactions to police harassment, immigration irregularities and wrongful deportations throughout the seventies.
By the eighties, however, the mood had changed. As disaffected, militant blacks grew older, many of them wanted to hear about their increasing success instead of their obstacles. Contrast did not grow or reflect these changing attitudes, remaining a soapbox for anyone with a charge of racism or police brutality. Typical headlines in a 1981 edition included: “Elderly Man ‘Mistreated at Mississauga Hospital'” and “‘Police Beat Me Up and I Get Put on Probation,’ Man Says.”
But the booming economy of the mid-eighties created an increasingly passive tone in the community, Foster says. And when the economy soured in 1991, so did the mood of the community. “After the downturn, we felt that we were the first to be dismissed from our jobs and that the few jobs that were open to anybody were in fact going to sons and daughters of people with connections,” he says. Contrast might have made strides in this climate of increasing discontent, but it wasn’t strong enough to survive the recession. Years of alienation from readers and advertisers led to the paper’s financial ruin and eventual collapse.

Contrast’s intransigence proved to be a boon to its main competitor, Share. During Contrast’s heyday, Share staked out a boosterish position to attract non-militant readers; its mandate was to cover “things worth celebrating.” The two weeklies were caught in a game of role-playing, which didn’t make for good journalism. Each paper seemed immovable in its views. When Contrast folded, it allowed Share to establish a new, tougher identity, and cleared the ground for other black voices to emerge.

Arnold Auguste, the forty-six-year-old avuncular publisher of Share, speaks softly in a halting, deliberate manner. He adjusts his square-framed glasses as he recounts his paper’s haphazard progress towards its present status as the black community’s leading newspaper.
Auguste came to Canada from Trinidad in 1970 with less than $150 in his pocket. He worked at Spear, a glossy magazine for blacks, and then at Contrast as a reporter. Publisher Alfred Hamilton fired Auguste in 1978 because of a disagreement over the radical tone of the paper. In April and May 1978, Auguste arranged two bank loans of$l,OOO each and put together the first 3,000 issues of Share in his tiny apartment. He distributed the fledgling paper himself. Share now bills itself as “Canada’s largest ethnic newspaper” with a weekly circulation of 40,200 free copies.
Auguste exudes the quiet pride of a self-made man. He does not easily admit that the paper’s boosterish attitude has changed, until the subject of police shootings of blacks arises. Then his Trinidadian accent thickens, a pained expression spreads over his face, and he finally concedes that the paper has “evolved.” This is apparent from the articles on racism and policing that have run in the past year. What the headlines promise are anything but feel-good stories: “Task Force Calls for Total Change in Policing Ontario” (November 19, 1992); “Police Made Racist Comments” (November 5, 1992); “Race, Status and Police Behaviour” (January 21, 1993). The reporting in recent issues of Share is tough, crusading, detailed and-perhaps most importantly-balanced by an editorial voice more reasonable than Contrast’s. The hard line on policing issues, for example, is tempered with a willingness to look for solutions instead of just reporting the problems. In a column from November 19, 1992, Auguste advocates negotiating with police over use-of-force legislation (which police were protesting because they didn’t want to file reports every time they took out their guns): “Can we compromise? Can we make a deal? What if we agree to give police officers the guns they feel they need. ..in exchange for their commitment to willingly accept the government’s legislation.”
Recognizing when the community itself is to blame is another part of Share’s new-found integrity. An editorial from early this year covering black-on-black nightclub violence notes: “Because of insensitivity, selfishness and lack of common sense by a few criminals, a viable black and West Indian entertainment industry is being severely damaged.”
The Share of yesterday rarely touched on these kinds of issues, focusing instead on what Auguste calls “things worth celebrating.” The May 5, 1982 issue gives an example of this Pollyannish perspective. The lead story, under the headline “Cooperation Needed,” states vaguely: “The chairman of the Ontario Human Rights Commission, Canon Borden Purcell, has called for cooperation from the community ‘to make Ontario a better place for all of us.'” Another article, from the February 16, 1982 edition, begins: “Jamaican Canadians have ‘a most admirable record’ in this country, Mayor Art Eggleton said last weekend. ..”
