Gerald Donaldson is sitting in the din of a jammed pressroom overlooking the front straight of a rain-soaked Nürburgring road racing course, site of the 1999 European Grand Prix. The course is carved out of the lovely Eifel Forest of west-central Germany, but on this dreary September afternoon, Donaldson’s concern is not with the scenery or even the weather – he just wants to make himself heard.

For the moment, Donaldson puts aside his laptop and picks up a microphone in his part-time role as colour commentator for The Sports Network’s telecast of today’s qualifying round. But he’s up to his earphones in problems. He’s trying to broadcast back to Canada over a modified telephone hookup in the middle of a room bursting with 400 people, all of whom are babbling in all the languages of Europe. What’s more, he can’t see how the cars on the course are doing. From the pressroom, Donaldson’s view is restricted to what’s happening on the front straightaway. The television monitors around the perimeter of the room, which show the cars qualifying, are of no use to him, because the pictures on them are different from the British television feed being beamed back to Canada. Donaldson has to depend on Vic Rauter, his partner in the TSN studio in Toronto, to describe the action he’s seeing.

Right now, there’s little action to describe. With the rain threatening to return, no team wants to risk a poor qualifying time or, worse, a wrecked car. Soon, though, the skies clear, the course fills with cars and Donaldson is back to flying blind. It doesn’t help that a big contingent of German reporters is in a lather because it appears their countryman, Heinz-Harold Frentzen, will qualify on the pole. When he does, the roof just about comes off. Donaldson chuckles and says, “Vic, there was just a standing ovation from about 400 objective journalists here in the pressroom.”

For nearly 25 years, Gerald Donaldson has covered Grand Prix racing as a full-time freelancer. Though he’s among the top journalists in motor sports, he’s little known in his native Canada, where – with the exception of a big splash of the Villeneuves, p?re et fils – auto racing is way back in the pack behind baseball, basketball and hockey. Worldwide, however, Grand Prix racing is huge. The TV audience for each of these 16 or 17 weekend races a year is between 350 and 600 million in 209 countries. Only World Cup soccer and the summer Olympics outdraw it, and they come up just once every four years. The Grand Prix circuit itself is an elite, glitzy, dangerous, big-money extravaganza that comes with a cast of more than 300 drivers, crew members and support staff – and at least 600 journalists.

Donaldson fits into this world like a hand in a driving glove. At 61, he’s gained a solid reputation in Europe and Asia as a good and knowledgeable writer about the sport. Which is hardly surprising since he lives it. In his 1990 book, Grand Prix People: Revelations from Inside the Formula 1 Circus, he introduces “a disparate lot, a group of strong personalities from many cultural and social backgrounds, united in a common cause: the quest for success at the pinnacle of motor sport. There is a great deal of camaraderie among them but, since the essence of this sport is competition at the very highest level, there is inevitably conflict and controversy among its players. There is also a great deal of humour and, perhaps surprisingly in such a mechanically oriented endeavour, some very deeply felt emotion.”

Grand Prix journalists, including Donaldson, have at least one thing in common with the rest of the circus: they have to have their regular racing fix. They put up with the endless travel, the separation from family and constant pressure to satisfy the race driver that lurks in all motor sport fans. In his book, Donaldson profiles 47 journalists, all of whom admit to being unabashed fans and drivers manque. Though lack of money, skill or courage keeps them in the pressroom, they can still, vicariously and safely, live out their fantasies 16 or 17 times a year.

Donaldson grew up in Almonte, Ont., near Ottawa. He caught the racing bug in his mid-teens, but it wasn’t that slam-bang North American favourite, stock car racing. Rather, it was the effete European kind, Grand Prix. Love it though he might, it wasn’t going to make him any money, so after working as a surveyor and hitchhiking across the country, he enrolled in the Ontario College of Art, where he studied advertising design. “I wanted to earn a living,” he says, “and painters traditionally starve.” After graduation, he worked in magazine art direction, but later switched to freelance copywriting for advertising campaigns. This was the beginning of his transition from pictures to words. To satisfy his love for motor sport, he took up amateur racing, but soon ran out of money. Looking for a way to get out to the track, Donaldson decided to put his newfound interest in writing to work outside advertising. The result was an article for Quest, a slick national magazine of the day. The opening scene captures the excitement and fearful anticipation that permeate any Grand Prix weekend: “The beautiful girls are there as always, sniffing the sexual scent of high-octane fuel and the chances of death in the sunny afternoon. George Harrison of the Beatles is there, unsuccessfully camouflaged behind a huge pair of shades, and so is Pam Scheckter who, in a few minutes, when the cars erupt into a series of scarcely controlled explosions, will turn her back to the track, not able to watch her husband, Jody, at work.” Once the piece was in print, Donaldson, for the first time, began to see how he could make a living from auto racing.

Grand Prix racing has long been a magnet for unlikely journalists. They’re men – almost exclusively so – with, to say the least, motley backgrounds. Stuart Sykes, for example, who was editor of the Paris-based magazine Prix Editions International until it folded, has a PhD in French and once held a senior lecturer’s post at Liverpool University. Mike Doodson, a Brit and a former accountant, wrote for Autocar and Motor magazine. Maurice Hamilton, an Irishman who used to sell drainage pipes, forged his first press pass and went on to write for The Guardian and The Independent.

Press passes are gold to these guys. You can’t report on a Grand Prix race without one – and they’re hard to get. The sport’s ruling body, Federation Internationale de l’Automobile, issues them only to journalists sponsored by media outlets that have a record of covering Grand Prix racing and are based in a country the FIA believes to be a significant market. Donaldson got his pass many years ago when the rules were less stringent. Today, he couldn’t qualify. Though Canada hosts a Formula 1 race every year at the Circuit Gilles Villeneuve in Montreal, television ratings here are measured in mere thousands as opposed to the millions in hotbeds such as Great Britain. But even a press pass doesn’t guarantee a place on the circuit: You need money. Newspaper reporters get their expenses paid, but not independent operators such as Donaldson. He figures it costs him $70,000 a year – and that’s travelling economy class.

To cover that kind of cost, Donaldson, like all the freelancers, takes on a mixed bag of assignments and is always looking for more. He has his television gig, five stories for The Toronto Star from each race and regular reports for two Japanese magazines, FI Grand Prix Special and GPX Sports Graphic Number. From time to time, he’s on Toronto radio’s The Fan 590 AM or in the pages of the Brit magazines BBC Grand Prix and Auto Sport. He’s even ghostwritten a newspaper column for a retired driver. “I take on all honest work,” he says, “and worry later about how I’ll get it done.”

That can be a challenge on any GP weekend, when the pace of events seems to match the race itself. It all starts on Thursday at about 7 a.m. when the pressroom opens, and finishes around midnight on a weary Sunday. From interview to press conference to telephone to mike to keyboard, the rush is on, ending in the last tapped-out sentence on deadline.

The pressure is heightened by the love-hate relationship between the racers and the reporters. Though they need press, the drivers and their teams often brush off the reporters, especially when racers aren’t doing well or feel they’ve been unfairly treated. Yet without the media exposure no sponsor would pony up the millions needed to run a team. Recognizing this, the FIA puts heavy pressure on the drivers to meet the media. It holds press conferences on Thursday and Friday after practice, on Saturday after qualifying and on Sunday after the race. FIA reps draw ballots to determine which drivers will attend the Thursday and Friday conferences. The top qualifiers show up on Saturday and the top three finishers on Sunday. Attendance is mandatory – no exceptions. To be fair, most drivers make themselves available one or two times a weekend outside of the command performances. But not all. The late Ayrton Senna cut off some reporters for 10 years if they made his black list. Current star Michael Schumacher cooperates grudgingly, but complains that some writers “speak to me for three minutes about my exhaust and then go away and write my life story.”

As with any other big-time sport, if the reporters upset the stars they may find interviews tough to get. Yet the writers aren’t content to be unpaid publicists for Mika Hakkinen, David Coulthard and Jean Alesi. The answer, Donaldson says, is to build a reputation for accuracy and fairness. But it took him 10 years to do that. When he was new on the circuit he was shunned as an outsider, mostly because he was a North American and therefore could not possibly understand the sport. Today, though, his work is respected throughout the pits, and many of the drivers who’ve read his books have become Donaldson fans themselves.

Donaldson is best known for his 1989 biography,Gilles Villeneuve: The Life of a Legendary Race Driver. This saga of the kid who rose from humble beginnings in Berthierville, Que., to Grand Prix stardom, only to die in a crash at Zolder, Belgium, in 1982, has captivated readers inside and outside the racing world. It has been translated into French, Italian and Japanese and it’s still in print in Britain and the U.S. Rather than pounding out a quickie book to take advantage of the death of an international sports hero, Donaldson took the time to write a knowledgeable and detailed account. “The Ferrari just kept flying,” he wrote of the crash scene, “and was airborne for over 100 metres before it slammed nose first into the earth, buckling the front end of the car in on the driver…The Ferrari chassis began to disintegrate with pieces flying in all directions. The driver, the seat and the steering wheel became detached and were hurled through the air…and ploughed through two layers of catch- fencing. Gilles’s helmet flew off and rolled to rest some distance away from his body.”

Donaldson and Gilles Villeneuve were friends. They broke into Grand Prix racing at about the same time. Over the years, Donaldson has stayed close to the Villeneuve family, so close, in fact, that other racing journalists consider him the Villeneuve expert. As such, he sees one significant difference between Gilles and Jacques: focus. Gilles, like so many Formula 1 drivers, focused on his career to the exclusion of anything else. Speed was everything, whether on the track, the highway or in his speedboat roaring along the Mediterranean coast near his home in Monte Carlo. Jacques isn’t as obsessed. He has outside interests such as literature and music. “Grand Prix racing isn’t everything,” he has said. To some journalists on the circuit, this explains his lack of success in the last seasons after winning the Grand Prix championship in 1997. They say he’ll never repeat it. Jacques Villeneuve is just one of many friends Donaldson has in the racing fraternity. He’s regarded as a real gentleman and a helpful guy. Pierre Lecours, who covers racing for Le Journal de Montreal, tells of being unable to get to the Japanese Grand Prix one year because his travel budget had run out. Donaldson called him after the race and gave him all the details he needed for his story. When Scott Higgins, a TSN producer, showed up in Europe trying to get interviews with racing teams, Donaldson set him up. Around the pits, that’s known as being a good bloke.

Still, being a good bloke doesn’t sustain a 23-year career. Week in, week out, Donaldson has had to deliver the goods to readers. One of his special skills is to put them behind the wheel of a race car. While most of his colleagues restrict themselves to race results, driver interviews and reports on Grand Prix politics, Donaldson takes his readers directly into the experience. In an award-winning 1984 piece for The Financial Post Magazine, he describes the start from inside the cockpit. “Berg’s head jerks backward to bang the roll bar as he pops the clutch at the green light…Berg’s right hand flicks the tiny gear-lever from first to second, then third, while his left is clenched firmly on the small padded steering wheel. His feet work the pedals, the left banging out a tattoo on the clutch and the right planting the accelerator firmly to the floor, but ready to stomp on the brakes in an instant. Already the sweat is pouring off his forehead beneath the fireproof balaclava and beginning to fog up the glasses he wears while racing…”

Again in James Hunt: the Biography, he describes the start of another race during which the famed British driver was suffering from a previous racing accident. “James’s forward view was confined to the wide rear wings and tires of the cars immediately in front of his car. He glanced at his instrument panel where the needle of the rev counter flicked up and down in response to his agitated right foot tramping on the accelerator pedal…Immediately, the discomforts of his churning stomach and splitting headache were obliterated in billowing clouds of tire and oil smoke and the blast of noise from 2,500 collective horsepower…The pack erupted forward in a melee of shaking metal and spinning rubber that spanned the full width of the road…”

For all his seriousness about his work, Donaldson isn’t above a bit of kidding in his newspaper reports. Last year, when there was little to report about Jacques Villeneuve and his new team, British American Racing, as they struggled through the season without earning a single point, Donaldson kept his readers abreast of Villeneuve’s technicolour hair changes and his romance with a gorgeous girlfriend. At least something was on track.

Donaldson is no crusader. He doesn’t rail against the loutish behaviour of some drivers and crews. “I believe in forgiving people their trespasses,” he says. Instead, he tries to see them in the context of the competitive and financial pressures they have to live with. That approach has helped him keep his perspective in what is, after all, a touchy political environment. Yet he’s prepared to say what he believes when the stakes are high enough. Last fall, a questionable ruling disqualified the first and second finishers, both Ferraris, from the Malaysian Grand Prix. Both cars, it was discovered, had side panels that were 10 millimetres too small. Knowing that the ruling could cost one of the drivers the championship, Donaldson wrote in The Toronto Star: “Fans will be deprived of a high drama of a showdown in the final race of the season, if Ferrari’s appeal is rejected. Beyond that, the ruling would make a mockery of what has been one of the most fascinating and closely fought title fights of the decade.”

Making a mockery of the sport that has been the driving force of his life for a quarter century is about the last thing Donaldson would tolerate. Grand Prix racing has given him his career, his quiet fame, his friends, his kicks. Even in late middle age, he’s got to have that regular racing fix.

It’s midnight. The European Grand Prix finished nearly eight hours ago. The track is dark, but up in the press booth lights still blaze. A sign on the door says that race-day hours are from 7:30 a.m. to whenever the last journalist leaves. Inside, there’s the sound of keys clicking as Gerald Donaldson taps out the last line of his story. He gives it one more read and then hits the send button. Outside, the night air is damp and a ground fog carpets the parking lot. Donaldson slips behind the wheel of the sporty little GM Opel he’s rented for the 45-minute drive back to his hotel in Blankenheim, where he’ll catch a few hours’ sleep before tomorrow’s flight to England. The road back is a wonderful stretch of two-lane blacktop that curves serpent-like through the hilly forest. Donaldson smiles, slides the Opel into first gear and takes off.

Kirk LaPointe, whom Conrad Black once called a “presentable young man,” sits in the front row of an auditorium filled with restless teenagers and their beaming parents. The new editor and associate publisher of The Hamilton Spectator is out on this cool October evening for two reasons. The first: to introduce the Hamilton Public Library’s fifth annual Power of the Pen awards, a celebration of poetry and short fiction by aspiring young writers. The second: yet another opportunity to tell area residents that the Spec is in the midst of an editorial revitalization. Seven months earlier, LaPointe returned to the paper following an unexpectedly short stint at the National Post. Since then, he’s attended dozens of local events as part of his plan to reverse a decade of decline in circulation, advertising and morale brought on by, among other things, a flurry of ownership changes (from Southam to Sun Media to Quebecor to Torstar in eight months) and relentless cost-cutting. His goal is to transform the Spec into the city’s leader of discussion and debate -? and he’s doing all he can to make himself the public face of change, whether through his regular Saturday column, a speech to a Rotary Club meeting, an appearance as co-chair of the United Way campaign, a shift as a Meals on Wheels delivery man, or as guest speaker at the Power of the Pen awards.

“He was born in Toronto,” says the library board member by way of introduction, “but we won’t hold that against him. The magnet that is Hamilton pulled him back.” It’s a reference to LaPointe’s first stint as Spec editor from January 1997 to March 1998, before the Post lured him away.

