“Four minutes to air!” Four minutes until the launch of the fall 2997 season of programming for CPAC, the national Cable Public Affair Channel. Four minutes to the start of the season’s new political interview show called The Roundtable. Four minutes and one of the four guests scheduled to appear has still not arrived. It’s Sunday night, prime time, and there’s a show to do. A live phone-in-show, uncut and unedited, with no commercial breaks. And two hours long. It’s an ambitious move for the station once confined to being the lowly Parliamentary Channel. In the darkened studio that belongs to CTV, the station’s set furniture has been moved to one side to make room for CPAC’s small, round table. A large window overlooking Ottawa’s Parliament Hill, bathed in spotlights in the evening darkness, provides a backdrop. Three MPs—Liberal, Conservative and Reform—sit around the table with the show’s moderator, Martin Stringer. “Three minutes to air!” The floor director removes the empty chair where NDP house leader Bill Blaikie was to sit. If he shows up late, they’ll have to find a way to get him into the discussion. “Thirty seconds!” But he’s not just late, he’s not coming. Turns out he simply forgot—misscheduled, actually. “Three, two, one….” Bet he would’ve been here if it were CTV.

Perhaps CPAC’s reputation, born of its dull beginnings, is partly to blame for Blaikie’s absence. When it first began in 1977, it broadcast the House of Commons for the 20 per cent of the month that it sits and a blue and gold sign that said “The Parliamentary Channel” the other 80 per cent. While it is still the station that broadcasts the House of Commons debates, since 1992 it has also aired raw; unedited footage of conferences and speeches when the House isn’t sitting. And for the past year and a half it has been much more than that. The Roundtable is just one of 22 original programs in CPAC’s new lineup—the culmination of four years of work transforming CPAC from the Parliamentary Channel to a station of meaningful political journalism.

A caller is on the line. She says the Reform Party doesn’t get enough respect as the official opposition. “I hope you’re there forever,” she tells the Reform MP. But Stringer misunderstands. “Who?” he asks, thinking the comment is directed at him. his face reddens as he realizes his error. The control room erupts in laughter, and the director quips, “Martin was disappointed.”

Disappointed, but not surprised. CPAC’s licence under the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission does not allow the station to develop television “personalities.” Hosts of CPAC interview shows are interchangeable. They are meant to facilitate conversation and debate but were cautioned against forging a relationship with the audience. Most importantly, their opinions are not allowed on camera; they are forbidden to influence a debate or interview. “It is not a platform for the moderator,” says Martha Wilson, CPAC’s general manager from its inception until December 1997. “The programs are not driven by the personality of the host, where the audience becomes attached to the host as much as they do to the guest.”

Instead, CPAC is driven by what its director of programming, Barry Conway, calls social responsibility journalism, or “noncommercial attempts to capture reality, for the greater good.” For example: CPAC is probably the only station that would, and did, broadcast a 1996 weeklong AIDS conference in its entirety. Conway likens CPAC’s role in the media to the long-format style of magazine journalism, citing The Atlantic Monthly, which still runs 10,000-word articles, Harper’s For the Record section, which prints transcripts of important statements or speeches, and Utne Reader which runs stories the mainstream press won’t cover.

“People think we’re not in the news business because we show long-format journalism and not 30-second clips,” he says. But CPAC is “access to public affairs at the grassroots end, very fast and in full format.” He says the speed with which it gets to air is what makes it news. “My commitment is to give people what they need to know, when they need to know it. Some people call that broadcast journalism. Some people see that as news.”

So that more people will see it that way, CPAC’s promotional material speaks of broadcasting “the big picture” and says, “When you edit content you edit meaning.” A glass of water is not half empty or half full, a TV spot that runs between programs on the channel attests, “it’s just a glass with water in it.” But what is now a philosophical statement—unedited footage with no voice-over—started out as a requirement of the station’s broadcast licence, imposed by the CRTC.

CPAC was conceived as an idea in the late 1970s when Phil Lid, then vice-president of U.S. operations for Rogers Cablesystems, wanted to create a Canadian version of C-SPAN, the U.S. Cable Satellite Public Affairs Network. Around the same time, the House of Commons feed in Canada began airing on a channel run and maintained by the CBC. Lind’s idea to include originated programming and interview shows grew more serious in 1988 when he organized a consortium of 30 cable companies to form a joint venture with the CBC. But in 1991, the CBC backed out of the arrangement, protesting Mulroney-era budget cuts. So the cable consortium began discussions to fund the 24-hour network on its own.

The following year, with an experimental two-year licence from the CRTC and a staff of two (Martha Wilson and her assistant), what is now CPAC took to the airways as the Cable Parliamentary Channel. The station occupied a tiny office in the Sparks Street press building, a block south of Parliament Hill. In addition to the House feed, it carried sporadic additional programming of conferences and speeches, but the station was not journalism by anyone’s standards. In its second year, for example, it televised an unmoving shot of the fireplace from the Quebec hotel Château Montebello on Christmas Day.

In spring 1995, the CRTC granted CPAC, a seven-year licence. Staff increased to 14. By September, staff had doubled again and the station moved into a new office in the grand World Exchange Plaza, across the hall from CTV’s Ottawa bureau. Barry Conway, formerly with CBC Radio, both as national editor on Sunday Morning and a producer with As it Happens, was brought in a director of programming to make CPAC’s station of hard-hitting news and journalism. The day he started, he says, footage of the Lake Couchiching Conference, shot three months earlier, was still being replayed Conway implemented four formats for programming: live, prime-time interview programs hard news broadcast later the same day, current affairs aired within 24 hours and feature-length footage within seven days.

But when CPAC applied to the CRTC for its seven-year broadcasting licence, CBC launched an objection, claiming the station was planning to cross too far into journalism. Some journalist in Ottawa say CBC Newsworld is threatened by CPAC, though none of the journalists at Newsworld interviewed for this story will acknowledge this. While the new interview programs and coverage of press conferences and speeches do put CPAC in competition with Newsworld, next to TSN and YTV, is one of the highest-rated specialty stations on cable television. CPAC, along with WTN and multicultural broadcaster VisionTV, is among the lowest.

The CRTC deemed the CBC’s objection a routine reaction to a perceived competitor. CPAC got its licence and in October 1996 made the transition to journalism with a gala relaunch that introduced the first of its new programs. Today, it operates with a staff of 37, including seven producers, an assignment editor and two full-time camera operators. CPAC produces 60 hours of original content a week (which is replayed each day throughout the week to fill airtime). The station relies on freelancers based in major cities across the country to make coverage truly national.

Viewers likely discover it while flipping channels on TV—CPAC programming isn’t carried in any TV listings. The station’s promotional literature explains that this is because its “schedules are determined on a daily basis,” based on the day’s events.

Most of the station’s original programming is on during prime-time hours. In addition to The Roundtable, there’s a one-hour interview program called A Public Life on Monday nights at 9 p.m., which has featured guests such as long-time Liberal politician Mitchell Sharp and AIDS activist Janet Connors. First Person, CPAC’s flagship one-hour phone-in-show, launched in the ’96 season, runs on Tuesdays and has been host to federal cabinet ministers. Democracy Abroad on Wednesday nights is an hour of interviews with foreign officials like Iraqi and South African diplomats. The Senate on Fridays is a moderated panel discussion with parliamentary committee members and senators.

With this many original programs in its lineup, viewer response ought to be lively. But the lonely video booth for CPAC’s public opinion program vox pop—à la Toronto based Citytv’s Speaker’s Corner—almost always sits vacant despite its location in the busy main concourse of the World Exchange Plaza. The metallic silver booth has “vox pop” spelled out in blue neon. Inside, bilingual instructions say that for the cost of a loonie (to charity), anyone can voice an opinion on CPAC. An issue of the week is posted and people can talk for up to a minute. The booth has been there for about a year, but the response has been poor. Martha Wilson has seen some of the few spots recorded in the booth. “People think it’s a photo booth,” she says. “They put their dollar in there and they just sit there. It’s quite hilarious.”

Others have had their own laughs over CPAC: the comedy troupe of CBC Televison’s This Hour Has 22 Minutes, for instance. Spoofing CPAC’s coverage of the 1997 federal elections (modelled on CPAC style, but with more edits), Rick Mercer plays an NDP candidate campaigning door-to-door—except people keep slamming doors in his face. Coverage continues. Doors slam. Cameras keep rolling. More doors slam. The political satire team Double Exposure (formerly of CBC Radio but now on CTV) paid tribute to the station’s full coverage of the Krever, Westray and Somalia inquiries with the plug line “All hearings…all the time!” CBC’s media and technology program, Undercurrents, ran a piece called “Allure of the Boring,” which looked with amazement at people who watch what most would consider painfully dull. The objects of their fascination? The black and white security can cable channel (a fixed camera trained on the entrance of an apartment building), the Sammy’s Souvlaki Website (a 24-hour camera shot, updated every 20 minutes, of the exterior of a London, Ontario, souvlaki shop)—and CPAC.

C-SPAN, the network’s American counterpart, is also a station that people like a laugh at. In 1995, Paragon Cable of New York forced customers to pay outstanding bills by replacing all channels with C-SPAN. “Money is pouring in,” the company reported just after the plan was launched. The two channels have even garnered mention on an episode of Seinfeld. Kramer to Jerry: “Listen, is it all right if I watch a tape in here?” Jerry: “Why here?” Kramer: “Well, I’m taping Canadian Parliament, you know, on C-SPAN.”

It’s the type of station few—Kramer aside—will admit to watching. Perhaps the problem, for CPAC anyway, is the straightjacket of restrictions imposed by the CRTC. It’s not allowed to have the traditional elements of a news network: a news desk and reporters. Its CRTC licence requires it to broadcast an uncut feed from the House and permits it to carry other public affairs programming only if covered in a similar style.

The uncut format series a financial purpose as well. With no expensive postproduction costs, programming is cheap for CPAC—it operates with a relatively small budget of $34 million over seven years, or $5 million a year since the relaunch. (By comparison, CBC Newsworld’s annual budget is in excess of $50 million.) The nonprofit station is entirely funded by what is now a group of more than 100 cable companies, and the cost works out to a few cents per subscriber. In addition, the House feed is supplied and funded by the federal government.

The budget may be small, but it would still be a waste of $5 million a year is no viewers watched the station. CPAC does draw a loyal contingent of political junkies. A telephone line set up to log viewer comments recorded over 3,000 calls between January and May 1997. “I would like to commend Martin Stringer for his demeanour,” one caller said. “He has the sense to ask a question…then shut up until the interviewee responds. He could teach the people at the CBC a few things.” “I notice you have the Red Cross on there now, snivelling about how they are not to blame,” said another. “You know, I am glad you put these people on so we can see how they operate.”

According to Martha Wilson, 7.5 million households receive the station in basic cable packages. Of those, A.C. Neilsen ratings show that CPAC grabs the attention of two million viewers weekly; a third of whom are university educated. Nearly half the viewers of a Friday evening program called Jurisprudence, which broadcasts Supreme Court hearings in their entirety, are women over 55 who never completed university. Coverage during the Quebec referendum, which sometimes used a split screen to show the action on the main floors of the Yes and No camps and alternated between the two during crucial moments, reached an audience of 2.7 million. It even beat CTV’s coverage, which pulled in an audience of two million, but not CBC, which drew just over three million.

Through its viewer numbers may not match CBC’s, CPAC rewards its audience with scenes they might never see elsewhere. During the August 1997 First Ministers’ Conference, television news anchors spoke dryly about the strained relations between Quebec Premier Lucien Bouchard and the other provincial premiers. Coverage on CPAC, however, showed Bouchard leaning back and stifling a laugh during then New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna’s awkward repletion of a speech in French.

CPAC’s cameras also capture the mood of an even, using cinema verité, a classic film technique more often associated with feature films than the news. With cinema verité, there’s no cutting; tape runs the way it’s shot. It is storytelling using a camera but no script, allowing stories to unfold on their own to convey candid realism. For CPAC’s Saturday evening program called in camera, it can mean simply letting the tape roll as striking teachers picket in front of an Ottawa school in October 1997, or showing Newfoundland correspondent Roger Bill driving around the province, attending moving sales and interviewing people about why they are leaving.

Using this technique, a cameraman will know that when someone points, he must follow the person’s finger. Because there won’t be any voice-over later, a producer must ask questions to fill in any holes on the spot. Mistakes go to air; they can’t be fixed in the edit room. It’s a demanding style of filming that can sometimes reveal how strong the medium of television truly is.

Former CBC producer Howard Bernstein introduced CPAC to the technique. “We were looking for something that they could do without breaking the rules, he says, “and at the same time still allowing them to cover the event.” Bernstein, a broadcast instructor at Ryerson’s journalism school, also covered the southern Ontario region for CPAC during the 1997 federal election and taught the station’s seven producers how cinema verité works. He had used the style of filming for years for the CBC and saw it as a perfect solution for CPAC. With mainstream news outlets focusing on short news items or features that provide analysis and context, there are few other places Canadian viewers can see history unfold before their eyes.

Another advantage to CPAC’s style of coverage is that it can sidestep pack journalism, as it did with the spring 1997 federal election. During a five-week project Conway called the Olympics of democracy, two CPAC crews crossed the country in motor homes, one travelling through northern Ontario and west to B.C. and the other heading east to the Maritimes. They covered local all-candidates meetings and followed small-town politicians as they canvassed door-to-door.

Martin Stringer remembers shooting streeter segments in Kenora, Ontario, during the campaign for vox pop. “We crossed this fellow’s backyard to get to the street. He was raking leaves and he looked up and we said, ’Can we ask you a few questions?’ He said a few things about the issues, but then he looked at us and he shook his head and the camera was still rolling and he said, ’I can’t believe you guys are here standing in my back lawn. I never thought the national media would take enough interest to be here.’”

The mainstream national media were elsewhere—following the leaders, tagging along in the luxury party coaches. For them this was the obvious story because party leaders are among the only politicians identifiable to viewers across the country. But elections are not only about leaders. They are about local candidates from small towns across the country. They are about issues and people and communities. And telling these stories requires escaping the confine of a sound bite.

After all, sound bites may be efficient but they are also uninformative. The National Media Archive, part of the right-wing Fraser Institute in Vancouver, kept a record of the CBC’s longest and shortest clips of the leaders during the first two weeks of the campaign. The shortest, at one second, is Gilles Duceppe saying, “Job, job, job.” But all of the party leaders were “featured” in sound bites of one to four seconds. Ultimately, the most memorable moments from the election have little to do with issues and more to do with images that can make an impact with a short clip—Duceppe wearing a hairnet or fretting over a lost campaign bus.

The mainstream media missed a lot of revealing scenes during the election. Leisurely coverage, for instance, of Reform MP Myron Thompson stretched out in a doughnut shop booth, chatting with the locals in Airdrie, northwest of Calgary. He had recently recovered from quadruple bypass surgery and was wearing a cowboy hat and a shirt that stretched over his girth. “That’s how he was campaigning,” Stringer says. “It was just the picture of his riding.”

Still, many say this kind of coverage does not add up to journalism. The kinder critics call CPAC programming news without a lead or unpackaged news or, as veteran CBC Newsworld anchor Don Newman puts it, “the most elementary form of journalism.” Others are more blunt. CTV reporter Roger Smith says CPAC airs the confusing “bafflegab and ancillary information” of daily scrums. CTV’s Ottawa bureau chief Craig Oliver calls it boring television.

On the afternoon of October 7, the buzz around town is that New Brunswick Premier Frank McKenna is retiring from provincial politics. Oliver is sitting in his office in the CTV Ottawa bureau, watching McKenna’s speech live on Newsworld. He interrupts each sentence with a glance over his shoulder at the TV. What he’s watching is the same type of program he’s just called boring, yet he can’t take his eyes off it. “They’re allowing people to say what they have to say at great length, which is useful, but they’re not making editorial decisions,” he says. “They’re not putting value on what people say. It’s almost like free-time political broadcasting as opposed to politics.”

He has a point, although McKenna’s speech is not on CPAC. That’s because right now CPAC is broadcasting a live feed from that House of Commons, a feed it must broadcast every day. Even if it runs overtime to overlap regularly scheduled programs. And even at the expense of breaking news. CPAC won’t run McKenna’s speech for another six hours.

“It’s the mandate, we don’t have a choice,” explains CPAC assignment editor Anne Truman. She admits that having to cover the House until 7 p.m. each evening is a constraint on CPAC’s ability to perform as a news station. “At the same time, if Newsworld’s covering McKenna, RDI’s covering McKenna, everybody’s covering McKenna, maybe it’s okay that somebody’s not covering McKenna.”

“Some journalists see us as anti-journalistic because we provide raw coverage with no commentary,” Conway says. But the station has attracted a high calibre a journalists, including Stringer, who left a job as a producer on As It Happens at CBC Radio to join CPAC. He sees his job as a career goal, as do many C-SPAN staffers who have been with the station for 19 years, from its beginning. Conway, too, left a senior position at CBC Radio and sees his position at CPAC as one of the highlights of his career.

Other journalists in Ottawa haven’t been so impressed. For some time there was doubt among them whether CPAC should be allowed to join the Parliamentary Press Gallery. “They didn’t understand us originally,” Conway says. “But now I think they see us as a legitimate partner, very different in how we conduct our business, but nonetheless, we’re journalists in the news business and there’s a real merit in what we do.”

Ironically, CPAC won membership in the gallery in November 1995 with the help of some of the same journalists who say it’s not quite journalism. Perhaps that support emerged because CPAC had made waves in Ottawa while trying to gain access to Parliamentary committee meetings. Those meetings can be televised, but only if they take place in rooms where Parliament’s cameras are set up. CPAC didn’t want an arbitrary assignment of rooms to restrict its access. Others, including Newsworld’s Don Newsman, saw this to be to their advantage as well. Newman phoned some of his friends at the helm of CTV and Global to convince them that CPAC camera crews were just like any other and should be allowed to become members of the gallery.

It’s about 20 minutes to 3 p.m. and Martin Stringer is joining his crew and other members of the Press Gallery on Parliament Hill. The Peach Tower bells start to ring as he nears the West Block. Question Period is almost over and soon MPs will be pouring out of the House of Commons into the throng of waiting reporters. This is where CPAC tapes Scrum, a one-hour show that runs weekdays at 7 p.m. CPAC records the chaos going on in the foyer of the House. And when the CPAC camera catches a scrum, it stays with it until the last question is asked. Stringer won’t be asking questions, but he still considers himself a journalist.

Health Minister Allan Rock is the first out of the doors. Journalists squeeze around him and the CPAC crew rolls tape. The crew stays with Rock, but Stringer circles the room, sticking his head and shoulders into each scrum that forms on the floor. He must direct his crew to the ones that, when strung together, will tell a logical story. And he must decide whether to keep his crew at the health minister’s scrum, which seems to be going on and on, or move it to another. If the crew leaves before Allan Rock is finished, CPAC won’t be able to play it at all. In this sense, CPAC is making editorial decisions, it is sometimes more than a fly on the wall. It’s also a truth meter that shows which MPs evaded questions and what quotes were taken out of context—or worse.

Former Ontario NDP premier Bob Rae can attest to that. On June 8, 1997, the front page of Toronto’s Sunday Sun screamed that Rae had said in a speech that Conservative Premier Mike Harris was “on the right track.” The story raised a commotion in the province, but Rae maintained he never said the words that ran on theSun’s cover. He wrote an angry letter to the paper, which said, “I have seen no other interpretation or account of my remarks in any other media whih support your desperate attempt to prop up the Harris Tories. The speech itself was covered by CPAC.” The letter drew a full retraction from the Sun: “We agree you did not say the Harris government was on the right track, or its cuts necessary and we apologize.”