This obsequious approach was a reaction to Contrast, where Auguste began writing a column in 1972. Auguste had come to Canada for a better life, not to fight the system. “That kind of publication made us feel as if we were wrong for coming to Canada if all we do is whine and complain,” he says.
Auguste’s strong “immigrant mentality” was a large influence on his early publishing philosophy. It fueled an emphasis on positive news and influenced much of Share’s format, including a news-from-home section called “Around the Caribbean” which often formed the bulk of the paper. The typical Share from the early eighties also included an eight-page section called “Family,” featuring book reviews, community service messages, an evangelical column called “The Bible Speaks” and short pieces of fiction. One piece in the December 25, 1982 issue begins: “Midnight enfolds the hills and vales, towns and cities of 1982. Christ looks down upon the birthday celebration planned in his honour. ..” Dull, unchallenging writing like this gave the early Share the feel of a church newsletter.
Recently, Auguste has shed many of the sensitivities that made his writing and publishing so cautious. “I’m 22 years in Canada-almost half my life,” he says. “This is my country. I feel more Canadian than Trinidadian.” The changes in Share reflect this change in Auguste. Local news and opinion pieces now dominate the paper, and the Caribbean coverage has been scaled down. “Maybe I’m less cautious in some of the things I say,” he admits. “I’m a lot more comfortable financially. I’m a lot more secure in my position.” This also reflects the changing character of Share readers, most of whom are middle-aged, small-c conservative immigrants from the Caribbean.
“Share’s readers have also matured,” Auguste concludes. “The middle-class people who didn’t want to know about a black community 10 years I ago, who didn’t care about being black, these people are now calling us and thanking us for standing up for them.”

At the same time that Share was toughening its editorial policy, Lorna Simms launched a new biweekly named Dawn to provide some of the soft news that Share was abandoning. After her unpleasant experiences with militant journalism at Contrast, she felt there was a market for what she calls “positive news.”
Launched in July 1991, the 16-page tabloid currently has a circulation of 20,000 to 30,000. It is aimed at blacks aged twenty-five to fifty throughout the greater Toronto area, and is assembled by a staff of two full-time employees (including Simms’s former Contrast colleague Paulette Grant), two part-timers and a host of free-lancers. Dawn’s strong appeal to black and West Indian immigrants is evident in the prominent news-from-home sections entitled “Caribbean File” and “Out of Africa.”
Just as Arnold Auguste had reacted to Contrast by launching a paper emphasizing the positive black experience, Simms wanted to celebrate the achievements and upward mobility of blacks. The editorial content is as homespun as that in the early Share. Under the headline “Black Jewels,” a story from the fall of 1992 begins: “Once again the black community honoured 30 young members of the community in recognition of their outstanding academic performance in various high schools throughout Metro Toronto.”
While Dawn’s unambitious journalism may not have added strength to the black press, it does fulfill the needs of some members of the community. And by concentrating on fluff and community service pieces, Dawn may actually relieve Share of some of its perfunctory elements, giving it more latitude and editorial space to pursue harder news.

The difference between Toronto’s oldest and newest black newspapers is dramatically apparent on the walls of their respective headquarters. Share’s offices, in the heart of the Caribbean shopping district on Eglinton Avenue West, display, among other photos, a glossy, seventies print of black female models with big hair and European features-the images of an immigrant culture aspiring to adopt the norms of the dominant culture. The Metro Word’s walls are covered with Jamaican wood carvings and an Afro- Brazilian painting-the faces belong to the diaspora, the features are proudly African. Here, art imitates Phillip Vassell’s attitude to publishing. The paper’s thirty-one-year old publisher says, “Our different take on issues is a generational thing.”
Vassell is, quite literally, at home with his publication, which he produces in his mid- Toronto apartment. Dressed in a loose-fitting, deep green T-shirt,. he exudes an irreverent, in-your-face confidence. When asked why he decided to launch a new ethnic publication in a crowded, recessionary market, Vassell interrupts: “This is not an ethnic publication. We designed a publication that was accessible to the larger culture. Ethnic represents something substandard.”