Earlier in the evening LaPointe looked exhausted, but as he steps up to the podium he seems to undergo a little personal revitalization. He jokingly refers to the brown stage carpet and how it reminds him of one he and his best friend used to wrestle on in elementary school. “If I decided to go into wrestling instead of journalism, I’d be beaten up pretty badly everyday,” he says. “So I’m really happy I went into journalism instead.” Comfortable with the crowd, LaPointe switches from cool guy to serious journalist: “I’m proud to say that we are making some inroads at the Spectator in the way we tell stories,” he says. “Our writing is more direct than it’s ever been. We are shedding many of the techniques of journalism that stood in our way.” As an example, he cites a “broken-back sentence” in this typical newspaper lede: “‘A man has been charged with 23 counts of murder, comma, police said yesterday.’ That’s not a sentence anyone would say. Why write something no one would say? And yet journalists commit this offence every single day.” Journalists, he adds, often “write things in a way that appears to be sophisticated and elevated and designed to show how informed and enlightened and intelligent they are, when in fact what they produce is less likely to be understood, less likely to provide meaning.”

By providing meaning, LaPointe hopes he can reverse the decline in readership. Shrinking numbers, after all, leave newspapers vulnerable to a trend that has seen chain ownership squeeze extra profits and journalistic aggressiveness out of once vibrant dailies. But can he succeed? The teenagers and their parents are receptive. They laugh at his jokes and applaud his message, but will they buy his paper?

A few weeks before the awards, I meet LaPointe in his office in the Spec’s three-story bunker of a building. On this afternoon, he’s wearing an olive green shirt with earth-coloured tie and brown dress pants that don’t hide the slightly bulging thigh muscles he developed from years of running marathons. He’s a remarkably self-assured and attractive man?a cross between Ricky Martin and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones. On his feet are eight-hole Doc Martens. They’re comfortable, he says. He has five pairs.

LaPointe is eager to talk. “I’ve had significant impact on this franchise,” he says. “People can actually keep their heads up when they walk into a room and say they work at the Spectator. Not purely because of me, but if the publisher hadn’t been interested in having stories told at length or exploring issues or widening the scope of the newspaper, then the paper could still be garbage. It could still be scandalously uninteresting for a city that is interesting.”

He shows me how a reader might have handled the Spec a few years ago. Holding an imaginary newspaper, LaPointe goes through the motions: “Boop, boop, boop, open the pages, open the pages, open the pages, skim this, skim this, skim this and away you go,” he says. “That was the paper’s mysterious approach: ‘We’re going to get out of your way as quickly as we can, we’re going to take our story size down, we’re going to make it so easy to digest, we’re going to write at a Grade 6 level. Everything is going to be so snappy…We will not make it difficult for you.'” He enunciates every word in his mocking tone. “And Christ, if you only have seven minutes to deal with us in the morning, we’re there for you.” LaPointe then rummages through today’s edition. He spots an awkward sentence. “This is crap,” he says. “Who speaks like that? Those responsible for it should be taken to the woodshed.” Perhaps a little embarrassed by his outburst, the man who once threatened to take himself to the woodshed over a factual mistake in his own column says it’s “irritating when there are simpler ways to do things.”

Once the flagship of the Southam empire, the 153-year-old Spec has been underperforming for years. In the late 1980s, the Spectator’s circulation stood at 140,000. Today, it’s at 107,000. In the past 10 years, the paper has had four redesigns, five publishers and four owners. It was also whacked by the double-whammy that hit most North American newspapers in the early ’90s: sky-high newsprint prices and falling revenues brought on by the recession. In 1994, 22 out of approximately 130 people in the newsroom lost their jobs. Throughout it all, there was weak editorial leadership. “What they had were really superb beat reporters,” says John Miller, author of Yesterday’s News and a Ryerson journalism instructor, referring to the fact that the Spec has always been a big winner at the Western Ontario Newspaper Awards. “But there was no direction in the paper. If a person happened to write a good story, it was in the paper, but there were a lot of dull days.” Jeff Mahoney, a Spectator entertainment columnist, and former president of the local guild, adds: “The coverage just seemed to be all over the place. There was a crisis of morale. There was a real malaise and lack of confidence in the leadership.”

When Pat Collins, former vice-president of finance at Southam newspapers, was appointed publisher in January 1996, he realized that major reinvestments had to be made in the newsroom. He found his leader in LaPointe, now 42, who graduated from Ryerson’s school of journalism in 1980. His first jobs were with Canadian Press as a reporter in Toronto and then on Parliament Hill, as lifestyles editor and television critic, and as news editor. In 1989, he joined CBC Newsworld for two years, anchoring coverage of the Gulf War and hosting several current affairs programs. In 1991, CP hired him to be its Ottawa bureau chief. He continued contributing to Newsworld but gave up his eight-year freelance job as Canadian editor of Billboard magazine. In 1995, he became editor-in-chief and general manager at Southam News. A year later, Gordon Fisher, vice-president of editorial at Southam and assistant publisher at the Post, suggested to Conrad Black and Collins that LaPointe could help the ailing Spectator.

“It didn’t matter that he wasn’t from a newspaper,” says Fisher, but it did matter “that he was recognized to be a journalist of importance who had done some serious work in the business. He knows how to energize a newsroom and what motivates people to read. He knows what’s important to community because he’s very community-minded himself,” he says. “His weakness is an intellectual certainty that is sometimes a bit too rigid. He is so confident that sometimes he doesn’t see when he might be veering on the wrong road.”

“He’s a personality,” says Collins. “He comes with an ego. We needed somebody to believe this would be a great newspaper, who had a passion. Someone to mobilize a newsroom that had been demoralized.”

In January 1997, LaPointe’s editorial mobilization began. He hired about a dozen new reporters and shook up all the beats in an effort to gain fresh perspectives. Not surprisingly, some writers welcomed the switch, while others were irritated by the changes that moved a court reporter to education, the labour reporter to city hall, the food writer to the society column and the theatre critic to the university beat. When LaPointe first arrived, court reporter Barbara Brown says, “People thought he could be cantankerous and that he was going to be a hard-ass and we all deserved to have our asses kicked.”

During this period, LaPointe encouraged staff to do long, investigative stories. He also put more emphasis on Canadian and world coverage and rebuilt the Life section with the expertise of former Chatelaine editor Mildred Istona. Only a few months into the job, LaPointe was called to assist in inventing Black’s new national newspaper and the Spectator became home to the team charged with the task. In May 1998, with only five months to go before the launch, the Post’s editor-in-chief, Ken Whyte, asked LaPointe to be his executive editor, a job in which he’d be in charge of everything from picking out carpet and computer systems to human resources. LaPointe accepted, but not without regret. “I brought a lot of people here, I’ve given a lot of people different positions, I rearranged all the staff, I blew up all the systems and then I bounced out of town, and it bothered me a lot,” he says. “When you leave, you know it’s like a mother hen leaving her chicks. Some of them are going to die. Someone’s going to come and kill them, or they’re just going to die on their own because no one’s interested in fighting for them.”

Howard Elliott, deputy editor of the editorial page, jokes that after LaPointe left, he and Dana Robbins, deputy editor of news, called themselves the two-headed editor. “It was difficult to maintain the momentum,” he says. “The editor has to keep control, not only in the newsroom but in the community as a source of leadership, a symbolic power. There was no way that two people doing a whole other job could step in and do that.”

It took Collins until November 1998 to replace LaPointe with Maryanne McNellis, a former editor of the Financial Post, then owned by Sun Media, which now owned the Spec. When they hear her name, most people at the Spec simply roll their eyes. “Quite frankly, she didn’t want to be here,” says Collins. Three months later, McNellis was gone and Torstar was finalizing its purchase of the Spectator when LaPointe let it be known that he’d be interested in coming back?this time with the added title of associate publisher and an editorial budget of close to $10 million, an increase of 12 percent from what he’d had before. LaPointe attributes the decision partly to the hellish daily three-hour commute from the Post’s permanent office in Don Mills to his home in Hamilton. Moving his family to Toronto was not an option. He’d uprooted them several times already during his career. His wife, former CBC television host Denise Rudnicki, had sacrificed her own career by moving from Ottawa to Hamilton, and the family lives close to gifted schools for the two children, Michael, 12, and Vanessa, 14, and stables for the daughter, a promising dressage rider.

But LaPointe’s decision to return to the Spec was also professionally motivated. The opportunity to be number one at the Spec, rather than number three at the Post, had appeal. At the Post, LaPointe “was helpful in a lot of editorial decisions,” but his role was “largely administrative,” says Whyte. What LaPointe didn’t expect was Black to counter the Spec’s offer with the editorship of two other Southam dailies. “Barbara Amiel even called my wife and told her how important I was to the next generation in leadership at Hollinger.”

When he returned to the Spec in April, he brought in his little black book full of 150 new ideas. Since then, he’s implemented nearly every one. They include: hiring a training and development editor, increasing the freelance budget by over five percent and newsholes by 25 percent; adding new beats; increasing local content and world analysis; boosting coverage of kids, seniors, teenagers and relationships; and adding better-quality photography. He’s also taken a few risks. An example: on November 29, the Spec ran a story on the penis in the new Men and Women section. “It was like, whoooah,” LaPointe says. “This was new territory for a lot of our readers who will always come back and say it’s a family newspaper and we shouldn’t be doing these things. And so, we’ll do a lot more as time goes on. Not to be oblivious or insensitive to the readership, but if we want to make an appeal to anyone under the age of 40, we’ve just got to do some of these things.”

LaPointe believes the paper must fight for people’s time?so it had better be engaging. Today’s Spec is indispensable, he says. You can no more turn off the water supply than you can turn off the Spec. One of LaPointe’s complaints about the old paper was that there was “no hierarchy in news coverage. There was no decisiveness of what’s a big deal to us today. It was a totally flat situation.” He’s referring to the fact that most stories were the same medium size of nine-, 10-, 11-inch stories. “It sends the signal to the reader: ‘We don’t actually know what’s a big story.’ “

Now, when the Spectator wants to make a bang, readers notice. For example: a December 18 look at the Hamilton harbour and a deal made between the city and the harbour commissioners to make it a place for heavy industry as well as people. The Spec turned it into a major editorial package. The front page story was 24 inches, but there were three supporting articles inside plus a primer explaining the history of the harbour, an analysis on what the historic agreement will mean and an editorial.

For LaPointe, big stories also mean investigative, idea-driven initiatives, like the seven-part series called “North of Barton” that also ran in December. It was a thoroughly researched look at Hamilton’s north end, an area of the city categorized as a cesspool of poverty, pollution and health concerns. To pull readers in, the Spec commissioned seven paintings by Hamilton artist Chelo Sebastian. On the last day of the series, the main article looked to the future of the north end and offered a prescription on how to reverse its decline. To illustrate the feature, the artist depicted a rosy future for the troubled neighbourhood by showing three boys playing street hockey, surrounded by images of Hamilton’s landmarks, parks and harbour.

Another LaPointe innovation has been to assign a daily full-page feature, about 2,500 words, to a rotating group of 30 journalists. The feature could take a philosophical look at time, profile a local rabbi or investigate academic dishonesty at McMaster University. Now many readers complain there’s too much to read in the paper. “I wanted it to be a daily commitment, like a contract with the reader so they would believe in us,” he says. “A newspaper needs also to be a magazine in order to justify its price and value.”

Local and regional news coverage has also been emphasized, in order to compete with the prosperous, Southam-owned Brabant weeklies in the suburbs. Under previous regimes, the front section was reserved for national and international wire stories. Most local news appeared in second, third and sometimes even fourth sections. “The Spectator somehow lost its interest in covering suburban politics and tended to focus only on the city and parts of Burlington, and the consequence of that was it lost its impact in the community at large,” says John Bryden, MP for Wentworth-Burlington, who was also city editor at the Spectator during the 1970s. Now the front section is filled with news from Hamilton, Burlington and the surrounding suburbs, thanks to a redeployment of reporters and a large network of stringers and freelancers. “The trick is to do enough that people feel the majority of the significant local events are being covered by the paper,” says LaPointe. “They have some prominence.”

In addition to finding money to boost local news, LaPointe has spent five percent of his $10-million budget on world news. Since 85 percent of his readers don’t get The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail or the National Post, international coverage is a draw, so he subscribes to such news services as those of the New York Times, Washington Post and Knight-Ridder, and has exlusive Canadian rights to London’s Independent. As well, LaPointe has created “Home Fires,” a section with news gathered from the Internet for readers who have roots in other countries.

LaPointe also wanted to light a few fires in Hamilton, which is why he chose crime reporter Susan Clairmont to be the new city columnist, the Spec’s answer to Rosie DiManno, the Star’s provocative and unpredictable bad girl. As Clairmont herself says, she was hired “to create a ruckus.” In his October 2 column introducing Clairmont’s inaugural piece, LaPointe called her “brave and proud to represent the underdog.” In an in-paper ad campaign designed to emphasize the Spec’s columnists, the sweet looking Clairmont is shown in a full-page, gritty black-and-white close-up, placed beside a photo of a bundle of dynamite and a copy block that reads: “Every day there are debates waiting to explode behind the headlines. I’ll take you smack into the middle of the action and then light the fuse.”

And she’s done just that. Her first column on October 2, was a response to the request for a private funeral from the widow of a police officer who had been killed in a car accident. Clairmont stood up for the widow’s choice and wrote that police officers who attend the funeral of a fallen officer they never knew “are just part of the spectacle… Dignity, privacy and genuine grief are swamped by a selfish pop-psychology need to share the moment.” The column sparked dozens of angry letters, phone calls and subscription cancellations, mostly from police officers and their families. Karen Henshaw, chair of the Halton Regional Police Association wrote: “I have often been enraged by articles The Spectator prints, but not as much as Susan Clairmont’s column… Because of the bond, which you don’t seem to understand, when an officer is killed, the entire community feels it… Don’t make such cruel, off-the-cuff comments about things you definitely haven’t researched, except possibly from articles in the newspaper or a couple of calls. This is our life.”

“She’s a hit in that respect,” says LaPointe. “As long as she doesn’t get irresponsible or flabby, she’ll help define the paper’s image.” Since then, Clairmont has taken stabs at, among others, an anti-abortion extremist who e-mailed the newsroom a gruesome poem called Ode to Slepian, about the murdered American abortion doctor (“I should pick up the phone, call his number at Pro-Life Virginia and tell him to rot in hell. I should yell obscenities, compare him to Satan, question his intelligence, his morals, his right to exist on the planet”) and a convicted rapist who demanded conjugal visits with his wife (“Well listen up Reggie. Sex is a privilege you earn. You earn it through respect and consideration and?pay attention now?consent… If you hadn’t raped anybody, you could be having sex right now.”)

On November 4, Clairmont and LaPointe raised their biggest ruckus thus far. That day the newspaper chose to ignore a publication ban on the criminal history of a 19-year-old “gun-loving, convicted car thief” who had violated probation and was loose in the community. In her column, Clairmont described the man’s history including his 60-plus Young Offender convictions for such crimes as car theft, weapons offences, escaping custody and engaging police in two standoffs. In addition, LaPointe wrote an explanation about why the Spec ran the story: “We believe our loyalty is to our readers and the community; We believe that, at large, this young man represents a threat to public safety.” The Spec also ran several follow-ups and an editorial. Since then, LaPointe, Clairmont and two other reporters have been charged by police with violating the Young Offenders Act.

