The staff gathered that Friday afternoon in what was called the President’s Office, a typically spacious, senior-management-type room dominated by a large fireplace. Grouped by department, people anxiously clustered around various landmarks: the bowl of Bits & Bites, the leather couch, the table featuring both a “fine selection of non-imported beer,” in the words of one staffer, and cheap wine in plastic glasses. Armed with a choice from the Molson Party Packs and a handful of Cheez Doodles, the staff tuned in to their CEO’s latest speech: “We’re well on our way to being millionaires.” After toasting the launch of e-magazineMykidsbenefit.com, staff drifted back to their cubicles, finished their daily assignments and went home.

The somber mood of MKB‘s June 15, 2000, launch foreshadowed the lightning-quick demise of what was originally promoted as a brilliant initiative to offer customized magazines over the Internet and take preference marketing to a new level. About a month and a half after its launch, MKB slashed three-quarters of its staff, mostly from the sales and marketing departments. By the beginning of August, the e-mag had ceased publication. While the official reason given for the collapse was the withdrawal of expected funding from Scotia Capital-not unusual, given the investment community’s anxiety over last spring’s massive realignment of tech stocks-other problems were evident long before this crisis. The bursting of the dot-com bubble aside, the late arrival and unconventional methods of the editorial team, as well as the ever-changing business concept, pointed toward the e-magazine’s uncertain future from the start. What most people believed to be an exciting new editorial start-up was simply another attempt by Mykidsbenefit CEO Michael Smythe to weave a successful company from the same marketing formula he has been touting for more than a decade.

TWO VIBRANT AND CHARISMATIC young men once held big dreams of ushering Canadians into the new digital culture. Andrew Heintzman and Evan Solomon made their names by founding Shift magazine and miraculously keeping the arts-and-Canadian-culture-turned-digital-culture mag alive since its 1992 launch. Although Shift has yet to turn a profit, its critically acclaimed design and cool, slick subject matter crowned the two as Canada’s new media darlings.

Thus, when Smythe needed a hip, young team to further develop his company’s online magazine, he chose Heintzman and Solomon’s new project, their consulting company Realize Media. Enamoured with what they believed to be potentially industry-changing technology (“No one had ever designed content to work on this kind of platform,” says Solomon), Smythe convinced Heintzman and Solomon to build the vehicle upon which the technology would be marketed: presumably the first-ever customized electronic magazine. At this point, Realize had met with the company’s senior management, and although they were not investors, “we did what we thought was due diligence,” says Solomon.

Realize had good reason to sign the contract-namely, the impressive reputations of the senior staff. “These guys weren’t dummies. It wasn’t a fly-by-night operation.” It was true that MKB’s seven-person management team had impressive pedigrees, most having worked for such major companies as Manulife Financial, Nortel Networks and Simon & Schuster. Yet the concept of the magazine-still raved about, even long after the fact, by MKB president Hart Hillman-was also very attractive.

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” proposes Hillman, “if we could capture all your interest areas and somehow put them into a magazine that was customized to your areas of interest? So when you open the magazine, only the things you’re interested in are in the magazine, and they change every week-with fresh articles, original content, articles written by really good, up-and-coming writers. Wouldn’t it be neat,” Hillman, the former president of CDG Books Canada (which is the Canadian publisher of the For Dummies series), continues, “if we could give this to people for literally nothing, other than the benefit that we would accrue by getting into their households so that we could put in appropriate advertising with appropriate articles?”

In reality, the situation was far less fairy-tale. Despite Mykidsbenefit being promoted first as an e-magazine with fabulous benefits for its subscribers, benefits such as online shopping discounts and cash rebates on purchases, the formation of a true editorial team was left until less than three months before the launch. The original plan for the magazine was to hire students to pluck free content from websites and repackage it into new, informative articles.

Only after management recognized that recycled material, plus book excerpts-gained through Hillman’s publishing industry connections-wouldn’t cut it was Realize Media brought in to flesh out the bare-bones editorial department created by one of the original editorial employees, Dave Watt, initially designated the preference editor for entertainment. Watt, a 12-year veteran of public relations, was redesignated manager of editorial operations. His new assignment: to find a pay Web content provider (he ultimately came up with the ill-fitting ScreamingMedia), while editorial staff building was delegated to Realize’s new editorial director, Matthew Church, former editor-in-chief of the in-flight magazine enRoute.

In mid-April, while Solomon, Heintzman and Church began redefining MKB’s shell of an idea for an e-mag into workable goals (cutting the nearly 800 proposed topic areas to about 200, for example), hiring began in earnest. Realize Media’s first wave of editorial staffers, of which there would eventually be 23, began on May 15, just a month before the date on which the test launch was scheduled.

