The first thing I noticed when I walked into the office was a magazine rack, bulging with previous issues of Adbusters, as well as other magazines such as Utne Reader,Harper’s and Mother Jones. The smell of coffee from a continually brewing pot permeated the air, and there were cookies and fruit on a table for up to a dozen volunteers and four paid staff. The room (no bigger than 800 square feet) was divided in half: in the front, the general office, I saw volunteers preparing mail and answering the four phone lines; in the back, editors and designers sat in front of the three computers.

In the three-and-a-half months I spent at Adbusters, I met people like myself, who had gravitated west to worship at the magazine’s altar. Adbusters, which describes itself as a “journal of the mental environment” is dedicated to media activism. Within its glossy well-designed pages, its goal is no less than to revamp consumer culture. Short news stories critically evaluate mainstream advertisements and corporate sponsorship-with a focus on the tobacco, alcohol and fashion industries-or describe the innovative activities of university professors or grassroots community organizations. Features challenge neoclassical economics, analyze graffiti in North American cities, editorialize on American presidential politics or evaluate the quality of products in huge, corporate-owned supermarkets.

But reading about the issues is a passive act. According to the Adbusters’ view of the world, most people are prisoners of consumerism in need of liberation. Adbusters is their guerrilla manual.

Many publications are known for their service features-from restaurant guides to makeup and hair colouring tips-but Adbusters has carved out its own unique niche in this specialized branch of journalism. Encouraging readers to become actively involved, the magazine provides how-to guides for “culture jamming” (defined as subverting the big-budget mass media that keep a consumer culture going). The magazine has published instructions for making do-it-yourself TV commercials for less than $2,000 and for disrupting marketing focus groups; and it has provided ready-to-mail petitions to broadcast regulators in North America. In recognition of its crusading efforts, Adbusters won the 1992 Press Award for service journalism sponsored by Utne Reader, the bible of North American alternative media.

The best-known components are probably the spoof advertisements. For example, a Spring 1996 spread reads: “Welcome to Marlboro Country.” The Marlboro logo is mimicked, but instead of a cowboy on a horse riding through the West, a crowd of employees huddle in the cold outside an office building amid a cloud of smoke. In the bottom right-hand corner is a mock Surgeon General’s warning label: “Smoking causes hypothermia as well as premature death.”

The founder and driving force behind Adbusters is Kalle Lasn, a compact 55-year-old with a thatch of thinning silvery hair. When he was a small boy in 1944, Lasn’s family escaped from Estonia ahead of the Russian army’s invasion. He was raised in Australia and as an adult moved to Tokyo, where he met his wife and worked with an American-Japanese market research company. Researching what motivated people to buy opened Lasn’s eyes to the manipulative techniques that huge corporations use to convince consumers to buy products, while often ignoring the environmental or social consequences of these purchases. Disillusioned with advertising, Lasn began making documentaries about Japan.

In 1970, he and his wife emigrated to Vancouver-a decision based on the international reputation of Canada’s National Film Board. For several years he made serious documentaries explaining social issues, but eventually became frustrated with being at the mercy of television producers and viewers with a remote control. Lasn started feeling that the best way to affect the masses would be to use the techniques of TV advertising: making 30-second films and inserting them in a time slot where they would be seen.

In 1988 Lasn and his friend, wilderness photographer and filmmaker Bill Schmalz, decided to make their own commercial. This was to draw attention to what they believed was the inaccurate propaganda that the B.C. Council of Forest Industries was broadcasting in its “Forests Forever” TV ads. Lasn and Schmalz’s 30-second ad, “Mythical Forest,” argued that contrary to the council’s optimistic message, the province’s forest industries were clear-cutting old-growth forests. Even though Lasn and Schmalz tried to purchase airtime like any other advertiser, the CBC refused to air “Mythical Forest” on the grounds that it was too controversial.

Lasn and Schmalz felt they were facing a freedom-of-speech issue. They learned that the CBC, which claims to be a public informational service, was not any different from any other network wanting to protect its advertising revenue. The two videomakers envisioned future uncommercials to air to the public. But to do this they had to raise awareness of this new movement.

A few months later, in February 1989, Lasn and Schmalz launched Adbusters, Unlike the polished product of today, the early issues were published on newsprint with limited graphics, and the editorial content focussed on the environment-more of a newsletter than a magazine. Readers were encouraged to buy airtime at TV stations. The two men were determined to get their video work aired all over North America. Around the same time they created The Media Foundation, to contain the different elements of their vision. Two years later, Lasn used his film experience launching Powershift to produce television ads for advocacy groups.

In its early days Adbusters lacked a clear focus, says Rick Pollay, a marketing professor at the University of British Columbia. He has been involved with Adbusters from the beginning and still sits on the editorial board. The magazine was both a critique of advertising and an environmental magazine, and Pollay doesn’t think Lasn and Schmalz were able to find an editorial mix that accomplished both.

Schmalz stayed for the first few issues, but then-citing a lack of income from the unprofitable magazine-returned to wilderness filmmaking and photography. (He is still the co-publisher, and sometimes helps out with photography and video assignments.) Under Lasn’s guidance, throughout the late ’80s and early ’90s Adbusters covered underreported issues such as forestry in the Pacific Northwest. “We were saying things people hadn’t heard before,” recalls Lasn. “It was an exciting crest of a wave to ride on.” By 1990, however, the mainstream media had discovered the environment too and the movement peaked. So Lasn decided to move away from covering the natural environment and concentrate his focus on the “mental environment.”

It was all part of Lasn’s goal to influence a wider market instead of preaching to the converted. Adbusters was usually associated with the political left, but Lasn believed that the Left was a dead force holding back the activist tradition. “Nobody is listening to those buzz words and rants by Noam Chomsky and all those left-wingers,” he says. “It’s time to create a new activism that is appropriate for our information age.”

Lasn shifted Adbusters‘ editorial direction and also revamped its appearance. Its former crude, cut-and-paste layout on newsprint went glossy, with bright colours, jagged blocks of text and offbeat visuals.

Today, Adbusters focusses on advertising and claims to have an international circulation of 30,000-two-thirds of which is in the United States. The quarterly is read by political and environmental activists, university professors, students and teachers of media literacy, ad agency executives, journalists and others working in the communication industries. Financially, the nonprofit publication has been building momentum. After losing about $1,000 a week for several years, the Winter 1996 issue finally made money. Although paid advertising is rare, Adbusters generates revenue through subscriptions and newsstand sales (the magazine is priced at nearly $6 in Canada), as well as the sale of postcards, back issues, calendars, T-shirts and taped uncommercials. Adbusters also recently got an offer to do a culture jammer’s handbook, with the money to be invested back into the publication. The magazine receives donations from people who believe in Lasn’s philosophy: this year, an American academic (and occasional Adbusters contributor) donated $1,000.

Lasn’s Winter 1995 editorial reads like a manifesto for the Adbusters’ philosophy: “A new breed of ’90s activists-the culture jammers-are taking legal action to open up the airwaves. They want [to] practice social marketing; to use the public airwaves-not only to sell products and corporate images-but to sell ideas, stir public debate and empower people to set their own agendas.”

Last summer, sitting on a legless Japanese-style chair on the floor of the Adbusters’ office, Lasn explains “culture jamming” to me. He says “jamming” is CB radio slang for the practice of interrupting police signals. “Culture jamming,” then, is interfering with the messages produced by communication industries like advertising. “The culture-jamming technique is like a judo technique,” says Lasn, making martial-arts movements with his hands. “Instead of using your own power and meeting people head-on, you use their momentum. We’re using the momentum of the consumer society against itself.”

Besides being an example of culture jamming, uncommercials are also a kind of advocacy journalism: they try to present alternative versions of accepted truths. In 1993, Adbusters purchased a spot for an ad entitled “Autosaurus.” The uncommercial depicted a dinosaur made of cars, rising and then falling into a heap. A voice-over said ominously: “It’s coming…the end of the automotive age.” The final frame showed people walking, cycling and taking public transportation.

“Autosaurus” appeared only once, during CBC’s Driver’s Seat, a weekly national automotive show before CBC officials claimed the ad breached its prohibition on advocacy advertising during news and information shows. However, Driver’s Seat had not been classified as a news and information show before “Autosaurus” aired. Adbusters took the CBC to the British Columbia Supreme Court, arguing that the CBC had violated its contract. The court refused to rule on the Charter issue at the time, and the appeal, which has been postponed several times, is now scheduled for later this year.

The magazine’s most recent uncommercial features a model-reminiscent of the waiflike girls used in Calvin Klein advertisements-apparently doing strenuous exercises. As the camera pulls back, viewers realize the model is dry heaving into a toilet bowl. The voice-over reads: “The beauty industry is the beast.” Despite much perseverance, Adbusters has failed in its efforts to get the uncommercial aired on CBC’s Fashion File and CNN’s Style.

Spoof ads in the magazine are another form of culture jamming; most of them are imaginative parodies of well-known ads that appear in mainstream media. In the Fall 1991 issue, Adbusters ran what at first glance appeared to be a typical Absolut vodka ad-part of the company’s legendary campaign. The bottle picture, with the brand name making up a two-word headline such as “Absolut Hollywood,” was the talk of the advertising industry. But in the Adbusters version, the headline reads “Absolut Nonsense,” followed by this small-print message: “Any suggestion that our advertising campaigns have contributed to alcoholism, drunk driving or wife and child beating is absolute nonsense. No one pays attention to advertising.” In February 1992, Absolut threatened a lawsuit, demanding a retraction, an apology and the destruction of all tainted issues. Adbusters refused, then sent out press releases challenging Absolut to a debate about alcohol advertising. The lawsuit was dropped and Adbusters has kept spoofing Absolut ads.

Another form of culture jamming is altering a billboard with a written message. Last year a Toronto “culture jammer” drew skulls on the faces of every model in bus shelter ads located along a downtown stretch of Spadina Avenue. The message: death to advertising. Culture jammers are protesting advertising saturation, from highway billboards to washroom stalls-a response to what many see as a one-way flow of information.

Adbusters not only supports this kind of activism, its editorial content often provides step-by-step directions for executing it. In a Winter 1996 article entitled “Adding The Blemish of Truth: Making Little Changes to Billboards,” the author explained how to build a billboard-altering device using a copper pipe, wood dowel, trigger cord and a can of spray paint. “Answering a billboard by spraying on a written reply was effective when clever but too often weakened towards mere defacement,” the article read. “In any case, a blatantly modified billboard was quickly papered over by watchful crews of local outdoor advertising companies. But what if you made small changes to the advertising imagery? The results would be more articulate (and) would probably last longer…. Best of all, you could add something so quickly you could be gone before anyone could say ‘Billboard Busters!'”

Some would accuse Adbusters of encouraging criminal activity. Lasn argues that there is a difference between spray painting an obscenity on a billboard, and reacting to the manipulation of advertising-what Lasn calls “billboard liberation.” One is just vandalism; the other is media activism-responding to the brainwashing techniques of the dominant powers in a consumer society.

“Absolute End,” says a bemused Dan Baxter, reading from an issue of Adbusters. Baxter was the director of account planning for the Vancouver office of BBDO, Canada’s largest advertising agency. We’re sitting in his posh office with its picturesque view of the mountains, the railway, the ports and the ocean. Favourite ads are taped to a wall behind his desk-ads that, as Baxter puts it, really “know how to target their audience.” He is looking at one of Adbusters’ spoof ads for Absolut vodka, in which the distinctive bottle is shaped like a noose.

“What does [Lasn] want you to do?” asks Baxter, shaking his head. “Not drink? Not drink and drive? Why Absolut? I don’t understand.” Lasn wants people to think about the messages in advertising. With the exception of public service ads, consumers are inundated with messages to buy. Rarely are we able to make the connection that by purchasing over-packaged products we are contributing to overflowing landfill sites. Advertisers are primarily concerned with selling their products, not addressing social concerns. However, Lasn says that people working in ad agencies have told him that Adbusters has made them more cautious when designing an ad, asking themselves: What could Adbusters do with this?

“To understand the media world we live in requires a great deal of education,” says Mark Kingwell, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Toronto and TV critic for Saturday Night. “You can ingest it with no education at all; but you can only ingest it critically with a great deal of education, the kind that publications like Adbusters are trying to give us.”

But can what Adbusters does be called journalism? Some of the magazine’s stories editorialize, reading like opinion pieces rather than the news pieces they are presented as. “Millions of people are already prisoners of television technology,” writes Rick Crawford in the Summer 1994 issue. “Although they are allowed to leave their living rooms on ‘work furloughs,’ they have given up control of their time to the rhythms and dictates of institutional marketing strategies.” Making blanket statements-that all readers feel they are prisoners of technology-breaks the basic rules of good journalism. Still, Adbusters publishes some thought-provoking essays and investigations. The Winter 1995 issue contained an analytical article by Mark Crispin Miller, a leading left-wing media critic and professor at Johns Hopkins University, whose work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly,The New York Times Book Review,The New Republic and The Nation. Miller argued that in this media-bombarded world, advertisers sell more than just products. They sell the fantasy of power to the dispossessed.

Other strong journalistic stories include a 1995 investigation into the tobacco industry by George Gerbner, a professor of communications at the University of Pennsylvania; and Canadian reporter Bob Mackin’s story, published the same year, about citizens who create their own pirate radio and TV stations in defiance of government broadcast regulations. Jonathan Rowe-author, policy director of Redefining Progress and contributing editor to Washington Monthly, whose work appears in prominent U.S. publications like The Atlantic Monthly-argued persuasively in the Winter 1996 issue that economists are out of touch with society. But writers of the calibre of Rowe, Mackin, Gerbner and Miller are the exception, not the rule.

Adbusters gives writers the freedom to address complicated issues, sometimes taking a point of view that is hard to sell in the mainstream media. So why aren’t traditionally trained journalists flocking to its pages? Have journalism schools succeeded in brainwashing students into thinking that objective journalism means not questioning conventional social norms?

One of the reasons is financial. According to the writer’s guidelines, Adbusters pays $50 per printed page for features-a fraction of what major magazines pay. Despite Lasn’s efforts to change the perception of the magazine as a marginal endeavour, it remains a fringe publication. Adbusters isn’t so much a magazine as a crusade to revamp our consumer culture. Writers attracted to the magazine believe in this philosophy, and the majority of them are academics and activists, not journalists.

Take the example of Arthur Kroker, a professor of political science at Montreal’s Concordia University and a leading intellectual who has written several books on the effects of technology on people. In the February 1996 issue of Saturday Night, Mark Kingwell wrote a piece that attempted to explain Kroker’s theories to that magazine’s general audience. A few months earlier, the Summer 1995 Adbusters had contained Lasn’s lengthy interview with Kroker, which explored the academic’s complex ideas in considerably greater depth.

Complexity, however, doesn’t necessarily guarantee accessibility: Kroker discussed his notion of “virtualization”-which means “the shutting down of human sensorium, and putting in its place a kind of vacant process of virtualization, which really means the harvesting of flesh.” As the interview goes on, the technical jargon gets even more confusing to the reader.

Reading Adbusters may feel like being an outsider in a private club. Its pages are saturated with jargon. Some terms have been borrowed from deconstructionist theory (“downshifter,” “bionomics,” “meme”); others have been invented by Lasn and his colleagues (“subvertising,” “decycling,” “mental environment”). When I asked Lasn to define “mental environment,” he chuckled and said it was so obvious he couldn’t explain it.

Adbusters scarcely qualifies as traditional journalism, but it has perfected a unique brand of service journalism. Adbusters supplies starter kits to help people create “culture jamming” groups in their schools and communities. (At one time, it published an insert called “Big Noise,” aimed at high school students.) The magazine’s service component is more effective at making people media literate than the features it publishes.

It’s probably not possible for Adbusters to be both subversive and part of the mainstream. That is what makes it a significant publication, a small counterbalance to the prevailing consumer culture. Lasn doesn’t expect the profile and mass acceptance of a Saturday Night. His goal is to make people more conscious of the influence of marketing and advertising-and then foster activism out of that growing awareness.

In this homogenous environment, it’s refreshing to think of the diverse views she presents in her column for the alternative women’s magazine Herizons. Manji has said, for instance, that monogamy can sometimes be a misguided virtue; she has also reconciled being a Muslim and a lesbian. Her mandate in Herizons could speak for many alternative women’s magazines today: to challenge conventions of all kinds-including mainstream “wisdom” and traditional feminism.

These days, all sorts of people are noticing these publications. Social workers and arts therapists often keep the magazines in their offices to lend to clients-a male therapist from Carleton University, for example, uses Matriart in his sessions with male abusers. Editors of women’s centre newsletters across the country use them to trigger ideas. And with the increase in women’s studies and gender courses at universities, more and more educators turn to these publications for hard-to-find information to include in their course work.

Perhaps these publications could have an even broader audience if they weren’t so hard to find. Once a prospective reader finally locates a store that sells them (which can be impossible in small cities), finding the magazines requires shuffling through what is often a mess of alternative publications at the back of the newsstand. Ron Sellwood, distribution manager at the Canadian Magazine Periodical Association, says in order to have the eye-level, front-of-the-stand display that a magazine like Chatelaine has, alternative magazines would have to boost their circulation from around 4,000 to 20,000-an unlikely event that would increase printing costs and require a huge jump in advertising revenue. The problem with getting more advertising, especially in women’s magazines, is that it can put pressure on editorial content-something any self-respecting alternative magazine would never tolerate. Companies placing ads often demand that makeup tips, recipes and fashion trends make it into the magazine to help sell their products. Considering that alternative women’s publications exist to deal with what they see as feminist issues-which don’t usually include makeovers and cooking-these publications will never be easy to find.

Ignoring the din of children over their Happy Meals, Manji puts down her cheeseburger and says this about alternative women’s magazines: the danger is that editors will get lost in their own subcategories of the women’s movement without feeling a responsibility to share their knowledge. She hopes editors don’t forget that “no one lives on a secluded island. What affects them, affects everyone.”

In the ’90s, there are many islands in the women’s movement: feminists often isolate themselves into single-issue groups concerned about, for instance, lesbian rights, women of colour issues, body image and health matters, universal day care or “equal rights, equal pay.” There are also long-standing lobby groups that try to effect change in such areas as violence against women and social spending. The National Action Committee on the Status of Women, Canada’s largest women’s lobby group, was for some time accused of focussing on middle class, heterosexual, white women, despite the fact that it represents some 700 member groups with different interests. For over a decade, it has tried to appeal to women of colour and lesbians.