“The last time he was on the lam it was a serious situation, so we chose to tell all,” says LaPointe. “The right thing to do for our readership was not simply to describe him as an adult who had reached probation, who has three convictions. That was wrong. That was only part of the story. We had to tell his whole life history.”

It’s the one-year anniversary of the launch of the Post, and back in LaPointe’s office, he’s received several e-mails and phone calls and is feeling a bit nostalgic. Of the few decorations that adorn the walls are the front page of the first edition of the Post and a mock-up front page given to him as a going-away present. It features a photo of the staff holding up letters to spell, “We’ll miss you Kirk.” The headline reads: “LaPointe catches last berth on the Titanic: Day one typo cop caps career with a scenic cruise to Hamilton Harbour. Says Kirk: ‘From now on, I’m content just to be a spectator.'”

There are signs that LaPointe’s changes have had the desired effects. Hamiltonians are talking about the paper. Circulation is slowly increasing, from 103,000 on weekdays in 1997 to 107,000 in 1999, showing the first signs of steady growth in 10 years. And advertising is up 30 percent since Collins took over in 1996. This year, the Spec will enjoy a record year in revenues.

It’s a good start, but will his revitalization reagain lost readers? One journalist who has closely followed LaPointe’s career is skeptical. He calls the Spec editor an opportunist, referring to his job-hopping. “He’s a good talker,” he adds. “But everybody’s hard-pressed to point out any achievements in his career, other than his personal advancement.” Of LaPointe’s abilities as an editor, the journalist says he’s a “profound bullshitter…with a profoundly shallow view of a newspaper.” He says his ideas are unoriginal and formulaic. “He’s kind of like the Martha Stewart of editors,” he continues, referring to LaPointe’s obsession with new trends, like the decision to put Britain’s sexy new virtual newsreader on the front page of the Spec on January 26. “How lamo.”

LaPointe admits that people are speculating on where he’ll go next. After all, he’s become one of the country’s most sought-after journalists. “LaPointe is probably the brightest, most innovative editor of a newspaper in Canada,” says Miller. All LaPointe will say is that “I want to be able to stay long enough that I see what happens when success isn’t an alien word in our dictionary.”

As LaPointe stands by his desk, I look again at those Doc Martens on his feet. They may be comfortable, but they’re menacing-looking, too. “I don’t see this as a desperation situation right now, just as an urgent situation,” he said on an earlier day when he was clearly impatient with some of his employees. “I wish I could fire people. I actually wish I could walk them out to the parking lot and wish them well…we’re all too bloody busy to defend or to get into denial about our mistakes,” he said.

Outside the office, cars full of potential new readers are streaming down the highway that passes by the Spectator building. Inside, LaPointe looks to a future when the paper will be seen not just as a vehicle for carrying information, but one that holds knowledge and wisdom. “I think it will take a long time for readers to feel that a newspaper should be something other than just an instrument of news,” he says. “But I think if we can move them along, if we can say we can deliver you not just the facts today, but we can deliver you some context, some meaning and once in a while, some great insight, then we can become more valuable to readers.”

The steadily greying readership of newspapers has been a cause for concern among publishers for some years. Now, in the age of great newspaper wars, dailies are even more desperate to recruit younger readers. Meanwhile, teens, who are being courted by everyone from clothing stores to credit card companies, aren’t even reading enough papers to be considered a readership group by the Canadian Newspaper Association or NADbank: neither organization keeps statistics on 13-18-year-olds. And as one retired newspaper editor says, if they’re not interested by the time they’re in their teens, they probably never will be.

One tactic to tap the market has been to hire 20-something columnists to pen their profound pensées on life, and most often, themselves. An even more aggressive approach has been to develop whole sections for teen readers, much in the way papers used to offer special “women’s” sections. So far, no paper in Canada has rivalled Ohio’s Akron Beacon Journal—with its unfortunately named Yo! Kids—which it mercifully abandoned in 1997, but The Toronto Star’s Young Street, launched the same year, came close. This often-patronizing, always-whine section was chock full of “way cool” stories about social injustice, penned by young people, but reading as if they were written for their rec-room-crusader parents. Typical stories were “Child Workers Rescued from Carpet Factories” and “A Street Lesson in Poverty: Teen Girls Spend Night Meeting the Homeless.”

By January of this year, the whiz kids at the Star realized that stories on homelessness just aren’t jiggy and created Boom!—still whiny, but this time focusing on what all teens do best: navel-gazing. Boom! runs weekly features like “Has Feminism Made Us Forget About Boys?” “Guys Feeling Dazed and Confused” and “Using the Power of the Right Shape,” and article about female body image.

As Boom! struggles with growing pains, we thought we’d speculate on what some of Canada’s other dailies may be up to in their attempts to keep up with what the kids are staying these days.

Being denied the keys to Daddy’s Mercedes on a Friday night is quite enough social injustice for readers of the National Post’s Post Secondary, thank you very much. This section will provide stories junior Posties really need, like “87% of Teen Girls Unhappy with Toenail Shape,” celebrity news and service pieces like “How to Spot a Knock-off Prada Handbag.” Once a month, readers can look forward to “Chillin’ with Conrad,” an informative column warning youngsters away from “militant homosexuals, feminists, abortionists, eco-geeks, worker radicals and social agitators.”

The Globe and Mail has never been known for cutesey section heads. Its Youth will help no-nonsense young Bay Street hopefuls prepare for the inevitable with articles like “You’re Never Too Young to Start Your RRSPs,” recreation news like “Club Link to Offer Junior Membership Rates” and help in planning their education with articles like “Study Says Community College No Substitute for University.”

The Calgary Sun’s Fresh Meat section will showcase the best of young Calgary. Not skimpy in content, it will chronicle crime in the city with its “Young Offender of the Week” profile and help teens home their consumerism with articles like “Where to Find Stereo Deals.” Of course, it will also include plenty of surveys like “Where Did You Lose it?” and service pieces on career options for those interested in those wussy lefty jobs requiring a post-secondary education.

Emulating the Ottawa Citizen’s tradition of such investigative gems as an eight-part series on the life and times of a family of robins, Cool Cats is for the teen who loves everyone, human or beast. Full colour graphics will accompany stories like “Finding a Hobby that Makes You Happy,” “Helping Fido Cope When You Go Off to School,” and “How to Turn Your Pet into a Prom Date.” The paper that brought us 188 Shania Twain stories in 1998 won’t let its young readers down, promising at least that many Britney Spears stories in 2000.

Reporter Rick Gamble enjoys the challenge of local television news, whether that means reporting on a fatal car accident on nearby Highway 401 or, as he is doing on this late August afternoon in 1998, reporting on the annual “wiener dog” faces in the southwestern Ontario city of Cambridge, about 20 kilometres from the Kitchener station. The assignment has gone well: the crowd of 100 people and 30 Dachshunds put on a great show and cameraman Andrew Heubner grabbed some terrific shots of dogs bolting from their racing lanes. After finishing their live report for CKCO’s 6 o’clock newscast, the pair are in the midst of taping of wrap-up for the 11:30 news when Gamble’s pager goes off. A 12-year-old boy, he learns, may have drowned at Parkhill Dam on the nearby Grand River.

It takes Gamble and Heubner 10 minutes to get to the river’s edge. Awaiting them is an eerie scene: two boys wrapped in blankets watching police officers waist-deep in the Grand while others search from a Hovercraft. The three boys had been playing by the concrete dam when one fell in and was sucked by the rushing water into a small underwater opening.

As the sun slips below the horizon, Gamble and Heubner get to work. They shoot footage of workmen setting up massive lights to aid the searches. They interview witnesses. They are about to talk to Constable Kevin Chalk, an experienced driver, when he is pulled aside and told to suit up: another diver, Constable Dave Nicholson, is in trouble, possibly caught up the dam himself. Minutes later, Chalk jumps into the Grand and is soon followed by one officer after another. All grab the thick rope attached to the trapped diver. Nicholson’s partner leads the pull. Dozens of local residents who had been watching from shore run to help. But with more than 100 people pulling on the rope, it suddenly snaps and hearts sink. Gamble signals to Heubner to turn off the camera when a high-ranking officer start to cry after hearing that Nicholson is dead.

Two days later, the constable’s body was hauled out of the dam. They found him holding out of the dam. They found him holding the 12-year-old boy. Gamble covered the double drowning for 36 hours straight, though he wasn’t the only one who put in extra effort. The entire CKCO team was involved, through regular updates, an examination of the dangerous dam, a historical overview of accidents at this dam and others like it, and a live broadcast of the funeral of Constable Nicholson, father of three yound boys and the first officer to die in the line of duty in Waterloo Region.

For its efforts, CKCO won two prestigious prizes: the Edward R. Murrow Award, presented by the U.S.-based Radio Television News Directors Association for best ongoing coverage by a local TV station outside the United States; and the Canadian Association of Radio and Television News Directors’ award for nest-day coverage of a news event. But more importantly, CKCO staggers earned the gratitude of an entire community. Gamble says people stopped him “for weeks and weeks” to thank him and his coworkers for doing such a good job. Others delivered their kudos through thank-you cards, phone calls and ever home-baked good.

The coverage of the tragedy at Parkhill Dam was local TV news at its finest, and CKCO staffers are proud of the job they did. But after five years of cuts, CKCO’s ability to regularly offer its community such high-calibre coverage has been hamstrung. Since 1995, the midsize station has lost half of its newsroom staff, forcing those who remain to do more with less—a lot less. The result: an increasingly difficult struggle to produce decent local news.

CKCO represents what’s happening to news operations at small- and medium-size stations across the country as their corporate owners—CTV Inc., Canwest Global Communications Corp. and CHUM Ltd.— re-engineer and reshape themselves to deal with changing technologies, a changing marketplace and a changing regulatory environment. Of particular concern to journalists is a recent ruling by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. On June 11, 1999, the CRTC said that local TV news would no longer be regulated in terms of quality or quantity. In the past, broadcasters were forced to produce a certain amount of local news if they wanted access to lucrative local advertising. Those rules end as of next September. After that, broadcasters will still have to provide local programming if they want local advertising, but they will have much more latitude in deciding what that programming can be. They will no longer need the CRTC’s permission to shut down smaller stations and shrink hour-long local newscasts into 10-minute feeds for provincial newscasts, as has already been done in Saskatchewan and New Brunswick. They will also be able to do away with local news altogether in some markets. Either way, the new CRTC rules will likely mean fewer local news stories, leaving viewers with less information about the cities and towns in which they live.

John Matlock stares at his computer, trying to come up with a witty, concise way to tell the viewers of the noon news that it will be sunny today. “I’m not really a weather guy,” says CKCO’s news producer, “but I try to make it fresh every day. We used to have a sports anchor do sports and weather at noon, but in the redeployment of people we were able to do without by using sports tapes from the night before and having anchors voice-overs the weather.”

Matlock’s desk is loaded with mountains of papers, thick research files and a huge daytime. His load has increased in many ways, particularly after the station’s second producer was let go in 1997. Matlock, who’s been working in television for 22 years, uses the word creative a lot of describe how he and his remaining news staff have dealt with the cuts. For example, most of CKCO’s resources are now primarily dedicated to the 6 o’clock newscast, not the noon or 11:30 p.m. broadcasts, which carry numerous repeats from the supper-hour show. “It’s a creative way to do it, but it hasn’t hurt us so far,” she says unconvincingly, then adds that the CKCO infrastructure “right now maintains slightly more than the 6 p.m. news.” But what if there are more cuts? CKCO could not continue all that it’s currently doing. Matlock admits, but he hesitates when asked to be more specific about what would go.

Matlock has deep roots in this community. He grew up in Kitchener, and from time to time helped run the family business, an appliance rental company. He’s married to a CKXO anchor. Daiene Vernile. In 1986, Matlock left Kitchener to work CBC’s The Journal but only stayed a year. “I’m passionate about local news,” he says of his decision to return. “I want to protect it.” Then he smiles as if he wants to say more. Statements like that help explain why his staff adores him. “John Matlock is the guy who really drives the entire newsroom, as far as I’m concerned,” says reporter Jim Alexander. “There are certain high standards which he maintains and will not let slip. He just goes and goes and goes.” But the long hours and heavy workload have taken their toll on the 40-year-old producer. Twice he’s left the station, but both times, he’s been lured back.

Matlock gets excited when he talks about how CKCO provides local perspectives in provincial and national issues. After a national report damned many brands of smoke detectors, for example, Matlock’s staff interviewed area fire chiefs and found out what they thought of the faulty detectors. Another day, CKCO’s news staff tackled the once important issue of Y2K readiness and how local businesses were preparing. “Most people get their news from local stations,” Matlock says, adding that 200,000 viewers regularly watch CKCO’s 6 p.m. newscast. “Yet we’re the ones feeling hard done by. There’s no question people are watching.”

Matlock checks the clock: 11:58 a.m. and time to sprint to the control room for the noon broadcast. Various monitors flicker to life as CKCO Action News begins. Anchor Brent Hanson throws to reporter Frank Lynn at a local career fair, but sound glitches send the show back to the desk. The newscast chugs along with a report on skyrocketing local gas prices and a warning to parents after a man was reported to be stalking children at a Cambridge school. Then the weather.

“Just go to the five-day forecast.” Matlock tells the guy handling graphics. There’s been a screw-up with the maps. “We’re on the right map!” someone yells “No, we’re not,” the graphics guy yells back. The newscast moves ahead. At the commercial break, Matlock darts out to see what happened. It was a small problem, one most viewers wouldn’t notice, but mistakes chip away at a newscast’s credibility.

The graphics guy looks up and smiles. “There used to be a production assistant in here,” he says, explaining the screw-up. “But we lost the assistant in the last round of cuts. There was a writer who would fill in, but we lost another writer in the cuts, so they told the one writer left to stay in the newsroom. Then they pulled an editor from downstairs. Then they pulled an editor from downstairs. Most stations would have a production assistant, especially in Toronto.” Reporter Jim Alexander, who was the local union president until 1998, says the cuts at CKXO started in 1995 when the station’s owner, Kitchener-based Electrohome Ltd., best known as a projection systems manufacturer, laid off five administrative staff and closed the station’s Windsor bureau, which had two employees. The reasons: CKCO had a small operating loss in 1994 and Electrohome, which also owned another station in Edmonton, was struggling to shore up a falling stock price and increasing debt load ($32 million in 1995).

In August 1997, Baton Broadcasting lnc., owner of CFTO in Toronto and 14 other CTV outlets, threw Electrohome a lifeline. The two companies merged in a deal that gave Electrohome 8.3 million shares in Baton and $24.5 million in cash in return for stations CKXO and CFRN in Edmonton. Three months later, Baton grew even larger. It announced its takeover of the entire CTV network, giving the newly christened CTV Inc., control over nine more stations, raising the total to 25. The buying spree left CTV deep in debt and the network cut 28 percent of its workforce—630 jobs—between February 1997 and December 1999.