It wasn’t until Friday of that week that the editorial people were completely set up with individual computers, Internet access (from which researchers were expected to find the majority of story information) and phones. Basics, like access to news databases such as Lexis-Nexis and reference books such as dictionaries and telephone directories, were not supplied (writers brought dictionaries from home and called Bell Canada for phone books). “There weren’t the resources to deliver the ‘first-class, world-class’ articles management wanted,” recalls Raizel Robin, one of four researchers who also served as writers.

Once the department was more or less properly equipped, the unconventional editorial work environment, which involved the separation of research and reporting from the writing process, provided another hurdle. Realize chose this model, based on similar hierarchies at weeklies such as Time and Maclean’s, to encourage a more effective use of employees’ time according to their “talents”-and to allow for a speedy turnover of what were to be service-oriented pieces. “It was, by definition, an assembly line,” explains Church. “We were designing something that was much quicker and formulaic. It wasn’t about literary journalism. It was about solid, reliable service pieces that would tell people stuff that they would like or need to know.”

The model was this: the editorial staff was divided into teams, and each team-consisting of one editor, one writer and three or four researchers-was responsible for creating content about its designated list of subject areas, or “preferences”: anything from “books,” “camping” or “technology,” to “trees and shrubs,” “mutual funds” or “exotic getaways.” After a weekly meeting at which story ideas were pitched, discussed and assigned, researchers would dig up as much information as they could find on the Internet, e-mail info packages to the writers, who in turn would e-mail in their finished articles. Then each piece would pass through the editors and a copyeditor before being posted online.

The premise was simple enough. Yet the division created discomfort for those accustomed to more traditional journalism. Ryan Bigge, a Toronto-based freelancer hired as a staff writer, recalls feeling odd about not doing his own research. Though Bigge and Tim Madden, his designated researcher for technology and business-oriented stories, agreed that Madden should do any interviews required for a story, Bigge was still uneasy. “I was always worried whether or not I could use the quote,” he recalls. Another researcher, Alicia Androich, understands Bigge’s concern: “The main problem was that a writer has his own idea of what the story should be,” she says. “It’s hard to get into somebody’s mind-set.”

Alternately, researchers (and sometimes the editors) scanned Web content provider ScreamingMedia’s vast archives for suitable stories. Staffers soon discovered that surfing through ScreamingMedia’s over 2,800 publications-purported to include titles such as Red Herring, Business 2.0 and RollingStone.com-mostly turned up press releases, pieces from GeoCities personal websites and articles from small local publications in the United States. Most frustrating, however, was that even some well-written and well-researched pieces were of no use to MKB because of its focus on service journalism. Furthermore, because each preference area was only updated every other week, articles needed a certain timelessness. ScreamingMedia, on the other hand, is essentially a sort of news ticker. “Anything you found that was half decent, you put in,” says researcher/writer Lara Mills. Eventually, editorial was forced to boost the proportion of original content to 60 percent from the planned 30 to 40 percent because of the lack of relevant, appropriate Web content.

As the original content requirement increased, so did the pressure on both researchers and writers to up their production. While researchers frantically surfed the Net and conducted interviews, writers pumped out anywhere from two to seven 500- to 700-word stories a day. Not surprisingly, this affected the quality of the writing. As Toronto writer and critic Bert Archer admits, “Great writing was not what it was about.” Although Archer, one of the most prolific of the five main staff writers, rather enjoyed the challenge of almost instantly turning plain research into readable-and sometimes entertaining-material, he was in the minority. “There was no heart in it, no trying to make it clever,” says Toronto-based writer Sheila Heti, who is best known as a budding short story writer. “No one had any illusions to what we were putting out. It wasn’t something I invested myself in intellectually or creatively.”

A final insult to traditional editorial convention was the proposal to create “edutisements,” described in the human resources orientation binder as articles “sponsored by” or “associated with” an advertiser, but crafted by MKB writers. Though the edutisement itself wouldn’t mention the advertiser, the content was supposed to “create a perceived need for the client’s particular products or services in the mind of the subscriber.” Editorial director Church didn’t agree with the edutisement concept, but felt that an article written for the “minivans” section that included an ad for Chrysler on the same page wasn’t really different from the advertising in most niche print magazines. Others weren’t so comfortable. “Would we eventually have to write for McDonald’s?” researcher/writer Robin wondered. “Editorial and business were obviously coming from two different ends of the universe.” And yet, Mykidsbenefit CEO Smythe was quoted just before the launch as saying it was his belief that on the Internet “content is still king.”

However, the business staff viewed the Mykidsbenefit scheme as a sort of “one hand washes the other” situation. From their perspective, they were empowering subscribers, who, by letting MKB know their interests, would-in a way-be choosing their own advertising. “It’s a very pure way of marketing,” explains Hillman. “Wouldn’t it be great if you only got marketed those areas that you’re interested in?” Eventually, Church realized that MKB’s focus wasn’t really putting out a great e-magazine at all. “It was aboutdatabase,” he explains. “It was about having 2.5 million names, differentiated and self-defined, so that you would know that 400,000 of them liked, I don’t know, beach volleyball or whatever it may be.”