Vassell launched “Toronto’s Black Culture Magazine” in March 1992, with the help of “family resources” and a new venture loan from the provincial government. He wanted “a voice for the people of my generation” (which may be Generation X twice over). A staff of three fulltimers and several part-timers puts out Word as a 2S-page tabloid with a free circulation of approximately 30,000. It is aimed primarily at the Canadian-born children of Share and Dawn readers.
Vassell is one of those children. “The other publications speak to my parents,” he says. “That generation is more willing to put up with things-they don’t rock the boat.” Although not afraid to make new waves, Word covers tough issues without going overboard editorially as Contrast did. “Strategies for defusing tensions between blacks and the police,” read one article in the May 1992 issue, “are as diverse as the opinions on the causes. But a nagging issue within the black community is the apparent lack of coordinated strategies among its ‘leaders’ to ensure that gains are made after the protesters leave the streets.”
The coverage in Word not only examines issues but challenges accepted ideas. In the June 1992 issue, Word examined the effects of maintaining strong ties with the home country: “Potential black leaders in Canada-unlike in the United States and especially those in the Caribbean-tend to maintain strong identification with their home islands. This is an understandable attitude but it leads to isolation and lack of unity.”
The most apparent distinction between Word and the other black papers is its entertainment slant. Vassell recognizes that the “entertainment publication” tag makes the Word attractive to advertisers without having to be editorially soft. Contrast didn’t have this advantage and scared off advertisers with its militancy. Word is seen as an entertainment paper that happens to have a political edge. An article on rap artist Sister Souljah in the November 1992 edition stated: “In a telephone interview, Sister Souljah renewed her commitment to empowering black youth and fighting institutionalized racism that prevents them from realizing their potential.” Such rhetoric appeals to a generation that is trying to strengthen its black identity. It is also a generation in touch with its African roots. This Afro-centricity is an important part of Word’s attitudes and is expressed in the paper’s use of iconography such as drums, spears and tribal designs. It is also evident in the language which employs pan-African expressions such as African-Canadian and black diaspora. “We recognize that there are a number of things that hold us together as a community-such as language, style and mannerisms,” says Vassell. “A black magazine should reflect who we are visually as well as journalistically.”
This reflection of a younger, more politically aware generation is the latest in a chain of events that started when Horace Gooden drove off in his Lincoln Continental on that last production night, leaving the completed final edition of Contrast in his office. At the time, Gooden’s decision appeared to be a wrecking ball to the dilapidated structure of the black press. As it turned out, he was clearing ground for mixed-use, new developments represented by the rising pillars of Share, Dawn and The Metro Word.

None of the editorial staff had been told. Finally, Davies asked, “How did you
know?”
“I knew by instinct,” Reynolds said, “I didn’t have to be told.”
Many of the staff, like Reynolds, had seen the writing on the wall long before they were told about the sale on the morning of October 26. In the paper that afternoon it was impossible to miss the front-page lead story: “THE WHIG-STANDARD IS SOLD TO SOUTHAM.” The official announcement was made in a Queen’s University auditorium at the end of the day. David Warren, then an editorial writer, was fatefully wearing a Whig tie and when Davies walked by, the publisher solemnly told Warren to “wear it proudly.” After the announcement, the staff brooded over “the proper etiquette when one’s paper gets sold,” Warren says. Many did the only thing they could do: “We went to a bar and got smashed.”
The Whig prides itself on being Canada’s oldest daily newspaper and it has been hailed as the best medium-sized daily in Canada. Now the official title on the masthead is Whig-Standard Co. Ltd., a division of the Southam Newspaper Group. Its course is directed from an office in suburban Toronto instead of by the captain of a local empire; the wind has finally been knocked from the sails of one of the last fine, independent daily newspapers in Canada. “Now that the Kingston paper is part of the Southam chain, it has to shoulder part of the burden for financial problems it didn’t help create,” says Peter Desbarats, dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario. “This is just another illustration of the negative aspects of group ownership.”