CPAC reveals the game between the media and politicians. Often the story is as much about journalism as it is journalism. Barry Conway says the station is redefining the trade. “After 20 years in the business,” he says, “you begin to think there’s only one way of doing things. It tells the stories that other stations don’t tell. In telling each story in its entirety, CPAC focuses the lens on parts of the political process that would otherwise go unseen.

During the Westray inquiry into the explosion at a Nova Scotia mine that killed a crew of miners, a supervisor was being questioned. He was testifying about the men who had worked for him before dying in the tragic explosion. In the middle of his testimony, overcome with emotion, he broke off to name each of the 26 men who died. It took him 59 seconds.

CPAC’s former general manager Martha Wilson was sitting at home watching the mine inquiry when it happened. “Just thinking about it now, I get goosebumps,” she says. “When you do a news report, you talk about 26 miners dead, 26 people died in the explosion. It’s not really anymore an individual when you distil it down like that. And his recitation of these 26 names from memory… Well, you’d never see that on the news. It brought home in such an incredibly powerful way what that inquiry was all about.” And what CPAC, at its best, is all about.

When Medical Post staff writer Pippa Wysong called Dr. Vivian Rakoff’s secretary last August to try to talk to him about his controversial psychiatric profile of Lucien Bouchard, her editor didn’t actually expect Rakoff to cooperate. After all, dozens of reporters were desperate to talk to the high-profile psychiatrist. Surprisingly, Rakoff’s secretary called back, saying he wouldn’t do it for anyone else, but since it was The Medical Post…. While reports in the popular press often had to include a Rakoff-could-not-be-reached-for-comment statement, the Poststory quoted the doctor’s protest that, as a concerned citizen, “[I was] entitled to write what I like….I don’t think it [what I wrote about Bouchard] was that marvellous or significant.

Months later, Rakoff is still steamed about the coverage in the mainstream press. “I was totally misrepresented,” he complains. Magazines like Saturday Night and Maclean’s distorted the story to make it appear as if he had said Bouchard was absolutely crazy, Rakoff says. “After my experience with the media last fall, I am so suspicious of them. I want nothing to do with any of them.”

So why did he agree to do the interview with the Post? Because, he says matter-of-factly, the paper is “reliable.” And his trust was not misplaced; he was happy with the Post‘s handling of the piece. Dr. Ken Walker, who writes a widely syndicated medical column under the pseudonym W. Gifford-Jones, shares Rakoff’s confidence in the Post. He describes itas “an excellent medical journal-I think the best in Canada.”

And he may be right. Forty-two times a year, the Post offers doctors a way of quickly catching up with the enormous volume of breaking medical news. But the two doctors’ high opinion might also be due to the fact that no other paper goes head-to-head with the Post, the flagship publication of Maclean Hunter’s health-care division. That’s partly because the Post has a such a large, loyal following in the medical community that challenging it could be extremely difficult. In addition, the paper’s staff includes some of the best people in the industry. But it doesn’t hurt that Maclean Hunter uses its money and power to dig out any competition before its roots get too deep.

For more than three decades, TheMedical Post has been offering the nation’s doctors bulletins about the latest studies and newest therapies as well as changes in provincial health regulations. A typical issue contains approximately 60 stories as short as 100 and as long as 1,200 words (“Royal College to Change Foreign MD Policy?” and “Coming Soon: Cyber Charts” are typical). It also carries features on ethical issues and health trends as well as profiles of doctors. And every issue includes doctors’ letters; some correct past stories, others relate their own experiences to corroborate articles. Often the space becomes a forum for debates on such issues as health-care reform and abortion.

The tabloid is not only respected by doctors but has been recognized by its peers for superior content. The “wall of fame,” covered with 16 framed magazine awards, is the only indication that you’re entering the maze of staff writers’ cubicles that constitute the Post offices. The prizes include 11 Kenneth R. Wilson Awards for top trade magazine work, as well as two National Magazine Awards and a Science in Society Journalism Award that Pippa Wysong won in 1996.

Just metres away in the cream-coloured labyrinth are the Family Practice cubicles. They look much likeTheMedical Post‘s space, only less cluttered, since the magazine moved in much more recently. Until late last spring, the 10 Family Practice staff worked out of the Thomson Healthcare Communication offices in Scarborough, Ontario, and competed with TheMedical Post for stories, readers and advertising. Now the former rivals share a photocopier.

Some protest that the two magazines were never in serious competition. John Shaughnessy, editor of Family Practice until February, calls it a “quasi-competition.” Kristin Jenkins, who worked at the Post for more than 11 years, says, “I never felt that Family Practice ever really gave TheMedical Post a run for its money. It was never really a big threat. [We] sort of watched them with a mixture of contempt and amusement.”

Family Practice ‘s biweekly deadlines prevented it from ever scooping its weekly nemesis, meaning the magazine was forced to concentrate on analysis and interpretation. The papers have different audiences: thePost is for all doctors while Family Practice targets only general practitioners. However, over half of the Post‘s almost 42,000 readers are GPs and Family Practice does cover many of the same stories. The similarities in their appearance-the same glossy tabloid format-are undeniable. Understandable, too, considering their closely entwined history.

About 15 years ago, The Medicine Group, a U.K. firm, launched an Australian medical publication calledAustralian Doctor, which bought second rights to the Post‘s editorial. Several years later, the editor ofAustralian Doctor visited the Medical Post offices to see how the publication was run.

Not long after, The Medicine Group launched Family Practice, published out of Mississauga, Ontario. It did fairly well in readership surveys, but the company’s core business in Canada was continuing medical education. The magazine needed a more aggressive advertising sales team than The Medicine Group had the resources for. When Thomson came looking for a flagship publication for its health-care division in November 1991, the group sold.

About the same time, Thomson recruited The Medical Post‘s publisher, Frank Lederer, who was later appointed publisher of its new acquisition. Lederer offered then-managing editor of the Post, John Shaughnessy, the editorship of Family Practice. Many people say Lederer is a leader in his field and largely responsible for the publication’s success. He gave Shaughnessy, a self-proclaimed “quasi-tightwad,” the power and money to bring the paper up to standard. Shaughnessy hired more photographers, illustrators and freelancers. He also stacked his editorial team with former coworkers. One by one, The Medical Post began to lose its managing editors to Family Practice. After Shaughnessy left, Kristin Jenkins recalls, there was a big party for him and Jenkins moved from features editor and senior staff writer to associate editor while Andy Monroe took over as managing editor. When Monroe left for Family Practice in late 1992, “they had a cake and some people standing around and a gift” and Jenkins moved up again. Then, after less than a year as managing editor, she left to start up Family Practice‘s clinical section. “They just about ran me out of that company on a rail,” she says. With all that borrowed talent, it’s small wonder that Family Practice took on the look and feel of The Medical Post.

After five years at Thomson, Family Practice was running smoothly and making money. Readership surveys showed a modest increase in the Family Practice numbers, while the Post‘s numbers were declining slightly. It seemed that Family Practice might be able to loosen the Post‘s hold on the GP community. Then, on Friday, February 7, 1997, Thomson Healthcare called a company-wide meeting. People who had the day off or were on assignment outside the office were summoned to attend. Downtown, a memo circulated regarding a similar meeting for the Healthcare staff at Maclean Hunter. Most of the morning was lost to speculation. There were rumours that Rogers Communications, Maclean Hunter’s parent company, was selling its publications. After lunch, both groups assembled in their respective meeting rooms. Frank Lederer, publisher of Thomson’s Healthcare group, and Jim Hall, president of Maclean Hunter Healthcare, announced that Maclean Hunter had purchased the Thomson health division.

The big story at that time had to do with two of the other six medical and pharmaceutical publications that Maclean Hunter had acquired. Thomson’s Pharmacy Post and its main competitor, Maclean Hunter’sPharmacist News, were merged under the title Pharmacy Post, and L’Omnipraticien was repositioned so that it was no longer competing head-to-head with Maclean Hunter’s L’Actualité médicale.

It’s not the first time that Maclean Hunter has effectively eliminated the competition. In the ’70s, a man named Frédéric Porte started up L’Actualité médicale for doctors in Quebec. It was very successful and Porte followed up by launching a similar, English-language paper called Ontario Medicine for doctors in the province. Ontario has the greatest concentration of doctors in Canada and, hence, represents a large portion of TheMedical Post‘s readership. In response to the success of L’Actualité médicale, Maclean Hunter launched L’Information médicale, which sources describe as a “disaster.” So Maclean Hunter did what it does so well: it bought the competition. Ontario Medicine came as part of the package in the acquisition ofL’Actualité médicale. Former Ontario Medicine staff say that, from the very beginning, no effort was put into the paper-they didn’t even have a dedicated salesperson, which meant that Ontario Medicine was merely an add-on, an afterthought to sell when someone had the time. Even so, the paper managed to hang on for just over a decade before a change in drug policy caused the advertising base to fall out from under it, and the paper to fold. However, L’Actualité médicale continues today as one of Maclean Hunter’s most successful papers.

So it was no wonder that many forecasted an early retirement for Family Practice, even though an article in the magazine industry’s trade publication, Masthead, on the Thomson acquisition reported that Family Practice was to “continue as usual.” The problem with that, says Derek Cassels, editor of the Post for 19 years until his retirement last June, was that Family Practice “was covering the same things. It was covering medical politics. It was covering medicine to perhaps a lesser degree than we were, but basically, it was doing the same thing we were.”

For example, the Post‘s November 4 and Family Practice‘s November 17 issues both carried headlines about new diabetes-testing guidelines. The dangerous fen-phen combination drug prescription story appeared onFamily Practice‘s September 15 cover and had prominent play on page two of the Post‘s October 7 issue.

Cassels wasn’t the only one to recognize that the two publications were looking a little too similar. Last fall, John Shaughnessy said plans were already in place to redesign the Post and Family Practice to “accentuate our differences.” The plan was to make Family Practice more of a community newspaper for GPs.

Apparently though, the top staff weren’t moving fast enough for Maclean Hunter. In February, Shaughnessy and managing editor Deborah Jones were let go and Vil Meere, also editor of Patient Care, another successful Maclean Hunter publication, took over as editor. He says that he wants Family Practice to put a greater emphasis on practice management with user-friendly information for GPs on how to deal with partners and other day-to-day duties, as well as service pieces and features that are “punchier.” “Quick hits in short, digestible pieces” is the paper’s new direction.

Meere’s newspaper background (he was at the Ottawa Journal for 12 years and was later editor of The NapaneeBeaver) along with the knowledge of medical practice he brings from Patient Care and four years atThe Medical Post makes him a strong choice for the job. His appointment is a good omen. Although Family Practice was part of a package deal, Maclean Hunter is obviously putting resources into the paper. And whileFamily Practice doesn’t generate close to the Post‘s estimated $8 million in annual revenue, it did reach about $3 million in 1997. Family Practice doesn’t seem destined to die the slow, wasting death that Ontario Medicine suffered.

Meanwhile, the Post has brought in a new editor as well. With the retirement of Derek Cassels, Pat Rich, previously the Post‘s managing editor, moved up to the editorship in May 1997. Rich, 40, has been with thePost for 16 years and many consider him an excellent writer and editor. He has increased the Post‘s coverage of medical politics and prefers features on subjects like medical ethics issues. He is described as a more personable, laid-back character than the gruff “curmudgeon” Cassels.

“Pat is more conciliatory and accessible,” says Kristin Jenkins, who has moved on to Multi-Vision Publishing, where she edits both Healthwatch and Owl Canadian Family Magazine. “He’s more sympathetic. He would be personally distressed if someone were upset. For Derek, you’d have to be dead in your chair before he felt it was something he should tackle.”

Still, Cassels’ confrontational style had its advantages. He was known to have frequent showdowns with publisher John Milne over editorial issues, including the encroachment of advertising on editorial. This has yet to happen between Rich and Milne. Some wonder whether Nice Guy Rich will be able to fight off an advertising invasion or whether his gift for compromise will ultimately, though inadvertently, compromise the paper’s editorial integrity. Pat Rich agrees that this is a perfectly valid concern. “It’s something that I’ve wrestled with myself. My personal management style being nonconfrontational, it may also be seen as wimpy. But I think I have enough commitment to the editorial mandate that I can withstand the pressure of sales.”

Of course, both the publisher and editors insist that there is a clear line between advertising and editorial. But Q&A, a special section for GPs that has been part of the Post since 1996, suggests otherwise. The section takes a subject that GPs frequently deal with in their practices, such as asthma or migraines, and asks a qualified specialist questions that would help GPs diagnose and treat the problem.

But each four- to eight-page section has a single advertising sponsor; the advertiser proposes a subject to cover and sometimes provides the sources and questions to ask. The January 20 Q&A on urinary incontinence even mentions the advertiser’s product, Elmiron. The section is printed on thicker, glossier stock and is free from advertising aside from the sponsor’s ad, positioned within the segment. However, nothing flags the item as being single-sponsored or essentially advertorial.Dr. Ian Gray, a 53-year-old GP from Alliston, Ontario, says that this kind of trick makes him worry that the story is biased. Still, he finds Q&A one of the best parts in an otherwise “gossipy” paper-he calls The Medical Post “TheNational Enquirer of medical news.”

“It makes lots of money,” says Rich of the section, “and it’s very popular among our readers.” However, he says it’s raised the question about “whether it was fish or fowl. And it’s taken a while to figure out whether it was an editorial-driven product or an advertising-driven product. But I think we’ve got editorial control over Q&A sufficiently that I’m quite happy with it.”

Family Practice has had its own problems with advertising-editorial adjacency. In its August 4, 1997 issue, for example, the Arthritis Alert section is preceded by an ad for Arthrotec and followed by a Cytotec ad, both of which call themselves a “powerful anti-arthritic.”

The advertising problems may be only a symptom of the larger problem: complacency. The repositioning-making a complementary paper out of a competitor-means that The Medical Post is left without direct competition. When the information you’re offering is important and you’re the only one offering it, there’s no real threat of losing those readers.

Maclean Hunter might have done itself a favour, financially, by picking up Family Practice, but ultimately it might have done the Post a disservice. Without the impetus to improve or at least retain the standards that made it successful in the past, the Post may go the way of many trade magazines-a necessary evil for their readers, a “spinach read.” The Medical Post is well regarded by many doctors and it certainly has many friends in the industry, including ex-staffers who loved and miss working at the paper. But there are those who are concerned by its lack of urgency.

Kristin Jenkins recalls a factory atmosphere when she was writing for the Post. “It was very rare that anything was questioned in the material. As long as the lead was sharp enough, the information flowed and you wrote a headline, it was like, ‘Next!’ ” she says. “You get complacent and stop questioning whether you’re doing the best job you can. Being the only job in town, they can do that…. If you can do it in your sleep, there’s something wrong.”

Simcha Jacobovici’s black and white limo pulls up to a red carpet outside the Princess of Wales Theatre. Floodlights roam the downtown Toronto skyline as he and his entourage-wife, sister, mother and in-laws-arrive at the reception for the screening of Hollywoodism: Jews, Movies and the American Dream, a film he codirected and produced. In front of the theatre he poses with his family for the cameras, an impressive figure at 6’3″ elegant in black jacket and pants, a round-collared white shirt, wire-rimmed glasses and large Middle Eastern-style black kippah on top of his chin-length blond hair. The night passes by in a blur for him-an endless parade of well-wishers and handshakes.

It’s a cold November evening, and the screening is a fundraiser for the Toronto synagogue and community centre Jacobovici has founded, the Jewish Film Festival and the Bloor Jewish Community Centre. The film, based on a book by Neal Gabler, tells the story of Hollywood moguls-heads of the largest movie studios. They were Jewish men who had immigrated to America and rejected their traditional pasts in favour of an invented reality they viewed as the American dream.

“One of the hopes I have for this film is that it would make Jews and other people who bought into this assimilationist fantasy buy out of it a little,” Jacobovici tells the assembled audience of more than 2,000 when the movie has finished. He speaks of one of its messages: to be proud of one’s roots, of one’s identity-part of the moguls’ downfall came from abandoning the world of their fathers.

Hollywoodism also has an anti-idolatry theme. “We created gods out of movie stars,” he says. “This film brings down the icons and puts things into perspective.” To Jacobovici, an Orthodox Jew and established documentary filmmaker, movies can be the bearers of false idols-the scourge of his religious beliefs-or they can send a constructive message and “make people proud of who they are.”

Twelve years ago, Jacobovici and his coproducer, Elliott Halpern, founded Associated Producers, a documentary film company. Together they have produced 15 feature-length documentaries and reaped more than 60 awards, including the 1996 and 1997 Emmys for outstanding investigative journalism for The Plague Monkeys, about the Ebola virus outbreak in Zaire, and The Selling of Innocents, about the child sex trade in India. Jacobovici’s best-known film to date, 1991’s Deadly Currents, about the Arab-Israeli intifada, won a Genie for best feature-length documentary.

Jacobovici has been called a guerrilla filmmaker-a moniker he earned by making intense, controversial films, often under the most trying of circumstances. He has led camera and crew into the geographical outposts of the Sudan, where he nearly lost a leg to an insect bite, for Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews. He has ventured into the political hot zone of the West Bank, where his life was threatened by extremists and rubber bullets, for Deadly Currents. He is quick to say that he is not a “fearless cowboy”-he feels the weight of keeping his crew safe. And since his marriage to Nicole Kornberg in December 1991 and the birth of their two daughters, he is conscious of being more careful. But his colleagues consider him courageous, someone who will go to great lengths to get the story that his insatiable curiosity drives him toward. His powerful, point-of-view documentaries are charged with passion and possess an earnestness that speaks of his faith in their message. He believes that documentaries must venture beyond the realm of entertainment. “Film should educate, celebrate and challenge our notions of identity,” he has said.

Canada’s history of documentary filmmaking dates back to the 1930s, when John Grierson founded the National Film Board, a government agency designed to support Canadian film. “For Grierson, viewers are passive receivers of information, ideas and feelings that have been arranged and presented by the filmmaker,” writes Clarke Mackey in an essay on Deadly Currents in the summer 1992 issue of Queen’s Quarterly. “This is still the most common type of documentary being made today.” According to Mackey, Simcha Jacobovici belongs to “an alternative school of filmmaking practice”-one that is meant to “induce the pleasure of learning.” Jacobovici is proud that his films don’t offer solutions to problems but instead create a framework for discussion and for asking questions. This open-ended approach, however, must not be confused with the notion of objectivity. “I don’t believe that any film is objective,” says Jacobovici. “Every film has a point of view….What I consider good filmmaking is bringing honesty and balance to your point of view.”

John Katz, a former professor of Jewish film at York University, is familiar with Jacobovici’s films and also knows him personally through the synagogue Jacobovici founded. “Simcha becomes more of an advocate in his films for an idea, an argument, than a lot of filmmakers,” he says. “His films don’t have that pasty indecisiveness that a lot of them do.” Jacobovici does achieve a degree of journalistic objectivity because of his Talmudic approach to filmmaking. “He looks at all sides and he’s always questioning,” Katz explains. “When you study Talmud [the written text of the Jewish oral law], you study with a partner and you may change sides, even to a side you don’t believe in, because you’re interested in the question, in the argument.”

In the 1993 book Brink of Reality: New Canadian Documentary Film and Video, author Peter Steven writes that “no producer stays completely independent,” and says producers will always be accountable to their “world view, sympathies and connections.”

“I’m always thinking as a Jewish person,” says Jacobovici. While only a few of his films have Jewish themes, all possess a degree of moral and societal introspection, evident in documentaries such as The Selling of Innocents and Northern Justice, the 1995 film about treatment of the Inuit within the Canadian judicial system. He has said that “all the films I make are Jewish because I bring that sensibility to it.”

For Jacobovici, religion and film are both a means to an end-a way to ensure cultural survival. In an age where market and industry have become civilization’s temples, he has found a balance between the secular and spiritual worlds. David Ostriker, an Orthodox Jewish documentary filmmaker who has known Jacobovici for 13 years, says, “You have to reconcile who you are and what you do, and combine the two. Simcha has done that to a large degree.”