ONCE UPON A TIME, THERE LIVED A man with the ability to weave a speech so captivating, so magical, that almost every listener was inspired to believe anything he said. Michael Smythe worked his magic in boardrooms and at seminars throughout the country, promoting his trademarked personal formula for success: Distinct Value multiplied by Quantity equals Wealth (or DV x Q = WealthTM). And the way Smythe proposed to create distinctive value was through “permissioned” digital marketing: the distribution of carefully crafted communications to prospective clients who had given prior permission to receive them. He spun a consulting company from the cloth of this business-to-business concept and called it PAMM-Direct Inc.

In 1997, following his own advice, he decided to sell a collection of carefully crafted motivational and educational recordings (his and those of others) over the Internet through a new company called Proof in Advance. Canadians, however, were skeptical about buying online and weren’t interested in How to Teach Your Baby to Read. And so it didn’t work. Undaunted, Smythe then spun out another company: one that would deliver carefully crafted e-mail communications about merchandise (the latest fashions, for example), hyperlinked to retail outlets. Student recruiters, who would make money from each click-through purchase made, were the base of this company, as they were to be the ones sending the e-mails. He called this company Studentprofit.com. The notion was that the students would benefit from the money earned while the participating families would benefit from the discounted purchases. Smythe, however, made the mistake of approaching school boards, which were understandably wary about using their students as salespeople.

Ultimately, financial difficulties, namely spending $30 or more to recruit each student, prevented Studentprofit.com from taking off. But Smythe still had a dream and, by late 1999, a large senior management staff and $10 million in venture capital. Thus, Studentprofit.com morphed intoMykidsbenefit.com (after a brief incarnation as Myemag.com), the target shifted from student e-salespeople to parents willing to shop online, and the carefully crafted e-mail communications, with hyperlinks to retail affiliates, became a customizable electronic magazine-with hyperlinks to retail affiliates.

During the dot-com mania, the need to move “at Internet speed” was regularly invoked. Hillman does it still: “One of the characteristics that became very apparent is that you’ve got to constantly evolve,” he says. “You’ve got to constantly change. You don’t run it like a normal business. You don’t run it quarter to quarter. You certainly don’t run it on a year plan. You really have to, week to week, change.”

In reality, however, MKB’s constant switching of tactics demonstrated a lack of focus. There was, for example, the initial recruitment process, begun when the company was still Studentprofit. The company initiated a viral e-mail campaign-sort of like an e-mail chain letter-to gain subscribers. Every new subscriber received $20, plus $5 for every person he referred who also signed on. This process was initially supposed to be capped when the subscriber list hit 5,000, but Smythe and the marketing department kept going, believing that higher numbers would attract more advertisers. The result was over 400,000 subscribers in record time. Some subscribers did receive their $20, but on various posting boards and websites, such as e-mail newsletter site Themestream.com, there are angry rants posted from those who are still owed money.

Another aspect that was consistently changing was the demands on the technology staff. As soon as an interesting new Web development broke, Smythe had to have it. An actual bricks-and-mortar warehouse, filled with product from the Studentprofit days, had to be dissolved and reintegrated as a virtual store using affiliates. The amount of the cash rebate for magazine subscribers who bought through the magazine’s affiliates was calculated as a percentage of items purchased. But this also had to be synchronized with the computer systems of those affiliates who had real-world stores so as to allow for the correct calculation of the rebate owed to subscribers who made purchases in person. At times it seemed as if the complexity of these tasks was lost in the classic power struggle between tech and the sales staff.

The complex technological endeavour of bringing together several complicated software applications and making sure the whole package ran smoothly fell to MKB’s executive vice-president of operations and technology, Dave Codack. The problem was that the business model itself was constantly in flux, hence the demands made of the technology regularly changed as well. One request from Smythe and the sales department proved to be too much.

While Codack laboured with Deloitte Consulting on the basic compatibility issues between the preference selection process, the BroadVision content software, ScreamingMedia’s software, the link to potential advertisers and the customer loyalty program, the sales staff wanted him to integrate a method of allowing small businesses to advertise in the e-mags, but only to subscribers in the area within the advertiser’s specific geographic region. At this point, however, incorporating this type of special advertising feature was the last thing on the minds of the technical staff, who were trying to ensure the consistent and reliable delivery of the magazine by the launch date.