There are also backlash islands: on them, feminism is dead. In August 1990, for example, Chatelaine published an article by Danielle Crittenden in which she claimed that the women’s movement has already achieved its goals and that die-hards are the only ones making demands because Ottawa is paying for them to do so. With so many different factions, Manji says that even she, who is perceived as “a poster-child for feminism,” has difficulty finding feminist islands where she’s welcome.

Despite a divided movement, alternative women’s magazines are reaching feminists. Four of the more prominent are: Matriart, At the Crossroads, Kinesis and Herizons.

Matriart, a glossy, feminist, visual arts magazine published in Toronto, uses thought-provoking, contemporary Canadian women’s art to define the strong feminist themes of its articles. For example, in the 1996 double issue “Women’s Bodies, Women’s Health,” one story bluntly tackles the North American obsession with breasts. Written to accompany the show-all works by photographer Sheri Hatt, the piece opens with a picture of the artist’s own bare-breasted body prior to reduction surgery, followed by a shot of her covered with bandages.

Published since 1990 by the Women’s Art Resource Centre, a nonprofit service organization funded by the Canada Council, the Ontario Arts Council and other government bodies, Matriart‘s mandate could be described as what Virginia Woolf called “a room of one’s own.” Matriart‘s published mission statement says it “provides a forum to empower and affirms women’s creativity.” Each issue of this national quarterly, which usually runs about 50 pages, focusses on such different themes as “Feminism Facing Systemic Oppression” (1992), “Women in Technology” (1994) and “Women and War” (1994).

In each issue, the feature articles, reviews and artwork all relate to one theme, allowing the magazine to go in-depth into various aspects of a subject. In the “Feminism Facing Systemic Oppression” issue, for example, one middle-of-the-book article titled “Land, Spirit, Power” by Mary Anne Barkhouse discusses contemporary native art. She says art will “locate an area for reconstruction and revitalization of culture” for natives, and help them come to terms with “the reality of colonial invasion and the destructive expansionary practices.” Toward the back of the book, there is artwork from Katherine Zsolt’s “Daughters and Sisters,” her memorial on the Montreal Massacre, which is an installation of 14 body casts with blindfolds on, hanging by their ankles. Barkhouse’s article and Zsolt’s somewhat gruesome installation are hard-hitting in their depiction of the oppression women face.

With 1,200 subscribers and a recent subscription drive in the United States, the magazine is permeating the art community. Many readers of this magazine are women artists or those who work in galleries, but editor Linda Abrahams says institutions and art enthusiasts also subscribe to Matriart. Judging by the ads, the publication is also seen by arts therapists, book publishers, art shops and art schools.

Although Matriart may be widely read, nonartists may feel it’s too serious and full of jargon. One section that can be alienating is the film reviews. Usually about independent filmmakers, the reviews sometimes use unexplained terms, such as scratching, bleaching and erasing. Unless a reader knows the field, this makes for a frustrating read. Still, overall, Matriart is an innovative publication in the way it links images to issues and manages to explore many different aspects of feminism through its thematic base.

Reaching a more specific readership, At the Crossroads is a black women’s art magazine. Editor Karen/Miranda Augustine describes why she founded it: “Your voice doesn’t get put out like you want it to. I was tired of other publications asking me [to write on] black issues. You feel used, like that’s all you’re good for.”

Its mission is to celebrate black culture by featuring up-and-coming black artists, including musicians, writers and actors, while discussing black issues head-on. Unlike Matriart, Augustine says that her magazine pertains to everyday issues and is not abstract. Certainly this Toronto-based magazine, which aims to be international, is more lighthearted in sections and easier to understand. In a 1996 issue there is a Seventeen-style quiz that places participants into four categories: Dancehall Queens, You’re Sooo R&B, Hip-hop Cheerleaders and Goddess of Acid Jazz. But it’s not all fun. The next article is about the Ottey sisters in Toronto who were murdered and whose killer had still not been found. The deck reads: “Why have their deaths not received the same attention as cases of police brutality against black men?”

Augustine aims to provide her 1,500 readers (1,300 in Canada, 200 in the U.S.) with what she calls “in-depth analysis” in reviews and stories. Unlike Matriart, the movie reviews, called Let’s Get Reel, are written in accessible language. Sometimes they discuss mainstream films-always from an alternative viewpoint-although they often lack insight. A recent review of Strange Days, for instance, says, “I was glad to see Angela Bassett in a mainstream film…. Our actresses/actors must get roles in mainstream films in order to obtain their rightful place in American cinema.”

At the Crossroads, which runs around 60 pages, successfully mixes regular feature articles with personal memoirs. In 1996 it profiled two 20-something fashion design students, Kafi Wilson and Kari Chong, who already have their own label, Vir-go’. Perfect subjects for an inspiring women-of-colour story, these designers often wouldn’t be considered big enough for attention from the mainstream press. In the same issue, writer Kristine Maitland recounts how, as a 17-year-old Toronto student, she received a phone call from a schoolmate who said, “Kristine, I am a member of the Ku Klux Klan and it is our intention to burn your house down.” Here, At the Crossroads provides a personal forum for exposing the virulence of racism, something not often taken on by the Canadian mainstream media.

The magazine receives what Augustine will only say is a small amount of money from Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council, and it runs an average of six advertisements per issue from book stores, art shops and specialty clothing venues. Keeping production costs down (it’s published on newsprint), At the Crossroads has been in business for five years. When assessing the magazine, it’s worth considering one of Irshad Manji’s comments on alternative publications. As she says, “People are all interdependent-what affects me as a woman of colour will affect you as a white woman,” and this should be recognized in alternative publications. Addressing that interconnectedness with the larger world is something At the Crossroads fails to do. What it does succeed at, however, is providing a voice for relevant black women’s issues. But the magazine could have a broader audience if it included some political discussion, such as examining how federal budget cuts have hurt black women. An analysis of this type of issue might make the magazine a stronger force.

One alternative women’s magazine that does take on politics is Vancouver-based Kinesis. At 23, it’s the oldest of these magazines. Usually around 24 pages, the publication is printed on newsprint, has a circulation of 2,500 and relies on volunteers-with the exceptions of one full-time paid staff person and a few paid part-timers-to publish 10 issues a year. According to the published mission statement, Kinesis’ objectives are to be a “nonsectarian feminist voice for women and to work actively for social change, specifically combatting sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, ableism and imperialism.”

This leftist feminist publication’s favourite topics appear to be protests, loss of government funding to social programs and unfair labour situations. Editor Agnes Huang says, “We don’t want [stories] just because women are women, we want a political paper.” Out of a recent sampling, about two pages of the four-page front news section were usually devoted to demonstrations. Protest stories-“Women in Quebec March Against Poverty” (July/August 1995), “Solidarity Rally Against APEC” (December/January 1997), “Demonstration at Parole Hearing of a Convicted Rapist” (June 1995) and “Protesters Confront Reform Party” (July/August 1996)-are so plentiful that the section can seem like a series of big picket signs.

Sometimes the demonstration-style chanting is witty and light in tone. The editorial for the July/August 1996 issue, for instance, read “lots of sun, right-wing weather over east with strong right-wing winds over Alberta. Tomorrow, less of the same, with more feminism and sunshine expected all over the world due to high pressure from out Left.” Informative international features, which cover such issues as the sovereignty struggles of native Hawaiians and the effects of free trade on Mexican women, add depth and insight to the magazine.

Fifty percent of the magazine’s financial support comes from its publisher, the Vancouver Status of Women, which is, in turn, partially funded by federal and provincial government bodies. Advertisers range from women’s bookstores to organizations promoting special events and protests.

Kinesis’ tag line is “News About Women That’s Not In The Dailies,” so it’s not surprising that the features can’t comment often enough on the inadequacy of the mainstream press. One example is Huang’s article in the July/August 1996 issue “Women Vote for Unity.” In it she refutes reports by mainstream media that women “walked away empty handed” after the NAC’s annual federal lobby. Although the constant reiteration of how the mainstream press gets it wrong can sometimes seem overstated and the protest coverage can become tiresome, this old-timer is full of energy and flags events rarely mentioned elsewhere.

Kinesis is the oldest alternative women’s magazine in Canada but Winnipeg-based Herizons, with a circulation of 4,500, is the largest. Its mission statement says that “Herizons aims to reflect a feminist philosophy that is diverse, understandable and relevant to women’s daily lives” by building “awareness of issues as they affect women” and promoting “the strength, wisdom and creativity of women.”

This national news magazine attracts insightful, well-known columnists such as Manji, who is also a producer for the “In the Public Interest” segment on Vision TV’s Skylight (a current affairs program which focusses on social justice issues), and Lyn Cockburn, who writes a column for The Calgary Sun. Michele Landsberg, columnist for The Toronto Star, is one of its 150 “sustaining subscribers” who believe in Herizons strongly enough to donate money each month.

Herizons has had its share of financial trouble. In 1987 the magazine was cut off from the government funding that had provided more than 50 percent of its budget since 1982. When it lost funding, publishing stopped. Determined to start up again in 1992, a reconstituted editorial board used part of $10,000 left over from 1987 to solicit 3,000 subscribers. The first independent issue came out that same year, and since then this low-budget quarterly (published on light-weight matte stock) has been in business-albeit with half the subscribers it once had.

Perhaps one thing that has kept Herizons going is its ability to address different factions of the feminist movement. Co-ordinating editor Penni Mitchell says she attempts to publish a variety of perspectives from both younger and older feminists. Indeed, columnists range in age from mid-20s to mid-50s. As well, some of the features, such as “Mixed Message: How the Media Went Wrong on the Breast Implant Story” in the summer 1996 issue, or the fall 1996 “Making a Business of Books,” about the dreary future of women’s bookstores in Canada, cater to a wide audience-every woman has breasts, and most feminists visit women’s bookstores.

Herizons can also be amusing. Its 1996 summer fashion supplement has a poem titled “To Shave or Not To Shave” by Mitchell, which asks, “Whether ’tis nobler to conform and suffer/The nicks and scrapes of outrageous fashion/Or to take arms (and legs) against a tide of fashion experts.” An article in the same issue called “Rebel Without a Bra” by Jackie Clements-Marenda, offers: “At some point during our conversation the novelty of my bralessness should wear off and the man should realize there is a body part above the chest from which a voice comes.” This entertaining style adds fun to Herizons, which may be the only alternative women’s publication that is successful in making every feminist feel included and welcome whatever her skin colour, age or political affiliation.

Canadian women’s publications in the ’90s have had many mainstream and alternative predecessors that depicted women in their time. Early this century, Everywoman’s World was published in Toronto. It included letters by men saying what they wanted in a woman. In the November 1914 issue, one man said that he wanted a woman to trust him: “Let me tell her of the wickedness of the outside world and be content to know it only vicariously.” Twenty-five years later, during World War II, magazines offered quick, nutritious recipes to help women juggle their housework with newfound employment. For the next couple of decades the publications greeted women, many of whom had given up their jobs for their war-vet husbands, with increasingly elaborate meals to prepare and new appliances to buy. Then, in the ’70s, the rights and difficulties of women, who now wanted back into the work force, took precedence in magazines. In the U.S., Ms. made it clear that women no longer needed to play a second-class role and shouldn’t have to do all domestic duties on top of having full-time jobs. In Canada, Doris Anderson, the editor of Chatelaine from 1957 to 1977, published articles about unequal pay as well as service pieces that told women where to get jobs. Encouraging women to work was one of many topics Chatelaine took on that offended people. Another, according to Anderson’s 1996 autobiography, Rebel Daughter, was abortion-the magazine said it should be legal under some circumstances. “Almost immediately we were inundated with phone calls threatening not only to cancel subscriptions but to have me fired and the magazine run out of business,” she says.

What was so important about Anderson’s contribution to Chatelaine was that she brought alternative thoughts into the mainstream. And no matter how many factions the women’s movement may be made up of today, its publications can do something similar-offer a voice for diverse readers and a home for dissent that can make its way into mainstream consciousness.

On the outskirts of Winnipeg, stalks of golden prarie wheat rustle in the summer breeze, and dust blows between the stubble in the fields where fresh-cut sheaves stand like miniature teepees. Dozens of grain elevators along the horizon cast long, skinny shadows as the sun lowers in the western sky. In the city, a disturbance is brewing at the Manitoba Free Press. An argument over the amount of space given to farm news has erupted in editor John W. Dafoe’s office. The loud, angry voices cease when agricultural editor E. Cora Hind storms out. She raps on the door of another colleague. Reporter Lillian Beynon Thomas answers, and Hind enters, cheeks flushed and blue eyes flaming. “Wouldn’t you think that this paper would have a news side with some sense of news value, with some idea of the importance of agriculture?” she asks in frustration.

Hind posed this question nearly a century ago. While she demanded-and got-a good harvest of agricultural reportage for her paper, following generations of farm journalists have not been as successful. Now, more than 50 years after her death, Canada’s daily newspapers have turned their attention far afield from the kind of reporting that Hind saw as vital. During the past two decades, reporters have virtually stopped touring around the nation’s barnyards and tramping through the country’s corn fields. In fact, the number of agricultural editors at Canadian dailies has de-creased by 65 percent.

Today, Hind-Canada’s grandmother of agricultural journalism-is an unfamiliar ancestor to most citizens. She is remembered at Toronto’s Royal Agricultural Winter Fair, where her portrait hangs in the Canadian Agricultural Hall of Fame. There, her eyes are permanently fixed on the scene where, every year, farmers compete for top honours in crop and livestock-two things Hind knew more about than any other Canadian of her time. From 1901 until 1942, western farmers and business people counted on her to keep them up-to-date on agriculture happenings.

As commercial and agriculture editor of the Free Press, she was an advisor in the shaping of editorial policies, and the paper’s authority on all farming matters. She assembled a daily marketing page that outlined crop and cattle prices; wrote articles about livestock, grain and irrigation; reported on conventions; and visited experimental farms to find out about new breakthroughs. Hind’s ability to foretell in summer how many bushels of wheat the Canadian West would harvest in fall made her name famous worldwide. Every July and August, wearing her trademark buckskin jacket, Stetson hat, riding breeches, high-laced boots and khaki shirt, Hind toured Western Canada, scaling fences and trudging through wheat field after wheat field. She surveyed crops to judge their size, took heads of wheat and threshed them with her hands to see how the kernels were filling out, and examined the stalks for disease. She was extraordinarily accurate. In September 1909, Hind estimated that the wheat crop would yield 118,109,000 bushels. The actual tally came in at 18,119,000. Every fall, grain dealers wouldn’t budge, refusing to place or take any orders until the Free Press had published Hind’s annual crop estimate. (Before the Canadian Wheat Board was established in 1935, the government didn’t fix the price of wheat, and millions of dollars were at stake in the buying and selling of the country’s main export.)

In 1922, Hind traveled to Great Britain to investigate the marketing of Canadian agricultural produce. In 1932, when she was nearly 72, she spent a fortnight aboard the first cargo ship of prairie wheat to leave the port of Churchill, in order to see it to the markets of the world and report the story. Three years later, Hind-on her final assignment as commercial and agriculture editor of the Free Press-took a two-year trip around the world to gather news for the people of the prairies. She traveled through 27 wheat-producing countries, speaking to farmers, government officials, researchers and journalists to investigate their methods and compare their conditions, sending reports back to Free Press. When she dies at 81, Hind was still on staff as a general reporter-and halfway through writing an article.

Today, the tradition of agricultural reporting established by Hind is on its deathbed. I’ll reveal my bias up front: I’m concerned by this fact. My family’s bungalow, surrounded by fields of corn in ate summer, is in Peel County, Ontario-a region 80 kilometres from Grey County, where Hind was raised on her grandfather’s farm. The scent of manure smells like home to me, as my grandparents’ dairy and cash-crop operation is just a walk through a pasture away. (My mom, the farmer’s daughter, couldn’t bear the thought of moving any farther.) From our laneway I can read the faded black tin letters that cling to the side of the barn, spelling Stone Away Farms.

Farming has been my grandparents’ lifelong occupation. And while I have no financial stake in it, agriculture is important to me. Growing up in a farm community made me the recipient of countless hick jokes and cow questions, but more importantly it gave me an appreciation for the land, and a knowledge about how the food I eat is produced. As a youngster, I would perform my own crop inspections with Grandpa. I’d look on as he shelled out a head of wheat in his hands, stained by tractor grease and nicked by dry air. Then we’d each put a kernel in our mouth, hoping that it would be hard to bite and ready to thrash.

Nowadays, apart from provoking some surprise, seeing a farm story in a daily paper fills me with a sense of pride. But for the most part, the nonfarming population isn’t concerned with what is happening “down on the farm.” They should be, though. Soon they’ll be eating what’s growing there.

While this decade has mostly been a health-conscious one, urban readers are largely unaware of important issues affecting the food they’re putting in their mouths. Many people are ignorant of the debate over biotechnology. Although altering the biological processes of plants and animals seems to hold unlimited potential for farmers-offering higher yields and more disease-resistant produce – opponents fear its long-term effects on the environment, animals and public health. The public also has little knowledge of agriculture policy. Few people realize that although the government prohibits fruit and vegetable growers from using certain chemicals on Canadian crops, these outlawed substances can still be found in produce aisles, on food imported from the United States and other countries.

Anyone who’s been on a livestock farm knows it’s tough to get the smell of the barn out of your clothes. Newspapers don’t seem to have that problem. Each year, Project Censored Canada compiles top- ten lists of stories that have been underreported by the national media-stories it believes the public should have been made aware of. In 1994, two of the ten were related to agriculture. One that made it into the top three revealed that the position of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade on plant patenting will limit scientific research and stifle the farm economy. Another story, exposing the dangers of fish farming, was in ninth position. It suggested that disasters related to interbreeding and disease may occur if Canada doesn’t impose stronger controls on the industry.

Agri-food is big business in Canada. It generates $80 billion in sales every year. It helps fill the stomach of every citizen. It employs one in seven Canadians. You’d never know this from the dearth of coverage in the mainstream press.

Back when a milking machine was no more complicated than a farmer’s two hands, newspapers had farm pages, farm sections, farm editors. They provided producers with vital information about their crops and livestock – from harvest predictions like Hind’s, to breeding information that ensured farmers maintained quality stock. But as the urban population grew, the rural population shrank. Newspapers gradually quit writing for a declining agriculture audience. Despite extensive research, I found few agriculture writers left at Canadian dailies, and only one who covers farm news full-time. In fact, I can count the number of farm reporters I unearthed on just one hand: Mike Strathdee at The Record in Kitchener-Waterloo; Michael-Allan Marion at The Expositor in Brantford; Jim Algie at The Sun-Times in Owen Sound; Ric Swihart at The Lethbridge Herald; and Lisa Schmidt, the lone full-timer, at The Regina Leader-Post.