Jacobovici’s passion for making documentaries with a social conscience stems from his background and upbringing. In   an interview with the popular Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz in December 1996, Jacobovici said: “The three outstanding foundations of my life are my ‘Israeliness,’ my Judaism and the fact that I am the son of survivors. They are the driving forces behind the subjects of my work-oppressed and suffering groups-and the guiding hand that leads me in the manner of my work.”

He was born in 1953 in Petah Tikvah, a small city in central Israel, five years after the creation of the state and eight years after the Holocaust, where he was raised with his younger sister, Sara, in a spiritual, though not Orthodox, home. There was a strong faith in God in the home, and at night the family would gather to say a prayer they had created. His parents, Joseph and Ida, had come to Israel from Romania after surviving the war. Jacobovici says that growing up as the first generation since the birth of Israel “felt special.” He and his sister were raised to believe that they were the first Jews in 2,000 years who were not going to be victims. “We weren’t going to take orders,” recalls Jacobovici. “We were encouraged to talk back, we were encouraged to break rules, we were told that there were no rules for us.”

When Jacobovici was 9, the family moved to Montreal because Ida needed a cooler climate for health reasons and Joseph, an engineer, had just received a contract for work there. But the experience of spending his formative years in a victorious country that had just secured independence affected him deeply. Jacobovici maintains that his “Israeliness” has very much remained a part of who he is (he now calls himself an Israeli-born Canadian). Jacobovici grew up arguing politics with his family over breakfast and constantly questioning and criticizing. “Nobody was an authority figure for me,” recalls Jacobovici of his youth.

In 1974, he graduated with a bachelor of arts degree in philosophy from McGill University. Soon after celebrating his 21st birthday, he volunteered for a year in the Israeli army out of a sense of nationalistic duty, an experience that reinforced his “Israeliness.” He also spent a year working on a kibbutz. Afterward, he moved back to Canada to pursue studies in international relations at the University of Toronto, earning an MA. He continued on toward a PhD, but soon made the transition from academic to activist, leaving his final thesis unfinished. He had all the necessary qualities of leadership-beneath his Bee Gees-inspired haircut and thick-framed glasses, he was intense and charismatic. He was elected president of the first Canadian chapter of Network, a North American Jewish youth activist organization, where one of his accomplishments was successfully negotiating the removal of national origin from Canadian passports. Another issue he struggled to publicize was the suppressed story of the Falashas, Ethiopian Jews. The international Jewish community was aware of the Falashas’ situation and many disapproved of the low-profile approach the Israeli government was taking to it. In Ethiopia, the Falashas had been living as practising Jews for thousands of years in a land where their religion was barely tolerated. Many had tried to escape famine and oppression by fleeing to Sudan, but ended up in overcrowded refugee camps where they were shunned and abused. In 1978, Jacobovici began writing articles describing the Falashas’ persecution, and eventually published several pieces in The New York Times. Without any experience or knowledge of the field, Jacobovici decided that film was the “next logical step” in spreading his message: “I thought documentaries in film are what op-ed pieces are in writing.” Unable to find an established filmmaker willing to take on the story, he organized the production himself. Between October and December 1982, he travelled in Ethiopia and the Sudan, to the remote corners of the mountainous region where the Falashas lived. To fund the documentary, he promised additional films about the area for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees and the CBC Man Alive series. In turn, they provided money up front. With Jacobovici was an experienced crew that included former National Film Board documentary filmmaker Peter Raymont, whom Jacobovici had commissioned as director. During the shoot, however, Jacobovici became involved with the actual filming, although officially his role was that of interviewer and political expert. “My analysis wasn’t just verbal, it was visual,” he says. He would point out shots he wanted, and ultimately directed three-quarters of the 80-minute documentary. Jacobovici’s vision strained his relationship with Raymont and the two men haven’t spoken since. “He felt like he could have made the film himself,” Raymont says.

From this directorial debut, it was evident that filmmaking came naturally to Jacobovici. Falasha: Exile of the Black Jews is a conventional documentary-presenting a clear, if somewhat plain, synopsis of the situation. Talking-head scenes prevail and there is little artistry in the narrative. But the film is nevertheless affecting. Stories the Ethiopian Jews tell of being tortured by local peasant associations are riveting, and their proclamations of religious devotion, touching.

An official guide of the Ethiopian government leads the camera through the dusty roads of Gondar province, to the places where Falashas are rumoured to be living. In a tiny village atop a hill, a young Ethiopian Jew waits until the guide is out of sight before he displays a forbidden Torah, tattered and frayed. The camera pans a row of Falashas behind a bramble fence, evoking the barbed wire and starving faces of the Nazi concentration camps.

One reviewer described it as a film “that believes in its ability to save a people.” Of Jacobovici, the Chicago Tribune wrote that “his is an admittedly partisan account, he is almost obsessed with the Falashas and condemns anyone not willing to go all out and rescue them.” Eight months after Falasha was shown in the Israeli parliament, Operation Moses, the airlift of Ethiopian Jews to Israel, was launched.

It was the success of this film that led to the creation of Associated Producers. It began in 1986, in Jacobovici’s townhouse on Broadview Avenue in Toronto’s Riverdale area, where he lived alone. The living room doubled as the company’s main control centre. Eight years later, when the company moved to its present location on lower Spadina Avenue, Jacobovici was still at the centre of all the action-his office is directly across from the main door, in between the boardroom and the kitchen. As he sits at his desk, engaged in one of his epic-length phone calls, he sees all who pass by and all that comes to pass in front of his wide office door.

Across the hall lined with award certificates, plaques and promotional film posters is the office of Elliott Halpern, Jacobovici’s business partner and coproducer. They had first met at a U of T political philosophy course back in 1980, but didn’t see each other again until years later. In 1984, Jacobovici had an idea for another film, but needed someone to write the script. In a meeting he describes as fortuitous, Jacobovici ran into his old schoolmate outside the building where Halpern was practising law. Although Halpern had no film experience, he had been editor of The Varsity, the U of T student newspaper, and Jacobovici thought he had “the right sensibility” for the story. In a “surreal conversation on the street,” Halpern agreed to write a draft. While that film would never reach production, it marked the start of a prolific creative partnership, and two years later, Halpern left law to help start Associated Producers.

Both men share many of the same ideals of filmmaking; neither wants to make “cookie-cutter” films that are driven by demand, but they do not see themselves as “esoteric art filmmakers” either. They strive to make films that have international appeal and exotic locations and that ultimately tell a good story in cinematic language.

Although Jacobovici has never studied film, claims no mentors in the medium and does not identify with any particular style, the artistry of a film is important to him, although not at the expense of content. SinceFalasha, there has been a noticeable artistic evolution in his documentaries. His 1996 film Expulsion and Memory: Descendants of the Hidden Jews, about Jews who were converted to Christianity during the Spanish Inquisition, achieves both ends through a mesmerizing quilt of flamenco music, sensual dance and seamless scenes.

In a Christian cemetery in New Mexico, many of the headstones are engraved with Hebrew words and six-pointed flowers symbolizing the Star of David. In Hervas, Spain, against a backdrop of worn, pale buildings, a young boy tells us, “In this town, if you go far back enough, we’re all Jewish.” Between scenes, a flamenco guitarist sits in a darkened room strumming a song-the tempo quickens and then slows as a Spanish dancer swirls, waving her arms to the hypnotic rhythm.

“A beautiful-looking film,” wrote John Haslett Cuff in The Globe and Mail. Jacobovici consciously uses music, art and dance in many of his films to advance the stories being told. While documentaries are visual recitals of facts, Jacobovici says they must be entertainment as well. “Are you telling the stories in a way that people feel like they’re being lectured? Or are you telling them in a way that people feel like they’ve gone on a journey?” he asks.

Jacobovici considers his increased artistry more of “a smooth evolution than a revolutionary break,” but according to Rudy Buttignol, head of documentaries at TVOntario, there was a turning point in Jacobovici’s career. “In Deadly Currents he transcended being a mere journalist and became a filmmaker, an auteur,” he says. “It was his nonfiction novel.”

“In each film that I make from Falasha to this day, I try to set myself challenges,” Jacobovici says. Sometimes that means using narration uniquely so that the film isn’t just an “illustrated lecture,” or even avoiding narration altogether and letting the people and places speak for themselves, as he did with Deadly Currents.

Deadly Currents was the film that propelled Jacobovici into the upper echelons of Canadian documentary filmmaking. Shot and edited over a year and a half, with Elliott Halpern and Ric Bienstock as coproducers and Steve Weslak as editor, Deadly Currents received wide acclaim and commercial success. Critics described it as “balanced and powerful,” and many considered it the best film they had seen on the Middle East conflict. For an independent film steeped in foreign politics, it had an extraordinarily lengthy run, playing in theatres in Toronto, Montreal, New York and Tel Aviv. It played for 11 weeks in Toronto, which is practically unheard of for a documentary. The $1.1-million film took in about $100,000 at Canadian box offices alone and an estimated $30,000 in the U.S.

Mournful music plays as scrolling text, outlining the fractured history of Jews and Palestinians and the claim each have on the land, travels up the screen against a background of a black-and-white photo of an army truck. At a swearing-in ceremony for Israeli soldiers, the film turns bright with colour. The story of the struggle is told through vivid characters; the Israeli soldier who is horribly burnt by a Molotov cocktail, the young Palestinian who is martyred and mourned by family after being killed and the street performer who is a descendant of both cultures and angrily rejects them.

The documentary won six prestigious awards, including a 1992 Genie. Despite such acclaim, many attribute the commercial success of Deadly Currents, and Jacobovici’s subsequent films, to his personality rather than his talents as a filmmaker.

Jacobovici is a master of media manipulation and has been described as a near-genius when it comes to getting publicity. Michael Posner devoted an essay to Deadly Currents in his 1993 book Canadian Dreams: The Making and Marketing of Independent Films. Of Jacobovici’s press savvy, he wrote: “The publicity campaign mounted for Deadly Currents was more nearly reminiscent of a military exercise than anything else, and Jacobovici was its high-profile general.”

David Ostriker, a Toronto film producer and Jacobovici’s close friend says: “At the end of the day, Simcha is a greater promoter than filmmaker.”

Elliott Halpern agrees that Jacobovici’s promotional savvy drives the company. Halpern is more involved in the international business side, although both partners contribute creatively to projects. “I think we have a way of keeping each other grounded,” says Halpern.

Still, both are headstrong and opinionated-they sometimes have shouting matches in the editing suite, and employees at the film company have to mediate between their creative visions. “They’re like the odd couple: Simcha’s the idealist and Elliott’s the voice of reason,” says Mark Leuchter, a researcher and writer at Associated Producers since 1995. “After a conversation between the two, when they’re yelling back and forth at each other, Simcha’s taken away a little bit of reason and Elliott’s taken away a little bit of idealism.”

Not all of Jacobovici’s creative relationships have been as satisfying. He is notorious for being difficult to work with. Ric Bienstock, a Toronto independent filmmaker, has known Jacobovici since 1986 and worked with him on several projects. “Jacobovici is capable of immense charm,” she is quoted as saying in Michael Posner’s book on Canadian independent film, “but he is also a perfectionist. He knows what he wants and he’ll stop at virtually nothing to get it. Sometimes, he is abrasive, not only with colleagues, but with people whose cooperation he really needs to achieve what he wants.”

David Ostriker agrees that Jacobovici’s methods, however successful, could use some refining. “He pushes people without any grace at all. He gets away with it because he’s a charismatic leader.” Another close acquaintance of Jacobovici says, “Simcha didn’t make enemies because he’s successful. He made enemies because he’s abrasive and brazen. He’s self-centred when it comes to producing.”

Some of his peers and colleagues have described him as ruthless. John Katz, who has known Jacobovici since the time of Falasha, argues: “I would never call him ruthless. He’s determined and knowledgeable. He’s exactly what a film producer has to be.”

Jacobovici’s younger sister, Sara, a music therapist, says there is another side to him that not many people see. “People will call him arrogant because he is very sure of himself. But after he speaks or makes a presentation, he runs to me or someone he’s close to and asks, ‘How was I?’ He always seeks people’s opinions.”

Those who have worked for Jacobovici say that he drives himself as much as he drives those around him. Off the record, some complain that they haven’t received the recognition they deserved. “Simcha’s weakness is that he isn’t generous enough in sharing credit and hurts people, very often unknowingly,” says Ostriker. “He and Elliott have grabbed the limelight whenever they could, and sometimes it’s better to share it.”

Jacobovici says that while he and Halpern often get the credit for a film in the press, he believes that “filmmaking is a team thing.” He is also aware of what he calls an “I-hate-Simcha-club,” referring to some of the strained professional ties he’s had over the years, beginning with Peter Raymont over Falasha. “I’m always butting heads and I think it’s a positive thing,” he says. “I need that feedback, that argument, that tension and different perspectives. But you’re walking a tightrope-if you butt heads to the point where your egos are involved, then it’s destructive to the filmmaking process. I like to think that my ego’s strong enough that I can take criticism without letting my ego interfere.”

“Sim is a guy with a tremendous ego,” says David Ostriker, “but he has the blessing of being a devout Jew, and it keeps his ego directed in a very positive, productive way. It is Simcha’s will, or ego, that makes him do what others consider to be impossible or fruitless.”

Jacobovici says that some people are amazed that he could still be “a good filmmaker in spite of the fact” that he is an Orthodox Jew who keeps the Sabbath and will not shoot on Friday nights or Saturdays. As he evolved from student political activist to the consummate filmmaker he is now, Jacobovici’s religious beliefs followed an evolution of their own. While he always had a strong Jewish identity, about eight years ago he began to practice his faith through daily prayer, a kosher diet and Sabbath observance. His new lifestyle led Jacobovici to start the only Orthodox synagogue on Toronto’s Danforth Avenue, in the predominantly Greek area in which he lives. It began in his home on Broadview Avenue in 1992 and now occupies a three-room store above a beauty salon.

The fact that Jacobovici lives and practises Orthodox Judaism on the Danforth is significant. “It’s easy to be a Jew at Lawrence and Bathurst,” Ostriker explains, “but to be an Orthodox Jew in Greek Town is a serious commitment.” It is a conscious declaration of independence, a geographical resistance to conformity. Rather than inhabit the Jewish Orthodox enclaves along Bathurst Street, where kosher bakeries, synagogues and Hebrew schools abound, Jacobovici and his family choose to create their own centre.

In his life, film and religion are intricately entwined. Indeed, Jacobovici leads a life of balance-between the spiritual and the secular, between film and faith. At its best, a documentary is a historical document, a visual liturgy of a phase in time. As an explorer of the past and journeyer of the present, Jacobovici uses film to pursue the people who have preserved and tell our history. “I’m very conscious of the whole concept of tikun olam, of making the world a better place,” he says. He believes that a film can be made to create problems-or to help find solutions. “I would like to think that I’m making films that are part of the solution,” he says.

Soon, Jacobovici will be screening a documentary that Ostriker predicts could be “the most important film Simcha ever does.” It is about the legendary 10 lost tribes of Israel who have been missing since they were exiled and cut off from the two tribes of Judah in 722 B.C. Jacobovici says he has found them in places such as Afghanistan, China, Indonesia and India. For him, this will be a film of passion-a film that, likeHollywoodism and Expulsion and Memory, will explain our past and unite us in the present.

If there are any doubts that negative attitudes and stereotypical notions about native people exist, particularly when filtered through the media, a look at how the mainstream press in Alberta covers native news-or ignores it-might dispel them. These days, native issues are virtually invisible in the tight page space of Alberta’s major newspapers, even though nearly 50,000 native people live on Alberta reserves and another 25,000 in the province’s cities and towns. After looking at the stories written by in-house reporters at the Calgary Heraldand The Edmonton Journal during the months of April and May 1997, I found that the two papers carried an average of eight stories per month on local native affairs. But when the Stoney reserve near Calgary came under scrutiny in June, after a provincial court judge postponed sentencing a convicted wife-beater until social conditions on the reserve could be investigated, the spotlight was suddenly back on the native community, and some felt there was a spillover effect from all the negative portrayal of corruption and scandal.

“People’s opinions are low, based on what they see in the media,” says Greg Favelle, a native business consultant based in Calgary. Favelle says he often has difficulty convincing clients to invest in the native community, due to a media focus that gets reduced to mishandled money, alcoholism and suicide. Headlines in newspapers throughout Canada scream about dissidents and armed conflicts, barricades and corruption-the issues become us versus them. “People accept it verbatim as truth,” says Favelle, and that makes the job of forming business alliances and strengthening native communities much harder.

While some journalists say they are covering native issues with the same judgement and balance they would apply to any other news story, natives like Favelle say the coverage is biased and often betrays ignorance of important historical issues that inform contemporary native reality. It’s true that mainstream news is selected and written essentially by middle-class, non-native reporters for a similar audience. And even the national native publication, Windspeaker, is run by a white editor. Many natives say greater sensitivity and awareness are urgently needed.

Canadian Association of Journalists President Tom Arnold agrees that what is printed about native life often has a relentlessly negative spin. But he points out that it is in the nature of the news to focus on controversy, regardless of what community is being covered. He believes that while a competent general assignment reporter should have the skills to write accurately and fairly about native issues and events, assigning reporters to a full-time native affairs beat would improve coverage. But it has been three years since theHerald and the Journal had full-time reporters devoted to the beat. Budgets have been reworked and newspaper structures altered, causing native affairs to fall by the wayside and news to be seen as a product to be consumed rather than issues to be explored.

Jack Danylchuk, an Edmonton Journal reporter who covered the native beat for three years until the beat was eliminated, explains that during the transition at the Journal over the past few years, native issues were classified as essentially rural, and therefore not of interest to an urban readership. Native affairs tend to be outside the scope of the revised mandate, so natives on reserves remain underrepresented and virtually absent from the coverage until a catastrophe. Danylchuk still occasionally writes about native affairs, but the paper’s coverage is now event-driven, he says, with little general public interest generated unless there’s a kerfuffle at the Stoney or Samson reserve, for example. After years of covering the beat, Danylchuk is dismissive of native complaints that stories about unemployment, corruption, high suicide rates and drinking on reserves feed stereotypical views. “They’re not stereotypes, they’re facts,” he insists, adding that resistance to facing these things is counterproductive to the communities themselves. “There’s a lot of denial,” he says, and this makes it hard for a reporter, especially a non-native one, to get on with the job.

That is, if the job is there in the first place. Being without a native affairs reporter in Alberta doesn’t make much sense to Wendy Dudley, a Calgary Herald reporter who covered the native beat just prior to its extinction. “Here we are, sitting in southern Alberta, with five Indian reserves pretty close to Calgary, and it’s not covered on a full-time basis,” she says. “I almost feel we’ve gone a little bit backward in media coverage.” She covered the beat for over three years, and when she left to work in other areas, the position wasn’t permanently reassigned. She feels it reflects a lack of interest in native issues, both within the community and the newspaper. Dudley says that as it was, her stories were buried deep in the paper’s back pages. “I used to say, in the dying days, this beat is too hard to go out and have the battles to get the stories and then to come in and have the battles with the editors to convince them that it’s important.” She was shocked to find one of her stories about a native dancer who had won an award running on the front page. “Can you believe it? It ran on A1 and it wasn’t a blockade story,” she says.

It may be that happenings in native communities don’t have enough obvious impact on non-natives to make them realize the importance of covering the issues, even though the native population is growing at a rate twice that of the rest of the Canadian population, making it reasonable to conclude that native affairs will affect more and more people each year. Dudley sees the native situation as unique and therefore deserving of a specialized beat. Mark Lowey, who worked the beat for four years before Dudley took over, agrees. “It has always boggled my mind why we have a dozen sports reporters at a big daily newspaper, yet we have no native affairs reporter,” he says.