While the tech staff was busy working the bugs out of the software package, the editorial staff was busy creating the content. And though staff began to question the relentlessly upbeat manner in which everything was presented, MKB’s management kept them predominantly out of the loop regarding the company’s financial straits until the end. Because editorial worked on a different floor from the rest of the company, staffers were less exposed to the rampant rumour mill-about management power struggles and an imminent third round of layoffs-that eventually brought other departments to a standstill. “Our job was to keep our heads down and fulfill our contract,” says Solomon. The segregation allowed management to spoon-feed bad news-like the dismissal of a whole department or the failure to secure more funding-to the editorial staff little by little, through periodic town hall-style company meetings. Despite Smythe’s optimistic controlled messages (“We’re leaner and meaner and more attractive to advertisers now,” he reportedly enthused after he laid off a large portion of the sales staff), editorial staffers grew increasingly skeptical about MKB’s future. “We were doing less and less work because it didn’t appear that anything was going up anymore,” preference editor Leslie Lucas recalls about the final week. “It was a really poisoned environment.”

THE RISE AND FALL OF MYKIDSBENEFIT.COM WAS A classic example of how not to run an Internet business. The Internet does change how business is conducted but it doesn’t justify casting aside good, old-fashioned business sense. A full business plan and a viable source of income are still necessary for success. Although Mykidsbenefit‘s heavy reliance on advertising for revenue was not unlike a print magazine’s, online and print are completely different worlds. Though advertisers in print magazines base ad purchases on passalong stats and audience numbers, the online equivalent-eyeballs on the page-hasn’t delivered the same results. The still-conventional ad companies know now that loyalty on the Net, with the distractions of hyperlinks and the ubiquitous “back” button, is practically nonexistent.

While MKB tried to create loyalty with its cash-back program, with bought readers, site attachment-or “stickiness”-isn’t very likely. The relationship that a magazine develops with its audience-the trust in editorial integrity, the expectation of a certain product, the comfortable and familiar environment-cannot stem from a marketing strategy. MKB‘s means of finding readers, as well as the initial plan to simply repackage free content, suggested its focus was never on the idea of developing a robust service magazine.

But nobody was duped into it, Hillman believes. Nobody was seduced. “This was a high risk venture,” he says. “Yeah, maybe high reward, and I think that’s why a lot of people got into it. But high risk. Everybody who bought into the dream, everybody who drank the Kool-Aid, if you will, did it with their eyes wide open.”

The editorial people may have willingly downed the Kool-Aid, but they also remained skeptical. “After my first week there,” recalls staff writer Bigge, “I told people it wouldn’t last three months.” After the second week, his prediction dropped to six weeks. Most don’t regret the MKB experience, though. “At my new job,” says copyeditor Wendi Phillips, “it’s like a badge of honour.” Phillips and others parlayed their time at MKBinto new online gigs, some at established companies like Rogers iMedia and Alliance Atlantis, others at younger ventures like Toronto-based startup incubator Brightspark. And some still think customizable magazines may be the way of the future. Evan Solomon is one. “The good side to this story is that the potential to build a magazine like this has yet to work,” he says. “The idea of this project is still an exciting one. Realize was interested in this model for publishing.”

For Smythe, the end of Mykidsbenefit meant another beginning. He envisions himself succeeding at preference marketing, no matter how many times he has to reinvent and repackage his message. And whileMykidsbenefit didn’t work, as a secured creditor, he now partly owns the elaborate technology that could carry out his mission. The knowledge and expertise to effectively put this technology to use, however, disappeared when he laid off all but a handful of the employees who had pulled it all together. For him, though, the story isn’t over. He’s attempting to weave yet another company from his marvelous marketing cloth and to spin his magical words. “Michael’s a dreamer,” says Hillman. “And you know what? There’s nothing wrong with that.” And for Michael Smythe, dreams are what e-business is made of.

Today is sting day. The place: a restaurant parking lot on the outskirts of Vancouver. The target: a confidence man named Reverend Narvin Wray Clarence Edwardson. The reason: some of his victims want retribution, so they called the CTV national news show Goldhawk Fights Back and hooked up with Dale Goldhawk—consumer advocate attack dog.

The Goldhawk Fights Back team is waiting patiently in the parking lot for Edwardson. The film is dark but the audio is clear when Edwardson comes out of the restaurant and Goldhawk introduces himself: “I need to talk to you about some money,” Goldhawk says. “Don’t you understand? I need to talk to you about some money, Reverend. Light him up.” Now the broad back of Edwardson is illuminated as he shuttles away at a fast trot.

“Reverend, you can’t just run down the road,” barks an exasperated and puffing Goldhawk. Edwardson attempts to hide, crawling up into the bushes beside the road. Then Goldhawk catches up and points the camera in the hole. Before you can say olly-olly oxen free, Edwardson crawls out ass-first and pauses to look balefully at the camera before running off again. The chase down the hill takes three minutes and ends abruptly when Edwardson hops into a red car that pulls at the bottom of the hill before racing off. The sting airs on May 28, 200. Although no money is returned, Edwardson is exposed as a con man on national television, and two weeks later, during the June 11 broadcast, Goldhawk reports that he fled the country almost immediately after the confrontation on the hill. As a parting shot, Edwardson faxed this message: “The difference is I am truly a Christian, and under God’s promise no weapon forged against me can prosper. I put my full trust in Him.”