At the Winnipeg Free Press, the grand tradition of prairie farm reporting that began with Hind lasted until the late ’70s. But since then, the daily’s agricultural coverage in Canada’s breadbasket has been sporadic, shifting between two full-time reporters and none at all. Its latest effort, a column called “Rural Revival,” has run every Saturday since August 1996 on the front page of the business section highlighting issues important to the Manitoba farmer. Its author, Laura Rance, also associate editor of the Manitoba Co-operator, a weekly farm paper, says the column was born to fill the agricultural void at the Free Press. “[The Press is] making a commitment of 14 to 16 inches a week, which isn’t anything to sneeze at,” she says. “But, by the same token, it’s impossible for me to do anything in-depth with that either. I think they’re not getting the kind of coverage that they could if they would put time and effort into developing someone in-house.”

Last November, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization played host to the World Food Summit in Rome. For five days, 100 heads of state met to discuss the world’s food shortage with the aim of halving the number of undernourished people worldwide by 2015. In 1974, the organization hosted a similar gathering called the World Food Conference. The same issues – such as how to improve the efficiency of the production and distribution of all food and agricultural products – were discussed. What had changed was the reporting. Organizers of the 1996 conference expected 4,000 journalists to attend. Just over half that number actually showed up. In 1974, The Toronto Star sent its own reporter, Mary Janigan, to cover the conference. For three days her stories from Rome were featured on the front page. But in 1996, the Star’s coverage consisted of a single Reuter-AP story that ran on page 12 the day after the summit ended.

Lou Clancy, managing editor of the paper, says agriculture has been an “unfortunate fallout” as newspapers deal with a shifting pendulum of issues. “This is a country that has been through raging constitutional debate, and you have a city here in which there are multiple issues around multiculturalism, around policing, around unemployment, around welfare, around whether or not you can find a decent place to live. These are all issues which newspapers are throwing their resources at,” he says.

The Globe and Mail, too, has shifted its resources. In 1993, its food and agriculture beat in the Report on Business was dropped when reporter Oliver Bertin was reassigned to write about aerospace and transportation. In 1994, Kitchener-Waterloo’s Record pared down its farm beat when full-time agriculture reporter Jim Romahn’s 20-year stint ended with a buy-out offer.

In 1996, Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. bought Saskatchewan’s Regina Leader-Post and Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix and promptly laid off more than 20 percent of the staff. Students at the University of Regina’s journalism school followed up with an investigation, reporting that the number of column inches devoted to agriculture declined by 80 percent at the Leader-Post after the takeover. The findings weren’t too surprising considering that D’Arce McMillan, the paper’s farm reporter for eight years, was one of the people Hollinger let go. But even Hollinger couldn’t ignore the province’s key industry for long. In November, the Leader-Post hired a new reporter, Lisa Schmidt, to ensure full-time coverage of farm matters.

If Schmidt headed east to Ottawa, she’d find that the parliamentary press gallery can be a lonely place when agricultural issues are on the table. Barry Wilson of The Western Producer, a farm paper from Saskatoon, has been in the nation’s capital since 1980 as the weekly’s political agriculture reporter.

“Until as recently as five years ago, three or four reporters would show up at [the] agriculture committee on a regular basis. And if the minister was there, or if there was a hot issue, there might be seven or eight reporters. Now it’s almost always just myself. Occasionally a freelancer will be there, but very, very rarely,” says Wilson.

Agriculture may be underreported because of its complex nature. A journalist without some background knowledge on such issues as biotechnology, dairy quotas or crop diseases may have a difficult time separating the wheat from the chaff. Agriculture is “highly polarized and politicized, and the jargon reigns supreme at some of these meetings,” says Laura Rance. “It’s not impossible [to cover], but it’s difficult for a general news reporter to just drop in and do a good job.”

General reporters might fear the farm beat, but the simple fact that agriculture is not very sexy may also explain its absence from the mainstream press. Soybean commodities and trade issues may not hook today’s techno-obsessed urban readers into a story. It’s difficult to appeal to an audience whose closest connection to the land is a bag of milk in the fridge.

In Hind’s time, approximately 60 percent of Canadians lived in rural areas. Today, farmers make up less than three percent of the population. And as generations move further from their rural roots, interest fades. Brantford, Ontario-former home of the Cockshutt Plough Company and Massey Ferguson-was once a major industrial centre for the farm machinery business. Michael-Allan Marion, agriculture reporter at the Brantford Expositor, says that results of a 1996 Southam survey indicated that only five percent of readers are interested in farm news.

The Globe and Mail also conducted demographic studies before eliminating Oliver Bertin’s position as food and agriculture reporter. Since the study found only a small audience for agriculture, the editors didn’t see why they should continue to carry farm stories. “Newspapers tend to be written and read by urban people who don’t have much interest in agriculture,” says Bertin, who would capture the attention of editors and readers by using a clever trick in his leads. “City newspapers, [which] tend not to have any sort of interest or knowledge about farming, have honestly no idea how big the industry is,” he says. “So if I did a story…I’d say the $3-billion wheat crop or the $800-million corn crop. Then they’d wake up and say ‘Gee whiz, it is big, isn’t it?'”

Bertin also recalls one Report on Business editor who suggested that agriculture reporting be moved out to Winnipeg. Bertin asked why. “But Oliver, they don’t have farms in Ontario, do they?” was the response.

In a certain sense, farm stories do make it into the daily press. They crop up every day in business stories (“Truce called in hog war,” Winnipeg Free Press, February 7, 1997) or the life section (“Milk: Nature’s ‘perfect’ food? Or a great white lie?” The Toronto Star, February 11, 1995). They take the shape of health stories (“Here comes the latest word in eggs,” The Globe and Mail, April 20, 1996) or environmental articles (“Farmers reduce use of phosphorus, help clean Everglades,” The Vancouver Sun, September 6, 1996). Some would argue that mainstream agricultural journalism still exists but has simply undergone a shift; that the traditional reports from the field, written for farmers, have been altered to suit an urban audience. The Star’s Clancy is critical of farm writing in daily papers that doesn’t involve the consumer. In 1990, at a meeting of the Canadian Farm Writer’s Federation, Clancy addressed the group of agriculture journalists, saying, “The only kind of story I am interested in is one that has a direct impact on the food on my plate.” In 1996, he reiterates his point for me: “Relate it to me, put it on my plate.”

But the stories that do get ink don’t always relate to our plates. At its annual conference last fall, Dairy Farmers of Ontario formulated its new policies following the win of an important NAFTA decision. Attendees discussed a national pooling system for milk to try to compete better with the United States-an issue that once would have made headlines. But, typical of today’s coverage, the mainstream media’s focus was on the big goal former Toronto Maple Leaf Doug Gilmour scored for the dairy industry. A Canadian Press story in the The Globe and Mail reported that the $20-million milk campaign Gilmour starred in had increased Ontario’s milk consumption by two percent.

While some farm journalists were disappointed by the consumer angle of this coverage, others accept the fact that agricultural reporting is changing. Owen Roberts, director of research communications at the University of Guelph and president of the Canadian Farm Writer’s Federation, predicts a bright future for agricultural reporting. Today, he sees it as being in transition. The challenge for farm writers is to make farm news relevant to urbanites. Not unlike Clancy, he says: “We need to reposition the ag beat to include a consumer beat.” Though it may take some time, Roberts believes “the new ag beat is waiting to be defined.”

Three post-secondary schools in Canada are poised to create this definition. For example, the University of Guelph offers a fourth-year course in agricultural communications, currently instructed by Roberts. At Loyalist College in Belleville, agriculture has been a program option of the two-year print journalism stream for a decade. And from time to time, the University of Regina’s School of Journalism and Communications offers its fourth-year students a class in agriculture journalism as an elective. Although the number of students choosing those options is tiny-this year there are three at Loyalist and four in Regina-the potential for graduates finding jobs in the mainstream press isn’t any greater. “We’re also looking at other directions,” says Loyalist instructor Joe Callahan. “What we’re hearing from some people is that there are more career opportunities in the information business, as opposed to hard-core journalism.” What Callahan is talking about is farm public relations.

Last November, Roberts invited John Muggeridge, managing editor of Farm and Country, a trade journal for Ontario’s farmers, to speak to his class in Guelph. Muggeridge titled his lecture “The Changing Agricultural Media: How You Can Be Part Of It.” Nineteen students listened as he forecasted that food would be the story of the future. As populations continue to grow, the demand for food will explode and farmers will need to increase production. “We’re going to need people like yourselves to help communicate the new issues and challenges to the public,” he told them. Muggeridge summed up his lecture by saying, “The general media has overall abandoned agriculture, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t job prospects for people who want to get into agriculture communications.” In part, these prospects lie with publications like his own.

Unlike daily newspapers, farm publications are looking to hire people who know a cultivator from a plough. D’Arce McMillan, who now writes for The Western Producer, says that the number of reporters at the farm paper has risen in the past 10 years.

Farmers hungry for information can find it in any one of Canada’s 99 farm publications. In days of yore, these publications were often rural people’s only connection to the outside world. Nowadays, they serve as reference tools for a highly technological industry-from updates on the biotech front to bulletins on fertilizer. The fact that the majority are owned by agricultural organizations, such as wheat pools and producer associations, raises the question of objectivity. Could the close affiliation push certain news items to the front page and bury others? John Morriss, publisher and editor of the Manitoba Co-operator (owned by Manitoba Pool Elevators) defends his paper. “We’re not here to promote the virtues of agriculture,” says Morriss. “We are first and foremost a newspaper. We’re not an organ. We’re not an apologist for the profession of our readers. We’re a straight-up newspaper.”

At my grandparents’ house, a daily paper is never delivered to the door. If one does come across the threshold, you might find it in the back kitchen under the rubber boots, keeping the manure off the linoleum. But peek under my Grandpa’s favourite couch and you’ll see his stockpile of The Draft Horse Journal and Ontario Farmer, hidden from Grandma, who can’t stand the clutter. Farmers relish these books. Last February, I roamed the aisles of the Canadian International Farm Equipment Show in Toronto, and I felt I knew everyone I passed – men and women in hats and coats boasting emblems that I’ve been able to identify with seed companies and equipment dealers since grade school. Among the harvester displays and the pesticide exhibits were the farm publication booths, with readers scribbling on paper and pulling out wallets to renew their subscriptions. And despite farm population declines cutting into the subscriber base, these publications can rely on advertising revenue to keep them in the black. They’re filling a vital niche, but these are specialized publications written for farmers. The non-farming population has little to gain by reading them.

For the most part we are a well-fed nation, but most of us are malnourished when it comes to knowing our food. Canada’s non-farmers-about 97 percent of the country-don’t know how the food they eat is produced and processed. This ignorance will no doubt be felt in years to come. Without the presence of agriculture stories in the mainstream press, The Expositor’s Michael-Allan Marion foresees less of an ability for the public to understand farming policy. “Over the next 20 years, an atrophy of agriculture policy may begin to take hold, slowly and subtly,” he predicts.

Without an understanding of agriculture, urban readers are vulnerable to special-interest groups such as animal rights activists and environmentalists.

These groups allege, for instance, that intensive cattle farming is cruel to animals, eating hamburger depletes the rain forest, and livestock-produced methane causes global warming. And when sensational items are all that make the news (like the mad cow panic of 1996), city people develop a lopsided view of farming that could eventually threaten the agriculture industry.

While I was researching this story, all my sources prodded me for my background. When they heard of my farm connection, they became interested and excited; they wanted to conclude that I’m an aspiring journalist with a mission to keep agriculture in the mainstream media.

If Hind could return to investigate the condition of agriculture reporting in 1997, today’s dailies wouldn’t come close to passing her tough inspection. She would surely barge in on editorial meetings across the nation and demand the revival of the farm beat. Perhaps Hind could succeed at such a mission, but it’s too great a task for this farmer’s granddaughter.

“I’m not really a magazine editor,” Stevie Cameron announces firmly over the lectern. “I don’t know what I’m doing. I have to pattern myself after you guys.”

The audience laughs. It’s September 1996, and a hundred-odd members of the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors are sitting over the remains of a buffet lunch. Many know Cameron personally; a few ? such as Anne Collins of Toronto Life ? she acknowledges as role models; all are aware of her reputation as a tough investigative reporter and best-selling author. And most have spent the last hour leafing curiously through the glossy advance copies of Elm Street, the new women’s magazine of which Cameron is editor-in-chief. This is the premiere issue, the editors’ first chance to view Cameron’s foray into their field-and to judge the truth of her self-deprecating disclaimer.

From advance publicity and trade gossip, most are already familiar with the Elm Street story: how Greg MacNeil, charismatic vice president of women’s magazines at Telemedia Communications Inc., set up his own shop; how his team courted Cameron ? to all appearances an odd choice ? as editor; and how he set out to produce what was billed as a magazine for the thinking Canadian woman.

The editors’ curiosity had been piqued by this anomalous concept: “intelligent” and “women’s” are usually considered mutually exclusive qualities in magazines. Would the result look like Chatelaine shorn of its fluff (the 10-Minute Beauty Fixes and Suppers That Say Pow), or like Ms. with the politics lightened by great risotto recipes? Conventional publishing wisdom has it that comfort reading (fashion, food and decor) and hard-hitting journalism blend as reluctantly as oil and vinegar. Could even Stevie Cameron combine the two?

Now here is Elm Street, perfect-bound on heavy paper (the editors’ practiced fingers gauge it as 48-pound stock, weightier than most rivals). An exploratory flip shows it to be fat with ads, the T-cell count of a healthy magazine. Canadian actor Matthew Perry, of Friends fame, is on the cover; inside are front-of-book snippets, profiles of achieving women, and features exploring serious topics such as corporate wife-beating. Cameron’s inaugural editorial tells readers she wants “the best Canadian journalism to inform you [and] entertain you…. We’ll have politics and crime and scandals and gossip; we’ll have fine recipes to try, and beautiful houses and gardens to inspire you.”

Indeed, the browsers find the food and homes sections (along with the fashion and beauty features) to be suitably stylish. What disappoints, surprisingly, is the much-hyped “intelligent journalism.” A couple of articles, such as the story of David and Linda Frum manipulating their mother’s memory, stand out. But others, though good of their kind, read like standard women’s magazine fare. On this first viewing, Elm Street looks to be more compromise than synthesis.

Cameron’s vision of superlative journalism, it seems, has simply been shoehorned into the traditional format ? a fact she freely admits. During her speech, she tells the crowd her aim is to make Elm Street a hybrid of Vanity Fair, Toronto Life, The New Yorker and the former Saturday Night.

“So why is it a women’s magazine?” one puzzled editor asks her.

“Because that’s what Greg MacNeil wants,” Cameron answers candidly. Again there’s laughter, but several editors shake their heads. Maybe the concept will work; but Cameron will have to find her stride first.

Elm Street had been on the drawing-board since early ?96. Greg MacNeil had conceived it after he left Telemedia in ?95 and started Multi-Vision Publishing Inc (MVP) with partners Lilia Lozinski and Bill Wolch. A maverick with a golden business touch (and a talent for self-promotion ? Canadian Living editor Bonnie Cowan pegged him as “a great guy, but his own best PR man”), he had several ideas for his new venture. The crown jewel, though, was to be a new full-service women’s magazine.

Positioning his book-to-be was no problem: MacNeil had spent most of his working life in the publishing business, and knew how to analyze other magazines’ comparative strengths and weaknesses. His knowledge of Telemedia books Homemaker’s and Canadian Living made it easy for the shepherd to turn wolf, using his former defensive skills to attack. If Canadian Living, Homemaker’s and Chatelaine attracted the rural and down-market demographic, then Elm Street’s niche would be monied urban women. It would woo advertisers by promising readers with deep pockets, and would lure those readers with interesting stories, quality writing and the magazine’s character.

All the team needed was the right editor. The man who had hired Sally Armstrong at Homemaker’s (and encouraged her to go to the Persian Gulf) knew he wanted a strong personality. So did Lilia Lozinski, who had been a fan of Cameron’s work for years. She had kept an enthusiastic eye on her career: newspaper food and lifestyles editorships, Globe and Mail columns, writing for Saturday Night and Maclean’s, a stint in television and her reincarnation as best-selling political muckraker. She had raised Cameron’s name on the two previous occasions when Homemaker’s had been looking for a new editor. But the timing hadn’t been right, and they had never actually approached Cameron. Now, thrilled to finally be in a position to offer Cameron a job, Lozinski told MacNeil: Call her.

In April 1996, when Cameron first entered the building on Bay Street at Elm, she was partly impatient and partly curious: why had these people she had never heard of called to ask her to edit a new women’s magazine? Even when she refused, they insisted on meeting to talk.

The 11th-floor offices of Multi-Vision were spacious, with lots of glass and floor-to-ceiling wood doors, and nearly deserted. MacNeil and his partners were delighted to see Cameron, and poured her coffee while energetically pitching the job.

“I’m flattered, but I’m not interested,” she told them frankly. “I don’t read this kind of magazine; I’m not into reporting on women’s issues any longer.” Sure that she was wrong for the job and that they were wasting each other’s time, Cameron tried to steer them toward somebody more suitable. “I was happy to tell them who they should look at,” she says. She had been around, she knew everybody. She could find them writers. And she liked the idea of a new women’s magazine, provided it improved on the existing ones.

That was the idea, Lozinski said: they wanted to do something new, a magazine style MacNeil termed “mass with class.” Cameron had class, obviously, as well as a background in women’s books; and her household-name status as a political writer might help a new magazine stand out in a crowded field. “The very reason why you don’t want to be in the women’s market is why we want you ? we want to treat women like adults,” MacNeil explained. And he dangled a carrot: what kind of magazine would Cameron like to edit? Taken aback, she mentioned her favourites, her ideal combination. She was even more taken aback when MacNeil said: “What if we let you do it?”

Obviously, this still meant: within the format of a women’s magazine. But Cameron was tempted despite her misgivings. MacNeil promised her editorial freedom, with no interference from the publishers; and whatever the subject, she would still get to work on good stories with writers of her own choosing. She could help encourage new talent, broaden the cultural landscape. The friend she asked for advice told her she had “horseshoes up her ass,” and chided her for even hesitating. What clinched it for her was the urging of Bob Lewis, editor-in-chief at Maclean’s. He told her to go for it ? it would be a great experience, and she could still keep her foot in his hard-news door. That did it: though she described herself as “grumpy” about the decision, Cameron took the job.