The Davies-Reynolds era, the golden age of the Whig, has already been consigned to history. Two-and-a-half years after the sale, Davies is just another inscription on the tombstone of former publishers on the Whig’s masthead: “Michael L. Davies, 1969-1990.” Although Reynolds resigned last May he is still listed with the living as “contributing editor,” which means his free-lance writing appears a couple of times a week on the editorial page and in the weekend supplement.
From 1978 to 1990 the Whig won eight National Newspaper Awards, four National Magazine Awards, three Nathan Cohen Awards for dramatic criticism and two Michener Awards for public service journalism. It developed a reputation among Canadian journalists as a “writer’s paper” and attracted the attention of the North American media, including Reader’s Digest which, shortly before the sale, profiled the Whig in an article titled “The Little Paper That Thinks Big.” It dispatched foreign correspondents to destinations as far-flung as Afghanistan and Romania and each year commissioned a long-term investigative journalism project. Its quirky editorial pages ran signed editorials and a letters section where a UFO sighting might bump against an intellectual dialectic about abortion between Queen’s University professors. The work of its reporters generated a dozen books and its Saturday magazine featured the lights of Kingston’s literati and academia. This, from a newspaper in a small Canadian city serving a community of 139,000.
The Kingston community, often characterized as sophisticated and snobbish, reacted with chagrin to a remote corporation entering its territory and fiddling with its newspaper. As one resident told me, things that have been wrong with the Whig for years have suddenly become Southam’s fault. Among locals the paper’s longtime nickname has been The SubStandard. “I have not heard that said in eight or 10 years,” says one staff member. “Now it’s coming back.”

In its public declarations, Southam is adamant that it is a white knight riding to the Whig’s rescue. “I would think this is one of the more challenging acquisitions Southam has made,” says Jake Doherty, fifty-six, the Southam-installed publisher. “The chance to buy a paper like this one doesn’t come along very often.”
As Doherty sits at the big desk in the corner of the publisher’s office, oversize portraits of Rupert, Arthur and Michael Davies loom over his shoulder. He dismisses them with a wave of his hand: “I’m the guy who’s in charge.” Doherty has lively blue eyes, a brisk step and big plans for the Whig. He says, “It’s easier for new faces to make changes.”

Southam insists it will maintain the Whig’s venerable character while bringing it into the colourful, reader-friendly realm of modem newspapers. Its mission is to “preserve The Whig-Standard as Canada’s oldest paper,” and “restore it to its glory,” Doherty says. To this end, Southam has invested $3.2 million in a new offset press plant, a key element in the relaunch of the Whig planned for this September. The relaunch includes a redesign to incorporate the colour capability of the new press, and an editorial revamping to attract a broader readership. Once the use of colour is mastered in the daily paper and in revamped “special sections”-that is, advertorials-Doherty predicts that the new press will also handle some of Southam’s commercial printing jobs. Restructuring of the Whig management and staff has resulted in a young, aggressive advertising team that hopes a crisp, colourful paper and improved graphics will help win back local advertisers.
The changes go beyond cosmetic surgery. In January 1993 the newsstand price was raised for the first time in three years, from 50 to 60 cents, at a time when circulation had already dropped from a high of 37,000 daily (in 1990) to an average of 33,600. In March the award-winning Whig-Standard Magazine, the literary and intellectual heart of the paper, was cut out and replaced by a mundane weekend supplement. The paper’s staff has been gutted by 22 members and morale has steadily declined as familiar faces disappear. Almost every member of senior management from the Davies-Reynolds era has been replaced.
The exception is the current editor. Harvey Schachter, one of Reynolds’s colleagues at The Toronto Star in the late seventies, followed Reynolds to the Whig in 1978. He joined the paper as city editor and has since held a variety of positions (most recently in marketing, planning and promotion), and won two National Newspaper Awards, one for columns and one for editorial writing.