Dudley agrees with natives who say that what reporting there is often tends to reflect the biases of non-native society. “We know that conditions are bad out there, or we should anyway,” says Dudley, but that doesn’t warrant coverage of the troubled aspects of reserve life to the exclusion of all else. Dudley says she tried to cover the good with the bad, people’s individual accomplishments and community business successes along with the turmoil and tragedy. But she admits there’s often a built-in tension between non-native reporters and native communities that could lead to misunderstanding. Sometimes, she says, people were upset when she didn’t cover positive events, yet never thought to contact her directly to tell her they were happening in the first place.

Native communities have rarely called Danylchuk with specific positive events either, he says, but native and government organizations routinely send press releases heralding success stories, which Danylchuk tends to dismiss as meaningless PR for minor business start-ups and dubious grant-funded crafts production. “We just get screeds of this shit coming in from Indian Affairs, from all kinds of agencies,” he says. None of it impresses Danylchuk as newsworthy, but Greg Favelle argues that what seems like a minor accomplishment to a white reporter may be far more of an achievement in a native context.

For instance, while non-natives might take finishing high school for granted, historical obstacles for natives mean that it’s a big deal and a source of community pride for a native student to graduate from high school. Maurice Switzer, director of communications for the federally funded Assembly of First Nations, agrees. He says that native children often have to leave the reserve and attend school in unfamiliar cities in order to graduate. A reporter who doesn’t understand or isn’t sympathetic to all the dynamics of the situation will either ignore the issue or spread misconceptions, he believes.

But there are conflicting views of how and what stories should be covered, based on cultural differences between native communities and the press, and also among natives themselves. One problem, says theHerald‘s Mark Lowey, is the clash between oral and written cultures. “You’re fighting against years and years of native traditions and native history that had nothing to do with writing things down,” he says. And reporters are trained to think in a linear way-they want answers to questions. Some natives resist that format. “They will circle around the question you’re asking and expect you to discern the meaning or their answer from it,” Lowey says. “Sometimes they’ll tell you a story that has nothing to do with the question you’re asking” until it’s analyzed. Reporters on deadline find this frustrating, but Lowey is philosophical. “You can either be generous and think this is their way of communicating, or you can be less generous and think they’re avoiding answering the question,” he says.

Lowey chooses to be generous, but many aren’t as patient, and the communication differences may only further the gap between native communities and the mainstream public served by the media. Lowey also points out that in an oral culture you don’t edit others, making the modern media practice of taking a few quotes and writing an article that reduces what is said to fit the space available in that day’s paper an affront to traditional natives, who see the abbreviation of their words and get angry. Experiences like this led Lowey to wonder whether a different way of reporting might work better to alleviate some of the hostility he encountered from native leaders he interviewed. “A solution is an unedited Q&A, where we can take a page or a half page and just ask them questions and let their whole answers appear,” Lowey says. He hopes to use this format for an interview with controversial Stoney Chief John Snow, but has so far been refused.

But new reporting techniques aren’t likely to be readily accommodated in today’s newspaper pages, nor would they entirely modify how the native community is perceived. Jack Danylchuk has noticed a shift in editorial opinion about the Lubicon band’s long-standing land-claim dispute. Several years ago, coverage was sympathetic, but in harsher economic times, the band has been the subject of less than enthusiastic editorial comment, he says. The band is now being played as stubborn and difficult, even though nothing has really changed.

Wendy Dudley has also noticed a swing in the level of concern for native affairs. During the Oka conflict in 1990, people were compassionate and understanding toward natives, Dudley says. Then Canada hit economic hard times and people had less sympathy to spare. “Now we’re having news coming out about the allegations of financial wrongdoings on the reserves, which is taxpayers’ money,” she says.

Yes, taxpayers read newspapers, and the Stoney story is considered news because it affects readers. But on the whole, what happens on the reserves isn’t seen as being of immediate consequence to society. This is reflected in what readers see in their daily paper. Mike Frank is a member of the tribal police force on Tsuu T’ina reserve near Calgary, and he experiences this apathy firsthand. “If this was happening in everyday suburbia, it would be a major crisis,” he says. “But it’s been happening for 70, 80 years and no one cares anymore.” What further muddies the waters is that natives are divided-some welcome media attention while others resent it.

As a reporter, Mark Lowey also sees the importance of researching native traditions and history, but found that nothing he read helped when he visited the reserves. “What helped the most was realizing how little I knew and how ignorant I was about their history and communities.” While he acknowledges the need to provide readers with background, today’s tight newspaper formats don’t often allow for it.

Debora Lockyer, editor of the national native newspaper, Windspeaker, says that most mainstream reporters don’t investigate the actual impetus for news events and don’t know the fundamental facts surrounding the issues. Kenneth Williams, former editor of the native publication Saskatchewan Sage, which is affiliated withWindspeaker and run out of Edmonton, is also concerned with the superficial coverage of native issues. Both say cramming a little on the subject isn’t enough. Reporters often call Lockyer looking for quick fixes of background information. An Alberta Report writer called her to ask about any Mohawks in the province-they are a central and eastern Canadian band. “I can’t spend hours and hours teaching Indian affairs to a reporter, especially from the Alberta Report, which has never been a friend to the Indians,” Lockyer says.

But in order for the media to adequately cover events, once they’ve done their historical research, they have to first be informed about them. Mikisew Cree Chief Archie Waquan says, “We have to start promoting ourselves.” He is proposing to his council that the band buy space in an ongoing Alberta Report section that allows businesses to address readers directly. He wants to show the public his vision, explain how things are done on the reserve and educate readers about the obstacles natives face in becoming accepted members of mainstream society. “I look at it as a challenge,” he says. “I could get mad, I could get ornery, but the thing is, we have to fight what’s out there with their own tools.”

And Maurice Switzer knows the power of that tool. He’s proud that as a freelancer he’s writing about native affairs but is disappointed that few others recognize the need for it. He uses his articles to educate the public about native culture and criticizes mainstream media for ignoring the accomplishments of his people. For example, mainstream reporters write about alcoholism without pointing out that many reserves in Canada have outlawed alcohol, he says. They focus on the high suicide rates but don’t include information about the peer groups of young people who help desperate people cope, or they dwell on sexual abuse without acknowledging the work being done in healing circles.

Wendy Dudley says she tried to be mindful of stereotypes, and cautions the media and the public against seeing reserves as totally different worlds subject to totally different rules. Reporters have to battle the pitfalls of these double standards and strive to be sensitive to reserve life, often while being regarded as an enemy just for being white. “Their natural inclination is not to talk to someone outside of the community,” Mark Lowey says, “and certainly not to talk to a reporter.” He attempts to write balanced articles, but it’s difficult without cooperation from the native community. Many of the stories about the Stoney situation have been lopsided because the chiefs have constantly refused to comment. But sometimes the tension is unbearable. He once went to the Stoney reserve to speak to an Indian Affairs official “and somebody not even connected to the tribal administration threatened to blow my head off-to get his gun and shoot me.” Lowey was called names for being there at all, for being white and for prying into their business. This kind of racism is representative of a small minority of the people he’s encountered, but it exists. Wendy Dudley says she’s encountered the same kind of resistance and frustration when she’s had to ask unpopular questions, and sometimes felt that as a white person she was being blamed for historical wrongs against natives. “You’d want to say, ‘Look, I’m sorry. I wasn’t on the boat with Columbus. Can we move on here?'”

For many natives, moving on means dispelling generalizations that allow the media to pass off one native group’s experience as representative of all. Chief Waquan says that his community is different from those getting negative press. “What is happening at Stoney is a Stoney problem,” he says. “You can’t lump all First Nations into that area.” He says he speaks openly to the media and welcomes scrutiny of the band council’s decisions.

Despite all the tensions and obstacles, Greg Favelle sees successful alliances forming between industries and aboriginal groups, with chiefs trying to convey their people’s accomplishments to a cynical and unreceptive public that isn’t well served by the media. “There needs to be more exposure,” says former Sucker Creek chief James Badger. “There is so much the public doesn’t know about.”

Alberta’s news media may view native issues as important enough to cover when there’s a crisis, but can they be convinced to return to more regular coverage? Mark Lowey hopes that the flurry from the Stoney investigation has opened editors’ eyes to the potential for more in-depth reporting. He’s suggesting that theHerald post a part-time native affairs beat, and he’s optimistic that the position will materialize. “Sometimes, we have to not worry so much about the bottom line and take a societal leadership role as a newspaper,” he says, as he waits to find out whether his bosses will agree with him.

After going through five day-care providers in 18 months, Sue Pigg was at her wit’s end. Pigg worked full-time as an editorial writer at The Toronto Star while her first child, Shannon, was a baby. She was horrified to find out that her babysitter’s husband was using drugs. At another babysitter’s home, Pigg’s husband, Tim, found Shannon already bundled in her snowsuit at the front door when he came to pick her up-he had no idea how long she’d been waiting. And at a third, there were so many children that Shannon began acting out her stress by biting other kids.

With her second child, Graeme, Pigg decided she couldn’t maintain her frenetic pace any longer. In 1991 she began working part-time as a copy editor, then moved to the assignment desk. Though it wasn’t a position she had ever aspired to, it allowed her to spend a lot more time with her children. Now, with a third child, two-year-old Claire, Pigg isn’t sure when she’ll go back to working full-time. Today, as a part-time assignment editor at the Star, she works three nights, an average of about 25 hours a week. Pigg would like to be the city editor and has been approached about management positions, but she just isn’t willing to put in the hours required to move up the newsroom ladder. Right now her career plans are on hold, but working part-time is “a way to keep my hands in daily journalism,” she says. “That was really important to me, to not get completely off track. I wanted to find a way to basically hang on by my fingernails.”

A framed picture of Shannon as a baby sits on a cabinet in Pigg’s dining room. She’s in a high chair, holdingThe Toronto Star, with an amused look on her face. Shannon, now 9 and home from school for lunch with her friend Ashley, is laughing so hard she falls off her chair. They giggle, planning a sleepover Ashley is having for her birthday party this weekend. Claire, in fuzzy, red Elmo slippers, runs from dining room to kitchen to living room and back, throwing a few somersaults on the way. A basket of toys, play table and stack of games sit in the corner. On the wall in a hallway is a mounted, colourful finger painting of tulips and sky, labelled “Shannon, aged 5.” Underneath it is a “Happy Mother’s Day” poem covered in handprints, entitled “Graeme, aged 3.” Pigg tells Claire to sit and eat and asks Shannon if she remembered to return her library books. During lunch, Tim calls and Pigg recounts how Claire locked her in the bathroom by accident this morning. Shannon disappears downstairs and returns wearing a promotional T-shirt designed by the Star: a head shot of Pigg with the headline-“Her 18 hours of persistence gave you new insight into trial.” Pigg says when she and her friends began starting families, they were still really ambitious, wanting to go after great stories, work late and travel. “We all went into this thinking you could have it all. It wasn’t even something we questioned,” she says. “Then we had kids and realized this is really hard.”

The Globe and Mail‘s arts reporter Val Ross, now on leave on a Southam Fellowship, remembers a day about five years ago that she spent working on a complicated Ontario Arts Council budget-cut story. The story was due by 5:30 p.m. to run in the next morning’s paper. At four o’clock, she checked her phone messages. There was one from her son, who was 10 at the time. “Hi, Mom! It’s me,” he said. “I forgot to tell you you’re in charge of costumes for the school play tomorrow. On your way home from work tonight would you pick up four god costumes.” God costumes? What did that mean-Greek gods? A thunderbird? An arty, symbolic representation? “Oh God,” she thought. In the end, she turned their old karate outfits inside out so they were all white, fashioning silver headbands out of aluminum foil. Pretty lame, she says, but not bad for such short notice. “When you’re trying to get an article done and your kid is sick or trying to get a project into school the next day, the laundry needs doing and people have head lice or measles, you don’t know where to begin,” Ross says.

The newsroom of the ’90s is filled with women like Pigg and Ross who face a difficult juggling act as they try to balance the competing demands of career and family, ambition and the desire to be there for their children. As they find ways to cope, they are part of a slow evolution in the pattern of work-an evolution that recognizes the realities of modern family life.

Robert Glossop, the director of programs and research for the Vanier Institute of the Family, says the structure of the workforce has been built on an old model of the family. “The nature of the contribution made by men back in the ’50s and ’60s to the labour market was made possible by virtue of the fact that there was a woman at home taking care of the kids and taking care of his needs as well,” Glossop says. “Employers could, in a sense, assume that there was this invisible resource to them, which basically subsidized the productivity of their own employees.”

Journalists are part of a changing work force, one that has seen a dramatic influx of women over the past 30 years, especially those with young children. In the early 1960s, 30 per cent of women were in the paid labour force; by the early ’90s, that number had doubled. Today, almost 70 per cent of women with young children work outside the home-partly because families require two incomes to match what they were earning in 1980.

Dual-income families have become the cultural and statistical norm. The workforce relies on women at all stages in their lives, and although men are becoming more involved in domestic life, women still spend one to two hours more each day than men on activities like housework, shopping and child care. The result of this “double shift” is stress. A 1992 StatsCan survey found that almost 30 per cent of women working full-time in dual-earner families felt they were severely time-crunched, always trying to accomplish more than they could handle.

A 1994 report on women in the economy by the Canadian Labour Market and Productivity Centre argues that the changing nature of the workforce “calls for parallel changes in our social infrastructure. The lack of adequate social supports for working families has major implications for the labour market of today and for the future.” Levi Strauss & Co. realized those implications when it examined work place issues in 1991. A company task force found that lost work time-due to absenteeism, lower productivity and workforce turnover-was often a result of the conflict between work and family. “In this global economy, the key competitive variable is now the quality of the workforce-its skills, knowledge, creativity and motivation,” says Julie White, a public affairs manager at Levi Strauss. “A company that ignores employees’ needs to balance their work and family lives may be making a costly mistake.”

Understanding the link between supporting workers with young children and corporate performance has led to the growth of family-friendly policies at Levi Strauss and other companies. These include flexible working hours, dependent sick leave, generous maternity and paternity leave and, more rarely, on-site day-care centres, or at least referral services to qualified care.

The newspaper industry in Canada has reflected this trend, though it certainly hasn’t led the way. Pigg is the first part-time assistant city editor and assignment editor the Star has had. It’s a small measure of a more willing attitude on the part of newspapers across Canada to accommodate employees. The Star, Canada’s largest independent daily, has formal polices that allow employees to job share, reduce their workweek and to fund a leave of absence by deferring compensation. At the other end of the spectrum, The Vancouver Sunhas only a formal policy on job sharing, but working fewer days a week has still become more common.

“If you don’t offer good employees some options,” says Shelley Fralic, deputy managing editor of the Sun,“you risk losing good people.” But she also points out that flexible work arrangements such as part-time, flextime, job-sharing and compressed or reduced workweeks don’t always work within the context of a newspaper. It’s true that long hours, travel, unpredictable schedules and daily deadlines are inherent in the 24-hour, seven-day-a-week nature of the news business, because stories don’t always break in convenient nine-to-five working hours. This makes it difficult to apply blanket policies.

Even Canada’s largest newspaper conglomerate, Hollinger-owned Southam, has no national corporate human resources policy; it leaves those decisions to managers at each of its 32 daily newspapers. TheOttawa Citizen, for example, has a work program that allows employees to reduce their workweeks and receive prorated benefits. The arrangement is renewed yearly and can be continued indefinitely, with two weeks’ written notice by either party to end the agreement, and employees’ full-time positions are held open for them. Job-sharing is also an option. For most of the past 10 years, Keri Sweetman, an assistant entertainment editor at the Citizen, has shared positions, working three days a week. Sweetman, who has three children, who are 7, 10 and 14, moved to editing because as a reporter “there’s no predicting what time you’ll finish work. You might have to go out on a story at four o’clock in the afternoon.”

Susan Riley, a columnist at the Citizen, says when she had her first child in the early ’80s, “you were kind of expected to keep on working as if nothing had happened. That was certainly the expectation I put on myself.” Riley later job-shared as an editorial writer, then tried working a four-day week. She believes women who choose to withdraw from the career ladder while their children are young shouldn’t be seen as uncommitted or uninterested in being good journalists-that attitude “leaves the way open for mediocre men.”

Don Butler, the Citizen‘s executive news editor, says the barriers holding women back in the newsroom are fading fast. “If you want to get the most talented people into key jobs, you’re going to have to accommodate the fact that, periodically, some of them are going to go off and have babies,” he says. “I think newspaper management is on the right page on that.” The Citizen hired Lynn McAuley as sports editor when she was seven months pregnant with her second child and held the position open for her until she returned from her four-month maternity leave.

Sheila Pratt, managing editor of The Edmonton Journal and mother of a three-year-old, says family-friendly policies are key to keeping women journalists in the workforce. “Especially with populations in the newsroom getting older,” Pratt says, there need to be “workplace policies that are flexible enough to allow women to be moms and have time with their kids as well as pursue their journalism.”

The Journal is one of only two Southam newspapers in Canada with an on-site day-care centre (the other is the Calgary Herald.) Journal employees are also able to take up to three days each year to care for a sick child or relative. Paula Simons, a cultural issues writer at the Journal, says the paper’s progressive attitude was one of the reasons she decided to move back to Edmonton, where she’s from, after working as a producer on CBC Radio’s The Arts Tonight in Toronto. Simons has just returned to work after being on maternity leave for 13 months. The Journal, like the Star and the Globe, allows employees up to a year off for maternity leave, although it doesn’t supplement EI benefits. The Citizen and the Herald, on the other hand, offer the minimum leave, but do “top up” EI earnings to 95 per cent. Simons now works three days a week, covering essentially the same beat she had before her leave. She says she’s thankful to have an employer that sees the wisdom in allowing her to work fewer days. “For those three days they get my absolute focused attention,” she says. “I’m not crying at my desk.”

Jenny Lee, a business reporter and columnist at The Vancouver Sun, says trying to find a balance between family and work is an issue that “seems to really tear at your guts and your heart in the early years.” When she wanted to reduce her workweek after her first child was born nine years ago, it wasn’t common in her newsroom. She and several other women drew up a formal proposal and management agreed to try flexible work arrangements. Lee now works three days a week, from 7 a.m. to 2:30 p.m., so she can pick up her two children from school. She says her kids have had a big impact on her career advancement. “It’s velocity. I’m not going at 120 miles per hour-I’m down to idle,” she says. “But that’s my choice.”

Thomson Newspapers, the third-largest newspaper owner in Canada with nine daily and nine weekly newspapers, also has no national policy on human resource issues. Thomson’s flagship paper, The Globe and Mail, has a casual approach to flexible work arrangements, but Sylvia Stead, the Globe‘s deputy managing editor, says she can’t think of any staff who have been turned down when they’ve asked to reduce their working hours. Stead has two children, and she worked part-time for five years while they were young. She says she made it clear when she went on to more senior jobs that her kids came first. “I’m not going to work what has been the tradition in this business, the 12-hour day,” she says. “Period. I’m not going to do it.”

The attitude of an employer makes a big difference in how people perceive conflict between their work and family roles. The Globe‘s education reporter, Virginia Galt, has four kids. She remembers one morning she played hooky from work because her son Alex was in Toronto’s city cross-country finals. She went to watch the race and as she cheered, she turned to see Colin MacKenzie, the Globe‘s managing editor, standing behind her. His daughters were in the race and he was playing hooky too.

Before she was married, Galt wanted to be a foreign correspondent. But the globe-trotting life of a correspondent-for many the pinnacle of a newspaper career-is, for the most part, still out of reach for those with children. Kathleen Kenna, Washington bureau chief for the Star, is on the road about two weeks out of four. It requires “an incredible amount of energy and a willingness to leap on and off planes,” she says. Kenna decided not to have children early in life, in part because of her desire to be a foreign correspondent. To be a great mother, she says, “I would have to make some other career choice.”