Once the news got out, others were more convinced of her suitability than she was. “Stevie’s fantastic ? I thought she was an inspired choice,” says Toronto Star columnist (and former This Magazine editor) Naomi Klein. “Most people don’t have the kind of balance Stevie has. She’s an incredible homemaker as well as an impressive journalist. She doesn’t condescend to the fact that women do care about food, fashion and decor. But she also doesn’t think investigative journalism is boys’ stuff. To find those two key areas in one person is unique.”

Aware of Cameron’s concern about her lack of magazine expertise, MacNeil offered her a compensatory hiring spree. (“We know you haven’t done this before,” he soothed. “Let’s find you a team.”) Multi-Vision already had a basic staff, culled from the 500 r?sum?s produced by the Help Wanted ad in Marketing magazine. Now MVP hired Charles Oberdorf (veteran gardening, decorating and travel writer, and former managing editor of City & Country Home) as second-in-command; high-profile art director Georges Haroutiun, founder and owner of Applied Arts magazine, to establish Elm Street’s look; and Julia Aitken, also a Homemaker’s alumna, as food editor. For the clothes department, Cameron (who once called herself “Mrs. Frump”) picked Globe and Mail fashion reporter David Livingstone.

Cameron’s own great strength is the high regard the close-knit world of Canadian journalism has for her. She called a few old colleagues; when news of hit the grapevine, others called her; and soon a network of seasoned writers ? respected names such as Naomi Klein, Robert Mason Lee, Alanna Mitchell, Robert Collison and Ian Austen ? was mobilized on behalf of Elm Street. Vancouver-based writer Robert Mason Lee, with whom Cameron once worked at The Ottawa Citizen, expresses the common feeling. “Stevie’s a quality person,” he says. “I signed up on the st rength of her concept of a mag that bridges the gender gap ? she can put my name on the masthead any time.”

In mid-September ?96, a few days after the editors’ lunch, 700,000 copies of Elm Street went out in newspapers to the top 15 urban markets across the country (25,000 went to newsstands, from which they sold briskly). Through the wizardry of controlled circulation, the magazines were sent to city and suburban neighbourhoods whose residents matched the profile of the prospective readers: women, aged 25 to 54, with household incomes of $50,000 and over.

A high-profile launch with a controversial figure at the helm will always generate gossip. (Think of the buzz over Frank Stronach’s business magazine, Vista, back in ?89.) Elm Street was big news among both suits and journalists, and everyone had an opinion. Radio spots for Elm Street gushed: “Finally, a woman’s magazine with an IQ.” (This irked Chatelaine editor Rona Maynard, who protested that her magazine had an IQ too, along with its tips on How to Blow-Dry Like a Pro.)

Other responses were less effusive; some were downright hostile. Probably the most considered response was offered by Antonia Zerbisias, The Toronto Star’s media reporter, who says that although Elm Street wasn’t “the slick and sophisticated women’s mag the Canadian market is missing,” it was still “a refreshing change from all those earnest features” the others offered. She also claimed that Elm Street was making the competition nervous. If that’s true, nobody’s admitting it. The Three Sisters of Canadian women’s magazines (little Homemaker’s, with a circulation of 1.3 million; Chatelaine, with 900,000; and Canadian Living, with around 600,000) are all healthy, with well-established readerships; and their editors shrug off the suggestion that the new arrival is any real threat. Homemaker’s editor Sally Armstrong admits, “They’re certainly competition for advertising dollars ? anyone who says they’re not is naive.” But since Elm Street’s editorial is more upscale than that of Homemaker’s, she’s not overly concerned about competition for readers.

Neither is Maynard, who points out that Elm Street’s service component is much higher-end than hers. Chatelaine readers, she says, have told her they want affordable clothing of the chain-store genre and easy, fast weekday meals, rather than painterly layouts of expensive clothes and “elaborate company meals for serious cooks.”

(Masthead’s irreverent “Code Breaker,” which translates trade doublespeak, says the proper diplomatic formula for the old books is: “We welcome the new magazine in our market. Competition is good for everybody.” Decoded for industry insiders, this becomes: “Who do these bastards think they are?”)

So Elm Street’s rivals were discreet in public, graciously conceding the first issue’s appeal. In private, though, post-hype disenchantment reigned ? perhaps simply because Cameron’s reputation had aroused high expectations for all aspects of the magazine. She had little to do with the art direction, for instance, but many felt let down by it. One senior magazine editor says he’d expected “something a bit more energized ? frankly, I thought the look was a bit staid.” Don Obe, another old-timer, agrees. “Haroutiun is brilliant, but I don’t think Elm Street is integrated enough visually ? it looks like a whole bunch of different magazines,” he says. “You may like Chatelaine or not, but page by page you know you’re reading Chatelaine.”

Another major criticism was that Elm Street lacked a clear focus. Veteran writer and editor Jim Cormier shrewdly attributed the “hodge-podge” to Cameron’s balancing of personal interest and editorial expedience, “a mix of what the owners wanted and her own impulses.” His own experience at Equinox had taught him that just publishing interesting stuff isn’t enough: if the material isn’t “filtered with discipline, it may have difficulty finding an audience.”

One could speculate that Cameron, sensitive about her lack of experience, is simply unwilling to trust her own magazine judgment yet. That lack of self-confidence may be self-correcting. Observers acknowledge that to find its voice, a new publication needs anywhere from several issues to several years. Cameron herself, though, insists the magazine already is focused ? just in a different direction than critics were expecting. Then again, possibly even she isn’t entirely certain yet where that direction is.

It’s November ?96, and Stevie Cameron is in her office at Multi-Vision. The second issue has come out to favourable reviews, and the third is well under way; so she’s at leisure, briefly, to correct rumours and answer questions about Elm Street. About the name, for instance ? why pick one so redolent of slasher films? “It was the only one we didn’t all fight over!” she says. The general favourite was Mayfair, until the team heard about the British porn rag of that name. Finally, sales rep Mary Coughlin suggested their street name. Cameron likes it: “It’s a nice plain-Jane name, and there’s an Elm Street in every town in Canada.”

And about the first cover, a monochromatic family portrait of Matthew Perry with four cute siblings. Although MacNeil defended it (“It’s kind and warm, people like that”), it evoked an almost universally negative reaction. One forthright editor described it as “among the worst I’ve ever seen ? it looks like an Eaton’s catalogue.” Others simply felt it was a poor choice; there was gossip that Cameron had wanted a harder-hitting cover, but had been overruled by MacNeil.

In fact, the choice was dictated by timing. For business reasons, the launch ? originally scheduled for spring 1996 ? had to be postponed until autumn. Because Cameron was committed to be out of the country until mid-June, she had to keep track from abroad and then hustle to assign stories when she got back. As a result, the much-anticipated first issue was put together in unseemly haste: copy was still being added three weeks before press date. And with such a time-crunch, Perry was simply the best of the available cover shots. Cameron, exasperated, flips through the options she and Haroutiun had to choose from: this is pick-up art; this is just an old file photo; this isn’t good enough quality; this was used already…

What about Barbara Frum, surely the obvious choice? The story itself, she points out, was really about the Frum offspring’s reinvention of her. More to the point, Saturday Night had beaten them to the cover shot, and they couldn’t get photo permissions. Well, the picture of the bloodied cuffs from the corporate wife-abuse story? Cameron looks outraged at the suggestion. “Not if you want people to buy the magazine!”

Inside the book, Cameron concedes ruefully, one item that attracted major criticism was the premiers’ makeover feature. With the magic of Photoshop, Elm Street had turned cosmetic surgeons loose on eight of the 10 provincial leaders, electronically nipping and digitally tucking their faces. Nora McCabe’s prose was lively: would Joe Clark, she mused, “still be prime minister if God ? or a good plastic surgeon ? had only given him a chin?” But the pictures failed dismally. The difference between before and after was barely visible, and the joke fell flat. That feature, along with the cover, always headed up the list of journalistic cavils at Elm Street.

But on the whole, sniping was confined to industry insiders ? as Greg MacNeil, knowing journalists for a querulous bunch, had foreseen. “Don’t give it to the writing community, give it to someone in our target group,” he had advised. And it’s true that, except for the few who disliked the premiers piece (“You promised no makeovers!” some complained), readers ? both male and female ? responded warmly to Elm Street. Letters, e-mails and faxes expressing gratitude for the new magazine papered the wall outside Cameron’s office, and few seemed inclined to criticize the magazine’s IQ. Magazine fan Linda Turk, who lives on a farm near Thunder Bay, dismisses the quibbles. “What should it be, an unsellable collection of serious pieces?” she scoffs. “To me it seems a cheeky but solid magazine, and I wish it well.”

The tastes of her new constituency have changed some of Cameron’s own ideas. As a reader, her view used to be: Don’t show me any fourth-generation Muskoka cottages I can’t afford! Now she works in an environment where decor, like fashion, is seen as intensely aspirational: people want to look at things they can dream about having, the theory goes, not at those they can actually have. And her new perspective as an editor had also changed her opinion of advertising. “Baking inserts used to really irritate me,” she confesses. “But now I rejoice, because they give me money to hire good writers.”

Will intelligent readers share her newfound tolerance, though, and reconcile an aspiring Toronto Life with 10 pages of Robin Hood recipes? Do they understand the intimate connection between the good writing they enjoy, and the baking inserts that may irritate them too? And can Cameron, with her strong principles, really feel comfortable attempting the extraordinary while being bankrolled by the mundane?

That perceived incompatibility has some observers questioning, if not how Elm Street itself will fare, then at least how long Cameron will stay there. So far, MacNeil has allowed her a free hand (somewhat to Cameron’s surprise: “I thought he’d turn into a monster, but he’s been very tolerant,” she confided). Still, he wants her to edit a women’s magazine, and she wants to redefine the concept: “I wasn’t hired to do a gender-free magazine,” she says. “I’m trying to get away with it.” No wonder insiders like former Masthead editor Doug Bennet speculate on “the relationship between Greg and Stevie, hard-nosed commercial publisher and hard-nosed investigative journalist. So far so good, but I wonder if eventually there’ll be a clash.” Another young editor, characteristically blunt, agrees. “It’s unlikely Stevie’s going to hang around for long,” he says. “Her heart isn’t really into magazines. And when she leaves, whatever credibility Elm Street had will go with her ? people will forget she was ever associated with it.”

Maybe. After four issues, though, she’s still at Elm Street‘s helm, and still learning by trial and error. The second cover, a head shot of comedian Cathy Jones wearing a towel turban and a saucy smile, made up for the first in audacity. (“How many other magazines would put a woman with a towel on her head on their cover?!” MacNeil demanded proudly.” Inside was more comedy: the genuinely funny Roseanne vs. Skoke mouth-off, the useful and delightful wine-advice article and the cute trophy-husband column. What wasn’t there, unfortunately, was the full profile of Jones that readers might have expected; there was only a photo and a hundred-word blurb. Too late, Cameron realized that a great cover needs backing up.

By the third issue, cover and story were wrestled into congruity: an elegant cover photo heralded a stylish feature on Si Wai Lai, the Chinese businesswoman who’s buying up Niagara-on-the-Lake. But beginning with the “Your Break Today” piece, which read more like a history assignment than a diversion, the comedy of the previous issue gave way to sobriety. Serious, tough-women stuff predominated: filmmaker Bonnie Sherr Klein on rebuilding her life after a stroke, Brenda Morrison on the infamous Prison for Women strip-search, and workers at Toronto’s McGill Club on fighting exploitation.

With such swings in tone and content, can Cameron be said to have imprinted herself on the fledgling publication? So far, Robert Mason Lee thinks not; he says Elm Street‘s major flaw is that “there’s not enough Stevie in it.” And it’s true she seems to be holding herself back: the magazine is nowhere near as subversive as one edited by Cameron ought to be. From her, people expect incisive commentary, wicked and flamboyant women, naughty humour.

They get some of those, but mostly just an awkward dualism. One the one hand, Cameron recognizes the importance of providing fashion and inspiring role models. On the other, she’s not really passionate about clothes herself, and has an aversion to “worthy” stories. She has, she says with a sigh, “this thing about women’s magazines. I just want to do a mag that’s fun to read, outrageous, informative.”

That desire isn’t always obvious; rather, one gets the impression she feels it’s her duty to the formula (or the owners) to pour her own forceful personality into the existing magazine template. But a new publication needs that strong editorial presence if it’s to become a firm voice for readers to recognize and respect. For now, Stevie Cameron’s personal ambivalence is hobbling Elm Street far more than the practical inexperience she confessed to at the editors’ lunch.

On that occasion, Cameron provoked another laugh when she announced that she didn’t have a vision yet ? she just knew what she didn’t like in a magazine. And maybe that isn’t the worst way for a new editor to feel her way into the job. As the fourth issue of Elm Street hits the stands, Cameron seems to be holding her own with her latest work-in-progress. For On the Take, she had the luxury of privacy. Editing a magazine, though, means having to make those first few missteps under public scrutiny. But no one should be too quick to dismiss what Stevie Cameron can do ? as one former prime minister, and thousands of readers, have already found.

It’s just about 7:30 on the night before Halloween, and the 30th anniversary gala of Homemaker’s magazine (now known as HM is beginning to roll at Guvernment, a trendy club in downtown Toronto. Sally Armstrong, editor-in-chief of Homemaker’s, for the past eight years, is working the room wearing an iridescent-green wrap-around blouse, a short black skirt and black chunky heels. She’s a striking 6’3″ in them. The party room is dark, except for glaring spotlights that shine on large posters of past magazine covers. There’s a five-piece band playing jazzy pop in one corner, and a 10-foot-long hors d’oeuvre table set up near the bar. People are chatting in clusters or milling about over drinks. Scattered around the room are live mannequins representing the 30 years of Homemaker’s– a ’60s go-go girl, a ’70s and 80s corporate business woman climbing a ladder to success, and a ’90s woman, complete with cell phone in one hand and baby with bottle in the other. Embodying all three is Armstrong, who introduces me to photo editor, Peter Breggk, and his wife.

“Peter,” Armstrong says, “this is Jennifer Foster. She’s a student at Ryerson and she’s doing a profile of me for the Ryerson Review of Journalism, so please make sure you don’t say anything bad about me!” Everyone laughs, including Bregg, whose long mustache curls up and out like a bull’s horns. Moments late Heather Armstrong, Sally’s eldest daughter, introduces me to Robert Lewis, editor in chief of Maclean’s. “This is Jennifer,’ Heather says. “She’s doing a profile of my mom for the Ryerson Review of Journalism, so you can only say good things!” We, chuckle. They more thin I, since they haven’t heard it over and over again, as I have during the course of my lengthy research. Armstrong, the engine behind Homemaker’s continues to work the room as if she doesn’t have a care in the world. The truth is, she cares intensely – and about matters that extend far beyond a glamorous promotional evening, into darkly troubled areas all over the world.

Homemaker’s is only typical of Canadian women’s service magazines insofar as it publisles how-to pieces on food, decor, fashion and beauty. The differences are evident in its editorial content and, more importantly, in the editor herself. Since 1991, Homemaker’s has been a direct reflection ofArmstrong and what drives her: “I love stories that move you emotionally [and] move you to action.” Readers get current, hard-hitting and thought-provoking pieces about the lives of women across the country and, two or three times a year, fom around the world. Not only does she push the limit of this digest-sized, mainly controlled-circulation magazine, she’s the one getting the first-hand acconts. Like the time in 1991 when she spent three 12-hour days in the Prison for Women in Kingston, Ontario. Or in 1993 when she followed the path of a container ofwheat by truck convoy through Somalia, from Mogadishu to Baidoa and beyond. 0r the time in 1995 when she went to Ruhengeri, Rwanda to profile Dr. Marie Skinnider from the international medical relief team, Doctors Without Borders.

It’s these eyewitness stories, distributed to 1.3 millioin readers (300,000 of whom are paid subscribers), that give Homemaker’s its edge. Armstrong connects with her readers on both a personal and intellectual level unlike the other magazines – she encourages them to effect change. “I wouldn’t lose sight of the fact that we’re in business to entertain, but I think empowering people with information is a very valuable thing to do.”

Despite her self-appointed position as head cheerleader of change for women, Armstrong and her work have sometimes strayed from worthy issues. Take her 1992 authorized biography on Mila Mulroney, for example. The night in May 1992 when she and singer/song writer Nancy White co-hosted the National Magazine Awards, at the Sheraton Centre Hotel and Towers in Toronto, Armstrong had to check her pride at the door. Mila, published only weeks earlier, had been execrated by dozens of the nearly 700 in attendance .

“I was getting boiled alive” with that book, she says now. “I was getting so trashed, I can still show you my scars.” Mila, at 274 pages, sold around 5,500 copies according to a Macmillan Canada source (national sales manager, Cari Burrows, refuses to confirm this number). On the Take, Stevie Cameron’s scathing 487-page book on the Mulroney years, published two years later, sold nearly 100,000 copies – an indication of what people actually wanted to read and know about the Mulroneys. In an August 1991 interview, Armstrong had told Maclean‘s her book wouldn’t be a “puff piece.” But that’s exactly what her critics labelled it. In one of his columns, journalist Claire Hoy stressed, “I think someone a tad more detached should have taken a look at Mila and her influence. This book doesn’t do that. It just says how wonderful Mila is. Armstrong acted as a publicist for Mila.” Others were less restrained. In a summer 1992 review in Books in Canada, Michael Coren called Mila a “flatulent puff piece” full of “blubber” and “banality.” He went on to say, “There are only the most innocuous of criticisms here, emollient reservations that drown in a sea of flattery and fawning.” Don Obe, professor of magazine journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University, shares Coren’s sentiments. Obe, who says he has never actually Mila, calls it “a totally sucky book…. People dismissed it because it was hagiography.”

At the core of Obe’s criticism is what he and others call the dichotomy: “How can the Sally Armstrong who wrote that piece of nonsense be the same person who wrote the Bosnia piece?” Obe says it was the fact that she was capable of writing siuch “nonsense” that made some people regard her as a “frosted hair…ditz.”

Some typical fare from Mila should reveal what all the fuss was about. At one point in the biography, Armstrong quotes Mila: “I feel that I’m expected to be creative, that since this is 24 Sussex, the meal or the event or whatever has to be special and interesting. I’m constantly leafing though magazines and looking for new candlestick ideas or interesting new ways to line bread baskets. I feel I have to always one-up myself.” There’s more. Armstrong also talks about the Mulroney kids: “The children have inherited their mother’s style and her beautiful-people standards.Their jeans are ironed.Their hair always shines. They have straight teeth (braces helped little Caroline and Ben) and good bone structure. Together they look like a Ralph Lauren advertisement.”