God’s promise notwithstanding, Edwardson’s faith wasn’t strong enough to protect him from Goldhawk. Hot much can protect someone Goldhawk is after. If you cheat, ignore or bully someone in Canada and Dale Goldhawk hears about it, chances are you’re going to become a target, just like Edwardson. Goldhawk Fights Back is action-line journalism, a form of the craft named after one of Canada’s first columns, the long-departed Toronto Telegram’s “Action Line.” In Canada, men and women practise this brand of journalism at many newspapers and television stations, telling stories that contain a mix of information, entertainment and advocacy. Eschewing the alleged objectivity of most jourmlists, ation lines use the weight of a news outlet’s reputation and investigative acumen plus the threat of publicity to fix the problems of everyday Canadians.

The Telegram launched “Action Line” May 16, 1966, billing it as a service that would publish solutions Monday to Friday—on the front page—to readers’ problems. A staff of 10 manned the phones and read the mail, picking out the problems a newspaper could fix. In the early days the column was all over the map, dealing with questions like “Is Batman dead?” and “Does a horse have to be destroyed when it breaks its legs?” It also provided useful information on more serious questions. In the first column, for example, a man form Pickering with a beef about a noxious septic tank next door was told that “Action Line” couldn’t do anything except wait for the town to complete its sewer system. In 1970, veteran reporter Frank Drea began heading up the column; Dale Goldhawk had joined the “Action Line” staff two years earlier after spending two years on the Tely police beat following graduation from Ryerson’s School of Journalism. The Tely closed down in 1971—but The Toronto Sun, born from its ashes, continued publishing “Action Line,” albeit with just one reporter answering only on question a day, down from three or four. The popular column continued until June 21, 200, written since 1989 by Maryanna Lewyckyj, who was there longer than anyone else since its creation.

After the Tely shut down, Goldhawk took a news job at CHIC radio in 1974, then joined the upstart Global Television News as an international correspondent, later becoming an anchor. But fixing gripes was in his blood; in 1981 he accepted a job as the ombudsman of CBC’s Toronto news operation, where he also hosted his own action-line show, Goldhawk Fights Back. In 1984, CBC Radio lured him over, and there he variously hosted Sunday Morning, As It Happens and Cross Country Checkup. Then , in 1992, John Cassidy, who was president of CTV, asked him to produce Goldhawk Fights Back on a national level. He’s been there ever since.

Goldhawk Fights Back gets 500 to 600 phone calls and 400 e-mails a week from people looking for help. Only a handful make it to the show, which airs every week. Goldhawk has two staff members to help him select and produce stories. Marlene McAdle is usually the first to cull the herd of problems, discarding those issues they won’t touch; Goldhawk’s team doesn’t like custody or divorce issues (too messy), they usually stay out of criminal appeals, and they try not to repeat themselves. That still leaves quite a pile of woe—consumers suckered by bad deals, unclear policies, dangerous products and inhumane corporate decisions. The stories that make the second cut are ones such as Edwardson’s: a swindler who bilked many people into investing in bogus corporations, including Scope International, Success Development, Southern Management, Turning Point and N.E. Constructions. Tom Johnson, a 64-year-old retired business executive from Kelowna, B.C., lost $300,000 to Edwardson and contacted Goldhawk looking for help. In their first attempts to find the reverend in early May 2000, the crew flew to Kelowna and searched for three days for him before leaving, having only managed to get tape of his wife exiting a local gym.

“When I first started, I thought we’re just going to get hundreds of lunatics calling us,” says Laurie Few, who doubles as a producer on Fights Back and a reporter on CTV’s more general consumer stories. Experience has shown her that most complaints are real, but in practice only a handful make it on air. “Our number-one concern is, is this good TV?” says Few.

At a staff meeting, McArdle pitches most of the new stories because she does almost 80 percent of the initial research. As McArdle talks, Goldhawk tosses out odd phrases like: “It matters not to me”; “Twas ever thus: every few years someone does a story on visa schools.” He opines, describing a former “flack” of Foreign Affairs Minister John Manley as too smart and conscientious to work for the federal government. He interrupts to tell the story of an eccentric inventor he met. Many of the stories McArdle mentions are already being followed up; Goldhawk says he has thousands of others to go through, and progress reports degenerate into bewildering shorthand. “I’d really like to do Madagascar,” Few says in a reference to some kind of Internet scheme.

The phone rings. Goldhawk puts the meeting on hold to bark at a network functionary about his time slot. Watching him gives you an idea of how formidable he must look when he shows up at your door. Big hands, a tall, thick body, a wide, bullish face with a mane of curly white hair—he cuts an imposing figure. On television he looks shorter and chubbier than he really is, which is unfortunate because for most people that’s where he exists.