Jan Wong’s kids, Ben, 7, and Sam, 4, were both born while she was The Globe and Mail‘s foreign correspondent in Beijing. Wong says although people here may wonder how she did it, she herself actually wonders how people here do it. In Beijing, Wong had a cook, a housekeeper, a nanny and a driver, and for the latter part of their stay her husband quit his job and was also home. When they returned to Canada, Wong says they were doing laundry at two in the morning before they found a nanny.

As women take on more responsibility in the world of work, men are taking on more responsibility in the home-but it’s still rare for men to make a significant change in their work lives to accommodate child rearing. Last year, Martin Mittelstaedt, who was the Globe‘s Queen’s Park bureau chief, took an eight-month leave of absence after his wife, Margaret Philp, a social policy reporter at the Globe, returned to work following her second maternity leave. The Globe allows fathers six months of unpaid leave, plus vacation time. Philp says it was amazing how much more she could accomplish at work with Mittelstaedt at home with the kids. If a story broke late, she could cover it without worrying about the “day-care dash.”

It’s middle of January, and now that her husband is back at work, things have changed. Today, Philp didn’t file a story, so she’s picking up the kids. If she had a deadline, he would pick them up. So far they’ve been lucky; there hasn’t been a day yet since Mittelstaedt returned in the new year that they’ve both had to stay late to cover a breaking story. Philp leaves the Globe at 10 minutes after five, uncommonly early for her newsroom, walking quickly and checking her watch every so often. Early in her career, Philp was nominated for a National Newspaper Award. She loves her job and knows she’s good at it, but she also realizes she’s not reaching her full potential there right now because she has kids. “It’s frustrating. If you could just stay late you know you could break the back of a story you’re working on,” Philp says. “But never is there any question of what comes first.”

It’s a short streetcar ride to Queen’s Quay and she’s just in time to catch the 5:30 ferry boat to Ward’s Island, where she and Mittelstaedt live. The ferry crossing takes about 10 minutes. Toronto’s skyline-skyscrapers rising into fog as dusk settles downward-recedes into the distance, as the small, friendly lights on the island come closer. Two little bundled figures with rosy cheeks are waiting for Philp on the other side: Philp’s babysitters have brought Christian, almost 4, and Hannah, almost 2, to the ferry dock to meet her. Philp trundles Christian and Hannah on a red, plastic sled to the small, toy-scattered house they’re renting while their house is being renovated not far away. Hannah is tired, wet and hungry. Philp nurses her while Christian watches Kratt’s Creatures on TVO, then starts dinner. She stops the pasta from boiling over as Hannah wheels a toy stroller around the tiny kitchen and Christian plays with a shiny red fire truck that has a loud siren. Philp settles Hannah in her high chair with a bowl of noodles, most of which end up on the floor.

Philp says she’s often tired and thinks about working part-time, although she did try a four-day week after Christian was born and didn’t feel as productive as she wanted to be. Finding the right balance is different for everybody; there are no magic solutions to maintaining both a satisfying career and a fulfilling family life. “It’s hard,” Philp acknowledges. “It entails sacrifice to your career and it still affects women more than men. But I wouldn’t trade places with anyone.”

It’s an often precarious, sometimes messy, choreography of racing against the clock to finish a story or frantic phone calls when child-care arrangements come tumbling apart, leaving parents scrambling. But the newspaper industry is evolving as it becomes more attuned to the needs of families. There are choices now that weren’t as readily available 10 years ago, choices that acknowledge the different roles people play. It seems that newspapers have finally realized what parents have always known: that kids are as important as the next big story.

For Marc Tom Yew, a fourth-year industrial engineering student at Ryerson, it was a typical day during December finals. As usual, he stopped into a convenience store along his route to school and picked up a newspaper. When he slapped the money and paper on the counter, the clerk greeted him with a sudden laugh and nodded to the cover: Tom Yew’s facr stared back at him from the front page of The Toronto Star. In early October, Tom Yew had been interviewed by Star staffer Tanya Talaga as part of “1,000 Voices-Lives on Hold,” a weeklong series focusing on youth unemployment in Canada. It offered an intimate look into the lives of young adults between the ages of 18 and 30 and presented first-hand accounts of their fears and hardships, and the realities they face in the struggle to secure employment. The reporters spoke to a variety of young adults, university and college presidents, researchers and government officials. On this chilly December day, not only did the Star‘s nearly two million readers see Marc Tom Yew’s face, but they were also privy to the thoughts and concerns his generation has about the future of employment in Canada.

The series included the standard interviews and surveys, and identified some factors contributing to the unemployment crisis facing 600,000 young Canadians: lack of education and skills, rising education costs and unprecedented student debt. A number of students, employers and education experts voiced their concerns about the quality of education in the nation’s post-secondary institutions. But unlike traditional news stories, “Lives on Hold” didn’t stop there. It also included suggestions on how to overcome the problems and encouraged readers to air their views in a discussion at the Star‘s Website. Almost two months after the series was published, the Star continued to track the issue by running follow-up stories. Dave Ellis, the Star‘s investigative projects editor, is optimistic that long-term changes will result from the series: “There was a First Ministers’ Conference the week after it was published and this [series] had an impact on the discussion at that. It’s going to have an impact on the federal budget in a couple of weeks.” In the meantime, Ellis says theStar is still fielding calls from companies who “are phoning and offering jobs to the kids.”

This type of journalism has been called everything from “conversational” to “civic,” “advocacy” to “crusading.” But it’s most commonly known as public journalism, a term that first surfaced in the U.S. five years ago. Public journalism not only aims to inform readers, but encourages them to become more proactive citizens. It requires that journalists seek greater input from their community, be more attentive to the context of the problems and what they perceive as possible solutions. Readers are no longer seen as news consumers who need to have their interests and desires dictated to them; instead, they are viewed as intimately involved in the functioning of society.

To some of its opponents, public journalism lacks objectivity, relies too heavily on opinion polls and simply takes too long to produce. Others, like John Douglas, managing editor of the Winnipeg Free Press, see the approach as nothing more than “a cliché that’s caught on in the United States.” Or as Bill Turpin of The Daily News in Halifax puts it “an expensive trend.” Perhaps, but it’s not a trend that’s widespread-at least not yet. In Canada, although the majority, if not all, of newspapers tackle social policy and community issues, few papers have embraced public journalism. And Turpin may have identified why: the price of going public is simply too steep for many dailies.

Jay Rosen has been described as everything from the “father of public journalism” to its “guru.” A journalism professor at New York University, he is the director of the NYU-based Project on Public Life and the Press, whose purpose is to assist journalists experimenting with public journalism. He traces the origins of this new form to the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign, which he describes as “the worst campaign in modern memory.” News coverage was dominated by jingoistic debate over the use of the Pledge of Allegiance in schools and vicious attack ads (remember Willie Horton?). Citizens, he says, were disgusted, and so were journalists. In a paper called “Civic Journalism: A New Approach to Citizenship,” Rosen and his two coauthors describe how “in city rooms and newsrooms, journalism think-tanks and foundations, working journalists and scholars began looking for a better way to cover politics.”

The first attempt to find a better way began at The Wichita Eagle in Kansas. In the lead-up to the 1990 elections, the paper first polled Kansans to establish what issues were on voters’ minds. Having identified 10 topics of wide concern, from education to the environment, the Eagle prepared a six-part “issue watch” about candidates titled “Where They Stand.” In conjunction with a local TV station, the paper also promoted voter registration and turnout. The project, Eagle editor Buzz Merritt later said, “caused people to move outside of themselves a little more, to view things as problems the community can approach rather than something politicians and institutions are going to fix.” Ultimately, he said, this experiment made him and his colleagues in Wichita realize “that maybe there’s a better way of newspapering, a different tone and attitude that can be applied to everyday journalism.”

Two years later, the Eagle presented “Solving It Ourselves: The People Project” in an attempt to engage residents in the search for solutions to problems like crime and gang violence, family stress and the flawed school system. The series ran for nine weeks and included a comprehensive listing of area organizations and agencies that were working toward change; the paper also promoted “idea exchanges” where residents could meet other concerned citizens and community groups to share possible approaches. The longest running public journalism project was developed by the Wisconsin State Journal. The paper spent three and a half years examining the way politics and public policy affect the lives of everyday people. By the time the series ended in the spring of 1995, more than 2,000 people had participated in town hall meetings, debates and civic exercises, like the one in which voters created state budgets. Meanwhile, in Florida, six newspapers with a combined circulation of 1.4 million (among them The Miami Herald and St. Petersburg Times) and 12 National Public Radio affiliates united to produce “Voices of Florida,” which identified statewide citizen concerns and feelings of dissatisfaction with the political system.

Most of these early public journalism experiments revolved around elections; but as the approach became more common, pieces sometimes focused on other social issues. For instance, in 1993, the Akron Beacon Journal of Ohio ran five series, including the three-part “Question of Color.” “It was after the L.A. riots in ’92,” explains projects editor Bob Paynter. “We, like a lot of other people, were asking what we could do to explain whether the question was as volatile as it appeared to be in L.A.” The paper organized focus groups of blacks and whites to discuss issues like crime and economic development, and invited local residents and organizations to develop projects addressing race relations by providing facilitators to help with project planning. At the end of the year, the paper printed coupons containing a New Year’s pledge to improve race relations and invited readers to send it in; by the summer of 1994, more than 22,000 area residents had responded. As a result, the “Coming Together” project was created to coordinate volunteer efforts with input from neighbourhood groups, companies, churches and area organizations. It still exists today as a nonprofit corporation. The series won the Beacon Journal the Pulitzer Prize for public service in 1994. Interestingly, Paynter explains that “Question of Color” was never intended as a public journalism project: “It just sort of evolved and became used as an example of it after the fact.” Paynter admits he has “mixed feelings” about public journalism: “I think that sometimes it really works. It did in this case and can in others, but I don’t think it’s something that can be applied all the time.”

Jay Rosen expresses the goals of this type of reporting in lofty terms: “A public that is engaged as well as informed, a polity that can deliberate as well as debate, communities that not only know about but can also act upon their problems, readers who are citizens as well as consumers of the news.” As noble as these aims seem, public journalism has lots of detractors, many of whom subscribe to conventional journalism’s dictates of “objectivity” and “balance,” which cast the reporter as an observer, fact finder and truth teller. Naysayers, like late journalist and media critic Edwin Diamond, have portrayed public journalism as nothing more than using opinion polls to pinpoint the stories that readers want covered, then spoon-feeding them the desired information. As Diamond argued in an April 1997 open debate with Rosen, “Sometimes we have to tell people what they don’t want to hear.” Skeptics exist north of the 49th parallel, among them The Toronto Star‘s Rosie DiManno. Last fall, in a column titled “My 10 Rules for Running a Newspaper,” she declared that no newspaper assignment should take longer than two weeks to complete. “News is what happens today and appears in the paper tomorrow,” she wrote. “Dissertations are for scholars.”

One of Canada’s earliest high-profile public journalism projects had its genesis not in the American political scene but in another type of U.S. media circus. In the months following the O.J. Simpson trial, The Toronto Star featured a highly touted eight-part series on spousal abuse, “Hitting Home.” Reporter Rita Daly, who had the original idea, says she “was curious to know how we handled spousal abuse in the criminal courts…and quickly discovered that there was actually no way of tracking how these cases were dealt with here.” In mid-June 1995, Daly attended a meeting with Dave Ellis, then city editor, and assistant city editors Greg Smith and Chris Zelkovich, where the story was given a tentative start date of June 25. Ellis recalls, “The chief Crown attorney in Toronto said, “Well, if you start on Canada Day, you should have a wrap by October.'” In fact, the series didn’t appear until the following March. “I don’t think we envisioned the magnitude of what we were beginning,” says Daly. “[But] I think that there was a recognition by the people involved early in the process that this was a project that would likely result in some pretty startling outcomes.”

Daly, along with reporters Jane Armstrong and Caroline Mallan, followed the lives and stories of 133 abused men and women in Metro Toronto. They collected more than 12,000 pieces of information, which were put into a database by assistant city editor Kevin Donovan. They then used the database to further examine such aspects of spousal abuse as how many abusers are allowed to plead to lesser charges without suffering jail time or a criminal record. The demand for the series was so high that the Star issued its first-ever reprint, and, almost two years after the series ran, Daly continues to field a couple of calls a week relating to the project. But aside from being a good read, the series prompted action. Daly rhymes off the results: “North York has set up a special domestic violence court. Toronto City Hall has set up a special domestic violence court. And in both these cases they have Crown attorneys specially assigned to those courts to deal specifically with these cases.” In her opinion, the overwhelming response the series received is not only an indication of public interest in the issue of domestic abuse, but in the style of journalism that brought it into their homes. “You know,” she says, “just the impact alone illustrates the need for it and the desire for that kind of journalism.”

Since then, the Star has run more series to promote awareness of and solutions for social problems. In addition to last December’s “1,000 Voices,” “Cry for the Children” looked at child abuse in April 1997, and, this January, “Madness” addressed the issue of mental illness. In each case the stories have prompted action. Some at the Star, including Dave Ellis, believe the inquests that followed “Cry for the Children” were a direct result of the series. Shortly after the seven-part “Madness” series ran, Ontario’s ministry of health announced a probe into mental health-care reform.

The Star doesn’t have an exclusive on public journalism in Canada. In 1995, The Kingston Whig-Standarddecided to take a close look at a hot local topic: the amalgamation of Kingston and three neighbouring townships. The Whig commissioned an Angus Reid poll to explore residents’ opinions on the subject, because, according to managing editor Lynn Haddrall, “We felt it was certainly a good investment in the community and it was an issue we really wanted to be a leader on.”

A week after the poll results were published, the paper ran a special eight-page amalgamation report in its Saturday Companion section. It outlined the municipality’s options, provided historical background and examined attitudes about local government. The final element was a town hall meeting that drew a crowd of about 300-not bad, says Haddrall, “because for most public meetings you’d be lucky if you get a quorum.” The meeting heard from local and provincial experts on municipal politics, as well as a mayor whose municipality had already weathered amalgamation. In the end, the amalgamation plans were approved by voters, and while Haddrall thinks it is a stretch to suggest that the paper played a significant role in the merger, she says the Whig‘s stories dealt with the issue “in a really in-depth way before a lot of people had wrapped their minds around it.”

In other parts of the country, newspapers are also addressing issues from a local perspective. Although unfamiliar with the term “public journalism,” Cam Hutchinson, managing editor of Saskatoon’s StarPhoenix,acknowledges his paper has used this approach: “I guess I’d never heard the term public journalism, but we are doing major pieces.” In 1996, The StarPhoenix explored street life and focused on child prostitution in the inner city. For almost a week, Hutchinson says, the paper’s front page addressed elements of the sex trade, like who’s involved, why they’re involved and possible solutions. The reaction wasn’t entirely positive. “A lot of people didn’t want to know prostitution went on right under their noses. Child prostitution-that’s something that happens in Toronto or New York or places like that, not in good old Saskatoon.”

While the issues addressed may vary from paper to paper, one thing remains consistentóthis is expensive journalism. Haddrall estimates that Whig staff worked on the amalgamation series for several weeks; then there was the cost of the Angus Reid poll and town hall meeting. Last spring’s sexual abuse series, which probed abuse in schools, was also pricey: “You’re talking about taking a reporter and keeping him out of the regular mix for several weeks, and at a small paper that is a huge investment.” The Star‘s Dave Ellis hesitates to do the math. “You really don’t want to think about the cost because it’s a lot. Just think of the reporters and already you’re up to $200,000,” he says. “If you have a small newspaper you cannot detach people for that amount of time.” As Haddrall says, “It is difficult journalism to do because of the substantial investment of resources and that investment is in dollars and people.”

That’s why public journalism is out of the grasp of papers like the Daily News in Halifax. The managing editor, Bill Turpin, believes the approach is successful in selling newspapers, but the fact remains, he says, “We’re a small paper and don’t have the resources to make that kind of investment.” John Douglas, city editor at theWinnipeg Free Press, doesn’t entirely agree. ” You don’t have to be a Toronto Star,” he says. “You look at some of the newspapers in this country that have done it best: the Kitchener-Waterloo Record,The Kingston Whig-Standardóthey aren’t big papers, but they still practise public journalism.” However, he does acknowledge that papers like his “just don’t have the staffing to cover every community issue in this way.” Cam Hutchinson at The StarPhoenix also says cost is not an impediment at his paper. “Basically, any reporter who comes up with a good idea that involves spending some money or some time, either one, we’re willing to look at it.”

On one level, the reason for the success of this type of journalism is simple: people can relate to it. At the same time, it gives readers an avenue to pursue change and make a difference. But public journalism also offers readers insight into issues that are grossly underreported or simply misrepresented in the media.

Daly says that stories like the domestic abuse one are particularly effective because “you’re dealing with serious social issues that have not been given the kind of focus they should have.” Donovan Vincent, who worked on the “Madness” series, points out that in the past the paper failed to offer the full picture and treated mental illness “in a very patchwork way. If there was a shooting, we talked about the policing area, or if there was a homeless guy, we talked about the homeless issue without giving it a context.”

But can newspapers, as commercial organizations, present a fair and accurate picture when public issues are involved? Vincent maintains they can. That a newspaper is a business “doesn’t necessarily mean that you can’t take on social issues, that you cannot look at a problem and say, “Hey, let’s try to fix this thing and be an advocate for change,'” he says. Bryan Cantley, manager of editorial services at the Canadian Newspaper Association, adds, “I’d have to say if it gathers momentum and gets the population interested in those issues that affect their lives, I think it’s valuable. It shows that a newspaper is more than just a business entity, that it’s got a soul and cares for the community.” Some, however, acknowledge the possibility of unintentional exploitation. Hutchinson says you feel proud when you do a good job covering an issue, “but you also don’t want to feel so good that you look as if you’ve exploited someone.”

Still, the fact remains that the multipart series that tend to characterize public journalism generally increase newspaper sales. The Winnipeg Free Press’ Douglas says the paper has seen an increase in circulation since it’s begun providing more than “core” news coverage. Currently, for instance, it is working on an examination of the health-care situation that will include a town hall meeting, due to be televised on the local CBC station in mid-April. It will also involve three days of coverage featuring people’s questions and concerns, plus suggestions offered by different experts. “When we do a special project, we let people know it’s coming and we generally do sell more papers,” says Lynn Haddrall. However, the projects tend not to be driven by an interest in increasing sales. When the Whig investigated 20-year-old allegations of sexual abuse by a local high school teacher last spring, for example, Haddrall says the newspaper published its findings, then ran a special series called “Trust Betrayed,” which revealed that the structural cracks that allowed the abuse to occur in the past still exist. Ultimately, she says, “the sexual abuse series may have sold more single copies, but in the end we lost a few subscriptions.” The Star‘s domestic abuse series had no such downside. The paper netted a number of prestigious awards, among them the 1996 Special Project Award from the Canadian Newspaper Association and the Michener award for meritorious public service. It was also nominated for the Associated Press Public Service Award.

Not that following the public journalism route is a guarantee that you’re going to win an award. As Theresa Boyle, Vincent’s colleague on the mental illness series, notes: “The Star has invested a lot of time and energy in other projects that have flopped. Sure, it’s nice to get recognition for your work, but I don’t think that’s what motivates people to do it.”

Jay Rosen understands the motivation. Over the last four years, he has given talks to about 3,000 journalists and the one question he always asks is, “Why did you go into journalism?” The most common response, he says, “is “I wanted to make a difference’ or “I wanted to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.’ It’s interesting, almost nobody ever says, “You know, I went into journalism because I have a passion for objectivity’ or “I wanted to be a journalist because I’m a detached person and detachment is my thing, so I figured this would be a great job for me.'” For Boyle, there’s an altruistic reason for pursuing public journalism: “It’s journalism that makes a difference. It’s substantive and it makes a difference in people’s lives.”