CKCO was hit hard, losing some employees who’d been there for as long as 33 years. In 1995, the station had 188 staffers. By the end of 1999, it had 115. Matlock’s news department was reduced from 44 full-timers and 13 part-timers by the end of 1999. The worst day was February 12, 1997, in what some all the off 154 people across the country. CKCO lost 20, including a producer, a reporter, a news writer and a camera operator.

Dennis Watson, CKCO station manager, says the cuts haven’t affected the station’s news operations. Alexander disagrees: “In the mid-’90s. We had fully staffed bureaus. Everyday we had contributions from Midland, Muskoka, Owen Sound. Most of that has been wiped out. Eight of the 10 bureaus are gone. We are no longer southwestern Ontario’s largest news team, which used to be our calling card.”

With the loss of so many reporters, complicated topics no longer get the attention they used to —nobody has the time to attach themselves to beat and dig deeper for information. “I don’t think people rely on us as a regular source of municipal information anymore,” Alexander says. “We do breaking news rather well—the fires, accidents. But I think where we are failing, where we used to be so very, very strong, is in cities likes Stratford, Brantford, Guelph, even Cambridge and the nearby townships—places within a 20-minute drive. We’re letting them down.”

Reporter Rick Gamble agrees: “The Parkhill Dam stories are always going to get done. My concern is for the stories that take time and energy and digging. Tough investigative stories are not being done as they once were.”

Of course the quality and quantity of local news in smaller markets is declining, says Howard Bernstein, who once worked at CTV, Global and CBC but now teaches broadcast journalism at Ryerson Polytechnic University. “How could it not? There are fewer people to do the jobs. Local stations are shrinking. That’s not an isolated case in Kitchener.” For example, he says, CKCO’s Queen’s Park bureau was closed in 1997. Now viewers in the Kitchener area get their news from Leon Korbee, CFTO’s Queen’s Park reporter, who occasionally files separate reports for CKCO and CTV’s other Ontario stations. “How does that make the provincial government responsible to anyone other than people in large cities?”

In other parts of Canada, the CTV cutbacks have been more drastic. Both Yorkton and Prince Albert in Saskatchewan lost their fully operational stations in 1998, a year before CTV reported profits of $7.7 million. Now the 200,000 mostly rural viewers, who once had daily noon and 6 p.m. broadcasts, have to turn to Regina and Saskatoon newscasts for short, taped segments about their areas. “We do the best with what’s left,” says Brian Schlosser, senior operating technician at CIPA in Prince Albert, an outlet that used to cover its 800-square-kilometre area with nine reporters and the ability to broadcast live. “At election time, we used to be pretty strong,” he adds. “all that’s lost now due to number crunching. And yeah, people notice. But with only three videographers, you have to look for only major stories.”

CJOH in Ottawa, another CTV station, has gone from 300 union employees to 91 in this decade, says Laurel Killmartin, who works in advertising and creative services. She admits the station may have had too many employees but adds that now it’s getting to be very difficult to do the same quality news with 200 fewer people on staff. In Vancouver, Art Simmonds, a broadcast journalist for 25 years and now a national broadcast representative for the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Unions, says that while big-city stations like BCTV in Vancouver and Toronto’s CFTO are healthy, “smaller- and medium-size stations have been devastated. Cuts don’t just occur in terms of staff, they occur in terms of how things are done. People are getting less quality information to make educated decisions about their communities and their lives.”

Mark Sikstrom, CTV manager of regional news and new media, won’t rule out more layoffs but insists company cuts have been spread across all news operations, including those in big cities and the national newsroom. The cuts are really a result of economic changes in the industry as a whole—10 to 15 years ago, main broadcasters only had themselves for competition. Now there’s cable and specialty channels—so many choices and competition is more intense. “We looked at where we could still make a contribution locally but avoid duplication—be efficient wherever possible.”

Sikstrom says local newscasts are “the roots of the CTV tree” and that the corporation is only as strong as the people who gather the news. But, he adds, “to remain competitive, we had to bring costs into line.” By competition, Sikstrom is referring primarily to Global, which wants to become Canada’s most-watched private broadcaster. Currently, CTV says it reaches 99 percent of the country’s English-speaking population via its own stations, cable and specialty channels and affiliated stations. Those holdings have recently attracted a takeover bid by BCE Inc., which covets the media giant’s news resources. The deal will provide content for BCE’s Internet service provider Sympatico, but is unlikely to mean significant re-investment n local TV news.

Global, now with eight stations, says it will reach 88 percent when the CRTC approves its purchase of the nine stations across Canada, including four in Alberta that are currently owned by Western International Communications Ltd.

Global has not made big cuts in local news for the simple reason that it doesn’t cover much local news to begin with. “Global has always been an operation run a lot closer to the bone, a lot leaner, and there isn’t as much room to cut,” says Trevor Henderson, a camera operator and union president at Global Vancouver.

Fri nuts start in 1974, Global was allowed to broadcast into homes across Ontario without operating local stations of offering local newscasts—on the condition that it exist only on national advertising, not local. Despite some rocky years early in its existence, Global is now thriving as a national broadcaster. Last year is reported a profit of $146.1 million. But despite its deepening pockets, Global continues to offer little in terms of costly local news operations, which gives it a competitive financial advantage over CTV.

Ken MacDonald, vice president in charge of news, says the team at Global is “putting more emphasis on being local, redoubling our efforts. People like and want local news. The best research indicates viewers want to know what’s going on around their community from a hometown news team.” But when asked to give examples of how Global was redoubling its efforts, MacDonald can only offer that the broadcaster has begun using a helicopter and has hired new staff—but both these addition are for Toronto.

Some critics, like Simmonds, the unionist in Vancouver, worry that if the CRTC approves Global’s purchase of WIC’s nine stations, the broadcaster will cut and merge operations to form provincial newscasts that leave smaller areas uncovered. He points to what happened in Saint John, N.B. In 1995, Global bought MITV and CHSJ from Irving Oil Ltd. It sold CHSJ to CBC, and turned MITV into a bureau to feed a Global Maritimes newscast in Dartmouth, N.S. It cut MITV staff from 120 to 20 in Saint John and reduced the number of reporters from 20 to 10. Clearly, says Simmonds, “Global doesn’t put the same priority on local news, or news in general, as other stations.”

But Kevin Babin, one of the remaining reporters at Global in Saint John, says that compared to what happened to ATV, the Maritimes network bought by CTV in 1997, his station is covering a lot more local news. “ATV has been decimated by cuts,” he says with an audible shudder. “They used to be everywhere; now it’s hard to find them. We’re extremely lucky.”

There are a few other private players scattered across Canada, the most noteworthy being CHUM, which owns Citytv in Toronto and five other small- and midsize stations in Ontario. The philosophy at CHUM is “hyperlocal,” meaning a huge emphasis on community stories backed by new resources for the news operations. But are local viewers better served? Based on what he’s seen from Barrie’s revamped station, University of Western Ontario journalism professor Michael Nolan says no—the newscasts are shallow, lack hard information and offer style over substance.

The lobby group Friends of Canadian Broadcasting is troubled by the loss and declining quality of local programming, says spokesman Jim Thompson. As an example, he points to what has happened in Winnipeg. According to a study commissioned by his organization, the quantity of local news programs available to residents in the Manitoba capital has dropped 20 percent in the past 11 years. Thompson says the CRTC decision to deregulate local news is wrongheaded. Friend’s research shows audiences want more local news than they are currently getting, not less.

What that means, says Thompson, is demand is outstripping supply when it comes to locally produced news about across Canada. The CRTC knows that an appetite for local news exists because the public made that clear at the CBC licence renewal hearings in 1999. The CRTC has since told the CBC it must reinvest in its local news. When it comes to private broadcasters. Thompson says his group is leery of less regulation, pointing out that despite the popularity of local news and the advertising it attracts, corporate owners have been downsizing it for the past five years.

At CKCO, John Matlock looks frustrated when he talks about the CRTC. “If stations want to sell local ads, they have to produce local news,” he says. “But there’s no definition of what that means anymore in terms of quantity or quality.” There’s all kinds of ways you can slice and dice newscasts into long-format documentaries or small, taped segments fed into province-wide newscasts, says Matlock. “But my fear is that it’s going to take a lot of character by a handful of people at the very top to maintain as much local service as they possibly can and to not let localism turn into tokenism.”

Andrew Wiley, vice-chair of broadcasting at the CRTC, helped develop the new policy. “In our opion, even without regulations local news will be provided,” she says, adding that it does not need to be regulated because it’s so successful in the ratings. The CRTC, is also allowing broadcasters to renew all of their individual station licences at one time, while Wiley says will be useful in evaluating a broadcaster’s overall commitment to serving the public Critics charge, however, that one-licence renewal will make it easier for megabroadcasters to leverage their size by trading off one commitment for another.

“Some may be saying that we are selling local news down the river.” Wiley continues, “but we say that would not be a reasonable response from the broadcasters. If they don’t serve their local audiences, we will put in different requirements. I may be optimistic, but I tend to believe that generally stations will want to build local loyalty. But we haven’t given up any or our powers.” Matlock hopes she’s right. He won’t come right out and say it, but it’s evident he’s seen enough cuts. He’s had enough tough decisions forced on him that lessen his ability to provide the 600,000 people in his community with solid coverage of the issues that affect them. But regardless of his desire to protect local news, there’s not much he can do when more and more power is being handed over to the megabroadcasters through the lifting of regulations and the consolidation of stations across the country.

Steve Simic, who left CKCO’s news staff in 1997 due to layoffs, sympathizes with Matlock. Simic now works as a producer at Rogers Media Inc.’s community cable channel in Kitchener, which he says is doing more local news, thanks to CKCO’s cuts. Matlock, he says, must be “very frustrated because money is driving the bottom line and even though he probably feeds he should be doing more, he can’t I’m sure he has days when he’s screaming.”

Matlock will only say that he and his staff will keep working as hard as they can and hope the cutting has stopped: “We didn’t stop covering the tragedy at Parkhill Dam on weekends, we followed it. Our people worked round the clock on that one. There’s no question that CKCO was the source for information as the events unfolded.” Matlock pauses and, chooses his words carefully: “For all the angst we feel, when we refocus and regroup, we know we’re doing good work. Will it continue when all the CRTC details come into effect? I don’t know. We are nursing local news along. I haven’t really felt pinched yet. But I guess I’m numb to it.”

A dozen broadcasters file into the Speaker’s gallery at Queen’s Park, a legislative locker room perched high above Ontario’s elected MPPs. They’ve reported dutifully for the annual Speaker of the House election, but their attention is focused, more or less, on another man: Steve Gilchrist. The Conservative minister of municipal affairs and housing is under Ontario Provincial Police investigation after allegedly telling developers to go through his own personal lawyer, Tory fundraiser Peter Proszanski, to get an audience with him – a privilege that’d cost them $25,000 each. Even juicier, Gilchrist has a criminal record for tax evasion dating back to 1984, shared with his father, who was at the time a federal Tory MP. It’s not quite Zippergate, but it’s something for the boys and girl in the Speaker’s gallery to yak about anyway. “Let’s get one more shot of Gilchrist for the archives,” cracks one reporter as the rest assume slouched poses on the carpeted bench seats or lean over the polished wood rail. Their barbs are halfhearted though: they need good shots of Gilchrist, but his communications staff has been doing its best to avoid that, staging photo op after photo op to force the cameras to focus on the brighter side of Tory life.

As the House is called to order for the election, the acerbic gossiping in the press gallery quiets down a little. “Oh my god, look at his hair!” hisses one reporter in a stage whisper, referring to an MPP below. “I guess the pre-electoral dye job is growing out.” Camerapeople and reporters take his lead, trash-talking the politicians below on everything from their intelligence (or reputed lack thereof) to their weight – anything to make this part of the day go faster so they can get to the good stuff.

After the election, they scurry out to the hallway. Cameras ready, they congregate, waiting for their last shot at a quality mike-in-face picture today. Gilchrist has got to come out sometime, and if it’s to say he’s resigning, they’d better get it on tape.

“We’re gonna ask him about the housing thing. If he’s already resigned, he’ll have to say so,” says Neal Kelly, Global’s Queen’s Park producer. It’s a sacrifice of sorts, an easy question designed to provoke a good clip for tonight’s newscast. The “housing thing” was a press conference held earlier that day by Toronto Parkdale-High Park MPP Gerard Kennedy protesting a Gilchrist-approved rent increase of as much as 50 percent. Kennedy, sitting at a brown desk in front of a grey curtain, flanked by two unhappy tenants just wasn’t “sexy” enough for the increasingly flashy evening news – only CBC attended.

As MPPs file out, CBC’s Adam Vaughan, now with Citytv, randomly asks them, “Are you the new minister of municipal affairs? Areyou the new minister of municipal affairs?” It’s a feeble joke and the MPPs walk right past him – none of them smi- ling, many not even bothering with a dirty look. This waiting game has been going on for almost two weeks now. And it’s getting desperate. Yesterday, the media followed Gilchrist down this very hallway for almost half an hour. “I don’t think he said anything but, ‘I’m walking to my car,'” says Kelly. “But it made for some good pictures seeing him running away like that.”

As Gilchrist emerges, the reporters squeeze in around him. With microphones in his face and lights in his eyes, the minister coolly rationalizes his support of the rent increases, thanks the media and walks away with a tight smile on his lips. The reporters pack up. “Damn!” says Kelly. “That was a waste of time.”

Across town just a few hours earlier, a grinning Grade 2 student named Stephanie was helping Premier Mike Harris make the most of his time at Harwood Junior Public School. Basking in the attention of a roomful of reporters, she spoke about her vision of Ontario in 2020 to the other 17 kids in the classroom, the principal, her teacher and – if the communications staff who organized the event would have its way – the rest of the province. Afterward, Premier Harris and Helen Johns, minister of citizenship, culture and recreation, gathered the children around to read from My Ontario, a collection of student works being put together as part of Ontario’s Millennium Project. It was vibrant, adorable and, most importantly, not remotely related to the Gilchrist affair.

TV newsmakers need vivid images to illustrate their stories. Harris’s Tories, easily the most communications-savvy provincial government this country has ever seen, are delighted to oblige – on their terms. They dodge negative coverage at every chance and will go to ridiculous lengths – giving preferential treatment to friendly reporters, shutting out critical ones and staging elaborate, unrelated events – to avoid it. Because they know the demands of getting on the news are a lot like the demands of the Miss Universe pageant: you’ve gotta be sexy, you’ve gotta have charm and you’ve better have something interesting (but not too complicated) to say.

With expectations so superficial, many television journalists are losing the incentive and initiative to go out and chase stories beyond the pre-packaged photo ops offered up by government communications staff. Even if they want to go beyond these prefab items, with shrinking political reporting staff and dwindling resources, they can only pursue one or two stories a day. Government PR people know this and are prepared to make it easy for journalists to get their precious pictures, provided the coverage doesn’t end up being too hard on them. The result is political coverage that serves no purpose other than promoting a government that’s already very good at promoting itself.