He hangs up. McArdle is not sure how to convince an elderly couple to appear on camera for an interview. Everyone about to get their complaint aired on Fights Back signs a release form that says he or she will be interviewed on camera, but it sometimes hard to convince them to go through with it. Goldhawk’s motto is to leave no one worse off than he found them. It’s a rosy phrase that doesn’t always ring true—Tom Johnson looked like a sucker on television and he still didn’t get any money back. Goldhawk sarcastically jokes to McArdle to warn to couple they will be beaten severely about the head and shoulders if they do the interview.

There is no question that action lines breed good stories—as Few says, she has the luxury of having too many good ones to choose from. In television, the dramatic pictures created by confrontation and resolution make action lines fun to watch. “It can degenerate into entertainment if you’re not careful,” says Peter Walsh, former CBC action-liner and now a correspondent on CBC’s Marketplace. “If you just pick individuals who brought something that was broke and embarrass the company into giving them their money back, then you’re the hero, end of story. There’s no journalism and there’s very little value in it.”

Peter Silverman—who has been working on Citytv’s weekly action line, Silverman Helps, since 1989— doesn’t see himself as a journalist. He thinks that what he does for his audience is different from what most journalists do. At 69, he is the grand old man of action lines. He’s not content with journalistic conventions that simply report facts and let readers make up their mind. He takes a side and makes a crusade out of a story. “There’s nothing wrong with crusading journalists,” says Silverman. “I think you need people who are committed. Whether or not it’s Greenpeace or consumer advocacy, you need them, otherwise nothing gets moved, nothing happens. I lived in [apartheid-era] South Africa, and I can tell you where the journalists were. They weren’t crusading too bloody much.”

Silverman says he often gets fraud referrals from the police, who can only afford to investigate if it’s a $1-million case. Besides, proving fraud in the already overloaded courts is extremely difficult. Silverman and Goldhawk both say they can help man y people solve their own problems, often getting a solution without taking the case to air. “But the people who come to us don’t come to us first, they come to us last,” Goldhawk says. “In almost every case they say, ’You’re our last hope, nothing else has worked.’”

Laurie Few was a lawyer before returning to school in 1989 to study journalism. Much of her working language bears a solicitor’s imprint: sources are clients, stories are cases. Few wears many hats at Fights Back, field producing, reporting, editing, managing the tape library and more. She takes a story away from a meeting and builds the file on it. With a lawyer’s diligence she digs until she has enough proof of wrongdoing to essentially take it to court and win. She paves the way for the closer, Goldhawk, to get the victims and targets on camera to tell the story.

According to Few, the simplest action-line story involves only two parties, a victim and a company/agency as the target. If the victim has been ignored, Few’s job is to make the target listen. “No one else has clear jurisdiction to intervene,” she says. “We just phone up. Obviously, our big weapon is the television screen, the pressure of the media.” So she pesters the target, calling every few days to see if any decision has been made yet. That worked for Maureen Sklapsky, a teacher in Castlegar, B.C., when Few convinced the Workers’ Compensation Board to reverse an earlier ruling denying her months of benefits. Sklapsky suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder after she was called to the gym to attempt CPR on her own son but was unable to save his life. The WCB ruled she was acting as a mother, not a teacher, and was therefore ineligible, but Fights Back got her $4,500 in lost wages and someone from the WCB appeared on camera to apologize.

Getting a spokesman from the WCB to appear on camera was a coup. Few says most large companies or government agencies will quietly admit error, but they don’t like to broadcast it. Getting them requires more robust pestering. As Few explains, “I say things like, “If you’re not going to go on camera this will be a “no comment,”’ or ’You realize we’ll say you refused an interview,’ and they’ll say, ’Oh no, we’re not refusing an interview, we’re talking to you right now.’ This is television—an interview means appearing on camera.”

That tactic usually works, but when the target is a real bad guy, a con man implicated in some kind of criminal wrongdoing, the last resort is to plan a video ambush, what Goldhawk’s team calls “a jump.”

John Allemang, until last fall the television critic for The Globe and Mail, has a dim view of action lines as consumer protection. “It’s not really an effective form of consumer advocacy, in the sense that as a crusade it’s kind of a foolish way to change the world,” he says. “It’s penny-ante; you could do all of this politely if you wanted to. I don’t feel like a more informed consumer watching their bits. I think it’s a place to park an old journalist—they’re all pissed off.” It is possible to produce effective consumer journalism, he says. He agrees that sometimes Marketplace, CBC’s 25-year-old consumer information magazine show, is one example. Allemang says that even though it is pitched to an aging audience, the show is still better than action-line journalism at helping consumers.

Marketplace doesn’t fall victim to the main problem with action lines: they usually provide only individual solutions for those lucky enough to appear on TV. Instead, it is the kind of show that can actually change policy because the stories are larger in scope. Jim Nunn’s investigation into Santa Maria Foods, a massive distributor of Italian goods, exposed the tactics it used to change best-before dates on certain products. Nunn warned shoppers that while some best-before dates are mandated by law, others are unregulated—and those dates can be misleading. There is no human defendant in most Marketplace stories, unlike Goldhawk pieces. But the dramatic Goldhawk Fights Back ambush tactics can create news that effects positive change as well. For a story on faulty ignition switches, Goldhawk chased the president of Ford Canada into a closet during a shareholder’s meeting; that story resulted in one of Ford Canada’s largest recalls.