That’s exactly what Marc Tom Yew is hoping his appearance in “1,000 Voices” will do. The front-page photo was a way for him “to advertise my position, especially from a student perspective,” he says. “Hopefully, some lucky employer is going to remember me.”

“There’s no villain, no ‘mean guy’…it’s just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.”
-Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

Peter Raymont speaks wearily into the telephone. It’s the irritable voice of a very busy man: a 27-year veteran filmmaker and producer, and founding member of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus. He has some problems with the CBC, and his complaint is echoed by many in the independent filmmaking community. They say there is an unreasonably high degree of homogeneity at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation-particularly in its documentary unit. They protest an implicit policy that favours the same producers and directors receiving assignment after assignment, while others struggle to find an audience. “We have the richest documentary film culture in the world,” Raymont insists. “There’s extraordinary diversity, but we’re not seeing that diversity in the shows.”

Many attribute the “lack of diversity” in documentary-based programs like Life & Times and Witness to a pervasive “CBC culture.” This “culture,” they say-a mix of headline-news focus and heightened economic concern that’s pushed the documentary unit away from riskier, unestablished filmmakers-is sustained, even encouraged, by documentary head Mark Starowicz and the senior producers in his unit.

As “someone who filmmakers come to to give them a hand in getting their films financed,” Raymont hears many complaints of roadblocks from filmmakers trying to work with the CBC. He takes such complaints seriously. “I think the role of a public broadcaster is to be a vanguard-not to follow a trend but to set trends…. The CBC has kind of a lazy attitude. A lot of independent filmmakers feel frustrated.”

So does Howard Bernstein.

In the gruff, timeworn tone of a barroom regular trading life stories with fellow patrons, Bernstein will gladly tell you of his seven years with Canada’s largest broadcaster, first as a senior editor at The Journal, then as an executive producer of news and current affairs at CBC Toronto. He’ll describe the “old days” with glowing idealism, when time and money were plentiful and a documentary like the 1988 film Runaways: 24 Hours on the Street(for which he was executive producer) could be made on a whim and a prayer: “We didn’t get budget approval until a month after the piece was finished!” But for the past 10 years, he’s been an instructor of broadcast journalism in Toronto and, like a host of independent filmmakers and producers, is outspoken about his frustrations with his former employer.

“The CBC works like a club,” he says. “You have to be a member of the club. You have to have friends. Wonderful things go undone or get financed in other ways; terrible things get produced because you have a friend.” He shapes his speech with his hands and emphasizes with tempo. His steady hazel eyes belie a deep resentment. “I tell all my students when they’re going to look for jobs: ‘Broadcasting is not a business in Canada, it’s a club. And like any other club, you have to get along with the other members. That’s far more important than the work you do.'” It’s a mentality, he claims, that most of the major Canadian networks share. “[But] the CBC is the worst offender.”

Look at a list of Witness’ lineup for the past three years and it seems Bernstein has a point. Of 49 original documentaries aired on the prestigious national series in the 1995-96 to 1997-98 seasons, about half were produced or directed by current or former CBC employees, including seven by former producers Brian McKenna and Gordon Henderson (four by McKenna, three by Henderson), and seven by former CBC reporters Jerry Thompson and Josh Freed (four and three, respectively). “How come the same people keep showing up every year?” Bernstein asks. “Are their ideas that much better than everybody else’s? I don’t believe that.

“You see, what they’ve done here is kind of what bothers most people in the industry. If you’re Gordon Henderson or Jerry Thompson, you get to produce one [film] a year-it doesn’t matter what the subject matter is; it doesn’t matter if it’s a good idea, bad idea or indifferent.” The result, he suggests, is programming that fails to meet the CBC’s mission statement (“CBC will lead the way in providing…meaningful programming that reflects the diversity of Canada,” using “people with diverse talents and perspectives”). It also leaves a whole lot of filmmakers with no place to go.

“You have to have what they would call on Broadway an ‘angel,'” Bernstein says, shaking his head, “someone who’s in a position of power, who’s willing to fight for [your story] and make sure that something’s going to happen.” He offers Yosif Feyginberg as an example. Feyginberg came to Canada from the Ukraine 20 years ago; the two met through a mutual acquaintance. “[He] was a theatre director in Russia, has his own tape equipment, wants to do some documentaries and has some ideas that I know if they’d come from Gord Henderson would be produced tomorrow. But because they’ve never heard of this guy, he can’t even get into their doors. They won’t even see him.”

“It’s not that I’m incapable,” Yosif Feyginberg insists. “The film industry here is extremely competitive with budgets, et-cetera. It’s difficult for people not in the inner circle.” His soft voice just barely carries over the din of the lunchtime crowd in the busy food court of a downtown shopping plaza.

He describes his humble beginnings here in Canada, making short technical films and corporate videos 10 years ago with nothing more than a camera and some basic editing equipment. Soon he was producing a short documentary on solar power for the Ontario ministry of energy, coproducing a film for History Television and consulting on a film for Bravo! In 1995, he even chaired a jury panel for Hot Docs, the annual Canadian film festival that showcases international documentaries. Finally, Feyginberg decided to try producing his own independent documentary feature.

With an eight-minute demo tape (“I was blown away by it,” Bernstein recalls), Feyginberg made pitches to various broadcasters, proposing films on the immigrant experience, a subject very near to him. But for all his promise and enthusiasm, he was completely unable to interest a broadcaster in his ideas. “The reasons for the rejection were not specified. I guess they just were not interested in this type of project.” That is, until he met Bernstein and Lon Appleby, Bernstein’s partner in their company, Infinite Monkeys Productions. “They’re better placed to act on my behalf,” the 51-year-old says earnestly. Now, one story, about the experiences of foreign professional actors in Canada, is scheduled for completion in June with possible broadcast on CBC’sRough Cuts in October. Feyginberg knows exactly which angels to thank. “I’m very lucky to have met Lon and Howard. The film industry is a very tight group,” he admits. “Without someone like Howard on my behalf, it would be close to impossible for me [to make a film].”

The prospects for indie filmmakers at the Corporation are grim, but not hopeless.Rough Cuts, for example, is identified by many as a bright spot for Canadian independent documentaries not only on the CBC, but on Canadian television in general. Its goal is to “speak with voices previously unheard or with visions that have not been screened on more traditional news programs,” and the show has built a strong reputation in its four yearsamong viewers and filmmakers alike. But even Jerry McIntosh, the show’s senior producer, concedes that ultimately, “because we’re a news network, we see what we do as journalism. It comes under all of the journalistic policy and practice of the CBC.” It also comes with a particular viewership that has “certain expectations when they turn on the television set about what they’re going to watch…[so] it has to be journalistic in tone and feel.”

Then there are the budget restrictions. McIntosh says he receives around 400 proposals a year from independent filmmakers. “We’re commissioning a dozen, which tells you what your odds are. In a way, I see my job as saying no, not saying yes.”

Not that Rough Cuts has ever had limitless commissioning freedom. It airs on Newsworld, which has only one-tenth the budget of the main English network. Working with inexperienced filmmakers, therefore, can be a liability. “When you work with first-time filmmakers, you’ve got to nurture not only their filmmaking ability, but you also have to guide them through what it is that a journalistic organization and a news network does,” says McIntosh. A filmmaker like Yosif Feyginberg, he says, doesn’t necessarily understand the complexity of producing a film for national broadcast. “It’s not just take a camera, go out there and do it. You’ve got to organize the financing, you’ve got to organize the resources.” Fortunately, says McIntosh, “Feyginberg’s working with some experienced people who’ve done this before…so he’s got the support that he needs.”

But few aspiring filmmakers have that kind of support. For them, the task of finding a broadcaster is considerably more difficult. Ever since the federal government’s jaws tore a chunk from the CBC’s budgetary belly, its conservative/headline-news-driven mandate has narrowed and discontent in the independent filmmaking community has increased. Members of the indie community feel the CBC (and Canadian broadcasting in general) is failing them. The other large broadcasters, CTV and Global, spend little to nothing on original documentaries, while smaller cable specialty channels simply don’t have the CBC’s resources. When the inexperienced, independent or unconventional are denied the opportunity to broadcast their work nationally, the state of filmmaking itself suffers.

Neal Livingston, an independent filmmaker from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, says the suffering is especially pervasive on the east coast. “In my case,” he says, “there was never a proposal that interested [the CBC] and there was never a finished film that interested them. When I’d sit around with my colleagues at the film caucus and talk about these issues, everybody had the same story!” Livingston has been making documentaries for more than 20 years. He says he’s sold more films to broadcasters in the U.K. than to the CBC, describing a “terminal difficulty” for filmmakers from eastern Canada who try to deal with the Corporation. “I mean, literally, you’re not phoned back when you call these people, they don’t write you back and most of us don’t really bother trying to deal with them anymore.” He calls them “gatekeepers” at a “fortress of programming…keeping this incredible flood of trained, creative talent away from the public.”

These sentiments are shared by Don Duchene, an indie filmmaker for 15 years. Duchene, who lives in Chester, Nova Scotia, describes his experience with Life & Times as “useless,” and tells the same story of discouragement and lack of communication as Livingston. “I think very little effort was made there to make this region feel included.” Duchene has made various pitches to the CBC’s doc unit, none of which, he believes, was even looked at. “When you send them letters, make phone calls and get nothing back, you really do feel on the outside.”

Many trace the decline of opportunity at the CBC to November 22, 1995-the day the Corporation announced a $227-million cut to its budget. At the time, the group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting predicted: “Because they need to cover such a broad swath of issues, individual reporters will be unable to develop the knowledge and expertise they need to do their job.” Today, with that forecast realized, FCB calls the Corporation “extremely fragile” and its programming efforts “relatively weak.” Yet external factors are only partly to blame for this fragility. The problems, many argue, have more to do with ideological myopia at the documentary unit, resulting from the deeply entrenched tradition of its predecessor, The Journal.

“The CBC is not very nurturing of independent documentaries,” says Barri Cohen, a filmmaker and editor-in-chief of POV, a magazine devoted to the interests of the indie filmmaking community. Through her magazine, and as a member of the Canadian Independent Film Caucus, Cohen has developed a strong sense of what is wrong with documentary filmmaking in Canada. And Witness, she says, is a microcosm of this.

“There’s no individual demon. There’s a very particular kind of corporate culture, a professional culture, at the documentary unit there. And in any culture you have a set of beliefs or a set of ideological principles about how you run your department, how you work, how you’re doing what you’re doing.” She feels the amount of material the Corporation produces leaves it little room for examining its “ideological principles.”

“The people there come out of a very journalistic background, they all came out of The Journal [in fact, half the doc unit were producers at The Journal, including head of documentaries, Mark Starowicz]and they have these notions of journalistic balance.” She argues that too deep a commitment to journalistic principles can hinder a documentary filmmaker. The documentary genre grew out of cinema, she explains, and although it has been reshaped by television in the last 30 years, it still should more closely resemble a piece of art (“more open, more meditative, more broadly concerned”) than a piece of journalism. For Cohen, this means following her own “special relationship to the subject” rather than a limited network mandate, where artistry and honesty can so easily be compromised.

“With the best films, it’s a very deep personal passion,” she adds. “One doesn’t talk about passion in journalism.” Or rather, one isn’t allowed, in strictly journalistic reportage, to make the passion for a subject explicit. Cohen may have an old-fashioned view of the craft, but it reveals some larger truths: the disadvantages of a narrow filmmaking approach. “It’s not really trying to get into capturing the difficult or really human moments.”

She contrasts the CBC with TVOntario and its “auteur-driven docs. Some of the best commissioning policies in North America are those driven by commissioning editors who are themselves filmmakers. The people who run the documentary unit at the CBC are not built that way.”

Mark Starowicz’s office seems cluttered despite its spaciousness. Perhaps it’s the boxes of videos, some still in their plastic wrapping, scattered on the windowsill, the sofa, the table. Or it could be the many framed photos and posters (of his family, of his past productions) collected on his end table or lining his walls. But for someone with so chaotic a working environment, the executive producer of documentaries for CBC television seems the picture of composure. One coworker describes him as “very elegant” and it’s easy to see why. He sports a well-groomed moustache-greying demurely-and speaks with grace and nonchalance, articulately addressing the criticisms that have already become familiar to him.

“This is an intensely commercialized public network, which is driven to the point of distortion by the exigency of commercial revenue. That is, itself, inimical to documentary form.” Distortion is inevitable, he suggests, when “reality” is selected for its marketability and shoved into 47 minutes (plus commercials), but it’s the nature of the “Darwinian” world of prime time, where only that which draws ratings survives. So the programming born of the current affairs department is more “current,” more “hard-edged”-drawing viewers with immediacy rather than rumination-an approach that, when it is challenged, is defended with: “If it didn’t come out of the current affairs department, it wouldn’t have come out at all.”

And then there are the unit’s financial restraints, which have decreased its contribution to the production of a documentary by as much as 50 per cent. Today, Starowicz says, one must essentially set up a company to produce a single documentary. “I’ll tell you what’s striking. The sign says Documentary Unit [but] there’s nobody out there who makes documentaries!” Instead, there are people conversant in the language of business plans, who understand professional accounting, production management and external financing.

“It’s sad [that] whether or not a documentary appears on Witness is sometimes a decision made in New York or in London.” In some cases, Starowicz says, a film simply can’t be produced without investment from a large American network like HBO or A&E. Even Telefilm, the federal cultural agency that helps promote and develop films for the Canadian private sector, is an “investment banker,” he says, that expects returns on its ventures. For a broadcaster, this means favouring those films, filmmakers or subjects that stand a chance of earning a profit. It’s a severe drawback, he concedes, but an unavoidable consequence of competition in a global television marketplace.

“Witness is a prime-time program that fights in an environment of 55 channels. It is not there to get 150,000 viewers and thereby disappear off the map and go back to 11 o’clock where it can retain the purity that is accompanied by marginality. What I’m good at,” he says, “is the most unpleasant part of the job: the politics of the CBC.”

“I think the documentary unit’s biggest strength and weakness are the same thing, and that’s Mark,” says a senior CBC producer. “Without him, it wouldn’t exist, but he is a very forceful presence. He’s a very difficult person to work with. He’s arrogant and he has trouble dealing with people.” Starowicz, he suggests, is also acutely aware of the responsibilities of working for the most powerful broadcaster in Canada. “He does tend to take himself too seriously.”

Programming driven by a heightened sense of duty to its country is very much a part of the CBC ethos. At the doc unit, with its added budgetary pressure, this means scrupulously avoiding any departure from the “safe course that producers know will be along the lines of things that have been successful in the past.” This producer believes shows like Witnesscould benefit from having “a little more creative energy. I personally find their documentaries rather predictable in approach.” Still, he confesses, “the problem with films on Witness is a lot larger than the people at the documentary unit.”

“[If] you read the mandate of the CBC and put it into ordinary language,” says the former head of Newsworld, Vince Carlin, “it says: Please be all things to all people. Be a noncommercial, commercial network that operates in the public interest but has to draw ratings. It’s a bizarre notion. The conflict is constant.” Carlin is now the chair of the journalism school at Ryerson, though his office is decorated with signs of his 23 years with the CBC. He says a broadcaster like the CBC, with its public responsibilities, should be a “catalyst. It should be in a position to challenge filmmakers and be challenged by them. The CBC had aspects of that years ago. The Journal served as a great training ground for people to produce considered material over a period of time.” He says it was like “a sandbox to play in. A lot of people gained documentary experience [there].”

It’s ironic that those same people, now heading an entire documentary unit, are criticized for not providing enough opportunity to inexperienced filmmakers. Still, “the realities of producing a prime-time, ratings-driven stream are that you are going to go to people you know will produce material that will survive in the slot. It is not a playground. It is not a place to learn the craft,” says Carlin. He calls it the “economics of broadcasting ….It’s not the stream some people want it to be, but wishing is not going to make it change. When you ask a program like Witness to meet certain audience and revenue targets, you are perforce telling it to take fewer risks. You are in fact ordering the network to make sure the end product will fit into that environment.”

It is an environment filled with tension and reservation-some would say very much like the CBC itself.

“They’re not trained to work with outsiders all that much,” Barri Cohen admits, “so there’s a lot of animosity and misunderstanding and a lack of communication.” In the end, it is this that plagues the CBC’s documentary unit and angers the filmmakers who’d like to contribute to it. “They need a bridge,” Cohen adds. “It’s their job to build it and they’re not.”

It isn’t that the unit is wholly bereft of truly independent, quality programming. In fact, in late March the CBC devoted an entire week to feature-length documentaries in a series called “Five Nights.” And though the films aired at midnight-one a night, far away from prime time-it was a step in the right direction (a “colossal breakthrough” for the network, according to Starowicz). But overall, the “gatekeepers” at the CBC’s documentary unit seem far better at losing friends than making them. The work of a handful of established, mainstream filmmakers does not qualify as “diverse” programming. The CBC’s doc unit must step out of the cozy confines of its restrictive mentality. Only then can it begin to embrace the films and filmmakers that truly reflect the complexity of Canada in our times.

“I mean, it’s only natural for them to commission people they know and trust and won’t have big fights with,” Peter Raymont points out. “It’s a lot harder to encourage up-and-comers and the independently minded. You get surprises that way.”

Walking into a story meeting for the magazine Reluctant Hero is like walking into a rowdy pyjama party-minus the nightgowns and slippers. Eight teens crowd around the sofa, flipping through the glossy pages ofSeventeen‘s current issue. An angry discussion is under way about how Seventeen,YM and Teenconsistently sugarcoat the reality of teen life and grossly underestimate the intelligence of their audience. Sarah Wayne, 14, snatches up a copy of YM from the coffee table, feigns an expression of naïveté and starts in: “I, too, can have great hair and get my dream guy?” she asks. “Tell me more, I must know how.” Her Barbie doll impression triggers a loud outburst of giggling and chatter.

This group of independent young teens is not too likely to chant the mantra of “Buy that product, follow that trend, get that boy,” which has become the established theme of the mainstream teen magazine genre.

Until very recently, that category has offered little alternative to the shallow pap produced by the American publications Teen,YM and Seventeen. These three magazines all claim to represent the interests of North American teenage girls, but with articles such as “Buff Your Bod” and “31 Signs the Boy’s Sweatin’ You Bad,” their grasp of these interests seems limited at best-girls are seen as thin trend-followers utterly consumed with boys and dating. Malissa Thompson, a former staff writer for Seventeen, believes this portrayal is outdated. “They have been putting out the same message on the assumption that teenagers today are facing the same things that they did 50 years ago, which is completely bogus.”

A look at several recent issues of YM,Teen and Seventeen shows that each pays little attention to serious teen topics. Most issues usually include only one weighty article out of some 20 stories. And despite their first-person titles (“My Friends Lured Me into a Cult,” for instance, or “Heroin Killed Our Best Friend”), they are always told by professional writers. Put together by people who have long since forgotten their adolescent years, these magazines strain to sound hip and brave but make too many incorrect assumptions about teen life. And the Big Three depend so heavily on advertising that their editorial content seems shaped more by the mandates of their corporate sponsors than by the needs of their audience. Stories on zit remedies won’t help the teenager who has a drug addiction. Nor will articles on the hottest fall hair colour aid a teen who is being sexually abused by a parent. It’s no wonder that, these days, Seventeen,YM and Teen are being dismissed by more of their target demographic than they likely realize.

North American teens are beginning to turn to publications that talk seriously about the issues that affect their lives. In the last few years, several low-budget teen-zines have emerged that break the traditional mold and meet this need. In Canada, Reluctant Hero and Spank! are two such publications. And they’re part of a growing trend. Along with American magazines 360,Blue Jean and Teen Voices, these new titles are written, edited and designed by teenagers and don’t depend on advertising.