To this day, Armstrong defends the book on all levels. “It was an opportunity to learn something new. I only had six months to write it. I’d never written a book. I wasn’t taking on an issue or a cause. This was an authorized biography so I had to be able to prove everything I put in the book.” But Armstrong is also quick to admit that “a little more Kitty KeIley would have kept the barracudas off my back.”

Criticism about Sally Armstrong’s work doesn’t stop with Mila. Many complain that recipes, fashion, and violence don’t belong in the same magazine. Critics seem quick to overlook the fact that this mix is found in nearly all women’s magazines. Do justice in the wokplace and taking care of your children’s health have to be mutually exclusive? asks Armstrong. “That’s the suggestion that bothers the hell out of me. And the suggestion that because we print recipes, everything else we print must also come in tablespoons and half measures -that’s very irritating.”

Not all judgement of Armstrong and her work is negative. Although her Mila book is devoid of profundity, her features in Homemaker’s – more specifically her international pieces -are not. To date, no fewer than 12 global-issues features have appeared in Homemaker’s since 1991. Perhaps the two that best display Armstrong’s dramatic writing talent are “Eva:Witness for Women” and “No Way Home: The Tragedy of the Girl Child.”

What makes her stories compelling is not only their meticulous attention to detail, but that she gives faces to these tragedies. With the October 1994 “Girl Child” story, Armstrong took a clever angle. She told the tale of a 15-year-old prostitute in Toronto named Angel and a13-year old one in Dhaka, Bangladesh, named Taslima. “We did it so our readers could not say,’Oh well, that’s just over there.'” Armstrong spent a week on the street with 11 girl hookers in Dhaka. “It was absolutely heartbreaking to me,” she says. An excerpt from the article articulates Armstrong’s experience: “The lice the kids pick from Taslima’s hair while she tells her story is only one sign of the lifestyle they’re yoked to. Most of them are coughing, scratching, yawning. They’re too small for their age, too wise for their years, too needy for words. They have scars and burns and body sores that bespeak horrid stories.”

Armstrong’s goal in this story (and all he, global stories have a goal) “was to put a hot blaze of light and attention onto governments.” She wanted to “point out that the governments around the world were allowing this to happen, and that they had to alter their thinking.” In this case, Armstrong succeeded. World Vision Canada, a nonprofit organization that, among other activities, sponsors girl-child projects world-wide, heard from about 4,000 Homemaker’s readers, many of whom offered to adopt or sponsor the child prostitutes in the story.

Armstrong, summer 1993 feature, “Eva: Witness for Women,” is by far her most moving piece. It’s a 12-page article about 48-year-old Evica Penavic who, in the autumn of 1992, was one of the first victims of mass gang rape in the Balkan region. It’s also a rivetting example of Armstrong’s knack for delivering eye-opening, first hand account of the atrocities women experience worldwide. Armstrong wrote the story to tell her readers that “You can’t turn people into ‘others.’ You can’t look at a situation and say, ‘Well, somehow they can handle that, I could never handle it, but they could.”‘ Armstrong wanted her readers to see Eva as “the universal refugee” – an ordinary woman just like them, but caught up in a set of horrid circumstances.

Armstrong writes: “Then they attacked her, like a pack of jackals, six men all naked…. By turns they raped her orally and vaginally. They ejaculated and urinated into her mouth….When they were finished with her they dressed her, cleaned themselves off with her lingerie and stuffed the fouled underwear into her ,outh, demanding she eat it.Then they marched her back outside into the garden…. Bullets ripped over her head…. They thought they had bagged another kill.”

“Why didn’t God take me when He took my [husband] Bartol?” Eva asks at the end of Armstrong’s piece. “I think He left me here to be the witness for all women.”

The feature won a gold award in the category of public issues in 1994 from the National Magazine Awards Foundation (of which Armstrong was president from 1991 to 1993). To this day, however, there is still griping in the magazine community about the win. One colleague said that some in the industry feel that, although the story “,,,.is very emotionally affecting,” it was “not terribly thoughtful nor terribly original.” According to him, many thought the award was more a reflection of Sally’s standing within the community than it was a piece of good journalism.” Readers, however, felt differently: no fewer than 2,000 letters from Homemaker’s, readers poured into the United Nations demanding change. Dozens of them also wrote to Homemaker’s offering to buy Eva a plane ticket to Canada.

It’s mid-October and I’m sitting with Armstrong in her cozy fourth-floor office at Telemedia Communications Inc. headquarters in North York, Ontario. Memorabilia from her experiences and world travels – a bronzed running shoe from the staff of Canadian Living, a baseball cap from the HMCS ‘Terra photos of her familiar awards and plaques -decorate every available surface. Gloria Steinem’s Revolution from Within is crammed onto her bookshelf. So is a book on menopause, and one on peacekeeping. Her in-tray is nearly overflowing. As usual, she’s fashionably dressed. Her ash-blonde hair, (no longer larger than life, as it was for years) is shiny and well groomed. She’s wearing pale-pink frosted lipstick and gold hoop earrings, ad her hands are perfectly manicured in a sheer beige polish. It’s 11:10 a.m. She’s just finished her biweekly French lesson (she has taken them for eight years to help her give speeches and proof copy in French), and is running behind schedule. She apologizes profusely, makes a call to a photographer in Croatia, listens to her messages, scoots into the hall to give instructions to her assistant and then hurries back into her offce.

While Armstrong and I are talking about her own take on herself, she admits that impatience is her worst trait. “When people don’t [understand something], I become extremely impatient. I think it’s because if I get it, everybody should get it. In my next life, I’m going to have patience.” What she’s happier with is her insatiable curiosity, which she dates back to her childhood.When she was little, she would hear adults talking incessantly about Monkland Avenue, a busy street for shopping in Montreal. When her mother forbade her to go there, she just had to make the two-block trip, and conned a girlfriend into going with her. They bought some bubble gum (an illicit substance in Armstrong’s house) and wandered around. Everything was going fine until 5-year-old Silly got hit by a car and briefly ended up in the hospital.

Armstrong is also proud of early attempts, trivial as they may seem, to make the world a fairer place. Even as young a 9, she was unhappy with inequality between the sexes. “I didn’t like the way the rules were, so I would challenge them.” She remembers her mother, Alma (who quit her job as a nurse when she got married in 1939 because those were “the rules”), serving her father, William (an employee of Bathurst Power and Paper), kippers on Saturday morning without giving Armstrong and her two sisters any. “I thought it was wrong, but I had loads of excuses for it.” Until her brother, who was then about 3, started sharing the kippers. That’s when Armstrong insisted that she, too, be allowed to try some of them.

Armstrong’s main devotion -bettering the lives of women – came to a head in her late teens when she was living in residence at Macdonald College at McGill University, in the mid-’60s. The different rules for men and women irked her and she fought them any way she could. Armstrong remembers the women having their freedom restricted by a 10 p.m. curfew and a leave system; the men had neither. “You can imagine the, shenanigans, how we’d cheat and go out windows…. You could be kicked out if you didn’t go along with the deal [and] I was often late.” If a woman was caught, she was called up in front of a disciplinary body known as the House Committee. Armstrong spent a lot of time there. Eventually, the realization that she as a feminist was cemented in 1967 when she found herself elated that the Royal Commission on the Status of Women had begun – Armstrong was 24.

Thirty years later, her approach to improving the status of women is still deeply personal. Rona Maynard, editor of Chatelaine, explains it this way: “There’s a sense of burning passion about her. She uses her own emotions very much as the litmus test for a story. Armstrong calls the features “the heart of the magazine”; her readers, “the soul.”

So what’s at the heart and soul of this 53-year-old former English and gym teacher? (She got her bachelor of physical education from McGill in 1966.) Armstrong is a combination of what you would and would not expect. As editor of a magazine called Homemaker’s you’d expect her to be married with kids – and she is. She’s been married to Ross, who’s in the molasses business, for 29 vears, and has three children: Heather, 27, Petr, 24, and Anna, 21. You’d also assume she’d always be wearing an apron and carrying a duster. “I don’t think my mother’s had an apron on in her life,” says Heather.

What you might not expect, however, is that Armstrong is a former ballerina who had to give up her love of dancing at 15 because she was too tall (she was already 6 feet and towering over the male dancers). She is also a self-proclaimed workaholic, perfectionist andjock (she jogs, skiis and plays tennis) who is as vulnerable and sensitive as the next person, yet won’t take crap from anyone. “You can still see the gym teacher in her,” says Kenneth Whyte, editor of Saturday Night. “She’s very straightforward. She doesn’t mince words. She’s very direct and up front about what she thinks, and she can be aggressive in articulating a position. I think that people who disagree with her on particular issues might find her to be domineering, but…I don’t feel that way.”

Mary McIver, who has worked with Armstrong for the last seven years as managing editor, describes her as a very complex person with mercurial moods. She says Armstrong is the best thing and the worst thing about working for Homemaker’s. “She’s like a dog with a bone when it comes to the this magazine,” says McIver. She never lets things go by and agonizes over detail. “She’ll lambaste you and say ‘This is a piece of shit.’ Once she even. said to an editor, ‘Is this supposed to make me jump out a window?'” One of Armstrong’s favorite expressions before she comes do-, hard on an employee is “I know I’m being a bitch, but…… Yet, at the same time, “she throws out a challenge …and makes you work and pull things out of your socks and make things better,” says McIver. Georges Haroutiun, consulting art director for Homemaker’s in the late ’80s and early ’90s, says Armstrong “knows exactly what she wants” in terms of art direction and “she tries to get ger way politely, and if she doesn’t, she becomes quite demanding…and difficult.”

While she may take her work seriously, Armstrong is nevertheless cheerful in her overall approach to life, seemingly unaffected by all the international evils she’s encountred. This, no doubt, is what has lead some people to think she’s shallow. Armstrong explains her resilience this way: “They are very scarring stories. I don’t think any journalist who covers those stories is untouched by them. [But] whenever I’m feeling the stress and the anxiety in a story, I quickly remind myself that I have a ticket out. They don’t. So I don’t like to focus any attention on what I may go through to tell the story of the person who has to live it every day.”

John Fraser, former editor of Saturday Night, has his own theories on why some view Armstrong as a “Pollyanna ditz.” According to Fraser, “Sally is so gung-ho. I think, mostly, magazine people are people who don’t like getting up in the mornings – and Sally’s someone who’d be bright and chipper and that would drive some people berserk.” To him, when Armstrong attends a magazine industry function, she’s “like the bluebird of happiness walking into a funeral home. We’re such a down-at-mouth, down-at-heel, pessimistic, nit-picking, back-stabbing group. And here’s this extremely positive, quite glamorously dressed, strikingly tall gym teacher. Well, she’s just bound to get on some people’s nerves.”

Armstrong made the leap from gym teacher to writer effortlessly – a job fell into her lap. A neighbour phoned her one day with a proposal to write about recreation and lifestyles for a new family magazine. And so, in December 1975, she was part of the team that launched Canadian Living.

She worked there for more than 12 years as a freelance writer, contributing editor and associate editor. Her stories ranged from the royal tours in Canada to family pieces on coping with teenagers. After almost every assignment, she would entertain her colleagues with tales of calamity and adventure. Like the time she was escorted out of a royal event by Prince Edward’s body guard because she was writing while he was eating. Or the time, about 15 years ago, she had to interview former Alberta premier, Peter Lougheed for a story on premiers and their families. Grateful for an interview, and nervous, Armstrong sat on the very edge of her chair, barely making contact with it. By the time the interview was over, her muscles had gone into spasm. She could barely waddle out of his office – let alone make a gracious exit.

Armstrong truly believes that what she’s doing will make things better for all women. Luckily, it also makes things better for the bottom line, since these global stories are what distinguish Homemaker’s from its sister magazines – Chatelaine and Canadian Living. (Elm Street, the newest Canadian women’s magazine has so far focussed on national issues and stories.) When owner Market Maid Corporation of Canada Limited published the first issue in July 1966, Home Makers Digest was a shopping list, a recipe book and a light-hearted child care guide – a lipstick-and-lasagna read.

But by the mid ’70s, under the editorship of Jane Gale, the profit-making magazine was taking on controversial issues such as incest, day care, gun control, divorce and – the one that caused an uproar across Canada – abortion (the article was pro-choice). Homemaker’s was the little magazine that continually surprised readers with its commitment to being a social conscience. By the mid-’80s, however, Homemaker’s, then owned by Comac Communications Ltd., was in financial trouble. In 1988 Telemedia Procom Inc. became the new owner and relaunched the magazine. And Armstrong, handpicked from Canadian Living by Homemaker’s new publisher, Greg MacNeil, was now in charge. From the moment she came on board, Armstrong had a vision. “I really wanted Homemaker’s to be a miniature Vanity Fair. I wanted strong, well-written, issue-oriented pieces, but I realized very early on that I had to protect the [readers’] interest in the food, the fashion and the decor.” With that in mind, a notable change in editorial content happened in 1991. Homemaker’s decided to try expanding on stories behind international headlines by giving them a personal slant. Half of the credit goes to MacNeil, the other to Armstrong herself. “It was my idea to send her to the Persian Gulf. It was her idea, I think because she really enjoyed it, to do more of it,” says MacNeil. Armstrong’s first international Homemaker’s story, about the women serving in the Persian Gulf War, was published in January 1991. The feature chronicled the daily fears and struggles of 15 women on board the HMCS Protecteur, who were the first Canadian women allowed into a combat zone.

It’s Halloween, and we’re both tired from the gala the night before. We’ve just spent a half hour looking at a sampling of tier photos – everything from war zones in Pakrac, Croatia, to cocktails at 24 Sussex Drive with Chuck and Di. The one that most succinctly depicts Armstrong is a picture from the Persian Gulf. It’s noon on November 24, 1990, during Operation Friction and she’s being transferred by two ropes and a pulley from the HMCS Protecteur to the HMCS Terra Nova across a nearly 100-foot-long gap. The cobalt-blue waters, with poisonous snakes riding the waves, are churning 30 feet below her. As I stare at it in amazement, she tells me the soldiers on the Protecteur were chanting, “Dip her in the water and buy you a two-four!” Her life, in that picture, hangs in the balance. The photo epitomizes the mix of danger and excitement she experiences on every trip to global hot spots to get that ever-desired eye-witness account.

The contradictory images and opinions people offer up when they talk about Sally Armstrong and Homemaker’s magazine have been rolling around in my mind a lot lately. What stands out more is the change in Armstrong since our interviews began. Instead of worrying over whether people are speaking negatively about her, she got to the point of brainstorming names of people who would probably trash her for me. And although she still dreads the thought of reading about herself in the Review, she says she’ll “cope” as long as it’s “a good read.”

He correctly surmised that Mike Watt, a “strictly plaid-and-jeans kind of guy” who was playing bass for Porno for Pyros, would want to get out of the toga-like garment he was wearing on stage as soon as possible. And sure enough, after the performance Lewis found Watt backstage doing just that. A rock star in his own right, Watt was an old friend of The New Music, having been interviewed by the show several times over the years for his own career. He was more than happy to help Lewis and his cameraman backstage-he got a kick out of sneaking them in “the backdoor of the biz.”

When the item appears on The New Music two months later, the viewer is shown the backdoor nature of the interview: Lewis follows Watt, the cameraman follows them, the camera’s light is adjusted (colours get distorted when they go inside), the camera bobs slightly with the cameraman’s steps and Lewis and Watt make small talk. (“One life is made of many days; the sun rises, the sun sets,” philosophizes Watt.) Finally, they all arrive at the dressing room that Porno for Pyros shares with Love and Rockets. Inside they find Farrell among bandmates and crew. Watt hugs Farrell and then Farrell puts on an English accent and insults Watt’s clothing: “Lookit yoo in yer jollywaggers an’ yer pollypoppers!” Then there are a few seconds of general chaos-indecipherable voices blending with laughter and the mike not anywhere near whomever is talking. Soon Farrell is saying, “tell you what, let me talk to Canada.” Taking the mike from Lewis, he begins a story about meeting some kids from Canada and saying how “beautiful” it was that they planted trees for a living in the summer. Then, as if announcing a whole new thought, he says that the “beautiful” idea of planting trees was given to him by college kids from Canada. That seems to be the end of the story because somebody puts some Brazilian dance music on a boom box and Farrell says, “Uh-oh! It’s time to dance!” And he dances around for about a minute before landing on top of one of the members of Love And Rockets. End of segment.

“Everything in that incident,” says Avi Lewis later, “was classic New Music.”

True, you wouldn’t see anything so raw on the CBC-and you may be questioning whether or not the Farrell segment could even be categorized as rock journalism. But Lewis is convinced that it can be and that it exemplifies “the best thing The New Music does.” The show brings the icon down from his pedestal and exposes him as a real person. It knocks down the PR wall and lets the viewers see how the idol interacts with the world. But more importantly, it exposes where music comes from and why. By doing all this, The New Music separates itself from a world of broadcast music journalism that is so often seen as a publicity tool by record companies and is characterized by sensationalism and celebrity worship.

The first episode of The New Music went to air on September 22,1979-predating Music Television (MTV) by one year and MuchMusic by five. Eighteen years and more than 700 episodes later, it continues to produce innovative music journalism that is seen across Canada and syndicated in 14 other countries. Both MTV (owned by giant Viacom Inc.) and Britain’s BBC have comparable music journalism shows but they are only available in other countries by satellite, making them more focussed on their home music and markets.

The New Music was created by John Martin, who at the time was a producer in the current affairs department of the CBC. He wanted something on t elevision that would give him the same type of information he was getting from print sources such as Rolling Stone and England’s New Musical Express-something that treated music as a serious journalistic subject with good reporting and analysis, but focussed on what was happening on the street. Martin tried to sell his idea to the CBC, but it didn’t have a place for a show that couldn’t be slotted in either variety or current affairs. He also tried Toronto’s Global Television, which wasn’t interested either. He then met with Moses Znaimer, president of Toronto’s Citytv, where the staff was young and the programming included dance-party shows and soft-porn movies. The station had just been acquired by radio and television broadcasting network CHUM Limited, and Znaimer himself had a background in music (he once owned a recording studio). Znaimer okayed a pilot, then 13 half-hour shows. “By the time we got to the second or third show it was an hour,” recalls Martin. “It was just obvious it was working.” It was the perfect marriage: A new show that treated rock and roll as a journalistic subject actually worthy of airtime, on a station that broke all the rules of conventional television anyway. The show was, and is, anything but static-as New Music special assignment and associate producer Kim Clarke Champniss says, what changes out there, on the street, is what changes on The New Music . And for each era of new music, there’s been a new era of hosts to mirror that music.