In the crowded Global bureau, reporter Monica Kim is chatting with Doug the cameraman. “I was talking to a journalism student today about how television reporting compares to print reporting and right in the middle of our talk, a viewer phoned to ask where I got my hair done!” she says, tittering, as Kelly returns. Looking rumpled but determined, he searches for a press release on his desk, a jumble of binders, Post-it Notes, Beta tapes and dusty editing equipment. He failed to score a lively clip at the scrum, and he still doesn’t have a visual hook to update the story. Kelly sits to discuss the plan with Kim. “Okay Monica, so you’ll do a summary of today. Start with the school thing.” He knows the event was a deliberate deflection from Gilchrist, but he needs pictures and this is all he’s got. “It’s Harris, and it’s something visual we can put in the story,” says Kelly. “Of course we’re going to say what they’re really doing.” Score one for the Tories.

Head games like this are played every day between reporters and communications staff. Veterans are fond of telling rookies (and a journalism student writing on the subject) about the time in October 1984 when Lesley Stahl said on air what President Ronald Reagan was really doing: she called him on all the prom-ises he had failed to keep, particularly to the poor, since his election, calling him a president who “highlights the images and hides from the issues.” But minutes after the CBS Evening News Broadcast was over, Richard Darman, Regan’s deputy chief of staff and Michael Deaver, a republican political consultant, called to thank Stahl. They’d watched it with the sound off, and without her verbal assault, it was just five minutes and 40 seconds of sweet, wholesome pictures of the American president with balloons, the president with the flag and the president with needy children.

As Stahl found out, consistently getting the right pictures on the evening news is a PR tactic designed to keep government in the public favour. Harris’s communications staff, many of whom are trained by Republicans in the U.S., subscribe to the Mike Deaver school of thought: they know they can’t control what journalists say, but they do their damndest to control what they show. Robert Fisher, a Global anchor and host of Focus Ontario, a weekly half-hour political analysis show, says he’s never seen such tight control by a premier’s office in his 19 years of political coverage.

“This government, unlike any governments before it, is absolutely obsessed with image,” he says, “whether it’s what shirt the premier wears or what the bus looks like or what backdrop he’s in front of. I don’t remember governments before being that concerned. If they stood in front of a grey curtain, they stood in front of a grey curtain. I’ve seen these guys change the curtain because it clashed with the premier’s suit.”

Harris does look good on camera. On a sunny day last May, he stood before a crowd of supporters, his blue denim shirt neatly pressed, his silver hair glinting in the sun. “McGuinty’s been making a lot of promises,” Harris said of Liberal candidate Dalton McGuinty, his competition for the provincial election, a playful glint in Harris’s eye belying the stern expression on his face as he surveyed the crowd. “So many, in fact, that we had to use this special spend-o-meter to keep track of Dalton.” At this, Harris gestured stage left and the cameras focused in on a giant, orangy-red, rectangular structure. A piercing kazoo sound squealed, a siren mounted on top of the monstrosity flashed and a big black needle traversed a photo that made McGuinty look like an oversized weasel caught in headlights. As Harris listed McGuinty’s proposed spending initiatives, the needle crept incrementally across his face. “That’s something Dalton just doesn’t get. That it’s taxpayers’ money that he wants to spend.” The playful glint gave way to a broad, triumphant smile as cheers erupted from the crowd. No doubt an accurate preview of his communications staff’s reaction as they watched the event unfold again and again on all the major news stations in the province that evening.

Wallace Pidgeon, who worked as Harris’s press secretary from fall 1997 until last fall, doesn’t come off as a man who would cheer out loud. In fact, entering from his new office into the lobby of Hill and Knowlton (a Toronto PR firm known around the Queen’s Park television bureaus as the place “where Tory hacks go to die”) he is barely noticeable. Both the man and the surroundings are subdued in overwhelmingly neutral tones of blue, beige and grey.

Pidgeon isn’t big on facial expressions. He speaks to everyone in the same way, like a PR form letter, inserting the name of whoever he’s addressing frequently and jamming each sentence with PR-speak. “We’re dealing with professionals, Kali. They know what they’re doing. It’s a matter of us looking to journalists, Kali, looking to the industry, looking to television and trying to figure out how we can best get our message out,” says Pidgeon. “My job is to build the trust, the understanding that I’m able to help you get your story out, and you’re able to get my message out.”

While Pidgeon doesn’t stand out in a scene, he devotes his life to creating them. Once media place themselves in his trusty hands, his next goal is to make the rest of the process as easy as possible for reporters and, more importantly, camerapeople. “That’s probably the greatest thing I concern myself with,” says Pidgeon. “Making sure, for example, that when the cameraperson is walking down the street backwards, and you know there’s a mailbox or a garbage can there, that they have the confidence in you that you can just grab their belt and say, ‘Hey, Doug. It’s me, Wallace. I’m right here. You can back up another five steps.’ Then they can get their shot.” Pidgeon also prides himself on having an ample supply of steno pads, pens and even quarters for the phone. Anything to help. “Little things like that go a long way,” he says. “That’s what keeps them coming and that’s the intention.”

Pidgeon really knows how to work the little things. He believes his most inspired contribution to the 1999 election campaign was shuttling Harris and a giant jar of loonies from one small-town diner to another so the premier could enjoy a casual cup of coffee with taxpayers. “It became a very good and effective way for us to get out the message that there was a tax cut, the tax cut was working, and here’s what people are able to see back,” says Pidgeon.

It was also a pretty easy gig for journalists. The table was always placed in the middle of the room so that there was plenty of space for the cameras to manoeuver, there was always good light and there were plenty of outlets. “They had to be able to catch reactions,” says Pidgeon. “If there were smiles and the loonie jar, then the message gets out. If there were no smiles and no loonie jar in the shot, then we didn’t succeed. But we always did.”

Reporters like Robert Fisher remember the loonie tour with a little less reverence but concede that it was one of the more successful publicity stunts. “It became a bit of a joke really. He lugged this damn jar of loonies everywhere he went,” says Fisher. “And Deb Hutton, one of Harris’s senior advisors, it became her job to polish the jar. So help me, this woman – probably the most hated woman at Queen’s Park, but very powerful – had a cloth and she would take the fingerprints off the jar and shake the loonies so they looked all even. Talk about being obsessive-compulsive.”

Being offered flawless pictures isn’t the kind of help reporters need, but it’s the only help they’re getting. CTV’s Queen’s Park bureau, which had three full-time reporters in February 1997, now depends on one CFTO reporter. Global also has just one. The Ministry of Health, however, has a communications staff of 40. “I’ve sort of adapted to it more, maybe because I’m younger and I can go with the flow a little more,” says Kelly. “But it drives guys like Robert Fisher nuts. In his day, we always did issue stories, issues were important.” Fisher admits the decreasing emphasis on solid political reporting does aggravate him, but he recognizes why it’s happening. Issues don’t usually make for good pictures and, once reporters commit their meagre resources to a superficial event, they can hardly afford not to cover it.

This budget-induced apathy is compounded by the stations’ general disinterest in traditional political coverage. Bill Fox, author of Spinwars, who has been both a political journalist and a communications advisor for Brian Mulroney, says news executives are giving up too easily. “Behind a lot of this focus on dumbing the news down is the belief that you can’t communicate anything of substance on television. But the academic research indicates the opposite. Used properly, television is an excellent medium to communicate very complex issues,” he says. Used improperly, local news becomes more vulnerable to communications initiatives. “You won’t have the time to get behind the pre-packaged announcement,” says Fox. Over time, consumers will realize that and move on. North Americans are already giving up the evening news as a source of daily information. In the late 1970s, 92 percent of Americans watched one of the big three stations’ evening news but that number, according to Fox, is now below 60 percent.

Toronto news organizations don’t seem deterred by these statistics and, according to Kelly, are perpetuating the dumbing-down trend. “We’re an inch thick and a mile wide,” he says. “TV news has always been very shallow and in the past five years we’ve become even more so. It’s shorter clips, shorter stories, more pizzazz. Reporters are focusing on doing fun things, entertainment things.” Indeed, the shelves of the Global bureau are lined with beta tapes of such things: Harris with the spend-o-meter, Harris flipping burgers, Harris being nice to animals. Kelly, pointing out these examples off-handedly, mimics the credo handed down by his superiors: “‘Don’t give me serious, big issues unless you can make them sort of fun and sexy. You’ve got pictures? Great. I don’t want to hear the story. Don’t give me details, just get me the pictures.’ That’s the new rule of TV. It’s gotta hit you.”

Leon Korbee, CFTO’s lone Queen’s Park reporter, clenches his fists when the topic of sexy news is broached. An old-school newsman, he still believes that substance and honesty are more important than flash, and refuses to see himself as the loser in the communications vs. reporter bout. As he speaks, his voice echoes slightly in the breezy room and sunshine tumbles in through the floor-to-ceiling windows, illuminating the dust on the three empty desks in the bureau. “The litmus test is, Do the images match reality? Do the images reflect fact or what I see as a journalist to be fact?” says Korbee. “If they don’t, you have choices to make.”

Korbee chose not to attend Harris’s event at Harwood Public School. Instead, he did a stand-up from the bureau. “I could have used those pictures, but I wasn’t doing that story. The Tories would have dearly loved it if I had used those pictures because it was right in the middle of the Gilchrist thing,” says Korbee. “And if you don’t use their pictures – it’s not televised radio – you’ve got to find an alternative picture. Unfortunately, that will usually mean that I use the far more boring television picture.”

By December 22, Neal Kelly was more interested in getting ready for Christmas than in the Gilchrist saga, which had been dragging on since September. But, when the call came that the OPP report on Gilchrist was in and Harris would scrum at 1 p.m., he rushed from Global’s Don Mills office and headed to the Park. Pulling into the gallery parking lot, he noticed Gilchrist’s gold Dodge, and assumed he’d been cleared and would comment.

He was right – sort of. Kelly arrived in the midst of the Premier’s statement “While the police found no evidence of criminal wrongdoing, in every comment a minister makes, he or she must exercise the good judgement that I expect and that I believe the public expects from members of my cabinet.” By the time Kelly left, the gold Dodge was gone. “The premier obviously spoke to him that morning and didn’t want him to face the media,” he says. “He called the scrum and Gilchrist hightailed it out of here.”

Gilchrist’s departure amounted to less than two minutes of coverage on Global’s evening news. An innocent verdict and a quiet exit are hardly the ingredients of sexy television, after all, and the PR staff made sure reporters never got a hold of anything jucier.

“They’re good at what they do,” admits Global’s Robert Fisher. “I’ve got to give the devil his due.”

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Just off camera, beside CTV’s national news desk, a row of new computers lines the front wall of the sleek, open-concept studio. As we walk along beside them, Henry Eaton, CTV’s vice-president of strategic planning, explains how 25 new, full-time staff are preparing to launch the online component of Newsnet – the network’s 24-hour headline news service.

Near the Newsnet studio, anchor Ken Shaw is preparing for a newscast. He goes over his copy and checks out information on a monitor embedded in the anchor desk, hidden away from the camera. Digital media has already changed the network behind the scenes; Shaw tells me he sometimes announces breaking news from reliable online services like CNN.com, straight from his laptop to the air. Now digital media is set to transform the network on a more visible level. “In a few months,” says Shaw, “you won’t recognize us.”

CTV’s new site is set to take viewers far beyond the ho-hum news offerings currently available in Canada. Apart from providing users with advanced navigability and broadcast-quality video on demand, Newsnet will be the first in this country – and likely the world – to offer video-dominated content as well as compatibility with WebTV. In WebTV, Internet information is routed though phone lines or cable for display on a TV screen. Those features may not sound wildly impressive to the uninitiated, but they represent the future of information technology, a future the IT industry is banking on. Newsnet is the most ambitious project of its kind ever to be undertaken by a broadcaster on the World Wide Web and it just may change the way others deliver journalism online. After years of procrastination, CTV’s brain trust finally decided to meet the challenges of the digital future face-on, jumping light-years ahead of the competition. In doing so, it will redefine how Canadians view broadcast news. For the first time, they’ll have the choice of watching TV journalism online when they want. That’s a far cry from the present state of Canadian broadcasting online – which is still largely in its infancy. So far, it has been limited to text with still images and occasional streaming video samples. (With streaming video, users don’t have to wait to download a large file before seeing video. Instead, video is sent in a continuous stream and is played as it arrives) Even CTV’s online news presence has offered nothing more than a token page filled with digital head-shots of Lloyd Roberston and Sandie Rinaldo.

But when it launches this September, Newsnet will set a new standard for showcasing news online. The site will primarily offer video content, though the network is also working on a strategic deal with one of Canada’s major newspaper chains (the chain is yet to be announced) that will provide supplemental text linked to the stories.

Henry Eaton’s demeanor is casual, but he talks excitedly and at length, like a six-year-old showing off a new toy in his room. We sit down to go through the features of the site, which is still in the testing phase. The idea behind all the technology, he explains, is to provide a richly interactive, video-driven environment that will put viewers in control of the news they consume. On their computers or WebTV sets, viewers will get an interlaced multimedia package where a main story, related video streams, text information, hyperlinks and ads are all pre-linked together – ready to be manipulated as the user wishes. If you’re a sports fan, for instance, you can configure Newsnet’s main page to load up stories tailored to your interests. Likewise for business, entertainment and politics. What sets this apart from other broadcast websites is that viewers will be able to manipulate video information as easily as the text they’ve been manipulating for years.

Newsnet’s site is divided into live video streams, a navigation bar, a table of links and a headline ticker – all of which can be customized by the user. Click on the footage of civil unrest in the Middle East to the right of Lloyd Robertson’s head and the site will take you to another stream with more video on that story. Click on the stock ticker scrolling below Robertson and Newsnet will whisk you away to more visual information on that stock from the TSE. Online video feed will be taken directly from Newsnet’s 24-hour TV news channel as well as CTV’s national TV news and affiliate station broadcasts. “We are the video news kings,” says Eaton, “and we’re going to import that onto the Web.”

The one question Eaton won’t answer is how much this endeavour will cost. Toronto-based e-business consultant Jim Adams estimates that setting up this kind of site could run anywhere from $750,000 to $1 million. Eaton acknowledges that the network isn’t expecting much financially from the page in the first few years but realizes it’s time to break into new media. “We’re going to develop out the site,” says Eaton, “and we’re not going to see any profit from it, but it’s something we feel we should do.”

The numbers for viewership, however, look good. When Newsnet launches online, some 500,000 Canadian households who already have broadband connections will be able to access the news site. Broadband allows information to pass through the technological equivalent of a fat digital pipe, instead of the thin straw that existed before. Such high-speed connections are a prerequisite for effectively streaming Newsnet’s video. For the other five million households (Canada has half the cable Internet users in the world) whose dial-in modems run at 28,800, 33,600 or 56,600 bits per second, the video streams will appear choppy – like a string of slides changing a couple of times a second. But the number of broadband users is increasing rapidly. In 1996, Rogers began offering cable-modem Internet access that runs 100 times faster than a 28.8 kps modem. Then, last year, Sympatico introduced ADSL technology, which allows its subscribers to surf the Net at 30 times the speed of a conventional modem and talk on the phone simultaneously. As these broadband connections become more popular, workplace computer networks that are attached to the net through T1 connections (which offer 1,000 times the speed of a dial-up modem) are also becoming more widespread. Indeed, research has shown that people are most likely to surf the Net for news while at work.