Founded in October 1996 by 28-year-old Torontonian Sharlene Azam, Reluctant Hero is titled in tribute to 20th-century American mythologist Joseph Campbell. He believed that we are all the heroes of our own journey and should follow our passions to find fulfillment. Written by and for girls aged 13 to 16, Reluctant Hero‘s mandate is to give its young writers and readers a forum for expressing themselves and discussing their concerns in their own words, without having to cater to advertisers. Although still a fairly primitive newsprint quarterly, Reluctant Hero has drawn rave reviews. It has been featured on CBC Radio and TV, as well as in The Globe and Mail and Maclean’s magazine. Its covers show confident young women in provocative poses that other teen magazines wouldn’t touch. The current issue features a teenage girl pretending to perform fellatio, with the coverline “What Your Sex-Ed Course Should Teach You.” A previous issue’s “covergirl” winks, unabashedly displaying her unshaven armpit.

The strictest rule at Reluctant Hero is that anything goes. Covering topics like smoking and leg-shaving, the girls are given free rein to write about their life experiences and the complex society in which they live. The magazine’s style is up close and personal; reading it is sometimes shocking.

“At the Time of My Latest Arrest” was written by former street kid Christine Andrews. She was introduced to life on the streets when she left home to escape sexual abuse at the age of 12. “The days I spent high turned into nights. I started dealing crack and cocaine to junkies or ‘crackheads’ as we called them on the street, and the money started to roll in, increasing all the time….I was hooked on the freedom of the streets, which, even without the drugs, is addictive.” Numerous arrests for robbery, assault and selling drugs finally convinced Christine that her life was self-destructive. She got off the street, but even as she supports herself with full-time work, she says, “I still feel the urge to work in prostitution and indulge in other criminal activity.” Reluctant Hero never forces its stories to end on a happy note.

It doesn’t pander to conventional views on teen sexuality either. In “Whatever Happened to Sexual Equality?” Penelope Jackson, 17, encourages her readers to do what feels right to them. “If there is a role you don’t feel comfortable in, don’t play it just because it’s easier. You are not a madonna; you are not a whore; you are YOU, and your sexual feelings are as valid and as real and as fun as his are.”

The magazine receives many letters of praise from readers each month. “These stories make me feel like I’m not alone,” wrote one. That’s exactly the kind of response Azam thrives on. Born in Fiji, she moved with her parents and two brothers back and forth between her homeland and Canada before she settled in Montreal in 1983. The frequent moves made it difficult for Azam to make friends in her teen years, and she had a hard time fitting in at school because she had skipped two grades in elementary school. “I was always younger than everybody, and spending so many hours a day in a place where you don’t fit is really uncomfortable,” she remembers. “I was completely isolated, and so I built up a bubble and decided I never wanted to be affected by other people’s bad ideas. I wanted to believe that anything was possible.”

After studying political science at the University of Western Ontario, she transferred to the University of Toronto and graduated with an honours degree in literature. Next, Azam volunteered as a reporter at the local community cable station in Vancouver and became interested in the media. She applied to Ryerson’s journalism program, was rejected twice, and then received a full scholarship from the radio and television arts faculty. Already working at the CBC as an editorial assistant, she tired of RTA after two months and dropped out.

Azam became interested in Third World development issues and volunteered as a gender policy writer for Save the Children Canada. She was asked to write a booklet, A Girl’s Right to Development, for the 1995 U.N. Conference on Women and her hard work earned her a trip to the conference in Beijing. While there, Azam decided it would be more practical to focus her attention on girls in Canada. “I didn’t have any power to affect girls’ lives in the international spectrum because there is so much red tape,” she says. “Girls here may not be worrying about sanitation or child labour, but I think their issues of self-worth are as important, if different.”

Initially, she decided to write a book for adolescents about self-esteem, and it seemed like a good idea to test the concept with teens first. She arranged to talk to groups of girls at alternative high schools in New York and Toronto. The girls told her they preferred magazines, but couldn’t find any good ones for teens. The idea for a magazine began to germinate and Azam realized that any publication she might produce would have to be written and designed by teens themselves to make it truly reflective of their lives.

She knew that convincing established publishers would be a challenge. “People assume that teenagers can’t write and that they don’t know what to think or what to say.” She created a mock-up magazine as part of a presentation package that she hoped would demonstrate the capabilities of her young staff. Azam also extensively researched the buying trends of the teen demographic to prove that the magazine would be marketable. She first showed her package to the late Catherine Keachie, then president of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association. Keachie was so impressed that she herself arranged a conference for Azam at Maclean Hunter. Later, she met with Telemedia, Key Publishers and Hearst Book Group of Canada.

At meetings, she was told that it was a “sweet” concept, but that it would flop without advertising and a focus on fashion, boys and stars. “I felt that these were 50-year-old men who didn’t know a single teenager, who didn’t know this market, and who couldn’t believe that there was anything other than the formula that works. I thought it was a personal failure that I wasn’t able to show them. Sometimes I would leave those meetings and walk home just weeping.” (Despite not being interested in Reluctant Hero financially, the publishing community has since offered Azam advice and support.)

Refusing to admit defeat, she decided to go it alone. She hired a graphic designer and a printer with $14,000 she had saved while working in corporate communications in New York. Revisiting her initial five target schools, she recruited 50 volunteer writers and spent days bombarding media outlets with press releases and phone calls about the launch of the premiere issue. The media blitz resulted in an onslaught of telephone requests for subscriptions. Azam printed just enough copies of the first issue to meet the requests she received-she was overwhelmed by the intricacies of newsstand distribution and decided to forego it the first time around.

Azam recalls her reaction to the physical appearance of the first issue; 32 pages of pamphlet-sized newsprint failed to measure up to her high expectations. “I didn’t even feel like it was a magazine. The Globe and Mailsaid it looked like the Jehovah’s Witness pamphlet, Watchtower, but they obviously hadn’t read Watchtowerbecause it has four colours and I only had two!”

Disappointment aside, the first issue repaid Azam her $14,000. Its editorial content was both well written and insightful, with stories on underage sex, vegetarianism and buying earth-friendly products. Its strongest piece was a 600-word personal essay on eating disorders written by a teen who weighed 67 pounds when she was 12. She wrote: “I was out of control and although I felt lonely and afraid, I wouldn’t let anyone touch or help me. I was an emaciated little girl who thought she was indestructible.”

In addition to discussing serious topics, the first issue also devoted some space to standard teen subjects like zits-but with a twist. Fourteen-year-old Guila Mandel on acne remedies: “When I watch ads by companies like Oxy, they make me feel as though it’s the end of the world if I get a zit….I think all the hype about pimples comes from the fact that teenagers are insecure about the way they look, and some company decided to make a million bucks off of it.”

The girls and their opinions went national when some of them appeared with Azam on CTV’s national news and CNN. As the story of Reluctant Hero began to circulate, people started calling to ask where they could find it. Several bookstore chains such as Chapters and Coles contacted Azam, eager to carry the new teen magazine that everyone was asking for.

Now selling up to 75 per cent of its 6,000 newsstand copies, Reluctant Hero has changed its look. The magazine went up to standard size with the second issue and, although it’s still on newsprint, covers are full-colour. Now available in most major bookstores, Reluctant Hero has a solid subscriber base of 3,000. The title is self-financing without advertising and, for now, Azam plans to keep it that way. “I want to shape its editorial personality without having to think about the conflict between my writing about tampons polluting the oceans and my back-page ad.”

Part of the reason for Reluctant Hero‘s success is the growth of North America’s teen market, particularly in the past five years. As baby boomers’ children grow up, the teenage population is skyrocketing. According to census statistics, the number of teens in Canada and the United States combined is expected to grow to around 34 million by 2010, up from 28.3 million in the early ’90s. YM,Teen and Seventeen have been cashing in on this population surge. For the first six months of 1996, Seventeen‘s circulation increased to 2.3 million from 1.8 million in 1993. Over that same period, YM‘s circulation jumped up to two million from 1.5 million andTeen‘s increased to 1.3 million from 1.1 million.

The expanding teen demographic also has an increasingly significant amount of disposable income. According to StatsCan, Canadian teens earn an average of $4,861 a year. Their heightened role as consumers in the marketplace has recently caught the attention of the advertising industry. “There is a realization that teens actually have money and that they are doing more of the family shopping,” says Lisa Lombardi, the former executive editor of YM.

Anxious to get in on the action, advertisers are lining up to buy space in several new glossy teen publications that have emerged in the U.S., like Twist, a five-month-old title by Bauer Creative Services, Time Inc.’s Teen People and Jump, published by Weider Publications.

Since the established teen titles depend on advertising for at least half their revenue, contentious editorial content often gets dumped or tamed in order to appease ad clients. The industry watched one big title stand firm, and its eventual failure still serves as a reminder to tread lightly with advertisers. Sassy, launched in February 1988, drew tremendous reader feedback in praise of its realistic, direct coverage of gritty topics like gay teenagers, incest and losing one’s virginity. Within five years, its circulation soared to 800,000. But its success drew unwanted attention as well. Upset by the magazine’s frank sexual content, a group of outraged parents joined with the Moral Majority to launch a letter-writing campaign to Sassy‘s primary advertisers demanding that they cancel their ad contracts. At the time, editor Jane Pratt chose not to make any editorial changes and five of the magazine’s advertisers cancelled their contracts. But after bouncing from publisher to publisher, Sassy eventually softened its content and finally folded in December 1996.

One way around the problem of being ad-dependent is to publish on the Internet. The monthly overhead for an on-line magazine is low; it can cost as little as $350 for a net server, $900 for telephone charges, $1,200 for office space and supplies, and about $300 for promotional costs and miscellaneous expenses. That’s howSpank!, a new Canadian e-zine for teenagers, manages to stay afloat while running controversial stories most advertisers wouldn’t want any part of. While the magazine has carried a couple of small ads for the Alberta Institute of Technology and a Calgary vintage clothing shop, ad revenue only covers about 10 per cent of the magazine’s expenses. If every advertiser were to pull its support, the Calgary-based publication would still be able to carry on as usual.

Good thing, since Spank! has already experienced advertiser fear firsthand. In August 1996, it lost the interest of Greyhound Air when it posted an account from a young girl who discovered she was pregnant again. She decided to have and keep this second baby after undergoing an abortion only three months earlier. Some excerpts from the story are stark. “At the clinic, they inserted seaweed sticks to dilate me….I could not have laughing gas and was aware of what was going on. I cried and cried, hating myself. Hating the world….The baby’s bones had calcified and his limbs had to be snapped off. The doctor at the clinic had punctured a tiny hole in my uterus….I was beginning to hemorrhage-I was bleeding inside.” Spank! and Greyhound were only in the process of negotiating a contract, so no actual money was lost. But the article has also scared away several other potential advertisers.

Launched in November 1995, Spank! has had difficulty making a profit from the electronic medium because it doesn’t charge its readers a fee. Now in need of money, the magazine is beginning to actively pursue ad accounts. Some products, though, will never appear on Spank!‘s site. Editor Robin Thompson, 34, and her 27-year-old publisher, Stephen Cassady, categorically refuse to entertain offers from companies selling diet aids or tobacco. They can afford to be choosy, having managed without significant ad revenue for two years. Still, the magazine requires about $2,700 per issue in funding from its core staff. Cassady and Thompson dip into their own pockets to fill that gap. “That effectively makes us poor and hovelling,” says Cassady. “But we believe in what we’re doing, we’re having a lot of fun and it’s really exciting to work with the writers.”

Cassady is behind the slick design of the magazine-he uses bright blocks of colour and relatively simple graphics to jazz up the site. And during his time at the University of Calgary, where he earned a degree in political science, he developed skills that now help him promote the magazine. “I always dealt with extracurricular activities that focused on approaching a target audience with material delivered in a way that’s useable and that generates feedback. I’m still using the same skills I learned in university.” The year after he graduated, Cassady interned with a small group trying to start a weekly newsprint magazine for teens. Thompson was leading that venture.

Thompson, who did a smattering of freelance writing after graduating from the University of Lethbridge, had noticed that there weren’t any publications for teens in Calgary and decided to start one up. In the early stages, it became apparent that the high price of paper would make publishing in print an impossibility. The Internet was a more affordable venue and Cassady had the know-how to make it happen.

Thompson sold her car and Cassady used some money he inherited to come up with $24,000 to fund the magazine. They depended heavily on Cassady’s MasterCard for awhile. To recruit writers, they visited 18 schools in Calgary and within a couple of months had gathered a big enough staff to launch the first issue.

Two days later, Spank! received its first Internet award for design and content-Web Specific’s “Spider’s Pick of the Day.” Eighteen more have followed, including the C-Net Award (October 1996) and the Snap On-Line “Best of the Web” (October 1997). The monthly magazine prides itself on its edgy content and witty style. Thompson is very clear about how Spank! differs from most teen titles: “It’s simple. We don’t give a shit about dating tips. We treat our readers like intelligent human beings.”

Spank! has published tips of a different kind, though. In “It Ain’t Easy Being Queen,” Carly Milne describes the evening preparations of two young performing drag queens. “Since Dan is wearing a red suit with a long-sleeved bodysuit underneath, he only has to shave his hands, face and a little patch on his chest….To do a proper tuck, the rule is control top, control top, control top!….Dan can’t find any of his panty hose. Luckily, the vest on his suit covers the offending penis, so he can get away with it tonight.” Spank! also includes popular culture features on sports (Susan Auch, the Canadian speedskater), music (54-40 and the Rolling Stones) and literature (Paul Quarrington).

Thompson works hard to promote the magazine in the media. “Every few months I send out press releases on something interesting we’re doing and spend days faxing stuff all over the world.” So far, the media haven’t shown that much interest, but Spank! was featured in The Globe and Mail‘s business section in July 1996-the article dubbed it “one of the most serious teen magazines available in printed or electronic form.”

To continue to be taken seriously, Thompson demands a lot from her young writers. Although initially, she and Cassady planned to pay contributors five cents a word for their stories, they’ve only been able to afford to pay a token penny per word. Between them they devote about 80 hours a week to the magazine, but neither Thompson nor Cassady is drawing a salary from Spank! Cassady is now looking for a computer-related job, and Thompson still lives off her work as a graphic designer and writer, but she defines her real job entirely differently. “My job is to make sure that teens have a voice because I think that they are the most intelligent generation ever.”

In an industry that largely ignores the voice of its audience and instead speaks to please corporate ad clients, magazines like Reluctant Hero and Spank! serve an important purpose. The teens at Reluctant Hero certainly have a voice, though individually they sometimes have to shout over one another to be heard. Back at the story meeting, Julia Dow, 16, stands up and hollers for attention. She suggests that the magazine’s inside back page be turned into a heroine section, featuring women from history whose great achievements were ignored by their contemporaries.

Dow tells the group about a 12th-century female scholar and nun named Hildegard von Bingen. She was among the first to describe the taboo phenomenon of female orgasm. She also started a vibrant convent that ignored the traditional rules of piety-Hildegard’s nuns wore white gowns and tiaras to celebrate their exalted relationship with God. At that time, nuns were forbidden to speak lest their purity be contaminated, but Hildegard flouted this edict and developed a secret language that she and her nuns could use among themselves.

Some 900 years later, Hildegard’s keen intellect and visionary spirit are still legendary, making her the perfect idol for Azam’s young writers. Continuing in her iconoclastic tradition, they set their own rules, bucking the status quo all the way.

Two months into his new role as cohost of CBC Radio’s This Morning, I’m sitting with Michael Enright in Fran’s diner near Yonge and St. Clair. His trademark bow tie and suspenders have been replaced by a grey pullover, with a crisp blue and red plaid collar peeking over the top. As he speaks, he fidgets-with his collar, with his goatee, with his filterless cigarette.

Grudgingly, he has begun talking about himself. But when I’m halfway through my questions about the many jobs of his checkerboard career, he stops talking and leans dramatically toward me. “You have to understand something,” he says, his eyes narrowing. “On the scale of things, what I do now is very unimportant.” At first, I think he means that being a cohost on This Morning is insignificant, except then he says that what he did before was unimportant also.

“But don’t you have the power to change things?” I ask. “God, I hope not,” he replies, his trombone of a voice filling the room. He sits back and locks his eyes on mine. “Because I’m such a swell guy, I’d only change things for the better, right?”

While Enright talks he often stops mid-sentence to tell me how boring he is and how he would much rather ask questions about me (he does). I’m not sure if he’s being modest or just wants me to think he is, but I do know that he hates reading about himself and has never saved a copy of anything he’s written. He’s not without ego altogether, but self-aggrandizing doesn’t seem to be his thing. There’s also something distinctly bad-boyish about him in person-like an ageing James Dean-that doesn’t come across on the airwaves. He’s playing with a jackknife.

As he edges away from my personal questions, I find myself thinking of a poem called “Alone,” by Edgar Allan Poe (From childhood’s hour I have not been / As others were -I have not seen / As others saw-I could not bring / My passions from a common spring…). Only, I’m not yet sure why. Maybe the answer can be found in something said to me earlier by Enright’s friend, Ernest Hillen, author of The Way of a Boy. When I asked him why Enright is so respected for his writing and yet hasn’t written any books, he said, “You need to become fairly quiet inside to write a book, and I don’t think he’s a quiet man inside.” Hillen also said that with friends, Enright is often introspective but with other people he’s usually on, like an actor, with one-liners coming around the corner very fast.

If this is true, then Enright is treating me like a friend, because the man I’m having coffee with is more philosophical than funny. And when he does say something funny, there is never laughter in his eyes. His wit “is a very serious wit,” says Jack McLeod, a university professor and an old friend of Enright’s, “in the sense that humour usually comes from some deep culture or sadness.” And this is one of the most striking things about Enright. He seems to wear torment like a heavy coat of armour.

Three hours after sitting down to coffee, we are standing in a posh specialty store around the corner from Fran’s. Enright needs to buy a replacement martini shaker. He’s just taken one off the shelf and he’s explaining to me with self-taught erudition that a real martini should be served in a shot glass. A slender male clerk, who has been lurking in Enright’s shadow, steps forward and slips it out of his hand. “Let me get you one without fingerprints,” he says, heading for the back room. “I don’t need the box,” Enright calls out after him, then strolls over to the counter. The cashier, a polished blonde, demands his name and phone number. “Why, will I win a car?” he drawls, and avoids giving his name.

As he’s paying, he asks her why there’s a whole shelf dedicated to martinis. “Where are you from, another planet?” she asks. “Martinis are in.”

“That’s unfortunate,” Enright sighs. “I’ll have to find myself a new drink.”

If there’s one thing Enright can’t stand, it’s being like everyone else. While writing this piece I often wondered if his sole purpose in life is just to go against his notion of the status quo. Enright has spent his life questioning things and, through his career, questioning people. In the late 1950s he even questioned his own religion, dropping out of a monastery in Dunkirk, New York, after his first year. “He’s determined to see through the bullshit and you can relate that back to his abandonment of the Holy Mother,” says John Gault, a former journalist and fellow disaffected Catholic, who worked with Enright at Maclean’s back in the mid-’70s. “He’s a deep questioner in a society that doesn’t begin to question enough, in a media that’s become embarrassingly homogeneous.” Gault says that it is this suspicion and cynicism that enables Enright to question everyone-from celebrities to world leaders. And George Jamieson, a senior producer at As It Happens for the past 10 years, says Enright becomes cynical the minute “he smells the aroma of going along to get along.” Enright calls this brand of journalism approaching things on the bias.

“He loves controversy,” says Cate Cochran, who worked with him as a producer at As It Happens for more than five years. “He was impish in many ways about saying things that were deliberately provocative. Bratty is what he is.” But, more often than not, there’s value in Enright’s brattiness.