Still, using national news show to expose a few con men does seem like using a bazooka to kill a fly. Kenneth Bell, an action-liner for CBC Saskatoon, admits those who get called bad guys on television might feel picked on and bullied, but they are merely the victims of their own actions. “If somebody’s doing what they are not supposed to be doing, then of course they’re not going to like being exposed for it,” Bell says. As Silverman likes to say, he doesn’t look for vengeance, he looks for restitution, and isn’t afraid to scare people with a camera in their face to get it. Goldhawk only acts when he believes he has the truth, which he calls the most powerful weapon in the arsenal. His finely hones sense of outrage at the injustice he encounters enables him to act as judge to his audience’s jury, putting his targets on trial in the court of public opinion.

In setting up an ambush, the first step is conducting property searches, corporation searches and licence plate checks on suspected targets. Next, reporters must familiarize themselves with the ambush site. Few says the address given on documents is often meaningless—the bad guys might use a parking lot or a Mailboxes Etc. location as their office. Oftentimes a cameraman and soundman are a necessary but expensive addition to the scouting party, just in case they are able to catch the target unprepared.

Even when they are prepared, targets will go to extraordinary lengths to stay off camera when Goldhawk comes looking for them. In one case, Goldhawk followed a swindler into the men’s bathroom at a Tim Hortons. Goldhawk took the crew in and filmed the closed door of a stall as he tried to explain himself. In another case, the crew was on a stakeout and a crony of their target came outside and flashed a handgun at them as they sat in their cars. Another man refused to go on camera, but did agree to allow Goldhawk to come inside his house to talk with him. As the crew filmed outside the house, the man’s son rushed out the door and attacked the camera, causing $20,000 in damage.

One week after their first attempt to find Edwardson, Few and Goldhawk are coming out of a Toronto courtroom on an unrelated story when Goldhawk’s cell phone rings: Edwardson has been spotted in Vancouver. They grab tapes, files and toothbrushes from the office and catch a flight two hours later. Late on the second night in B.C., Edwardson’s car is spotted at a motel. Few calls the front desk pretending to be a misinformed person looking for Edwardson. This technique is quite successful; people dish up all sorts of information when trying to be helpful. Edwardson is definitely inside and they decide to return in the morning to nail him. But when they arrive around 7:45 a.m., he is already gone.

Things are desperate, but they know of a “shill,” their word for a civilian who has gotten mixed up with the target and might help with bringing him down. Inviting a civilian into a jump is a risky move, but when contacted, the man agrees to help. He’s meeting Edwardson that very night, but he doesn’t know where yet. The sound guy on the crew has radio equipment that he one used to track bikers for a story in Morocco. The shill is wired up and tracked across town to a fancy restaurant. Few and the sound guy go into the restaurant to monitor Edwardson. As luck would have it, they are seated next to him and the shill. They wait, communicating by two-way radio. Being able to hear what Edwardson says at the moment of the jump is critical, so as Edwardson prepares to leave, the sound guy leaves Few at the table and goes outside to set up his gear. Few sits alone, watching Edwardson leave, as she waits for the cheque. She knows very well what’s about to happen—she’s seen it dozens and dozens of times.

“Hello, Reverend, my name is Dale Goldhawk from CTV national news.”

“Hi,” Edwardson says.

“I need to talk to you about some money.”

I’m sitting in John Allemang’s office on October 20, 2000, his last day as The Globe and Mail‘s television critic. It’s a spacious office containing a TV and VCR for Allemang to watch tapes of the programs he reviews. The tapes, sent by the networks for Allemang to study, are piled hip-deep in two of the office’s four corners, occupying entire cabinets, stacked on just about any flat surface available. They spread across the room like soapsuds in an episode of I Love Lucy where Lucy floods the house while trying to do the laundry. They consume the office so completely that it’s easy to imagine Allemang wading through them to get to his desk each day. “Take whatever you want,” he offers with a dismissive wave of his hand. Deciding I probably don’t need a 1998 episode of the fifth estate, I politely decline. But how is he going to clear all these tapes out of here by 5 p.m.? “There’s a Dumpster waiting somewhere,” he jokes.

The sea of tapes makes for a fitting scene: Allemang navigating the morass of mediocre programming to find something worth watching. That’s what a good TV critic is meant to do-slosh through the mess for the reader who’s too busy to get his feet wet. But being a good TV critic, writing intelligently about television, isn’t easy. It’s a thankless job. Viewers don’t believe television matters and, unlike Allemang, most TV critics aren’t inclined to try to change their minds. It is easy, after all, to cop a condescending attitude toward the boob tube, the idiot box, the medium charged with the dumbing down of society.