No one can be certain when broadband will hit a critical mass, as TV did in early 1960s, and allow separate media to converge. When that convergence happens, it will dissolve the distinction between TV and the Internet. Broadcasters and webmasters are looking forward to that day, when one wire will connect various devices, like phones, televisions and computers, to the Net.

Until recently, there has been a lack of high-quality broadband content on the Net, providing little incentive for home net users to pay the roughly extra $20 a month for high-speed access. That began changing in 1999 with a surge in the number of Internet radio stations, web-only sitcoms and talk shows and streamed video newscasts. America On-Line’s January buy-out of Time Warner Inc. will accelerate the process, since this new company will have the resources to make slickly-packaged broadband entertainment and news programming – upping the stakes for major media organizations everywhere. Meanwhile, communications giant BCE’s takeover of CTV will give Newsnet more clout.

At this point though, Canadian broadcasters online are staring into a black hole – no one knows what the audience will demand of TV news once all media enters the home through a single digital pipe. Hedging bets on technology like WebTV, CTV is hoping to capitalize on a booming digital culture. Indeed, even before widespread broadband penetration paves the way for convergence, Newsnet may be able to start building a strong viewership with Canadians who already have high-speed hookups.

Broadcasting online needs to stand out in the global information jungle. Newsnet may help TV journalism find its niche on the Web. With the proliferation of specialty cable channels, home digital satellite services and websites, media landscape has been turned on its head. During the past 10 years, networks have shifted their attention from broadcasting to narrowcasting. In Canada, two national networks have had to service the interests of all English-speaking viewers. Narrowcasting focuses content on very specific interests or demographics, giving viewers a wide range of options – from Home & Garden Television to Space: The Imagination Station.

“The difficulty has been that TV is a generic product,” says Mark Schneider, host of CTV’s Digital Desk, who also sits on the new media advisory board of the Canadian Association of Broadcasters. He’s talking about the perils of 21st century broadcasting. “It’s like throwing a handful of darts at a dart board. If you are really good at identifying viewer interest and demographics, you might be able to turn one or two of those darts into guided missiles. But we haven’t figured out how to deliver these products online. It’s a huge intellectual jump that not many have made yet.”

On the Net, competition is even more fierce than it is on TV. Our national news websites – whether generated by newspapers, TV networks or Web portals like Sympatico or CANOE – must compete with each other. National sites also compete with regional ones, which have better local news, and international news organizations, which have much larger budgets. “The audience has become untethered from the TV,” says Schneider. “We’re struggling to keep up.”

If networks are to truly alter the media landscape in Canada, he says, they must provide a sense of discovery beneath the flashy surface they hope to wow us with. “I’d like to see more humanity on the Net, more souls. Who are these people behind the news?” adds Schneider. Slick packaging and dynamic navigating may outglitter TV, but a site must aim for imaginative, in-depth reporting if it hopes to lure Canadians away from TV. “We must offer a portal by which people can influence the news agenda. We must create a door to people who are programming these TV sites. I’d like to see a news website where every reporter’s face, e-mail and biography are posted so you can see what story that person is working on and what it means to them. Everyday people should be able to see the guts of the news business.”

But all this still lies ahead. Amidst the recent hype about streaming video and broadband, many new media content developers have forgotten about the Internet’s potential as a two-way medium between consumers and producers of the news. Technological bells and whistles are just the beginning. True change will happen only when someone figures out how to use them effectively and meaningfully. In the meantime, Newsnet is at least on the right wavelength

For freelance magazine writers in Canada, a beleaguered bunch at the best of times, the news came like a rejection slip. On January 19, Southam Inc. announced that Saturday Night, the country’s last general interest monthly, would become an insert in the weekend National Post. The venerable 113-year-old commentary on Canadian culture will be, according to the Post line, going back to “its historic roots” as a weekly. But many freelancers couldn’t help wondering if it meant their role at the magazine would also belong to the past.

Long considered Canada’s most prestigious publication by freelancers, Saturday Night was also – as of its last monthly issue in March – the best paying magazine in the country, and one of the few that consistently gave writers the space needed to tell a story properly. More issues mean more content, though the smart money says the bulk of it will be provided by Post staffers, with the odd piece imported from across the pond. And writers worry the few freelancers who do get work won’t get paid as much. With a shrinking number of attractive, high-paying markets and an increasingly hostile relationship between writers and editors, the freelance writer is looking more and more like an endangered species in this country.

A weary Derek Finkle was worried about this long before the news about Saturday Night became public. One afternoon last October, Finkle was having a beer with his 4 p.m. breakfast at a bar called The Auld Spot Pub on Danforth Avenue in Toronto. His menu decision, coupled with his shoulder-length hair, made him appear more like a rock star than a freelance writer. Then he began talking economics. A regular Saturday Night, Toronto Life and Flare contributor, Finkle expressed frustration at Canadian pay rates that have not changed in well over 10 years. Compared with American rates – which range between US $1 and US $2.25 per word (big name writers can demand even more) – Canadian pay appears just short of criminal. “It’s like you’re trapped in an endless cycle,” he said. “You’re going to be paid a dollar a word for the rest of your life.”

Or, more accurately, until you burn out. There is no retirement fund for freelancers, though some suggest residuals from electronic republication could serve as one in the same way SOCAN cheques do for musicians. The problem with such a proposal is that publishers see no reason to part with extra revenue reaped from the electronic reproductions of previously commissioned stories. In fact, some standard contracts now give the publication – rather than the writer – not just electronic rights, but rights for any means of transmission yet to be invented. When Rogers Media Inc., former magazine powerhouse Telemedia and other publishers moved to grab e-rights in their contracts a few years back, it reminded freelancers how badly they are exploited.

Most freelancers responded with grimaces and complaints, though a few brave souls decided it was worth the effort to fight for what they believed belonged to them. Freelance writer Heather Robertson launched a $100-million class action suit against the Thompson Corporation. Represented in the suit are freelancers who sold work to The Globe and Mail and had their work reprinted without permission in the InfoGlobe electronic database. In the United States, Jonathan Tasini, president of the National Writers’ Union, won a landmark copyright case against The New York Times last September when a federal appeals court ruled that using newspaper articles in a database without the author’s permission was a copyright violation.

Publishers have seen profits rise with ancillary, electronic revenue streams and their magazines have grown fatter with ads since the last recession ended, but editorial staffs have stayed thin. Editors, unlike their counterparts in advertising, have not gone after publishers for bigger budgets. And that’s just fine with publishers. “You rarely hear readers talk about bylines,” says Paul Jones, publisher of Maclean’s, “If the readers don’t care, why should the editors and publishers care?”

They should care. Readers may not look for bylines, but they easily recognize high-quality content. And the assembly-line mentality that has developed at many of the country’s magazines is hardly conducive to producing top-notch journalism. These days, it seems, the main goal is to just get the product out. Instead of taking the time to teach writers the craft of magazine writing, many editors prefer to rewrite. “More rewriting goes on because good writers get tired of crappy pay and leave the business,” says freelancer and Chatelaine contributing editor Kim Pittaway. “And newer writers don’t get better because they don’t get the time and attention.” Simply put, a good number of editors see freelancers as providers of raw materials, not as talented suppliers of finished product. The use of freelancers as glorified researchers is a throwback to an era before the birth of New Journalism. A more literary and scene-heavy style, New Journalism made the writer’s voice an essential part of a magazine piece. After it first appeared in Esquire and New York in the late 1960s, The Canadian and Toronto Life began assigning handling editors to help writers improve pieces and get to the heart of their craft. Staff writers lost their jobs, and freelancers – suddenly cared for and appreciated – became the principal content providers for the country’s magazines.

But today’s speeded-up working environment, coupled with a slew of younger, less experienced editors, has all but forced that nurturing environment into the realm of nostalgia. Anne Collins, Jocelyn Lawrence, Jim Sutherland and Anne Vanderhoof are some of the solicitous old-school editors whose absences are felt in today’s less civil freelancing climate. Toronto Life’s John Macfarlane, one of the last “writer’s editors” in Canada, says editors’ mediocre pay (usually between $35,000 and $55,000 a year) and increased workloads mean a high turnover rate. And younger editors – many of whom come from newspapers where tight deadlines preclude social niceties – have not learned from the older generation how to treat writers. “There are fewer editors than there used to be,” Macfarlane says, “and they’re working harder. They don’t have the time for the care and feeding of freelancers that they used to.”

The inevitable result is a growing climate of hostility between editors and writers. Writers resent the editors who constantly rewrite their work, and many editors, especially those with a newspaper background, seem to hold little respect for writers who don’t fit the institutional mentality of the newspaper world. Tony Keller, the goateed, fresh-faced editor of National Post Business, who came over from the Globe in early 1999 with virtually no experience in the magazine industry, is typical of this new breed of magazine editor. He concedes the small number of top Canadian writers working for the country’s magazines is a consequence of poor writer remuneration, but rejects freelancers’ cries of ill treatment. He claims courtesy is an unwritten part of his job description. “There are so few good freelance writers in Canada,” says Keller, “that I had better be nice to the ones that are capable of stringing something together that a reader might actually want to read.”

Indeed, award-winning writers Ian Brown and David Macfarlane feel both respected and appreciated by the editors they work with. But that kind of contented feeling was not on the menu when a group of mostly young freelancers gathered at Corso Italia, a hip eatery in Toronto’s Little Italy, on a warm night this past October. It was one of several informal freelance gatherings organized in recent years by A-list writer David Hayes and Alex Gillis, one of Hayes’s former students and a budding freelancer in his own right. Like its predecessors, the evening at Corso Italia afforded an opportunity for freelancers to swap work stories, keep abreast of changes pertinent to their jobs and whine a little to colleagues – among them Hillary Davidson, Mikala Folb, J.Timothy Hunt, Laura Penny and Diane Peters – who understand.

With the average freelancer earning $20,000 a year, money is an issue, but the writers at Corso Italia mostly complained about a lack of respect. Editors, they said, don’t realize freelancers are forever immersed in a multitude of projects. And why, they asked, do editors have such a problem with returning phone calls, even the repeated kind. “Just respond,” said Folb with a self-deprecating laugh. “Just tell me to fuck off.” Editors sometimes see things differently. Recalling his days as editor of Saturday Night, National Post editor in chief Ken Whyte says that while he worked with some fantastic freelancers, a number of others had expectations that exceeded their professionalism. “Their pitches were ill-considered, their expectations were often too high, and they seldom delivered on time and to length.”

So maybe editors are just returning the favour as they consistently look for new ways to shortchange freelancers. Take kill fees for example. Traditionally, they are only supposed to be used when a piece is beyond hope, and not if a magazine decides against running – or opts to shorten – a piece because of space or timeliness. But it is not such a black-and-white matter according to Keller. When he took over as head of National Post Business, he made a point to get input from Canada’s magazine editors as to when a kill fee should apply. He found no consensus. “It’s shocking, but not surprising,” says Ian Brown. “Magazines are reprehensible in all matters with regard to paying writers.” A similar anger, in an earlier time, was an impetus for forming the Periodical Writers Association of Canada, recalls founding member Val Ross, who is now a Globe staffer. In the 1970s, because PWAC boasted big names like June Callwood and Erna Paris, the association carried enough weight to influence fee schedules for several magazines and the industry-wide standardization of kill fees. But as PWAC grew to take in more hobby writers, it stopped serving its senior writers. As the big names left, it became tougher for PWAC to keep other writers and attract new talent – and that left the organization with little muscle.

These days, the PWAC offices consist of two rooms in a red brick low-rise in the shadow of Toronto’s bohemian Queen West neighbourhood. Traditional jazz is the soundtrack, an American Cocker Spaniel named Ben is the mascot and the most telling decoration is a hanging black T-shirt with white lettering that reads: “YOUR OPTIMISM HAS NO FOUNDATION IN REALITY.” Few serious writers belong to PWAC, especially in Toronto where most of the country’s major publications are headquartered. Perhaps if more writers did belong to PWAC, the country’s editors would have to take the association seriously. But as director Victoria Ridout points out, freelancers are by nature independent and thus difficult to cajole into joining anything, especially if it would involve a boycott. “The will among writers to turn down work is not there,” she sighs.

Increasingly, freelancers are choosing flight rather than fight. Some cross over to (gasp!) public relations, while many redirect their skills to the more lucrative arena of commercial and web writing. Others are following our best actors and musicians toward the U.S. “It’s not for nothing that the two best Canadian magazine writers – Malcolm Gladwell and Adam Gopnick – have never worked in Canada,” says Keller. Maybe he is forgetting about other Canadian talent like Ian Brown, Don Gillmor, Marni Jackson and David Macfarlane. But the recent flight of Guy Lawson and Clive Thompson speaks to Keller’s point.

Dianne Forrest, a former freelancer now editing at Maclean’s, believes the talent drain in Canada has forced magazines to hire more editors to clean up copy. As time goes on, and rates still don’t move (because editors feel the writers now aren’t worth any more), the spiral grows, and the quality of content decreases. “When was the last time you saw Saturday Night or Toronto Life or, God forbid, Chatelaine come out with anything you didn’t already know about?”

Saturday Night certainly commanded attention in January, though it was more because of the magazine’s future than its ability to break stories. For freelancers already saddled with the realities of poor pay, eager-to-exploit publishers and hostile editors, the death of a monthly Saturday Night has made their profession seem even closer to extinction. And for those aspiring magazine writers, toiling away at journalism schools or taking their first steps into freelancing territory, the uncertainty surrounding Canada’s magazines is also raising doubts. “I’m becoming more bitter, more cynical,” says Alex Gillis, who is just three years into his freelancing career. He says a part of it is money, but the big thing is the ability to do good work. Or as fellow freelancer Mikala Folb puts it, “I can honestly say I don’t want to be a freelancer for the rest of my life.”

On June 6, 1999, in the cavernous basement ballroom of Toronto’s downtown Sheraton Centre, 800 magazine people were assembled for the industry event of the year: the National Magazine Awards. After a rubber-chicken dinner, the house lights dimmed and booming music heralded the main event. But about halfway through the awards, Brian Banks, executive editor of Canadian Business, realized something was wrong. He’d been duped. Some publications were winning – and they weren’t even real magazines. “My immediate reaction when PC Magazine was read out for the gold award in still-life photography was to boo,” recalls Banks. “I thought, How did that sneak in there?” Banks didn’t clue in that PC Magazine, and other winners enRoute, Images and Confidante, were magalogues until well into the awards. But when he did, he decided it didn’t feel right. “It just didn’t pass the smell test.”

Banks isn’t the only one in the magazine industry who smells something fishy. Journalists traditionally have looked down on magalogues as a marketing tool with nothing vaguely journalistic about them. But today’s magalogues are redefined by high production values and the fact that they’re winning awards at the magazine industry’s highest level. Aside from PC Magazine’s gold and enRoute’s silver, Canadian, Images, Food & Drink and Confidante all won honourable mentions at the 1999 awards. Are the NMAs the place for magalogues? The industry is in a state of indecision, exemplified by the battle brewing at the National Magazine Awards Foundation – the independent group that oversees the awards – over whether magalogues should be in or out of the program. Some say magalogues can have editorial integrity while others argue they can’t possibly and their existence cheapens the medium. This question of legitimacy is forcing the magazine industry, led by the NMAF, to decide what a magazine is, and to declare what’s at stake – namely, the continued trust of readers.