With his curly brown hair and reddish beard, Schachter, forty-five, looks as snuggly as the teddy bears on his necktie. A few days after being named editor in November, the small, slight Schachter sits on a couch in his office, speaking in a gentle monotone and clutching a dingy pink and white stuffed bunny. The bunny is left over from Reynolds’s era, a talisman from his young daughter. Reynolds kept it because he was amused by the way visitors were unconsciously drawn to pick up the bunny. It remains in the editor’s office, a survivor of the Southam takeover.
Schachter is careful to give his predecessor his due, and he calls Reynolds his mentor. “Eighty-five or 90 per cent of my journalistic beliefs agree with Neil’s,” Schachter says. “I didn’t become editor to tear down what he did.” In fact, some of the decisions he has made are “not necessarily what I would’ve done if I hadn’t had the economics forced on me.”
Still, Schachter plans to implement his own vision of the Whig. “I’m not comfortable working for a paper that doesn’t have a life-style section, doesn’t cover health, doesn’t cover food, doesn’t have enough sports,” Schachter says. The new paper will incorporate these but nobody not even the new editor-knows for certain what else it may become. So far, it seems that in September the gray and serious Whig will begin its transformation into something that’s a little more like the Star than like The Globe and Mail, a maxim that is dutifully recited by those involved with the relaunch. Already, certain contemporary flourishes have appeared on the staid Whig, such as skyboxes above the flag and infographics.
Readership is divided between those who want a local paper that provides the best available coverage of Kingston and the large surrounding area, and those who want a paper that competes, journalistically, on a national level. The requisite surveys, studies, focus groups and task forces have been trotted out to divine the magical mix that will be everything to everyone. Budget cuts mean there are three fewer reporters than last year, so Schachter is covering the ground close to home. In the recessionary environment, self-generated international reporting seems to be on the back burner.
“Across the country, we were the paper that went to Afghanistan. But we didn’t cover Kingston township,” Schachter says. “We have a reputation with journalists across Canada-well, so what? Are they reading it? Are they buying it? The reputation of The Whig-Standard I’m concerned with is in my community.”

Two autumns after selling the Whig, the former publisher downplays its significance by decorously referring to the award-winning paper as “a little blip” in the prosaic course of Canadian journalism. Michael Davies, fifty-six, has a no-nonsense manner and the air of a man who is accustomed to being surrounded by fine things. He is looking out over Kingston Harbour from his well-appointed office at the Davies Charitable Foundation, which he set up after selling the family paper. The foundation, a philanthropic organization which helps local nonprofit groups, is his family’s bequest to Kingston.
When Davies hired Reynolds from the post of city editor at the Star in 1975 and made him editor in 1978, his aim was to produce the finest provincial daily in Canada. “I did it, but don’t forget I could afford to do it,” Davies says. He decided to sell “not because I particularly wanted to get out, but because I could see the time was up” for independently owned newspapers. He received an undisclosed sum of cash and 1.1 million Southam shares at the time worth about $19.5 million just as the bottom fell out of the newspaper business. “I’ve always said that Michael’s sense of timing was exquisite,” Doherty says wryly.
Former staff members say Davies was a generous and respected family publisher who did not shrink from tough decisions; Davies admits that despite all the fond eulogizing of the past two years, he was not always popular. One 31-year Whig veteran says, “In some ways, there was a lot more respect for him when he announced the sale than there was while he was running the paper.” Warren, who left the Whig to devote himself to editing the literary magazine The Idler in 1991, says the staff had mixed feelings when Davies sold: “It was something much more complicated than betrayal. Betrayal was only a small part of it, and only for some people. It was impossible to believe that this feudal protector would betray his staff.”
Journalists associated with the Whig over the years say the resignation of its crusading editor marked the demise of the paper as they knew and loved it. Reynolds is a naturally elegant man who carries his fifty-two years well on a tall, lanky frame. From his charming smile and eloquent conversation it is apparent why colleagues describe him as a charismatic personality.

“Complex” and “enigmatic” are two other frequent characterizations. He is a high school dropout who read Wordsworth aloud at staff meetings and edited one of the most literary newspapers in Canada. The same man has a gift for writing sensational, tabloid-style headlines, such as “Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary, Where Did You Really Go?” rebuking an errant local commissioner. He took a leave from the Whig in 1982 to pursue politics as the leader of the ultra right-wing Libertarian Party of Canada. His fervent, resonant speech reveals his legacy as a preacher’s son, and he has the magnetism of a man who, as one former colleague says, “should’ve played a role in Canadian public life, but hasn’t.”