It was 1979-the tail end of the punk era and the beginning of the “new wave”-a coincidence that Martin describes as “fortuitous” for the show’s beginnings. “It meant that as the show launched, it was also launching off a whole new block of music,” says Martin. “So you got something completely different than anything on television-a show that suddenly had reggae, punk and ska and whatever. And the only other music on television was an Anne Murray special.”

A limited budget (dollar figures aren’t available) helped to define the style of the show in the early days. The hosts, J.D. Roberts and Jeanne Beker, couldn’t be flown to London or New York, but they could wait for artists like Madness and Iggy Pop to come through Toronto. Martin believes that Toronto sees more quality musicians pass through than England or the U.S. The minimal budget also meant no fancy sets when the bands did come to town. The New Music camera caught them backstage or in their vans-wherever they could catch them. Just like Lewis did with Perry Farrell. Not too slick, but you got to the artist. The show also covered music news such as the riot that erupted when Alice Cooper didn’t show up for a Toronto concert in 1980, Bob Marley’s funeral (for which Roberts went to Jamaica) and the 1981 Reggae Sunsplash/Police picnic-a huge rock festival held just outside of Toronto headlined by British band The Police. An Iris award for the best independently produced television program in North America went to the episode that featured the Marley funeral and the Police picnic. These segments were produced much in the style of City’s news show, CityPulse. After the Roberts-Beker era ended, this newsy technique didn’t carry on as strongly, perhaps because Roberts, who wanted to (and did) become a professional news broadcaster, was no longer an influence on the show’s style.

After Roberts and Beker had moved on to other things at City in 1984, Daniel Richler-a messy-haired, leather-clad DJ and seasoned arts reporter-became the host of the The New Music. This was just what the show needed to really bring it down to the street-since Roberts and Beker had grown a little too used to “pride of place,” as Richler says, becoming too focused on getting to interview the big stars. “I wasn’t really interested in meeting Mick Jagger,” says Richler. “I was more interested in angry young turks with nails in their noses and their pubic hair dyed purple and why anger was an energy for them. And I said, ‘Look, I’ll go to the place you cannot go.’ Because in their pursuit of the Top 40, J.D. and Jeanne had become a little cut off from the street. If they went to a grungey punk club, they received some abuse from the rude crowd. And they really didn’t like going into those places. I was more anonymous. I was branded differently and trusted more.” Richler also would not be told by record companies who he should be interviewing and where and when that should be. He felt (and feels) that rock and roll is youth politics. “I thought, ‘Let’s use the principles of investigative journalism in the world of rock and roll and let’s go looking for things.” In 1984 he went looking for things in London without a clue as to what he might find. So he went to the street and asked the punks what music they were into. The name Jesus and Mary Chain kept coming up, and the band was playing at North London Polytechnic. So Richler and his cameraman went and “All hell broke loose right in front” of them. The “music” consisted of yelling and speaker feedback, and then there was a mini-riot because the band only played for 20 minutes. The bassist had only two strings on his instrument (“introduce another couple of strings and you confuse the guy,” said his bandmate). Questions about their popularity got answered all right: “Because we’re so good.”

“And I went ‘wow!'” Richler recalls. “I can’t believe we scored.”

Laurie Brown joined Richler as co-host of The New Music later in 1984, and she believes she was first considered because of her ability to act (she’d “starred” in two Corey Hart videos) and experience in a band. Brown approached the show with the honest curiosity of a huge music fan, which complemented what Richler was doing. She too wanted to go further than any other media went-further than the scheduled hotel interview. Brown recalls doing many interviews in washrooms “because they’re the quietest places” in most venues and it jars the artists out of their typical interviewee mind-set of plugging the new album. In particular, she remembers talking to Simple Minds in the men’s shower room of a football stadium.

When Richler left to become an arts reporter for CBC’s The Journal in 1987, Denise Donlon became The New Music‘s producer and Brown’s new co-host. Donlon brought a strong social consciousness to the show. Again, change on the show reflected what was happening in the music world. It was the time of growing awareness of global issues, epitomized by Live Aid, the benefit concert for the famine in Ethiopia. Some typical fare from Donlon’s day: “Rock ‘n Roll ‘n Reading,” to promote literacy; “Earth to Ground Control,” which tackled environmental problems; and “In Your Face: Violence in Music,” for which Donlon won two awards at the 1993 Yorkton Short Film and Video Festival. The shows were a mixture of facts, video clips and artist comments about the given issue.

Today, The New Music continues to take on these kinds of subjects. “The idea is to give these issues some life,” says the current New Music producer John Marshall. “Keep it a pop show-bouncy and visual, and actually have a real discussion in there and real serious food for thought that will stick with the viewers, and they’ll think ‘Oh, I never really thought of that ,’ or ‘I didn’t expect to hear that from that artist.'” In “Rock ‘n Roll ‘n Reading: Chapter 3,” for instance, viewers found out that angry thrasher Henry Rollins has his own publishing company.

Despite the success of this approach, Brown left in 1989 because she felt that Donlon was pulling the show in a direction that was a bit too mainstream-catering to the same huge audience that watched MuchMusic (launched by Znaimer in 1984) and forgetting that The New Music was supposed to be cutting edge. Donlon’s new co-host, Jana Lynne White, reinforced what Donlon was doing, producing her own “issues” shows including: “AIDS: Your Place or Mine?” and “The Big Tease: Media Imaging of Women.” The White era also presented a number of pieces on the “big” stars like Madonna, R.E.M. and Van Halen.

After seven years on the job, Donlon moved on to become the director of music programming for MuchMusic/Citytv, and White continued to host the show solo until September 1996. That’s when Avi Lewis (who had been a reporter for the previous four years at CityPulse) and Larissa Gulka took over as co-hosts. In many ways, they make the show an updated version of what it was in the early days-showing sides of stars that don’t come across in the standard PR interview by imbuing The New Music with a real feel for what is happening on the streets.

For Lewis, it’s getting past the rock-star facade that makes good music journalism. One of his favourite moments was when he actually got Lou Reed (who in 1986 had walked out of an interview with Richler after only five minutes) to crack a smile by asking him about the woman he was living with. He finds that one good tactic for getting some personality out of stars is asking questions out of left field. When he asked Keith Richards about aliens and UFOs, Richards’ reply was something like: “UFOs? I drive them for a living!” And about transvestites: “You’ll have to ask David Bowie!”

Co-host Larissa Gulka is also the show’s resident “videographer,” a crew of one who interviewees and shoots with the camera always on her shoulder-the camera as the human eye. While doing a story on dance moves, Gulka asks a dancer what part of his body gets the best workout when he’s dancing. The answer: “My ass!” And the camera jerks from the dancer’s face to his backside-just where your eye would go if you were there. Visually effective, not to mention cost-effective. This technique, along with Gulka’s specialty-stories on raves and club life-brings the viewer to “the street” more than ever.

Beside the street-style videography, editing technique also helps tell the story. “TV operates on so many levels,” says John Marshall. “It’s not just what you’re seeing and what they’re saying-it’s the pace of the edits. There’s a literacy to that too.” All along, the editor wants to reflect the artist’s musical vision. If the piece is on an industrial band, for instance, the edits are fast and jerky. If the piece is on a group that sings medieval Celtic music, the frames are slightly blurred and grainy.

The New Music is the longest running rock-journalism show ever, so its formula must be working. It has a viewership of 56,000 (ages 18 and older) per episode and receives fan mail from Canada and around the world (about 60 pieces per show, in various forms-mail, e-mail, phone calls). Reporter and assistant producer Jennifer Morton has found that people from all over the world recognize her “TV Frames” specials (which feature the music and culture of a different city on the globe) and that Toronto radio stations start to play bands that were introduced to the world on her specials. Greg Quill of The Toronto Star has called The New Music “one of Canadian TV’s most lasting institutions,” and The Globe and Mail‘s Rick Salutin has written that he “would like to nominate it as the most intelligent show on the air.”

In Lewis’ opinion, it now takes more to impress audiences than when the show first began. Just getting an interview with a rock star isn’t a big deal any more-it’s expected. But getting backstage at Eden MusicFest to talk to an artist who wasn’t supposed to be talking to any press-that’s a big deal. As silly and amateurish as that segment may have seemed to someone just tuning in, the incident really was classic New Music. It was unruly, spontaneous and, above all, it told you a little bit about who Perry Farrell really is-you begin to understand why he looks so freaky on stage and why his music is as different as it is. And it was all possible because of the show’s long-standing relationship with Mike Watt. As Avi Lewis would later say, “our history came to our rescue.”

Andrew Coyne is so excited that he barely touches the brick-grilled chicken on the plate before him. When he does come up for air, he stabs the chicken with his fork, ripping at the meat, in too much of a hurry to use a knife. Olives and small chunks of tomato fly off the plate. For long bursts he doesn’t eat at all –too much to say, his mind racing, off on what you think are tangents until he miraculously comes back to the question, which you have long since forgotten. He talks not just in fill sentences, but in complete paragraphs. You can hear the punctuation.

He has barely caught his breath after arriving 20 minutes late for lunch, slightly frantic. His reputation for lateness precedes him –20 minutes late is a compliment. He’s slightly dishevelled and unshaven, hair askew. His blue knitted pullover covers a T-shirt. Near the collar there’s a spot of something reminiscent of spaghetti sauce.

The wine has loosened him up. He launches into another long monologue “I’ve said this before, so forgive me if it sounds a little rehearsed, but it’s like that Seinfield episode — I’m not a conservative — not that there is anything wrong with being a conservative–some of my best friends are conservatives.” And in part because of the company he keeps, Coyne is known as a brash neocon writer, despite his significant liberal views. He’s a Southam columnist who chose journalism because he thought law would have been too easy. He’s the kind of guy who can rewrite the national budget but paid no attention to expenses incurred to at least one publisher when he missed a deadline. While he’s ruthless in print, in person he makes sure a near-stranger has cab fare. At 36, Coyne his presence felt-on television and radio, in magazines and newspapers.Three times a week, two million readers get a peppery taste of how he thinks the country should be run.

The TV camera catches Coyne’s eyes burning with rage. His tie needs loosening. He pounds the table with the outside edges ofhis hands, boldfacing the key words in his rant. He is co-hosting CBC Newsworld’s Face-Off with Judy Rebick, a show where political pundits get together for high-spirited debate. Being the co-host hasn ‘t protected Coyne from being attacked himself. He’s the one in the hot seat, on this December 1995 episode entitled” Neocon Media.” Diagonally across from him is Rick Salutin, left-wing Globe and Mail columnist. Rebick and Saturday Night editor Kenneth Whyte, the other guest of the day, might as well not be there.

Salutin leans back in his chair with his characteristic smug look.The black shirt with the black jacket gives him the desired air of anti-establishment. People say, privately that Salutin is obsessed with Coyne. In Salutin’s weekly column, he mocks “a world view this cocky you don’t have to argue your points, you just state them,” and cringes at the fact that Coyne has written about what the Left should be doing. He slips in snide comments about Coyne’s academic style ofwriting and his debating days at the University of Toronto’s fabled Hart House.

Talk of who controls the media-the Right or the Left-quickly deteriorates.The debate turns personal hen Salutin accuses Coyne of “straight character assassination.”

“I’m sorry,” Coyne responds. “What did you spend your last six columns doing? What was your last column about? How ‘l liked the other right-wingers better’ What do you think that was? Was that character assassination or not?” Salutin sits back while Coyne bellows at him. He has goaded Coyne into losing his temper.

“You’ve decided in your Olympian wisdom that you’re going to call me a right-winger,” Coyne shouts. “Apparently I have no say in the matter as to how I define myself. Apparently to be a right-winger in this country is to be in favour of public health care, public education, public pensions,redistributive taxes, liberal immigration laws, right down the line.”

It is a rant that Coyne has practiced after years of being mislabelled. If forced to categorize himself, he says he’s a liberal. And many of his positions are liberal. He’s against the death penalty, and believes crime, is in part, a social problem. He believes in a national integrated child-care benefit. He does not think it’s time for federal tax cuts. And he says gays should be allowed to marry and adopt like everyone else.

But there are other liberal views Coyne does not spare from his venomous pen. He is someone who likes to disagree, and triumphs in coming up with ingenious ways to coax readers into his camp. Why shouldn’t we include unpaid housework in the GDP? Because “by the same argument, the figures should be adjusted to take account of unpaid sex, at the going rate for a prostitute.”

Since leaving his position as columnist and editorial writer at The Globe and Mail for Southam News last May, he has scoffed at others’ worries about Canadian culture. He dismisses the claim that the CBC is Canada’s broadcaster: “If that were ever true, it is not true now-not with an average audience share in prime time o fless than 10 percent.” He mocks the magazine world for trying to protect Canadian. content:” Sports Illustrated‘s crime is to have hired Canadian writers to write about Canadian athletes for the pleasure of Canadian readers of a magazine printed in Canada by Canadian workers. Thank goodness that was snuffed out.”

Coyne’s rousing words give him influence. Globe editorial writer Marcus Gee explains that “you have to raise your voice a bit as a columnist or editorial writer. Because there is so much mumbling out there on all these issues, somebody who has a clear distinctive voice like Andrew’s, a voice with real edge, gets noticed.”

“Sometimes he got people thinking because they were so enraged,” Gee says. “He just enraged an enormous number of people [at The Globe and Mail.] And maybe that turned some people off-probably got a lot of people to cancel their subscriptions. But on balance I think it was good for the paper. His editorials were talked about.”

People may be talking about him, but not necessarily in fair terms. They label him as neoconservative because they’re lazy, says The Next City editor Lawrence Solomon. And once someone is labelled, he adds, “You don’t need to know anything else beyond the picture on the column-you see Andrew Coyne’s picture and you know he’s a neocon, so no point reading him.That’s where I think the criticism of Andrew Coyne comes from. People feel it’s legitimate to codemn him without understanding what it is he’s saying.”

And letter writers have condemned him. “We have neocon Covne providing his usual shallow right-wing insight,” wrote one reader. “While he proclaims to be neither left- nor right- wing, his neoConservative columns in The Globe and Mail and The Financial Post would show otherwise,”wrote another reader, unhappy that The Toronto Star had decided to run his column twice a week.

Most journalists, with the exception of Globe writer Miro Cernetig, have bought into the idea that Coyne is a neoconservative. Coyne was noticeably absent from, Cernetig’s mini-profiles of the so-called neoconservative players in “Young Bucks of the New Right.” The February 1994 scorecard as topped by Devon Cross, president of the Donner Canadian Foundation, which funds the conservative magazine The Next City. (Coyne is a contributing editor.) Kenneth Whyte made the list, as did David Frum, Financial Post, columnist and author of two books on the New Right. Stephen Harper, who orchestrated much of the Reform party policy-and for some time was expected to succeed Preston Manning-was said to be another important player.There were others-journalists, politicians, academics and philanthropists–but generally without a liberal streak like Coyne’s.

In “Young Bucks,” Cernetig characterized the neoconservatives as “small-l liberals who have been mugged by reality. It’s not that they are opposed to government, they just wish there were a lot less of it.” Ironically, this definition better describes Andre, Coyne than the people whom Cernetig named in his article. But in Canada, the real meaning of the term has been lost in the Left’s frenzy to label and dismiss a rising group of more conservative thinkers.

According to Mark Gerson, author of the 1996 book The Neoconservative Vision: From the Cold War to the Culture Wars, the term was first used by Michael Harrinigton and the editors of Dissent magazine. It described a group of disillusioned NewYork liberals, such as Saul Bello, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had moved to the Right in the ’60s and ’70s.Writer and editor Irving Kristol, considered the doyen of neoconservatism for having been a few years ahead of everyone else in articulating this disenchantment, calls it “a current of thought emerging out of the academic-intellectual world and provoked by disillusionment with contemporary liberalism.”

But in Canada, neoconservatives are rarely characterized by either the original American definition or Cernetig’s adapted Canadian definition.To this day, the term is being used to describe everywhere from CFRB’s brash radio talk-show host Michael Coren to Ontario’s NDP premier, Bob Rae. The “communist pigs” have made room for the “neocons” in the cesspool where radical thinkers are thrown.

Because Coyne’s views range from extremely liberal when it comes to personal liberty, to very conservative when it comes to government spending, it is simplistic to try to place him on the political spectrum. But Coyne has been pegged as a neoconservative for two reasons. One, because the conservative views he does hold are often radical. The other is because, like Certenig’s young bucks, he is young and causing a stir.

In a quiet renovated house in the Annex neighbourhood, Coyne’s rented office has the same reflective feel as the nearby University Of Toronto campus. He chose to be alone with his thoughts here instead of taking an office at The Toronto Star or Saturday Night.An imposing built-in china cabinet, and a fireplace with a servant’s buzzer beside it on the floor, remain from the office’s former role as a dining room.The green leather chair he finally bought for guests is buried under the week’s newspapers.Two walls of shelving and cabinets are dedicated to files on the Constitution, the debt, immigration–a collection more complete than the average high school library’s.

The setting echoes the academic air of Coyne himself: the faithful tweed jacket, not-the-quick-matching pants, the way his voice drops when he’s asked about himself. Despite gossip that he likes to talk about himself, he is modest and self-conscious. To avoid the unknown of being interviewed, and to make sure his ideas are understood, he hauls out the meticulously filed paperwork-two big binders, plus several file flnders of columns and articles.

He thinks like an academic.The example colleagues use most is Coyne’s stance on immigration. In a long article for The Next City that won an honourable mention for a National Magazine Award, Coyne argued that it is immoral to limit immigration and we should throw open our borders. But even Coyne’s admirers including former Globe colleagues, say they don’t think he has thought his argument through to its logical end-overcrowding and resource depletion-despite the fact that he has been making the same argument for open immigration since at least 1988. Globe and Mail editorial writer and friend Anthony Keller believes this is one of “many issues in which he sacrifices real-world workability for the sake of theoretical consistency.”

For Coyne, opinion writing is more than just an exercise in theoretical consistence, its a sport-life is one long debate. Michael Valpy, husband to Andrew?s cousin Deborah Coyne, questions how much Coyne believes of what he writes. Despite having great respect for his writing, Valpy wonders “whether Andrew is just so clever and so quick that he gets off on the debate rather than the implications.”