There are a lot of similarities between magazines and magalogues, also called customer magazines. Magalogues carry ads, for their own company as well as others, just like real magazines. They all have a table of contents, departments, columns and letters from readers. You’ll find some of the same writers and photographers in real magazines that you see in magalogues. You can also find some corporate magazines for sale in company stores and bookstores.

So if they look and act like magazines, the thinking goes, they must be magazines. But they’re not. “Even the best executed magalogues reflect a corporate vision of a product,” says Chatelaine editor and veteran magazine writer Rona Maynard. She concedes that some magalogues have more style and consistency than others, but doesn’t consider any of them real magazines. Though many magalogues publish articles that could easily appear in real magazines, there are ulterior motives. The September 1999 issue of enRoute, for example, featured articles on lifestyle, homes, travel and photography. A feature article about the island of St. Lucia and private vacation villas gave a real sense of island culture. But it was followed by the line, “Air Canada flies to.” Would enRoute have written about St. Lucia if Air Canada didn’t fly there?

In one way or another, magalogues are under the control of the sponsor company’s marketing department. At harry, for instance, former editor Michael Totzke says he started with the intention of having a real editorial product. “It never happens, though. The marketing department can’t keep their hands off it,” he says. Harry’s Autumn 1999 issue features articles on how to buy a trenchcoat, how to buy and care for leather, and a question-and-answer section with Harry Rosen, the founder of the men’s clothing store by the same name. Every product mentioned in the articles is an advertiser’s product; advertiser Zegna is also the subject of a feature article.

Indeed, product mentions are the name of the game. IKEA’s glossy Space mentions IKEA products in 13 of 17 items listed in the table of contents. And though a B.C. court justice ruled in May 1999 that Holt Renfrew’s Point of View was a legitimate magazine and therefore didn’t have to pay provincial sales tax (unlike ad material), a reading of the Autumn 1999 issue reveals there are no actual articles. Spread after spread of clothing, shoes, cosmetics and accessories mainly feature the Holt Renfrew line of products.

Granted, other magalogues are less in-your-face. PC Magazine has only one department where it explicitly plugs President’s Choice products: Off the Shelf. It’s a two-page spread in each issue that features photos and descriptions of four PC products. And Joe, Starbucks’ publication, doesn’t mention coffee once. It features some great writing about everything but coffee. Still, it’s a marketing tool created to be mused over while sipping designer coffee.

Many magalogue editors and publishers defend their publications, and say they subscribe to time-honoured editorial practices. Just before her publication folded because of the Air Canada/Canadian airline merger, Canadian editor Penny Williams called her book a hybrid. She said the editorial process is no different from any magazine. “We worry about mix, focus, tone, language and our audience,” says Williams. “It’s naive and dangerous to think editorial integrity is only in question at magalogues. There are always sponsoring interests whether the magazine is published by Rogers or Quebecor.” At PC Magazine, publisher Jack McIver says he provides a good market for Canadian writers, photographers and illustrators. “We use the most talented,” he says. “None of them have qualms about having their name attached to a credit line because they believe it’s a real magazine.” PC editor Patricia Holtz says the book is meant to function as a service magazine with a major, but not exclusive, emphasis on food and cooking – not as a corporate mouthpiece or glorified catalogue. “The PC presence is limited to a two-page spread in each issue,” Holtz explains. “Clearly, ‘Off the Shelf’ is a promotional feature from Loblaws which is something I presume most of our readers can figure out whether the word advertorial is there in six-point type or not.” Of course, where the PC presence is really felt is in the magazine’s name and logo.

EnRoute publisher Raymond Girard says there are no corporate veto rights over editorial, though the corporate side may see a copy before publication. McIver says his company, Zaxis PCM Inc., sends an editorial line-up to Loblaws a couple of months in advance, but doesn’t show the grocer the manuscripts or photos before they’re published (although he admits Loblaws could ask to see them if it wanted to exercise approval rights). Says Girard, “There are some [magalogues] that talk about the great Armani suit next to the great Armani ad. EnRoute has a healthy distance between church and state.”

The magazine v. magalogue debate is further muddied by practices at some “legitimate” magazines. “Is Vogue a magalogue?” asks Vancouver freelance writer John Masters, a 20-year veteran. “As I understand it, fashion magazines are forever making deals with their advertisers. And what about Vanity Fair? A Hollywood agent will let you put his Big Star on the cover if you promise to do a nice feature on his Rising Young Star. Does that make it a magalogue? If you define a consumer publication as an independent editorial voice that serves its public without fear or favour, the list these days might start and end with The New York Times.”

The issue has landed squarely in the lap of the NMAF, because inclusion in the awards could be seen as an endorsement of the editorial integrity of magalogues. The awards foundation began struggling with the issue in the spring of 1999 when a letter from an art director at a national lifestyle magazine arrived suggesting magalogues should not be allowed in the competition. Perhaps they should be given their own category, she suggested, or even their own awards program. At the time, the existing rule banning advertorial was slightly rewritten but remained essentially the same.

It didn’t help: Confusion reigned at the 1999 National Magazine Awards. Judges voted to award Air Canada’s enRoute an honourable mention in the coveted Magazine of the Year category. But prior to the ceremony, enRoute was disqualified by NMAF officials because, according to the NMAF, it has a corporate purpose, evidenced by the letter from the CEO, the airline promotional material and the company logo on the cover. The NMAF decided corporate magazines could win in categories that award individuals, like Best Art Direction or Best Photography, but not in categories that honour the magazine as a whole. EnRoute publisher Girard hadn’t questioned his magazine’s eligibility because it had won other awards in individual categories in previous years. Similarly, citing corporate ties, the NMAF deemed PC Magazine ineligible for the Best New Magazine and Magazine of the Year categories, but awarded it a gold in photography. Things were made worse when Girard read about the disqualification in Dan Brown’s National Post column before letters were sent by the NMAF.

The NMAF took its first step toward clarity by rewriting the rule for the 2000 awards that clearly states the status quo: corporate magazines are allowed to win in categories that honour an individual’s work but not categories that award the overall magazine. The second step was to launch a review of eligibility and judging processes by magazine consultant D.B. Scott. Scott will survey the magazine community to determine how it feels about the judging process and specifically, customer magazines. One consideration is precedent: publications such as enRoute have been participants in the awards for as long as anyone can recall. Less importantly, there’s a financial component to any decision. Each publication pays a $50 fee per entry to the foundation. A ban against magalogues could hurt the foundation’s finances. And where would the line be drawn? Magazines like Seasons (the magazine of the Federation of Ontario Naturalists) and CA (Institute of Chartered Accountants) are not traditional magazines, either. Would they be given the boot, too? Scott’s report will be back in time for changes to be made – if there are any – by the 2001 awards.

In the meantime, some journalists are speaking out. “Do you let a cat into a dog show?” asks Toronto Life editor John Macfarlane, who also sits on the NMAF’s board of directors. “How would you feel about a pseudo film made by Pepsi being nominated for an Academy Award?” Macfarlane believes magalogues aren’t real magazines and shouldn’t be allowed at the NMAs.

Rick Salutin, a Globe and Mail columnist and former Chair of Ethics at Ryerson, doesn’t have anything good to say about corporate magazines. “The bottom line is that magalogues are not serving the greater good” he says. “I think it’s good for the people working at these magalogues to get a slap in the face by excluding them from awards.”

Six years ago, when Paul Jones, now publisher of Maclean’s magazine, led an extensive review of NMAF procedures, the issue of magalogues didn’t come up. Today, his personal view is that corporate publications should not be allowed to compete at the NMAs. Says Jones, “I find the grey areas most troubling: what’s left out or not reported on.” But Jones enters a grey area himself: “With the Loblaws magazine, my gut-feel answer is no, they shouldn’t be allowed to compete, but I disagree with the disqualification of enRoute. To me, inflights are bona fide because they are not there first and foremost to promote the airline. They’re meant to provide a reader experience. This is closer to the true vision of what a magazine should be.” Both Jones and Vince Carlin, current Chair of Ethics at Ryerson, suggest establishing a new award for best commercial material, or have a separate awards organization altogether.

The magazine industry in the U.S. is not struggling with these issues in the same way. The American magazine awards are run by the American Society of Magazine Editors. To compete, magazines must meet strict editorial guidelines which render magalogues ineligible. This solution doesn’t seem viable in Canada: the Canadian Society of Magazine Editors and the NMAF are two separate groups and as a volunteer organization, the NMAF can’t possibly screen all magazines to ensure they follow CSME’s advertorial guidelines. Meanwhile, the Magazine Publishers of America is a step ahead in recognizing custom publishing as unique. At the end of 1999 it instituted a separate division called the Custom Publishing Council. One of its aims is to “promote custom publishing as an increasingly important and relevant marketing and communications discipline.” By contrast, the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association has shut out magalogues completely from its membership and has strict rules regarding promotional material and trade publications. The existing NMAF rule is a classic Canadian compromise, and it has its supporters. Cottage Life publisher and NMA judge and board member Al Zikovitz is happy with the way the rule stands now. Award-winning journalist Robert Fulford agrees magalogues should stay. He says excluding company magazines from the NMAs would impose a false and purely imaginary purity on magazine journalism. Fulford himself enjoys reading and writing for Imperial Oil Review, which has won NMAs in the past. “Should my articles published there not be considered journalism because they live under a non-journalistic corporate roof? I think they’re as valuable, or not, as the articles I publish elsewhere.” As for the awards, he thinks it’s up to the judges to sort out the issues: “They may surprise us all by discovering in a magalogue something absolutely brilliant.”

Brian Banks won’t get any surprises from PC Magazine at this year’s awards. Jack McIver decided in January to boycott them; he felt it would have been hypocritical to enter. “When the time came around to enter this year, the foundation basically said to us, ‘You can enter but we don’t consider you a magazine’,” said McIver. In a testy protest letter written to the NMAF he explained: “What I’m most bothered with is the fact that I have to continually defend PC Magazine as if it were some sort of substandard mutant windshield flyer.” If anything, McIver’s boycott puts even greater pressure on the volunteer board of the NMAF to make up its mind. The current compromise clearly is not satisfactory. To journalists like John Macfarlane, the answer seems obvious. But why stop there? Perhaps it’s time, as others suggest, for the National Magazine Awards Foundation to launch its own new brand. Custom Publishing Awards, anyone?

An early Sunday evening in Toronto. The rain that fell throughout the day is starting to let up, and Eric Malling has the house to himself. His son, Leif, is away at university, his wife, Pat Werner, is out of town and his daughter, Paige, is at her job at a local drugstore. It’s late September 1998 and Malling has grudgingly faded from public view. Two years earlier, CTV fired him as host of W5 – the same show he once helped to save. Malling still hasn’t recovered from the shock. He aches to be back in the limelight, to once again have a regular platform for his acerbic perspectives on current events. He does, however, have a few documentary projects in the works, which go some way toward soothing the pain and giving him an answer for the often-asked question “What are you doing now?” Indeed, he would have spent part of this day preparing for a Monday meeting with Dick Nielsen, an independent producer, if the session hadn’t been rescheduled for Tuesday. Now, with some unexpected free time, he pads around the house and decides to head to the basement, to its spare bedroom and makeshift office, the place where Malling, an alcoholic, does most of his drinking. As he begins his descent, steps he’s taken countless times before, he trips. If there’d been a railing on the open side of the staircase, he might have been able to grab it and break his fall. Instead, he crashes down and is knocked unconscious.

Later that evening, an acquaintance passing by notices that the front door to Malling’s house is open. Concerned, the acquaintance walks up to the house, calls out, goes inside and discovers Malling at the bottom of the basement stairs. Within minutes, an ambulance takes him to Sunnybrook Hospital, where a day later, on September 28, Eric John Malling, age 52, dies of a brain hemorrhage.

In the weeks that follow, there’s much public praise for Canada’s most famous journalist-contrarian. “I was at his funeral and the who’s who of journalists showed up. Why? Because they respected that kind of audacity,” says reporter Susan Ormiston, who worked with Malling at W5 and saw him at his worst and best. Among his career accomplishments: one Gemini and six ACTRA awards, three Gordon Sinclair awards for excellence in broadcast journalism, and the infamous tainted-tuna story for the fifth estate in 1985, which led to the resignation of Federal Fisheries Minister John Fraser. But the qualities that fuelled Malling’s rise also became his undoing. Opinionated, controlling and stubborn, often called an asshole, he refused to believe he was ever wrong about a story – or that he had a problem with alcohol.

When Eric Malling first headed east from his home province of Saskatchewan and the Regina Leader-Post for The Toronto Star, his main goal was to grab front-page bylines. Over five years, 1969 to 1974, there were many, but the one that indirectly led to TV Stardom was on the invocation of the War Measures Act during the FLQ crisis in 1970. The piece caught the attention of a man who’d already become a journalistic legend, Ron Haggart. Haggart would go on to help fashion the fifth estate, but at the time was working on a book called Rumours of War. “I thought Malling had a hold on the situation and the events that went beyond the drama and the rhetoric of the time,” says Haggart, now the co-executive producer of Counterspin on CBC Newsworld.

In 1974, after three years at the Star’s Ottawa bureau, Malling moved to CTV’s Canada AM, where he did live interviews with Parliament Hill politicians and sharpened his aggressive style. With a ferret-like face, thinning hair and big owl glasses, Malling didn’t have standard-issue TV looks, but Haggart didn’t mind and saw enough promise to bring him aboard the fifth estate for its second season in 1976. The transition was sometimes difficult. “Too many words,” says Bill Cran, then a producer at the fifth estate, of Malling’s first efforts. He had to learn how to talk more conversationally to the camera instead of barking at it, and to get rid of his habit of leaning into his interviewees, then wagging his finger and demanding answers.

Co-host Adrienne Clarkson privately called him Eric Mauling. He was a “very aggressive interviewer,” says Phil Mathias, then a fifth estate associate producer and now a senior correspondent for the National Post. “She had the impression that it was overdone.”

But otherwise, his flair for interviewing “was the thing that distinguished him and moved him ahead,” says Mike Lavoie, who became friends with Malling at the Star and worked with him as a producer at the fifth estate and W5. “He knew what to ask and when to depart from his prepared questions and when to listen, and he made his interviews into conversations.”

He also knew when to ambush. In 1978, Malling and Cran teamed up for a one-hour documentary on the illegal export of artillery shells from Canada to South Africa during apartheid. At one point, Malling confronted an unsuspecting representative of Gerald Bull, an arms smuggler, with shipping documents that all but proved Bull’s guilt. The story displayed Malling’s talent for confrontation and his knack for developing a clear narrative. “He was a very direct person,” says Haggart, “and he was skillful at making sure that stories like South African arms – that were really complicated – made sense.”

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

At seven minutes after 11 o’clock in the evening, on September 8, 1954, 16-year-old Marilyn Bell waded into the choppy water of Lake Ontario at Youngstown, New York. In drizzling rain, the 119-pound high-school girl started swimming. Soon, nausea swept over her as the rolling swells of the lake crashed above her head. Eels attached themselves to her legs, her arms, her neck. Had she given up there’d have been no shame; she wasn’t expected to finish anyway. Professional marathoner Florence Chadwick was the real draw for the swimming spectacle that would end in front of thousands of cheering people at a concrete breakwater in Toronto harbour.