Four days after the sale, in an inspiring Atkinson Lecture at Ryerson’s School of Journalism, Reynolds expressed guarded optimism about the Southam takeover. “They’re not going to shoot themselves in the head,” he said, speculating that if the newspaper changed direction it wouldn’t happen overnight.
Eighteen months after Reynolds’s rosy prediction, the erosion of staff and a gradual stultification had set in. “What really makes the business fun is passion,” Reynolds says. “I thought we were at the point where further reductions would take the fun out of the paper.” So on May 29, 1992, he made a flurry of final announcements. One was his resignation. The Whig’s front-page story the next day quoted Reynolds’s parting memo, in which he nobly said that he “wasn’t pushed.”
“I think it was inevitable that I would go and I knew that from the start,” Reynolds says. When he started to talk to Doherty about leaving “it was a completely mutual decision. No one tried to keep me there. I knew that if I stuck around much longer we would get in a fight one day.”
If the paper had remained under the ownership of the Davies family, says Reynolds, “there’s no question we would’ve gone through the same recession and the same restraint. But I have no reason to believe that the relationship with my publisher would have changed.”

At the core of the vision Davies and Reynolds shared of the Whig were editorial pages that would make many publishers nervous. Editorial writers expressed opinions so extreme and volatile that they often infuriated editors of other newspapers when they went out on the news wire. A 1990 readership poll showed that an incredible 74 per cent of readers read the editorials, traditionally one of the least-read departments in a newspaper. (Only 58.6 per cent of Globe and Mail readers peruse the editotial pages, and the industry norm is closer to 37 per cent.)
“It was a good page, a thoughtful page,” says Michael Cobden, a former editorial page editor and another colleague who followed Reynolds from the Star to the Whig. “It provoked a lot of anger in the community because people weren’t used to it.” Now director of the journalism school at King’s College in Halifax, Cobden says he altered editorial policies while he served as editor during Reynolds’s 1982 leave. For instance, he edited the letters, which normally went into the paper virtually untouched, and he tried to improve the inconsistent local news coverage for which the Whig has always been criticized. The same resources and imagination devoted to national and international stories were not spent on coveting Kingston, critics say. Under Reynolds a beat system was adhered to only loosely, allowing reporters to explore unusual tangents. Local institutions received uneven coverage. For a newspaper serving an area with two universities, a college, a military base, six hospitals and eight positions, not covering institutions is a serious charge. To which Reynolds replies, “A local paper is not just one that sends reporters to local meetings, but one that’s open to local people with something to say.”
Instead, Reynolds thought Kingston needed a wider window on the world. Good journalism “says something about the community by saying something about the world,” he says. He once sent an award-winning entertainment writer and two photojournalists on a clandestine assignment to interview Soviet POWs hiding in Afghanistan, waiting to defect. The resulting Whig articles were carried by papers across the country. They stirred an interest in the plight of the POWs that prompted the Canadian government to send Operation Moonstone to rescue five of the defectors and the stories won the paper international attention.
In its zeal for a story, the Whig sometimes pushed journalistic ethics beyond the limit. In 1990, the paper hired private investigators to follow Kingston public utilities commissioners to a conference in Texas. One commissioner didn’t attend any sessions of the conference-in fact, she wasn’t even in the same city as the conference. The story caused a local scandal, but the shady use of PIs was questioned in the journalism community.
The uncompromising journalism practiced ?t the Whig in the golden years sometimes offended advertisers. On May 12, 1990 a favourable review of a new book on how to sell your own house ran in the “Homes” section. On the front page. Of what is, in most newspapers, a glorified advertising insert for the real estate business. It didn’t slip through any cracks, either. Davies and Reynolds discussed the impact it might have, and still chose to publish. A few days later they met with Kingston’s incensed real estate community but refused to apologize. The resulting realtors’ boycott has so far cost the Whig an estimated quarter-million dollars in lost advertising revenue.