The art of the debate got the better of Coyne in a particularly sarcastic 1995 Globe column analyzing Linda McQuaig’s book Shooting The Hippo. Having defended the Bank of Canada, he concluded, “Or it may be that these [things] are no longer much debated because-do I dare say it?-some things are not worth debating.” Coyne stands by what he wrote- he was trying to say that we shouldn’t worry if we sometimes reach consensus. But how can a man who has built his career on questioning others’ sacred beliefs, such as the need to financially support the arts community, really mean some things aren’t worth debating?

Intellectual combat is all-consuming for Coyne. Kenneth Whyte recalls covering the Tory convention with him in Winnipeg last summer. “It was like a three-day debating marathon. He was probably the only journalist there who’d read not only the summary and list of resolutions to be debated, but the all of the policy research, and all the background documents that had been provided as well. He’d not only read them but he’d absorbed them and argued it out in his mind. And he spent the whole weekend talking about first this resolution, then that resolution, exhaustively.” And when other journalists sat in the sun debating over beer whether Progressive Conservative leader Jean Charest should cut his hair, Coyne was still stuck on policy.

Peter C. Newman wrote much the same thing about Coyne’s father, the former governor of the Baik of Canada. James Coyne gave “the impression of being much more concerned with ideas than with people,” wrote Newman in his 1963 book Renegade in Power: The Diefenbaker Years. The elder Coyne clashed with Diefenbaker in 1961 over the role of the Bank and the independence of the goveror. Despite repeated calls for Coyne’s resignation, and a hearing into the affair, he stood his ground, telling the Senate that he “was fighting for important principles, and fighting very largely alone against an extremely powerful adversary.” (Only after he was vindicated by the Senate did Coyne resign.)

The younger Coyne inherited this penchant for standing alone. The first public example came when he was 19 and editor of the University of Manitoba’s newspaper, The Manitoban. He refused to remove the word “cunt” from a page on which students sent messages to one another for a quarter. The mainstream press grabbed hold of the story, thrilled that this was happening to James Coyne’s son. His refusal to take the word out led him all the way to the provinicial publishing board,which came within one vote of firing Coyne. What he genuinely regrets about the incident is any embarrassment he may have caused his family

He opeNs up his personal life through boxes of mementos, tucked away in the back room of his student-like apartment, where he lives alone. He has saved everything.The nursery school report card (playing better with others; impatient with others’ thoughts; moves well to music). The notebook from when he was 7 or 8, in which he hypothesized that the difference between Judaism and Christianity is that Christians read both the Old and New Testament.

On the wall beside us, tucked between a bookcase and the corner, hang the two National Newspaper Awards he won for editorial writing in 1992 and 1993. (He was a finalist again in 1994 and 1995.). Two small black-and-white photos, one of his father and one of his mother, Meribeth Riley, hang on an adjacent wall. His parents still live in Winnipeg, where he was raised with his two sisters and two brothers.

He takes out a contact sheet of studio photos from his short-lived acting career. In his last year at U of T’s Trinity College he was approached by an agent who saw him in a performance there.After a few auditions and a bit of paid work (playing a Merry Man disguised as a bush on the TV show Rich Little’s Robin Hood),exams came, and that was the end of it. “In another life,” he says, “I would have liked to be an actor-in another life with a lot more talent. It still intrigues me that it’s kind of like journalism by another means.” How so? The stage is a place for him to express himself more. freely,. and this shows in the untempered opinion overflowing from sketches he has written and performed with friends.

The Under the Umbrella festival in the summer of 1993, for instance, featured Coyne and two friends in front of a small Toronto audience. Many of the Globe staff attended. One sketch particularly exemplified Coyne’s ability to combine commentary with comedy. As one colleague who attended described it: “Thorsell was sitting right in the front row, and there was one skit about a newspaper editor who is very, very close with a certain minister, and the two of them are having lunch together, and they’re just like way too chummy and incestuous, and all of are thinking-Holy Cow Thorsell’s sitting in the front row. And I don?t know how much you know about the long history of Thorsell’s very close relationship with Mulroney, but a lot people thought that was a direct swipe. It probably wasn’t, it was probably written 12 years ago. But nevertheless… ” Coyne flatly denies that the skit had any such implication. “With journalists in general, ” he says, “there is always this difficulty that you get too close to your sources. “

He shocked the audience in another skit by running onto the stage apologizing for his lateness, saying his father had died. (In fact his father, now 86, is very much alive, and revered by his son.) In other skits he usedhis sarcasm to make his thoughts on political correctness and arts awards ceremonies funny.

Coyne is as much the performer off the stage. His friend Paul Kingston, now a U of T professor, points to a trip to the English countryside. Coming upon a flock of sheep in a meadow, Coyne addressed the group. “Think for yourselves! You are free sheep! Don?t just follow the flock! ” But the sheep didn’t respond. “It was not the last time, ” Coyne says, laughing in recollection. “It was to set a pattern which was to be followed many times later in life. ” It is this side of Coyne that his friends want to talk about. The fun, funny side.

His friends from U of T paint a picture of someone who was in the thick of it, one of the last people to leave a party. He began performing as soon as he transferred to Trinity College from the University of Manitoba in 1981, acting in A Winter’s Tale, Measure for Measure and in Stained Glass, by fellow student and author Douglas Cooper. As Speaker of the Lit, the head of the social side of the Trinity government, he presided over debates, organized deejayed dances, and performed in cabarets.

It wasn’t until 1984, when Coyne went to the London School of Economics for a master?s degree, that he started to concentrate on school instead of his extracurricular activities. Though he B.A. had been in economics and history, he says it was at LSE that he really began to think about economics and understand the principles that would guide his writing in later years. He spent much of his free time debating, reaching the semifinals in a national competition.

The opinions he developed at LSE, backed by his understanding of economics, now form the backbone of much of his writing. In his column, he tries to sway readers not just by giving his opinion, but by explaining the economic theory behind it. One December 1996 column explained how Statistics Canada measures poverty, and then showed why “it is almost mathematically impossible to make any headway against poverty.” Another explained why he thinks those who say little inflation will lead to the creation of new jobs are wrong. And after a report on the post office was released, Coyne wrote two columns on the theory of natural monopolies, and why the post office monopoly should end.”

He says column writing imitates academic writing by forcing him to sit down and consider an issue from all sides before deciding what he thinks. He tries to consider policy issues by answering the question, “If I were to design a system from scratch to achieve X, what would that system look like? ” It is a process that has set Coyne apart from other columnists.

Despite his belief that Coyne’s solutions are too theoretical, Globe writer Anthony Keller admires his style, “Just imagine you are chairman of the board,” Keller says. “You’ve got 10 people sitting around the table and you ask them, ‘So what should we do about this? You’ve got nine of them who can identify the problem and talk about the failing, and how badly it’s going, and the other one goes, ‘Well here’s how we’re going to fix it. Here’s the plan.’ Andrew might be wrong, but he actually has a plan. No one else seems to have any plan at all. “

The one thing Coyne hasn’t planned is his career. And yet the path to Southam’s pages has come rather easily. After a couple of summers chasing ambulances for The Winnipeg Sun, and a stint as the business editor at the CKO radio in Toronto, he got into The Financial Post in 1985. He used his friendship with editor Neville Nankivell’s son Jeff as a door opener. His first story there was a forgettable piece on what CEOs were reading that summer. But soon he was writing editorials and, by age 27, a column. In 1991, he began freelancing, hoping he’d find more satisfaction with the length of magazine pieces. But the enticement of The Globe and Mail proved too strong, and by the end of 1991 he was writing editorials and, eventually, his own column. Along the way he has made television and radio appearances and has written for many magazines, including Canadian Business, Saturday Night, Profit Magazine and the now-defunct Idler.

He was lured away from the Globe by the Southam chain last spring with the promise of greater autonomy, a larger audience, more money and three columns a week. But co-workers say it wasn’t just what Southam was offering, but also what was lacking at the Globe –respect. As one colleague put it, “The Globe is sort of filled with insults to its employees; and Andrew is a very proud person person, someone who feels he deserves a certain respect. And the Globe didn’t give him that. ” The biggest manifestation of this lack of respect, as several people confirmed was Coyne’s tiny work space, which had neither room for his files nor room to turn around. Coyne confesses this began to irritate him. Now he has a carved wooden desk and walls of file-not to mention a shared research assistant and somewhere to park his car whick were also lacking at the Globe.

Coyne’s success has created a palpable jealousy among fellow journalists, though no one says it directly. Instead they preface criticisms with “Others will say…” Others will say he talks over his readers’ heads with his economic lessons. Others will say that Coyne doesn’t have enough experience at straight reporting. Even Rick Salutin, who made this point in a column on what’s wrong with the New Right, won’t say it in person. He contrasts journalists with reporting experience, like Toronto Star columnist Claire Hoy, with people who “take graduate courses in monetarism and [move] straight into columns and editorials on how the world works.” Salutin denies that this was a direct attack on Coyne.

These days Coyne doesn’t seem to care too much what others say about him. Isolated in his office in the Annex, he’s give up the daily debates with his friends at the Globe. He’s often unsure of who his readers are because they are spread over more than 30 Southam papers, as well as The Daily News in Halifax and The Toronto Star. In general, their readers are less responsive than he’s accustomed to. He views this as a challenge. Like William Thorsell, his ex-boss at the Globe, Coyne believes he’s in the business of buying people’s time-giving them a reason to read him. And he has potential of two million readers with whom to share his way of thinking. His goal? To get his new audience to rethink its basic assumptions and try things his way for a change. “I have a particular view of the world that I, you know, think is reasonably sensible, and I try to persuade people to look at the world the same way.”

This reminds me of a comment he made last fall, en route to our second interview. Cutting through a parking lot, Coyne stops at the edge.He braces his foot against a low wooden fence His shoelaces are untied-they’re always coming untied, he says, “I’m trying a new way of tying them. Someone told me the other day that all my life I’ve been doing it wrong.

Here are some of the things I have learned since I started watching the show in late September: that seals can spend up to two hours underwater at depths that would burst a human’s lung; that “Klingons” actually speak in their own tongue, composed of different syllables from various languages; and that if you stacked every human in the world together, they would form a pile one kilometre cubed.

@discovery.ca describes itself as “an eclectic mix of documentaries, features, quizzes, columns, video essays, interviews, and panel discussions.” All this in a one-hour show. While general news programs barely touch on science, @discovery.cais all science, A to Z, from astronomy to zoology. And it is a purely Canadian show.

More than one person has said to me, ‘You’re going to run out of material if you only focus on Canadian science,’ and the problem is actually the opposite,” explains Ingram. “We don’t have the people, editing suites, to push through the amount of material we could do.” More than quantity though, it’s the quality of reporting that’s drawing viewers. And people are watching. According to Nielsen Marketing Research, roughly 1.5 million Canadians tune into @discovery.caat least once during the week. (It’s on at 7:00 p.m. EST and 8:00 p.m. PST.) What is surprising is that more than half a million weekly viewers are women over the age of 18 – a third of the show’s audience.

It is not just the general public that is hooked. Michael Smith, head of the Canadian Science Writer’s Association, calls the show “interesting, newsy, upbeat and detailed.” Stephen Strauss, science columnist for The Globe and Mail,has said he is “amazed at the hour of science.”

A look at one of those hours should demonstrate what all the fuss is about.

Wednesday, February 12, 1997

7:00-7:07 p.m. Show intro: @discovery.caleads with a segment on the shuttle Discovery, which will be updating the Hubble telescope tomorrow so that it will send better pictures back to NASA. Ingram interviews Story Musgrave, NASA’s oldest astronaut, who explains how the Canadarm will add new lenses to the telescope.

Since it is @discovery.ca‘s mandate to cover what is current and national in science, the show goes for the Canadian connection in every story.

This process begins at 9:30 a.m., with a daily meeting in a modern, spacious boardroom in North York, Ontario. Most of @discovery.ca’s 20 staff members, sleepy-eyed and with coffee mugs in hand, are discussing past, present and future story ideas. Many of the ideas come from recent headlines, journals and scientific reports that the staff read regularly, and these are their sources for stories like the Hubble repair segment. Paul Lewis, executive producer of the show, feels it is important to connect the latest headlines with science. “We’re putting a new spin on the stories. Like, for example, the ValuJet crash in the Florida Everglades. We focussed on ‘What exactly is the black box?’ instead of focussing on the tragedy. We’re constantly looking for a scientific, technical angle for the other side of the story.” Lewis says approximately one-third of their story ideas are original.

During the meeting, the staff also critique last night’s show. Today’s postmortem is unusually quiet, but according to Penny Park, one of the show’s two senior producers, debate is common, and crucial, in shaping what goes on the show. “A good debate also helps focus a story. It is also a reminder of where exactly a segment is heading. One of the constant problems we have is how to present information in an interesting way, while answering all the right questions and being accurate without boring people. For example, how to present microscopic evidence when there is a lack of visuals but no lack of data. We want to make our stories accessible to the viewer, but we don’t want to lose information in the process.”

In half an hour, the group discusses the lineup for tonight’s show: a feature story on Jupiter, part of a weekly series on the solar system; the latest evidence on Alzheimer’s disease; how the Canadian team is doing in the solar car race in Australia; a discovery of fossilized “dinodung;” and a visit to a “cubed” house in Toronto. They are a jolly group, cracking jokes throughout the meeting. (“I hear Iceland is flooding. Could it be from all that vodka?”)

7:07-7:09 p.m. Every day in this time slot, the show focusses on the latest-breaking science news. Tonight, there is a report on the dangers of driving while using a cell phone (people are more likely to get into accidents while using them), and new research on schizophrenia, which reveals that sufferers have fewer brain receptors than normal.

“If you want to hear an expert discussing a significant science discovery made that day, you come here,” explains Ben Schaub, one of the show’s segment producers. Today, Terry Dickson (a comet expert) and Musgrave discuss recent events in their respective fields.

The crew bring these discoveries to light in a cramped, cluttered area on Discovery’s fourth floor. They are a mixture of journalists, each contributing his or her own expertise to create a show devoted to the latest science news. Some are CBC news alumni, others have reported on science, and three of the producers used to work on CBC Radio’s science program, Quirks and Quarks. “Basically what I’ve done on the staffing side is find a whole bunch of people who had experience doing daily quick turn-around TV, and a few people who had experience in science programming in radio, and others who had more of a science background,” says Lewis. “So we all mixed them together and they started learning from one another. That’s why we’re a pretty tight-knit group.”

The “father” of this family is Jay Ingram, an experienced journalist who came to Discovery with a reputation for popularizing science: he hosted Quirks and Quarks from 1979 to 1992; he has won numerous accolades, including the Sandford Fleming Medal; and he is a science columnist for The Toronto Star.

I first meet Ingram, 52, after he has taped a discovery segment called “The Mindbender.” He has an intimidating presence: silver hair and beard, eyes that are focussed and intense, and an air of seriousness and worldliness. I walk into his office cautiously, very much aware that this is a man who lives and breathes science – a subject I know little about. He motions for me to sit down. Once I start asking him questions about science and the show, his face comes alive. The eyes grow animated, and his face crinkles in a slight smile. “Jay has never lost that natural curiosity about science,” explains Lewis. “He’s a boy, and he’s constantly asking questions.”

Ingram’s foil is his partner Gill Deacon. Although she has no science background, Deacon is an experienced journalist who has spent the previous four years as an entertainment reporter at CBC Montreal. Now in her first season with the show, she is popular with viewers and staff alike. Deacon says she that has gotten a “great response from the public” and her co-workers. “She has an incredible naturalness in front of the camera,” says Lewis. “She is a lot of fun, kind of quirky and quite brilliant in an understated way. It’s good to have a perspective from outside the science community, someone who has had not that much science experience but is open to many things.”

And Deacon does present an air of naturalness on first impression. I meet her after my interview with Ingram. She is dressed in jeans, a purple turtleneck, a pair of hiking boots and no makeup – pretty in an understated way. I immediately feel comfortable in her tidy (and still unpacked) office next to Ingram’s. Two months into her job at @discovery.ca,the 30-year-old Deacon has not found the pressure of joining the program in its second season too overwhelming. “There’s pressure because the show’s standards are so high. I want to make it work as well as it’s working, and to bring it along even further…. Viewers have said they like me, and I think it’s partly because Jay and I just hit it off.”

7:13-7:15 p.m. “You Asked For It” (“YAFI”) is a daily segment in which viewers pose questions to experts. Tonight’s topic is d?j? vu – what is happening in our brains when we experience it? (The temporal lobes in the brain make a mistake.) “YAFI” receives hundreds of requests every week, so many that the program now devotes an entire show each month to the segment, with a panel of experts – such as marine biologist Stefani Paine and astronomer Ivan Semeniuk – answering about 20 queries. Schaub explains that “YAFI” has become so popular because viewers can get involved: “The interactive aspect is integral to the channel. Like having viewers vote for what they want to see…. People like having choice.”

Discovery’s interactivity doesn’t stop there: it launched a groundbreaking Web site, the Exploration Network (EXN), on, amusingly, Halloween at 13:13. Suzanne O’Connor, executive secretary, has high hopes for the new venture. She calls EXN “the Web site of the future. A few months down the road we’ll have live programming that will air the same day. We have a team of four producers that will write stories for the site and will attempt to get the stories on the Net before our competition does. Discovery was the first broadcasting network to have a Web site, and now we are the very first multi-active, high-technology network available.”

@discovery.ca contributes to Cable in the Classroom, a school program that uses television to augment schools’ curriculums. @discovery.capackages together segments with related themes (for example, stories on ocean wildlife) into one show weekly that is aired on Mondays at 8:00 a.m. EST. Schools across Canada are encouraged to tape the shows to help them teach science in the classroom.

At the end of the “YAFI” segment, Ingram quips, “Those are some of the theories about d?j? vu. Have you heard of them before?” It’s not unusual for these hosts to jest with the topic of science. @discovery.ca wants to present science with a sense of humour. And with Ingram and Deacon hosting, the program is one big science party. Take, for example, Deacon’s intro to the humdrum subject of car airbags: “How fast does an air bag open up? Try 480 kilometres per hour. That’s faster than Jay packing his bag and leaving after work.” But there is a danger of the show actually being too much fun. “Sometimes we cross over the line and people write to us and say ‘There is too much humour and not enough substance,'” Lewis says. But Bree Tiffin, an intern who also sometimes writes for the show, says this wacky approach to science is important. “It’s really heavy on information for science types, so the show has to be fun.”