Instead of holding its annual multi-competitor race in the lake, the Canadian National Exhibition had decided that year to sponsor Chadwick alone in the first-ever attempt to cross Lake Ontario, all 51.5 kilometres of it. But Marilyn wanted to swim, too. She implored her coach, the celebrated Gus Ryder, to let her try. He agreed and asked The Telegram to sponsor her. But the Tely’s publisher, John Bassett, would have nothing to do with encouraging a teenaged girl to attempt such a feat, so Ryder went to The Toronto Star, which ponyed up the $5,000 in return for exclusive rights to the story if Marilyn made it.

The Star appeared to have the Tely scooped before the swimmers even entered the water. It had more reporters and photographers, more money and more boats, taxis and airplanes. Its contract with Marilyn allowed the Star to have a reporter in the boat accompanying her and, of course, she couldn’t talk to any other paper. The Star, in short, seemed to have it all. But the Tely had Dorothy Howarth, the best sob sister in the business.

At midnight, Marilyn passed Chadwick. At dawn, Chadwick was pulled from the water, too sick to go on. Toronto heard the news, and more than 150,000 people – the largest crowd in the history of an outdoor swimming event – lined the harbour. They waited in tense hope as Marilyn, by now beyond exhaustion, struggled through the waves. This was a huge story, and the Tely’s hard-edged managing editor, J.D. MacFarlane, had to figure out a way to get his paper into the action. He emptied the newsroom. As MacFarlane’s troops fanned out along the lakeshore, photographer Ted Dinsmore headed for the breakwater and waited. By now, Marilyn had stopped swimming. Her arms and legs hung limp in the water. Ryder and the others in the boat used corn syrup and constant encouragement to rally her and she began to flutter toward the shore again.

After 20 hours and 59 minutes in the water, Marilyn touched the breakwater, looked up and Dinsmore got his shot. Seeing Tely guys all over the place, the Star contingent pulled Marilyn into its boat and took her to an ambulance it had waiting. As her stretcher was loaded in, Dorothy Howarth calmly climbed in beside her.

Last October, on a warmer day than that memorable one, Dorothy Howarth (now Richardson) sits on the comfortably worn couch in the den of her four-storey home in midtown Toronto. At 88, she still has the warmth and quick wit that characterized her reporting days. “Nobody told me to do anything except get a story,” she says with a chuckle. “That’s what we were all scrambling to do.” She smiles as she recalls what she was wearing that day: a navy blue skirt suit, white blouse, black shoes and pill-box hat. Was it intentional or accidental that she dressed that way and that she was taken for a nurse? She won’t say. She just smiles and goes on with her story.

People parted to let her into the ambulance. One Star reporter even gave her a hand. She was so focused on Marilyn that she doesn’t remember who finally recognized her. “They grabbed me and pulled me out,” she recalls. Then the Star whisked Marilyn away to the Royal York Hotel to get its exclusive story. “So I headed for the coast-guard station, and again, they thought I was a nurse. I knew her two doctors were there – one who’d been with her in the Star boat and one who’d been with her when she came out. They told the lifeguard all about it, and I got the whole story: what she said, how she swam. I went back to the office and told MacFarlane, ‘I’m not quoting her because I didn’t talk to her.’ And he just said, ‘Oh, don’t worry, we’ll figure out something.'”

What they figured out was to have Howarth write one of the most ethically questionable but most read stories of the ’50s. While a Tely reporter went to Marilyn’s school and got a copy of her signature in the yearbook, Howarth wrote a first-person narrative of the ordeal as though she were Marilyn. The Tely ran it the next day on the front page under the banner headline “I felt I was swimming forever” and Marilyn’s purloined signature. “We had fun,” says Howarth with a chuckle. “Oh we had fun.”

“Those were great exciting days,” MacFarlane has said. “In my lifetime [1916 to 1995], there was never a period to match those whoop-de-do years. We didn’t hurt anybody. We may have embellished. We may have stretched. But there was always a hard kernel of truth there.” From the bullet-spattered saga of the Boyd Gang to the imported sleuthing of Fabian of Scotland Yard to the havoc of Hurricane Hazel and the heroism of the Springfield miners, the kernel was often stranger than fiction. What veteran reporter Val Sears has called the razzmatazz days – the Great Newspaper War between the Star and the Tely – made the present battle between the Globe and the Post look like kid stuff.

It was also an era when most women worked in the women’s department, covering social functions, fashion and family life. Howarth and her two legendary colleagues – Phyllis Griffiths and Helen Allen – worked in the newsroom covering breaking stories, though often from a soft or feature angle. Howarth charted the emotional lives of people in the public eye – the heroes, the villains and the victims and the families they left behind. She was fearless but she wasn’t cynical. She was, in fact, the epitome of Sears’s description of Star and Tely women of the time?”wily proto-feminists who could steal a picture, vamp a cop, slug a rival or stitch a wound.” She always knew what she wanted from newspapering, and for the most part she got it. But when the whoop-de-do ended, when the razzmatazz was over, she didn’t try to adjust. She left.

Howarth was born in 1912, and grew up in Weyburn, Sask., a small town outside Regina. Her mother died giving birth to her only sister, Bertha, a year later, and while Howarth’s father raised Dorothy, an aunt raised Bertha in Vancouver. The two never even met until 1949 when Howarth won a Women’s Press Club award and went back west to accept it.

Being recognized for her work was strange to Howarth, who began her working life as a schoolteacher in a one-room school in the prairies. There, during the Depression, she taught children of all ages for two years with little pay. She had to walk through the fields early in the morning and arrive before the students so she could light the fire to heat the room. Looking for better things, Howarth went to the Regina Leader-Post and eventually worked her way to reporting in the women’s department.

“When the war came,” she recalls, “things perked up. It was easier to get jobs, and I decided I wanted to go east.” She boarded a train for Montreal with $400 she had saved, to get a real journalism job. At a stopover in Toronto, she took a look at “the Toronto which everybody out west hates” and decided to stay. After being turned down by The Globe and Mail, the Star, Maclean’s and Chatelaine, Howarth landed in the editorial department of The Telegram. She made $25 a week and boarded at the YWCA. Soon, she was covering the university beat. “There were very few women, but they took me on. So then I started doing some real reporting.” Her luck was that J.D. MacFarlane, never made any distinction between males and females. “It didn’t matter to him,” she says. “He’d send me on any story.” That included follow-ups to his crazy ideas – the craziest of which might have been his hunch that the atom bomb was just a myth. In her subsequent piece, Howarth concluded “that there could be no such thing as an atom bomb. Less than a week later one fell on Hiroshima. The editor came storming out of his office, shook his finger under my nose and said, ‘I ought to drop an atom bomb on you.'”

MacFarlane never called her Dorothy. He’d growl “Howarth, come-eere,” when he wanted her attention. Howarth, too, had her tough side – without it she couldn’t have done the stories she did – but it never got in the way of her dealings with people. She was popular around the newsroom, and though she was a senior reporter, she always had time for newcomers, particularly Marilyn Dunlop, with whom she’s still good friends.

When Dunlop, who would go on to become a top medical reporter, arrived at The Telegram in 1949, she was only 21 and fresh out of journalism school at the University of Western Ontario. Howarth was a star whose series on Newfoundland’s entry into Confederation had just won the first-ever National Newspaper Award for feature writing.

Howarth had been a little daunted by the assignment. She’d never been a political reporter and she wasn’t at all sure that she deserved to cover one of the biggest political stories of the time. MacFarlane, though, was sure she could do it. And she justified his faith by forgetting about politics and writing about people.

When she got to Saint John’s, she was overcome by the sadness that enveloped the city and spread out over the new province. People wore black arm bands, flew black flags and wept openly in the streets. “It’s like a country dying,” Howarth quoted a librarian as saying. “It doesn’t matter how you voted, confederate or responsible government, today still means that we’re no longer a separate country. We’re only part of a larger one now.” While the Star stayed in Saint John’s, Howarth headed for the outports, the tiny fiercely independent island communities where the fishermen built their own houses and boats and had little need for the outside world. But, Howarth wrote, that world was about to come crashing down on them. Though they didn’t understand it yet, they would be the real casualties of Confederation.

Later, Howarth travelled the globe for stories. Sometimes she even flew without a destination, such as her ride in the DeHaviland jet airliner, Comet. She wasn’t keen on the assignment at first. She didn’t, as she later wrote, know much about pilots, navigators and “knobtwiddlers kibitzing in the engine room, or whatever they call it on a plane. I’m just plain lily-livered, and as one who gets seasick at the dizzying speed of a Bloor streetcar, the idea of a ride in a jet didn’t seem like any picnic.” But in the end, despite her trepidation – “good gravy, they don’t even use real engines” – she was sold on jets. “I was all set to eat my cereal to get the box tops for my space helmet.”

However she travelled she was a model of deportment. In a 1957 profile for Gossip, a magazine of the day, Kay Alderson described her as “a human satellite who hurls herself around the world…Hewing to this rugged existence should require hockey legs and a tom crop; instead she is elfin slim with a butter-coloured mop and a resolute chin.”

She was, above all, determined, and that served her well when the real razzmatazz arrived. Where the Tely clashed with the Star, there was Howarth. She wasn’t a digger, but she was intuitive and observant. The Sponge, as MacFarlane called her, soaked up all the details and all the quotes long before tape recorders were in widespread use on newspapers. She, like all her colleagues on the Tely, was no-holds-barred competitive, especially when it came to the Star. When she got to the scene of a story, she’d find the nearest phone and hold onto it while her photographer got his shots. Then they’d swap places while she did her reporting. That way, the Star couldn’t call in the story.

Yet Howarth could be as soft-hearted as she was tough. Helen Allen (now Stacey), who was a fixture at The Telegram for 42 years, remembers her friend Dorothy coming into the office one day wearing a new pink cashmere cardigan she’d saved up for months to buy. It happened to be the day of the Burlington floods and Howarth was immediately sent out. At the scene, she met a woman whose home and belongings had been swept away by the rushing water. Howarth took off the cardigan and gave it to her.

Other times, she gave of herself. For Howarth’s Tely, the Boyd Gang was the stuff of juicy headlines. Edwin Alonzo Boyd and his gun-toting henchmen were forever knocking over banks, getting caught, being thrown in the slammer and breaking out of it. By the time the cops had rounded up the gang for good, Howarth had found Boyd’s wife, Doreen, and had her hidden away in the King Edward Hotel. Meanwhile, Star reporters were scouring the city for her. They knew Howarth had her but they didn’t know where. For three days, the reporter and the distraught wife stayed in the hotel room, ordering from room service, watching TV and just talking. Though Howarth says modestly that it was just part of the job, the truth is she could have left the hotel after the first night, when the Star gave up. “I felt sorry for the woman and her children,” she says. The assignment was a typical Howarth sob story, a role she was well aware of. “Oh I knew that,” she says. “I got all the tearjerkers.”

Even when she wasn’t assigned the big stories, Howarth usually got her nose into them anyway. After a robbery in which the victim was bound and gagged but managed to dial the operator with his nose, she stayed in the newsroom while others covered the story and reported on her own and her colleagues’ attempts to accomplish the trick. “Almost anybody can duplicate the performance,” she wrote. “And it’s not the people with the protuberant probosces that do the best job. The long point beak dials zero the first time…Bergerac schnozzles have trouble fitting into the hole in the dial.”

Howarth had a light touch, but she didn’t take her work lightly. Though often delivered in a wry tone, her opinions were carefully considered. For women who wanted a career in newspapers, she recommended that they learn: “How to cancel gracefully, a dinner and dance date, made a month previously, because you’ve been assigned, just an hour ago, to cover the Altar Guild’s annual St. Swithin’s Day bazaar:…And how to remember, at all times, that no matter how small, how hackneyed, how old, how oft-repeated a story seems to you, it is still new and shining and important to the person telling it.”

Marilyn Dunlop learned this and a lot more from Howarth. Howarth was always asking stupid questions and Dunlop couldn’t figure out why. “I thought you only asked what you don’t know,” recalls Dunlop, “but she would ask anything.” When Dunlop asked why, Howarth explained that it was to capture a subject’s personality – to get their own words. She had no qualms about making herself sound dumb. As a result, she made the people in her stories come alive.

By the late ’50s, Toronto newspapering was beginning to change. As Val Sears has written, readers were becoming more sophisticated and less tolerant of papers that sacrificed credibility to flamboyance. Looking for a change, Howarth joined The Vancouver Sun, where her arrival was a big event. Jeremy Brown, who went on to become a prominent writer and broadcaster in Toronto, was a cub reporter on the Sun at the time. He remembers the buzz of her arrival as “a class act from the East.” But there was resentment among the editors over her star status. They didn’t let her do her kind of stories and they rewrote her mercilessly. Two years later, she returned to The Telegram, but she still wasn’t happy.

“I wasn’t as curious,” she says. “I wasn’t interested anymore. It had become a whole different ball game because of TV. There was no way you could beat the camera, so newspapers just gave the facts. Reporting just wasn’t as much fun.” To Howarth, it has become more and more deadly as time has passed. When she visited the newsroom of The Toronto Sun (which rose from the ashes of The Telegram) a few years ago, she was astonished at the atmosphere.

“There wasn’t a sound there,” she marvelled. “Nobody talking, just silence. On the old Telegram, everybody would sit around drinking coffee or sit on the corner of your desk, yakking away.”Dunlop says that back then the staff was like a family, mixing business with pleasure. Howarth loved incorporating her life into her work, such as the time she spent in Tokyo decades ago.

Sent to cover the coronation of the emperor, she decided to get her hair done before the big event. In the salon, she started chatting with the woman beside her and by the time they were coiffed, they were great chums. The woman, of course, turned out to be the empress – and Howarth got a great story.

“She could find something in common with anyone,” Dunlop says. And she still has that knack. “We can be standing in line at the grocery store,” says Dunlop with a chuckle, “and by the time we leave, she’ll know all about the life of the person behind us. People talk to her because she has an air of caring.”

The same kind of chance meeting with Dr. Harold (Hal) Richardson led to their marriage in 1967, when Howarth was 55. She decided to retire and help raise two of Richardson’s five children who were still at home. “She no longer felt her style of writing fit in,” Dunlop says. “So that was that. She moved on.”

Then again, maybe it was the chance to realize other dreams. In a Tely piece in which she wrote about herself in the third person, she said: “If you ask Miss Howarth if she had to do it over again, would she? ‘No,’ she says. ‘I’d marry at 18 and have six children by now!’ Then, in a much smaller voice: ‘uh – that is – at least – I think I would.'”

Hal Richardson died four years ago. Howarth still sees the kids. She considers them her own. She loves art and takes watercolour classes. With Dunlop and Allen she goes to theatre and ballet matinees. It’s for sheer pleasure, but she still watches with a critical eye. She knows when a dancer feels the music, when an actor is in character. And she knows what she likes.

That goes for journalism, too. While Allen devours all four Toronto dailies, Howarth only reads the one that considered itself far above the razzmatazz, The Globe and Mail. Howarth and Allen are glad they’re not in the business anymore, but every once in a while they’ll come upon a piece in the paper and say to each other, “Wouldn’t that be a great story to cover?”