“It’s like an accident, a really major accident, that takes about eight different things to happen,” says Davies of the boycott. He says the realtors were actually looking for an excuse to cut back on advertising. There were other factors as well, among them the soft real estate market, the recession’s lock on advertising dollars, and the competition from chain newspapers, such as Kingston This Week (part of Torstar’s Metroland group), to deliver fliers cheaper than newspaper advertising. “We had every right to publish. It was a true story.”
But truth has its price. “Every time the Whig made a mistake, they would quietly move in, bit by bit,” Warren Stanton says on the paper’s competitors for ads. Stanton has followed the Whig over the years with a curiosity greater than that of the average Kingstonian; he is the former managing editor and Neil Reynolds’s immediate predecessor. Since leaving in 1979, Stanton has been publishing the kind of small, local niche magazines, such as Fishing East and The Best of Kingston, that Davies calls “ankle-biters.”
Stanton has not made peace over the events of 1978-79, when Davies made Reynolds editor and ended Stanton’s 22year tenure at the paper. He disagrees “totally” with Reynolds’s brand of “vanity” or “enterprise” journalism. “The Whig started to alienate the community. There was almost a meanness of temperament in the paper,” says Stanton, like Reynolds a native of the Kingston area. “You can’t bring big-city journa4sm to a small town and start kicking the shit out of people and institutions.”
In 1979, the Whig exposed an aluminum smelter in New York state that was contaminating Cornwall Island, just up the St. Lawrence River from Kingston. It found experts who said that the native band on the St. Regis reserve, its cattle and its gardens suffered from fluoride poisoning. The series prompted a federal government study and won the paper’s first Michener Award. Stanton says it was a “show-off’ story that served no purpose. “The cows are still standing and the Indian band is still there.”
“I’m comfortable with that,” Reynolds says, responding to allegations of muckraking journalism that hurt the community. “Just by reporting the news you offend people every day,” Davies concurs. Stanton says he used to fantasize that one day Davies would sell out and Reynolds would leave the Whig. Now that it has happened, he still doesn’t understand why Davies devoted the paper to Reynolds’s brand of journalism. “I don’t get any pleasure out of it,” Stanton says, “but I think he made a mistake.”

For the 10th anniversary of The WhigStandard Magazine in 1989, Reynolds wrote an essay that reiterated its original mission: “We have The Whig-Standard Magazine, a 32-page tabloid dedicated to readers who love to read and reserved for journalism as literature and reserved, further, for our own community, for Kingston. For 10 years. ..no writer without an organic connection to Kingston has appeared in its pages. No wire-service copy. No syndicated copy. No strangers allowed. Yet in these pages we have circumnavigated the globe.”
The Magazine represented Reynolds’s belief that the Kingston community was uniquely suited to appreciate literary journalism. Its loss in March marked a distinct shift in the journalistic tradition of the Whig. “I believe that successful publications are the result of someone’s vision, and the attempt to fulfill that vision,” says former Magazine editor David Prosser, in 1986 the Whig’s reporter in Afghanistan. “I believe that Harvey is fulfilling the needs of a corporation.”
The Magazine featured thoughtful columns and essays, short fiction, classical music reviews and an acclaimed books section that in 1987-88 was voted the best in the country in a Writers Union of Canada survey. When the Whig was working a big scoop, the entire magazine could be devoted to a single story, as with a 48page issue titled “Rock a Bye ‘Baby” in 1989. The story profiled a woman who had spent most of her life, and committed suicide, in the Canadian penal system. It won both the gold President’s Medal and a silver for investigative journalism in that year’s National Magazine Awards, and a National Newspaper Award for special project journalism.
Its cost-conscious substitute, The Whig Companion, replaced many local free-lance reviews and features with wire-service copy and additional work by Whig staff. Coverage has extended to popular music, and fashion, health, science, television and gardening stories now vie for space in the 24-page tabloid.