For example, in 1988, while Enright was the host of As It Happens, three whales became trapped in the ice off the coast of Alaska near a village called Barrow. It quickly became a media zoo with more than 150 journalists from at least 26 TV networks worldwide. But while everybody else was talking about saving the whales, Enright was thinking about eating them. So he did an interview with a native from the village-the man who first told the community about the whales-who said if he had known there was going to be such a fuss, he would have killed them and hauled them out for food.

“If it doesn’t have a little grit in it, it’s not for him,” says Jamieson. “This makes him endlessly entertaining to be around. It can also make him a horrendous pain in the ass if he gets on a tear about something.” At As It Happens, the tedious issue for Enright was the environment. He thought the topic was boring-producers had to fight hard to get their stories aired. Tensions exploded behind the scenes on occasion because producers believed that the show’s listeners were interested in hearing about environmental stories, even if Enright wasn’t.

Last November, The Hamilton Spectator published a story about murder. Despite the subject matter, it wasn’t a typical news story. In fact, it wasn’t a news story at all. Though reporter Adrian Humphreys spoke to police, Crown attorneys, criminologists and even the victims’ families, he didn’t just report their observations and opinions. Instead, he spent several weeks painstakingly gathering the details of every homicide in Hamilton-Wentworth for the last 10 years and analyzing it himself using a computer.

The result was a five-part, 10,000-word piece examining the general profile of murder in Hamilton, the sentences received by the killers, the locations where the killings took place, the characteristics of the victims’ families and the details of the few cases that remained unsolved. Humphreys’ article reached beyond the facts for the larger story: not just a murder or a series of murders, but murder in general, a decade of murder in the city of Hamilton.

The murder story is just one example of a new kind of journalism being done at the Spectator and in a handful of newsrooms across Canada. Computer-assisted reporting, as it’s called, encompasses many different techniques. At its most basic level, it includes any use of computers for reporting as opposed to writing. This could mean getting information from the Internet; communicating with sources via e-mail; storing, searching and sorting interview transcripts in a free-form database; making financial calculations in a spreadsheet; or doing statistical analysis of government databases. At its most sophisticated, computer-assisted reporting also involves a reporter gathering empirical data, analyzing it and reaching original but objective conclusions, an approach called precision journalism.

Both types of CAR make reporting more precise, more authoritative and more comprehensive, freeing journalists from having to rely on statements from governments, corporations or experts. At the same time, a reporter armed with computerized analysis is able to ask more pertinent, specific questions when interviewing sources. All this adds up to better journalism.

Computer-assisted reporting is relatively new at the Spectator. When Kirk LaPointe took over as editor in January 1997, he immediately began to bring the newsroom up-to-date in its use of technology. One of the first things he did was give every reporter direct access to the Internet. He also set aside a full page for a daily “big read” feature and scheduled time for reporters to develop stories for it. The murder story fit right into that framework.

“My vision for the paper is that we should be the best in Canada at computer-assisted reporting,” says LaPointe. “There are two ways to look at where we are now. One is that we’re a long way from where I feel we need to be, but the other is that we’re not far from being the best in the country. It’s not a very aggressive field at the moment.”

As LaPointe suggests, computer-assisted reporting has been adopted somewhat unevenly in Canada. Internet access and e-mail, for example, are now quite common in newsrooms, while spreadsheet analysis is rare outside of business reporting. And there are still only a handful of reporters doing analysis with databases or statistical tools, although those who are set a high standard. Kevin Donovan’s work at The Toronto Star, for example, has produced several extremely successful stories.

Donovan became interested in computer-assisted reporting as a way of broadening the scope of his investigative work. His first project, published in May 1995, used analysis of several government databases to uncover waste and corruption in Ontario’s nonprofit housing program under the Liberal and NDP governments. Next, Donovan was the database editor for a series by Rita Daly, Jane Armstrong and Caroline Mallan on spousal abuse called “Hitting Home.” The series, which tracked 133 cases of domestic violence through the court system for 18 months, was published in March and November of 1996. In April 1997, the “Cry for the Children” series, which Donovan wrote with fellow Star reporter Moira Welsh, documented the failure of the Children’s Aid system to protect children who were being abused (see “Blanket Statements,” Spring 1998). “Before nonprofit housing, the Star had done stories on individual housing project units,” Donovan says. “But it’s way better to do it on the whole thing.”

These series led to such changes as the creation of a new domestic court in Metro Toronto, the establishment of new police protocols for cases of domestic abuse and a coroner’s review of child deaths over a five-year period in Ontario. The spousal abuse series won a National Newspaper Award, the B’nai Brith human rights award and shared the Michener award for meritorious public service with the child abuse series; the latter series was also nominated for a Canadian Association of Journalists investigative award.

The Halifax Chronicle-Herald has also done several large CAR projects. The first, published in December 1995, just after the districts of Halifax, Dartmouth, Bedford and Halifax County were amalgamated into the supercity of Halifax, was a demographic profile of the new city based on 1991 census data, reinterpreted to reflect the new municipal borders. In May 1996, the Herald did a comparison of Nova Scotia schools based on standardized test scores. The Herald put the entire series on its Website and even made the raw data for each school available. This past November, the Herald completed a third project, an analysis of census data showing how the province has changed over the past 45 years.

According to Paul Schneidereit, new media editor at the Herald, who worked on all three pieces, these stories were well received by the public. “People liked the series and many had questions sparked by the content, suggesting other areas of interest,” he says. But Schneidereit says that he got very little reaction from fellow journalists: “I think maybe it wasn’t hot enough, which I do understand. These pieces were not ‘gotcha’ stories but examinations of issues.”

Computer-assisted reporting has been employed by journalists at several other Canadian newspapers and on CBC Radio and CBC-TV, but the total number of stories produced using CAR still remains relatively low. One reason is that many journalists don’t feel the technique is applicable to their own work. John King, deputy managing editor at The Globe and Mail, notes that most of the CAR he has seen tends to concentrate on local issues: “Because more of the Globe‘s resources are allocated to the national stuff than the local stuff, we haven’t gone into that kind of reporting in the same way.”

One of the first investigative reports to use computer analysis was done in 1972 by Donald Barlett and James Steele of the Philadelphia Inquirer. They combed through more than 20,000 pages of public records to assemble complete histories of 1,374 incidents of murder, rape, robbery and assault that took place in 1971. Then they developed a coding system to record such items as the race of victims and the suspects, the assailants’ previous arrest records and the length of the final sentences. Assistants then entered the codes onto punch cards and ran them through an IBM mainframe computer. The result was 4,000 pages of printout, which Barlett and Steele combined with courtroom reporting and interviews with police, lawyers, defendants and judges to produce a story about the unequal justice being dispensed by the court system.

Barlett and Steele had been introduced to computerized analysis by another reporter, Philip Meyer, who wrote the program they used to analyze their data. Although newspapers had used statistical analysis before, particularly for polling purposes, Meyer was among the first journalists to use computing for a story. Awarded a Neiman Fellowship at Harvard University in 1966, he spent his year there studying the quantitative analytical techniques used in the social sciences. Then in the summer of 1967, he used a computer to analyze survey data in order to uncover some of the causes of the Detroit riot in a Pulitzer-winning series for the Detroit Free Press.

Meyer later wrote a book, published in 1973, that became almost the bible of computer-assisted reporting. It described a new style of journalism based on the scientific method and the principles of objectivity. He called the book Precision Journalism to distinguish his approach from the more literary “new journalism” practiced by writers like Gay Talese, Tom Wolfe and Norman Mailer.

Interest in computer-assisted reporting grew among investigative reporters, but it wasn’t until the early ’90s that it became widespread. The catalyst was Bill Dedman’s May 1988 “redlining” series for The Atlanta Constitution, which compared bank records with census data, exposing racial discrimination in the lending patterns of Atlanta banks. It won him the 1989 Pulitzer for investigative reporting.

In Canada, one of the first reporters to practise computer-assisted reporting was Bill Doskoch of Regina’sLeaderPost. He was introduced to the idea at the 1990 CAJ convention by James Brown of the National Institute for Advanced Reporting at Indiana University. “I was quite taken with the whole notion of CAR,” Doskoch said, “and bought my own computer a year later, which gave me a massive technological advantage. The LeaderPost to this day still uses dumb terminals hooked up to a mainframe.”

In 1992 he attended a NIAR convention in Indianapolis, Indiana, and began incorporating computerized analysis into his reporting at the LeaderPost. His first story was a sidebar to a feature he was writing about women in the NDP. He used a spreadsheet to analyze provincial election records back to the founding of Saskatchewan in 1905. He found that while the Liberal Party had nominated far more women candidates than the NDP, women candidates from the NDP had a much better chance of being elected. Since then, Doskoch has done several smaller computer-assisted pieces and has been active in promoting computer-assisted reporting through the CAJ.

Another of the early proponents was Robert Washburn, who at the time was a reporter for the Cobourg Daily Star. His first exposure to computer-assisted reporting was in 1992, soon after he bought his first computer, a Mac Classic II. He began looking for information on CAR and found it in an essay written by Doskoch. “It was like Paul on the road to Damascus,” says Washburn. “I was blinded by the brilliance of it all. I thought, ‘My God, this is great!’ The idea of using on-line resources and analyzing data just blew me away.”

So Washburn jumped in his car and drove the 100 kilometres to Toronto to meet with David Stewart-Patterson, then business editor at CTV’s Canada AM and president of the CAJ. They sat down in the CTV cafeteria and Washburn sketched out his ideas for a caucus within the CAJ devoted to new technology. This was the beginning of the CAR Caucus, which later became known as the CAR Network.

The new organization held its first conference in Canada at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, in February 1994. A larger conference at Carleton University in Ottawa followed in August. Since then, the CAR Network has held training workshops across the country and has become one of the CAJ’s largest caucuses, with over 100 of its approximately 1,500 members. “It’s really blossomed,” says Washburn. “Besides all the training stuff, we’ve also involved ourselves in freedom of information, because, of course, we want to gain access to information from government in electronic format. Right now in Canada it’s very difficult to access raw data.”

Access to data is one of the reasons why computer-assisted reporting is only slowly being adopted in Canada. Many of the computer-assisted reports that regularly appear in American media would simply be impossible to produce in Canada. Where U.S. freedom of information laws emphasize the public’s right to scrutinize the activities of the government, Canadian laws favour the protection of the government’s ability to govern and the individual’s right to privacy.

In a broad sense, the two laws are actually quite similar. Both give access to all records held by government agencies, with specific exemptions for certain types of records-mainly those relating to national defence, law enforcement, internal governmental decision-making processes and confidential information submitted to the government by a third party. The real differences are in the details and interpretation of the laws.

The privacy exemption in the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, for example, is discretionary. The government has the option of withholding information that would constitute a “clearly unwarranted” violation of an individual’s privacy but is not required to do so. In practice, this means that the information must shed light on the activities of a government agency or official-which is usually what journalists are after.

The privacy exemption in the Canadian Access to Information Act, on the other hand, is mandatory. It specifies that a government agency may not release any type of information on an individual unless the head of the agency decides that it will serve the public interest. But public interest doesn’t require the agency to release anything. The Canadian law does a much better job protecting privacy, but at the same time it often makes it difficult for journalists to get the information they need.

But even where the law requires governments to disclose information, Canadian reporters often have difficulty obtaining it. Kevin Donovan at The Toronto Star routinely has to appeal to the Information and Privacy Commissioner of Ontario. Over a coffee in the Star cafeteria, he talks with rueful exasperation about how hard it is to get the data he needs for his stories. “The government doesn’t want to release this stuff because it’s embarrassing,” says Donovan. “We have people inside the government who desperately want to get information out, but the corporate mentality is ‘Can’t release anything.'”

Government ministries also use delaying tactics to attempt to suppress potentially sensitive information. In his report to Parliament in 1997, John Grace, the federal information commissioner, wrote, “Delay in responding to access-to-information requests is now at crisis proportions. Given the clear and mandatory obligations placed on government to provide timely 30-day responses, the flouting of Parliament’s will in some institutions is a festering, silent scandal.” Grace cited a review of Health Canada’s records that showed that 80 per cent of requests were delayed. Throughout the system, delays can range from a few weeks to more than a year.

Donovan says he tries to tailor his requests so they will be dealt with more quickly-for example, by specifically stating that he does not want personal information such as names or addresses. Although this can speed up the process by reducing bureaucratic delays, it’s not useful when government ministries, intent on suppressing information, deliberately stall. As an example, Donovan talks about a request he made in connection with child deaths. He wanted files related to cases of sudden infant death syndrome in Ontario. But even though he requested that all identifying information be removed, he wasn’t given what he needed because the coroner’s office claimed that some of the cases might be still under investigation. “Well, they can say something is under investigation forever, right?” he says. “We’ve had to go to court before on other cases to prove that something is not being investigated. It takes a year to do that. A year from now I’m probably going to be doing another story-I’ll have moved on, and they’ll have won.” Almost incredulously, Donovan tells of another FOI battle he fought. Early in 1991 he wrote a series of stories exposing corrupt politicians in the City of York. The province responded by creating a special police task force, Project 80, charged with investigating allegations of corruption in the municipal governments in the greater Toronto area. After several years, Donovan noticed that the only convictions Project 80 had achieved were from the original cases in York. When he asked how much it cost to run the project, the solicitor general’s office refused to tell him. So he filed a request under freedom of information legislation. The resulting legal battle spanned two years and three appeals. He estimates that the story, which eventually ran 35 column inches on page seven, might have cost the Star $20,000. The victory was important, since he has used it as a precedent in other cases, but it also shows why CAR is so much more difficult in Canada than in the U.S.

“We fought that thing all that way. And by the time we did it, Project 80 was gone. This is the frustration: we’re doing all the right things and we’re fighting these cases and that’s just to get a bunch of papers saying how much cops are paid. In the States it’s in a book somewhere. It’s probably on the cops’ Website. It’s a different attitude.

“We have a hard time doing regular investigations because we can’t get the government information. Now we’re trying do stuff where we’re trying to get not just one bit of information but 1,000 bits of information. It’s not like we just file a request and sit back and they tell us no and we go away. We don’t. But what can you do, short of storming the barricades of government and stealing the information?” says Donovan.

Donovan’s success with computer-assisted reporting has received a mixed reaction from others at the Star.Many of the people he works with are content to concentrate on traditional reporting. Others have begun to pick up the computer skills necessary for precision journalism. Moira Welsh, who worked on the Children’s Aid series, for example, has gone to the States for training at the National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting. Welsh says the training and work on the CAS series have changed the way she approaches investigative reporting. “Whereas before you might approach a story by trying to simply talk to a lot of people, in this case, you try to collect as much data as you can-in addition to interviewing every person you can possibly find.”

Over at The Hamilton Spectator, Adrian Humphreys is pleased with the positive response his work has provoked. The murder story generated a number of calls from the public and received a good response from journalists both inside and outside the Spectator. “Immediately after the series ran I think I got five requests from my colleagues to help them out-they had their ideas for stories or series. I’ve been doing little mini-tutorials around the newsroom.”

Humphreys’ work has led to a flurry of smaller stories involving computerized analysis by other reporters at the Spectator and he has set up an analysis workstation in the newsroom library and begun giving training sessions to those interested in using it. He also has plans for new projects of his own.

The first of these is already underway, although he’s cagey about the details.What he will say is that it’s going to be about education and will cover the entire province rather than just the city of Hamilton. There is one thing he’ll do differently the second time around: “I’m demanding the data be on disk. I’m not about to enter in the data for the entire province. That was one of the problems I faced with the murder series-having to get the information in very traditional ways and then trying to use it in an untraditional manner.”

The new enthusiasm for computer-assisted reporting at the Spectator fits right into LaPointe’s overall plan for the paper. He wants to see computerized analysis become part of the routine of the newsroom, as Internet research already has. “I don’t think that many newsrooms at this point can afford to set people off in the corner and say, ‘From now on you just do CAR,'” says LaPointe. “I think it has to be approached project by project and I think you have to borrow time from doing other things the conventional way. At the moment I don’t believe that there is a decent enough return on your investment of time and energy to do that. But as the information becomes more accessible, more journalists will find that computer-assisted reporting is an effective and an efficient way to work.”

For now, most newsrooms in Canada don’t have the resources to dedicate a reporter to a single story for weeks on end. This effectively rules out the large, labour-intensive projects that Donovan and Humphreys have done.

But small newsrooms can benefit from computer-assisted reporting as well. Monday Magazine, an alternative weekly in Victoria, does computer-assisted investigative reporting on a shoestring budget. In May 1996, it ran a two-part series analyzing campaign contributions in the upcoming provincial election. Monday‘s news editor, Russ Francis, and editor James MacKinnon, obtained an electronic copy of B.C.’s public accounts. The data on campaign donations was only available in hard copy, so it had to be entered by hand. Finally, they went to the province for the names of the principals of many of the companies that had made donations. Then they used a computer to sort all the names into alphabetical order so they could go through it looking for matches. The project took about a month to complete.

Francis says Monday can’t afford to have anyone working exclusively on computer projects-but that didn’t prevent the magazine from doing precision journalism.”We take on projects and just find a way to do them,” he says. “We find the time later. I’m sure there are lots of things we wouldn’t do if we worried about where we were going to find the time first.”

Francis and MacKinnon also made maximum use of the equipment they had available. The computer they used to analyze the data was nearly a decade old, but that just meant they had to wait a bit longer for the results. “A lot of people think you need to have the very latest and fastest equipment to do this, but you don’t,” said Francis. “For a long time our Internet access was via a 286. We’ve improved a bit since then, but youcan actually do it.” Francis also mentions that you can buy a 286-based computer for under $300, which even the smallest newsrooms should be able to afford. “They’re practically giving them away. And that’s all you need, plus basic Internet access.You have phenomenal access to information these days that way, much cheaper than by hard copy means. Just in time going down to the library it will pay for itself in a week.”

But the real benefit of computer-assisted reporting can be more than just saving money or reporters’ time. It’s more than flashy multipart stories. The practitioners of precision journalism argue that it makes them better journalists.

Kevin Donovan has been an investigative reporter for nearly 10 years. He feels his work has gotten stronger since he began using computers. “What it has done for me is that, instead of looking at one company, one person, one cop, one child, I tend to look at things in a more global way.” He says that without the computer analysis, the child-abuse series would have been “just a bunch of talking heads”; instead, the hard data he and Welsh obtained prompted change. “If we had not done that,” Donovan says, “we wouldn’t be able to say that it takes 44 months on average to remove a child to safety, which has become the cornerstone of the changes that Children’s Aids are going through in Ontario.

“You gotta think, ‘What should journalism do?’ I think we should change things. I think we should be investigating problems in society and writing about them. And that’s what we’ve been doing lately. The Star is suggesting solutions, based on the research and what the people out there are saying.”

Dana Robbins, the metro editor at the Spectator, finds that precision journalism is a better way to achieve the journalistic ideal of objectivity. He compares it with the more traditional technique of showing both sides of the story: “On issue X, you go out and you canvas five, six, eight, whatever opinions of what issue X is, and then you regurgitate that for the readers. The truth is that sort of he-said, she-said journalism rarely advances anything and rarely allows people to form any sort of thoughtful opinion.”

CAR takes the opposite approach. Robbins points out that the second story in the murder series found that the men who murdered their wives received the harshest sentences in Hamilton. “That’s completely contrary to the common perception,” he says, “and certainly completely contrary to what you would get if you went out and asked Joe Blow from here, Sam Blow from here, Susan Blow from there. You would not have got that story. You would not have got the truth, the reality about what is happening in our courts. So not only is it more authoritative, it’s more reliable.”

Precision journalism provides facts, which a good reporter can express in a way that leaves the public with more than just the balance of opinions. Often, that’s the difference between a story that’s fair and accurate and a story that’s true.