7:15-7:25 p.m. Meet Steve, a computer that thinks by itself and was created to teach people in the U.S. Navy how to use an air compressor. It is the first of its kind and the sort of breakthrough that the show likes to trumpet. This type of advancement was what inspired the creation of @discovery.cain the first place. Technology’s role is getting larger in our daily lives. And that, in turn, has created a market for a show about these new discoveries.

@discovery.ca was also born out of a need to distinguish The Discovery Channel Canada (one of 12 global Discovery channels) from the other new specialty channels, such as The Life Network and The Learning Channel, which came to air in January 1995 and are similar to Discovery because of their scientific content. Trina McQueen, former head of CBC News,had been placed at the helm of the channel and wanted a show that would be relevant to the 1990s. “A daily nature and science show seemed right,” she says. “It is a show that connects to the day. This is a generation of Internet gurus, technological whizzes, and this now has an atmosphere of cool about it.”

7:27-7:34 p.m. An international satellite launched in Japan promises to rival the Hubble’s pictures. Deacon interviews Dr. Wayne Cannon, a Canadian physicist at the Institute for Space and Terrestrial Science, who is part of the international team that worked on the satellite. Although interesting, this piece further saturates a show that is already heavy on astronomy.

@discovery.ca tries to promote an active interest in Canadian scientific research, and this commitment is being rewarded. The show was nominated for two 1997 Gemini awards: one for Best Information Series, and the other for Best Special Event Coverage, for a segment called “Canada in Space” that aired last year.

7:34-7:41 p.m. Terry Dickinson, editor of Sky News and an avid comet enthusiast, is on hand to explain that another comet is entering our solar system this week. But Jay isn’t too concerned about where you can view the comet. Instead, he wants to focus on what a comet is, how close this one is to the earth, and how bright it will be. @discovery.catakes the time to go in-depth here.

But no episode has delved more deeply into the inner workings of science than @discovery.ca‘s notorious “Great Tomato Experiment,” which aired during the week of September 2 through 6, 1996. Lewis had a basic premise for the experiment: “Last summer, we wanted to do something on alternative medicine. How the mind controls the body. That by manipulating the body’s energy through the mind, you can make yourself feel better.” The experiment’s subjects: four tomato batches. Two were injected with disease, a third was injected with water and the fourth was not touched. The audience didn’t know which batch was diseased. The show invited seven individuals from Group Therapeutic Touch, a organization devoted to the healing powers of the human mind, to come to the set to provide healing thoughts for the tomato batches. Ingram then asked viewers to send positive messages to see if they could help.

And the public did call. One man even sang the Barney song for the tomatoes. The show also received a barrage of publicity. Critics, such as Robert Choquette, a professor of religious studies at the University of Ottawa, accused the show of using this “farce” as a ratings ploy. But Lewis dismisses the idea. “What we wanted was an experiment that dealt directly with our viewers. And that’s how we got our idea. It was important that we showed the viewers how a scientific experiment was put together, step-by-step.” One of the people who helped set up the experiment was Dr. Verna Higgins, chair of the botany department at the University of Toronto. She says, “It was a legitimately designed experiment. It required some refinement, but we did the best job we could in the time available.” Although the show has certainly weathered the criticism of the segment, the tomatoes suffered a less fortunate outcome – none survived.

7:44-7:55 p.m. The largest chunk of the show, usually over 10 minutes, is devoted to “The Mindbender,” @discovery.ca’sweekly viewer quiz. As Ingram lists the previous week’s answers, he is comfortably propped between a dinosaur head and a large, metallic replica of DNA. @discovery.ca‘s set is as unique as the show itself.

Like a sprawling, empty museum, the set’s artifacts glow dimly after everyone has left for the night. Here you’ll find everything from a telescope to the dinosaur head.(“A museum in Alberta just happened to have an extra dinosaur head,” explains Lewis.) “The concept is the back room of a dinosaur exhibit at a museum…. For the last two summers we’d go out to junk shops and ask museums for any extra items,” Lewis recalls.

“Mindbender” questions run the gamut from “What is the world’s largest freshwater lake?” to “What is the closest living relative of the largest mammal of all time?” After Ingram reveals the previous week’s answers, he apologizes for the show’s mistake of showing an image of a porcupine instead of a beaver in answering a question. Of course, attentive as they are, @discovery.ca‘s viewers were quick to point out the mistake. One woman went so far as to question the show’s “Canadianness,” to which Ingram responds: “We remain among our Majesty’s most loyal Canadians!”

When I visit the set one afternoon, Schaub is packaging the “Mindbender” segment in a large control room. He shouts directions to Ingram via a headset. It’s quite dark, but the numerous TV screens and buttons allow enough light for me to see my notepad. This is one of seven or eight segments that will make up tonight’s show. Some segments have been taped well in advance, others, on that very day. Ingram has just finished taping another segment to air on Halloween – an interview with a Transylvanian doctor on the myth of Dracula. The atmosphere is jovial. Laughter and jokes echo through the control room and through the headset. Between takes, Ingram is flashing his teeth, and the camera zooms in dangerously close, giving us a good view of his dental work.

7:58-7:59 p.m. How did tabloids get their name? The topic seems an unlikely one for a weekly segment called “Joe’s Chemistry Set,” hosted by Joe Schwarcz, a professor of chemistry at Vanier College. But there is a science link, all right. When one company in the late 1800s made small pills, it called the tiny tablets “tabloids.” Before long, anything else that was reduced in size became referred to by the same name. Since many newspapers had become more compact, the name attached itself to them as well. It’s a quick but amusing tidbit, and a tidy way to end the show.

7:59-8:00 p.m. Time to say good-bye. “Too bad,” Deacon laments. Ingram tells the viewers what to expect tomorrow – one story is on how men and women behave differently from each other on the Net. “Like we didn’t know that!” cries Ingram.

Off camera the banter doesn’t change. On another day, while taping show intros, Ingram and Deacon are up to the same old antics. He jokes that she has only been there two months and already “runs the show!” But seconds later, once the camera is on, they execute their intros perfectly. Soon enough the humour kicks back in, and Deacon uses her monotone teacher impression (from the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off) to introduce the “YAFI” segment on whether frogs are able to burst their own vocal sacks. (The answer is no.) Ingram and Deacon feel comfortable enough, both because of their scientific knowledge and their personalities, to ad-lib certain stories. According to Lewis, the hosts know how to feel out the tone of a story: “We don’t want them to sound rehearsed…. They both have a great sense of humour and are spontaneous, and we don’t want them sounding too serious all the time.”

Since the show is a success, will the world’s other 11 Discovery channels, particularly the U.S. one, follow with their own daily science news programs? Would this concept work well in other countries? “There’s a huge tradition in documentary, in-depth current affairs programming in the U.S., and there’s a large audience there, so I don’t see why it wouldn’t work. We could put together a U.S. show tomorrow, if we had to,” says Ingram. Deacon echoes the same sentiments. “I think it’s a format that could work anywhere, and it would probably be an even easier time in the U.S. They tend to have more disasters…and even more money for research.”

With a budget of only $4,000 per show, @discovery.calooks incredibly polished. Especially considering the big money and large staffs of glossy, big-production news magazine shows, whose daily budgets could produce a month’s worth of @discovery.cashows. The task may seem daunting, but with little money and lots of imagination, @discovery.cahas Canadian viewers – and Canadian cats alike – fascinated by science. Just ask Mojo.

“I don’t want to know about it. I just don’t want to know aaanything about it!” says freelance writer Heather Robertson. “I don’t want to know about the technology. I just want to be fairly paid.”

Robertson doesn’t want to know about the circuitry and programming behind the databases that hold her words. All she needs to know is that electronic versions of her work are being sold without her consent. It’s a situation she could never have predicted when she started writing 25 years ago. Like most freelancers, Robertson always thought the publisher’s verbal agreement or assignment letter bought first North American rights – and nothing more. In February 1996 she found out the truth. Her publisher, McClelland and Stewart, had sold The Thomson Corporation the right to use an excerpt from her book Driving Force in the October 1995 issue of Report on Business Magazine. As a freelancer for The Globe and Mail, she had also written several book reviews – reviews that she thought would be published once on paper and never again. But the use of those articles didn’t stop after the first publication: Thomson put the book excerpt and reviews onto its database, InfoGlobe, and people paid to read her work.

Robertson never saw any of that money. But she’s asking for it now. And with her $100-million class action lawsuit against The Thomson Corporation, Information Access Company, Thomson Canada Ltd. and its affiliates, Heather Robertson is fighting on behalf of freelance writers across Canada.

Sitting in the kitchen of her country home, Robertson seems a most unlikely hero for electronic rights. In her beaded moccasins and pale green sweat suit, she looks more like a model for Cottage Life than Wired. I, myself, am a Wired-girl. A Web-designing, C-programming, three-hours-a-day-on-the-Net kind of girl. So I’ve known about this database technology for awhile. But as a writer and computer geek, I’m starting to realize that I’m one of a rare new breed: a techno-literate content creator. Most writers didn’t think much about electronic formats when publishers first started using them 20 years ago.

Initially, publishers simply saw electronic databases as compact alternatives to filing cabinets, but it didn’t take long before the commercial possibilities became apparent. By the late 80’s, you could search thousands of articles in a matter of seconds by variables such as author, subject or title – as long as you paid for the privilege.

And there are so many ways to pay! Which would you prefer: an annual fee billed to your personal or business account, or a fee based on the amount of time spent on your search? Would you rather have a copy of the database sent to you annually on CD-ROM or access through a remote server? And what about special services, like having only the articles that interest you sent automatically by e-mail? But wait! There’s more! Why not access your favourite paper products on the World Wide Web, for “optimally repurposed material.” What? You say you’ve never heard of repurposed material? Why, it’s the latest thing. Just rip out the content of any old magazine or newspaper and shove it into an electronic format.

Yes, those ingenious publishers and database companies have found just about every way to make money from your information needs. And they can make even more money by licensing their material to companies such as Knight-Ridder Information, Inc., which sit at the top of the information food chain. Knight-Ridder is one of a few immense U.S. companies which own the computer systems used to search databases such as Southam’s Infomart Online. So Knight-Ridder gets its content from databases, databases get it from publishers, publishers get most of it from staff contributors – and the rest from poorly paid freelance writers.

So how does Knight-Ridder ensure that the publishers have the right to license the material they sell? “We really have no control over that,” says Susan Prather, senior manager of marketing communications at Knight-Ridder. “We simply have to assume that they have the right, or that they are at least being honest with us that they have the rights for redistribution.” Without that control, says Prather, Knight-Ridder simply can’t be held responsible. Besides, the bulk of the content on databases is created by magazine and newspaper staffers, whose copyright automatically reverts back to the publisher.

According to Canadian copyright law, the situation should be just as clear for freelancers. It stipulates that the copyright of any creation, be it a photograph, illustration or written work, belongs to the creator unless otherwise specified. But without a legal contract between the freelancer and publisher, not much has really been specified. And back then, Robertson didn’t see the need for any specification. Nobody did, because nobody took much notice of the new technology – except the publishers.

Freelance writers’ groups like the Periodical Writers’ Association of Canada (PWAC) certainly weren’t pressing the issue. John Mason, past national and Toronto-chapter president of PWAC, argues that during the last 10 years there was no way they could monitor what was going on because “the technology was such a barrier to entry.”

But it wasn’t just PWAC that let the issue slide. Robertson puts a lot of blame on CANCOPY, a non-profit organization that distributes xerography royalties to writers and publishers, for its own decade of inaction. “When CANCOPY started they said, ‘Once we get the photocopying under control then we’ll start worrying about electronic rights, so don’t worry,'” she says. “And so everybody went to sleep, only to wake up and find that CANCOPY had done absolutely nothing on electronic rights. Zero. Zip.”

And that’s probably the most you’re going to get out of CANCOPY in terms of electronic royalties, at least as long as Lucy White is associate director. “It’s a primary rights issue and CANCOPY deals with secondary rights,” says White. “If a writer has sold print rights only to The Globe and Mail or nay other periodical and then that periodical takes it and does something else with it, such as putting it on an electronic format, it’s not a secondary use of the print work – it’s a first-time electronic rights issue. And it’s not CANCOPY’s issue.” So it comes down to a case of semantics. Most writers think of their e-rights as secondary because they’re sold in addition to their first North American print rights. CANCOPY sees it as a primary right because it’s the first time the articles have been used in an electronic format.

Regardless of their reasons, the silence of PWAC and CANCOPY inadvertently let publishers like the Globe continue databasing their consent unabated. And that gave publishers years to establish their own idea of an industry standard, which they use as a part of their defence. “The company’s position has been that we’ve been doing this for almost 20 years and now all of a sudden there are objections,” says Earle Gill, executive editor at the Globe. “Our understanding was that when we bought the thing, we bought the right to publish it. And ‘publishing’ these days means any number of things, whether on paper or electronically.”

But Robertson didn’t know that until, as she puts it, all the “hoo-ha” started.

The hoo-ha came largely in the form of a PWAC educational campaign. In the spring of 1995, the writers’ group searched about two dozen commercial databases for the by-lines of 21 members. Mason was shocked by what he considers an abuse of copyright law. “We found something like 1,700 hits of our members’ work, and 79 percent of the content was there without the permission of the copyright holder,” he says. “Not one penny of this revenue was getting back to any of these 21 people.”

PWAC’s campaign prompted Robertson to launch her own search, so she asked the Metropolitan Toronto Reference Library to check InfoGlobe for her work. They found the excerpt from Report on BusinessMagazine, along with a bunch of her book reviews. Robertson didn’t immediately opt for a lawsuit. Initially, she tried to negotiate something with the Globe. First there was an exchange of letters between Thomson and McClelland and Stewart, but that went nowhere. Then there were more letters – this time from her attorney. What Robertson got back, she says, was a “Piss-Off-And-Die letter from one of Thomson’s lawyers.” By June 1996, she had met with lawyer Michael McGowan to file her class action lawsuit and set some legal precedent regarding electronic rights.

The members of PWAC’s executive had already begun their own pressure campaign against various publishers and editors. They wrote letters, made phone calls and created a PWAC web site to express their discontent over the unpaid electronic use of their work. They were aided by a small ad hoc group called Concerned Writers, which started its own education campaign. In response to the pressure, publishers hastily drew up contracts – most of them specifying that freelancers give over their electronic rights for no additional payment.

PWAC tried negotiating the terms on these new contracts, but with little initial success. Mason’s important first meeting with Gill was rather uneventful. “He listened, he nodded and he was able to go back to his masters saying that he had consulted with the creators,” says Mason of Gill’s actions that day. But while it appeared that publishers just weren’t taking PWAC and its demands seriously, PWAC’s executives were partially to blame. Gill asked them to get back to him by April of 1994 and that never happened.

“We dropped the ball. He didn’t hear back from us, so he didn’t know what the opposition’s stand was,” admits Mason. So the Globewent ahead with another draft of the contract, followed by another round of unproductive negotiations with the two writers’ groups.

Under pressure from the writers, many other publishers have drawn up new contracts, some of which acknowledge freelancers’ concerns. But these contracts can still be confusing. For instance, MacLean Hunter Publishing Limited’s latest contract lumps electronic database rights into the “basic rights” category, but leaves online rights (for things like the Chatelaine ConnectsWeb site) in the scope of “additional rights.” And while Chatelaineoffers a token payment of $10 to $30 for the online use of any article over 500 words, payment for use in a database is a little more complicated and a lot more ambiguous.

When I asked Ivor Shapiro, then managing editor of Chatelaine, if his magazine pays for database rights, he said that it’s a part of the blanket fee. But when I asked him how much of that actually pays for database rights, I didn’t really get an answer. What I got was Shapiro’s house metaphor:

“When you buy a house you do not pay separately for the broadloom, curtains, dishwasher and refrigerator. You specify in a blanket sale agreement that all the above are included in the negotiated price. Does this mean you are grabbing or stealing the broadloom? Of course not. In the same way, Chatelaine negotiates a fee to cover all the permissions it needs – including the one that has by far the greatest value: first print rights.

This system is confusing enough on its own. But what aggravates the situation is that each publisher, and often each magazine, has taken a slightly different position on the electronic rights issue. On the one hand, The Financial Postdemands non-exclusive world-wide rights for varying periods of time, depending on the type of article. Canadian Gardeningmagazine, on the other hand, offered Robertson an additional 10 percent fee for an additional one-year license to reproduce an article on their Web site.

Even amid this commotion, PWAC has made some small victories with individual publications and publishers. Telemedia Communications Inc. backed down on its initial electronic rights grab and the Globe has finally begun to give in, offering an additional three percent of the initial fee for electronic rights. It may be only a small amount of money, but it represents a growing trend of publishers acknowledging a monetary value for electronic rights.

What that value is, exactly, remains unclear. Shapiro says that less than one percent of MacLean Hunter’s profits comes from its electronic ventures and that it’s simply a case of market economics setting the value of electronic rights at a low level. Hence publishers like MacLean Hunter follow the invisible hand of the free market and pay for electronic rights at a rate that ranges from nothing to negligible. When I bring up this argument with Prather from Knight-Ridder, she laughs. “Oh my Lord! We’ve been in this business for 25 years. Yes, indeed, we make a lot of money and the people who provide us with the information make money. Or they wouldn’t do it,” she says.

It is quite possible that both Prather and Shapiro are correct – that while Knight-Ridder gets lots of money from electronic databases, they’re not a profit-maker for Chatelaine. Perhaps it would be better if freelancers were well-paid for their contributions and market evolution took its course, as Shapiro suggests, only this time letting the financially weak companies die off and drop out of the information industry.

Jim Carroll, freelancer and co-author of the Canadian Internet Handbook, says he simply doesn’t care whether the databases are making a profit. He stopped writing for Computing Canadatwo years ago, when he discovered his work was being used without his permission. The magazine tried to force Carroll into a contract that would legally sign over his electronic rights to the publisher. He spreads the word about electronic rights through Concerned Writers, his radio show, NetTalk, and any opportunity he can find to speak to the public. “My articles are being sold by them with no recompense to me. That is fundamentally, legally and morally wrong. That is like saying it’s okay to go out and mug somebody in the street because we don’t find any money in their pocket.”

Database companies such as InfoGlobe argue that even if they were making money, their limited technology simply could not ensure that some of the new media profits went to the freelancer. “The database we’ve got is still the original software, which is 20 years old. It’s not exactly cutting edge. It can’t even tell you what somebody looked at. All it knows is that Customer A signed on at 8:03 and signed off at 8:07,” says Gill. I could see this reasoning going over well in a room full of computer-illiterate writers, but I know better. I’m tempted to tell Gill that this is simply not a complex programming task. Even I could fix it.