An October 12,1992 Globe and Mail story blew the whistle on the plan to cut the Magazine. Five days later, the Whig, in an editorial letter by Schachter, confirmed that the Magazine would be replaced by a Saturday section with a broader appeal to serve more readers. Schachter claims that the Magazine was considered elitist by some readers and some of the newspaper staff, but the real motive in killing it, according to Prosser, was to serve the bottom line by eliminating its $100,000 free-lance budget.
He says he offered to trim it to as little as $21,000 in order to keep the Magazine going, but “it became quite clear, by the end of that number-crunching process, that zero was too much.” It was also apparent that Prosser didn’t have a future with the new weekend section. “The way it was presented to me was, ‘Would you like some money to leave?” Which he did at the end of 1992. The two other Magazine staff have continued as coeditors of the Companion.
The Magazine faced a similar crisis a few years ago, when it was first thrown on the budget chopping block. To save it, the editors agreed to take a little slice off of everything to preserve the essence of everything. “Journalism is cheap. Publishers believe it is expensive,” Reynolds says. “A hundred thousand dollars is a bargain for what the magazine covered.” A former magazine employee says it was rumoured that under Reynolds the Magazine operated on a ridiculously low budget-on paper. In reality, Reynolds always made the necessary funds available.
Editors again offered to make unilateral cuts to save the Magazine. But Schachter, who edited it for four months in the eighties and was one of its advocates in the 1990 crisis, felt that gradually eroding the Magazine would have a worse impact on readers than cutting it altogether.
Appeals for a grass-roots, mail-in protest appeared on Whig vending boxes this winter. The articulate protests, many by former free-lance writers for the magazine, poured into Doherty’s office and were dutifully run on the editorial pages. Doherty and Schachter were unmoved. In fact, Schachter admits to greater reservations about cutting another popular feature, one which detailed provincial court cases such as drunk driving arrests. “I’ve received far more calls about giving up ‘In the Courts’ than I have on the Magazine.”
On the fourth floor of the nearly century-old, decrepit Whig building, is a quiet chamber with a row of high windows that afford an outstanding view of Kingston’s grand old City Hall and the daily busyness of King Street. It is a boardroom that Michael Rupert Llewellyn Davies built in 1985 to commemorate 50 years of service at the Whig by his father, Arthur Llewellyn Davies. The seldom-used room is plushly carpeted and handsomely wood panelled. A long, diamond-shaped wooden table runs its length; from a certain angle the table looks like a large coffin. Although it is decorated in contemporary shades of rose and plum, the boardroom is a vestige of an era past, a fragment of grace and elegance that is out of sync in the prevailing corporate milieu.
In 1894, fifteen-year-old Rupert William Davies arrived in Canada from Wales with nothing but determination to succeed. He became a printer and published several Ontario weeklies before purchasing the British Whig in Kingston in 1925. In 1849, the British Whig had become the first continuously published Canadian newspaper to put out a daily edition. In 1926 he merged it with The Kingston Daily Standard and by 1939 he was sole proprietor of The Whig-Standard. His son Arthur joined him in running the paper and two television and two radio stations in which the family had a major interest. Rupert’s other son, Robertson, was editor of the Davies-owned Peterborough Examiner, and has become an internationally renowned novelist. Rupert was appointed to the Senate in 1942, and died in 1967. Arthur, eighty-nine, was publisher of the Whig from 1951 to 1969, when his son Michael succeeded him.
Michael became owner in 1976, and under his leadership the paper continued a tradition of donating generously to local charities. Until the summer of 1990 he hoped to pass his journalistic inheritance to his son Eric, who joined the Whig as an assistant to the general manager in 1987 (and has since left). Prohibitive tax laws affecting non-arm’s-length transactions, such as those between a father and ~on, made the transition an economic impossibility. After 64 years and three generations, newspapers were no longer a viable family business.
“We probably ran the best provincial newspaper in Canada, bar none,” Davies says of the years he and Reynolds ran the Whig. It practised cutting-edge journalism that often skirted the gray areas around libel law and invasion of privacy. At times it went too far, and could have used some reining in. But, as Davies says, “I would much rather have a tiger by the tail and be dragged through the jungle than have no tiger at all.”