Toronto Life media columnist Robert Fulford says people, TV critics included, like to feel superior, “and television is something they feel they can be superior to.” A quick glance across the dial reveals that Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire and Temptation Island aren’t exactly raising the intellectual bar. It’s junk food TV, and it’s leaving us all with a bad case of gut rot. But Canadian TV critics aren’t, as Fulford suggests, “professional scoffers” who believe themselves to be superior to the medium they’re meant to review. A look at dailies across Canada shows that most TV writing in the country is smart and well written. It’s competent. It’s good. But it’s not great.

In his book On Writing Well, William Zinsser says that good critics, true critics, do more than just review programs (using the term “reviewer” a bit derisively), but actually provide a cultural context for what they are reviewing, in addition to their own opinions and thoughts. So, outlining what happens in a given episode ofWill & Grace and then weighing in on whether it was funny or not gets the job done, but it does little else. As renowned former New Yorker TV critic Michael Arlen writes in his book The View from Highway 1, a good critic should “speak of television as if it mattered.”

In every other school of criticism-film, music, literary and theatre-there are Great Critics, critics whose writings are required reading for anyone even peripherally involved in that business. Movie critic Pauline Kael’s columns in The New Yorker in the ’70s and ’80s were must-sees in Hollywood. “You had to read it,” Fulford says of Kael’s column. “You just weren’t in the business if you didn’t.” Today, Kael is considered one of the most influential film critics in the history of the medium. But television, particularly Canadian television, has never really had that one important critic. If television is the most truly vital and culturally significant of all media, why is it so hard to find truly vital and significant writing about it?

Television is a complex medium. It’s relatively cheap, it’s nonelitist and it’s widely available. As such, it’s arguably the most significant medium?more people are watching television any night of the week than attending a play or going to the movies. TV permeates our culture, yet critics can’t decide how much it matters (or whether at all), and viewers are left wondering the same thing.

Sometimes the reviews in other dailies aren’t even reviews. One of the biggest problems with TV criticism today, according to Robert Fulford, is that too much ink is devoted to what goes on behind the scenes. “There’s an awful lot of writing about the industry-I think an awful lot more than the public needs,” says Fulford. “Many critics would much rather be covering or criticizing a CRTC hearing than actually watching television trying to figure out what it says or what it means.”

Toronto Star television columnist Antonia Zerbisias would rather be covering a CRTC hearing than reviewing the new fall season-she writes reviews only because her job calls for it. “I think of myself as a reporter on television,” she explains. “I never refer to myself as a TV critic-it’s so pretentious.” Pretentious or not, it’s a bit unsettling that Canada’s largest daily has a TV critic who dislikes writing reviews.

Fortunately, a disdainful view of criticism is not a problem at most Canadian papers. Indeed, most TV critics at Canadian dailies do their jobs well: they watch the programs, and pass the verdict on to the reader, occasionally making reference to other shows and movies to provide context. The typical formula is to review one show per column, spending the majority of the column describing the show, and at the end deliver the verdict. Critics like Brad Oswald at the Winnipeg Free Press and the Globe‘s Allemang all reviewed the fall 2000 retread of The Fugitive in the context of the movie as well as the original series. (They also resisted the temptation to slam it just because it was a remake.) Again, while not glowing, reviews were fair. It was solid TV reviewing. (Explaining how the show’s premise does not hold up to 21st-century DNA and forensic testing, Oswald called for “a little bit of ’60s-style suspension of disbelief…but the payoff is worthwhile.”)

Oswald’s treatment of The Fugitive is indicative of Canadian television critics today; it’s actually harder than you’d think to find an example of anti-bias from TV critics anymore. Indeed, just about every critic claims to greatly enjoy television, and a look at their writing proves it. The fact is, it’s hard to do good work (let alone vital work) if you hate what you do. Dan Brown, who reviews television for the National Post (even though the paper has no official TV critic), believes it’s natural. “People who do the best TV work are the people who are generally enthusiastic about it,” he says. “That’s not just limited to TV, though. If you want somebody who writes well about American politics, you’ve got to find somebody who loves American politics.” And this, of course, is true. Canadian TV criticism is good. Good, but not great. But someone’s working on it.

If Allemang was an above-average critic, then Doyle is well on his way to being one of the most important TV columnists Canada has ever produced. Doyle, like Allemang before him, clearly believes in the importance of television as a medium and is well aware of its cultural importance. “So much of what we know about the world, what we know about our own society and culture, comes from television,” says Doyle. “We form our impressions through distilled images from television.”

Much of Doyle’s writing is about those images, rather than the programs themselves. During the Canadian federal election last November, Doyle regularly devoted segments of his columns to the election and its coverage, often discussing how politicians manipulate television for their benefit. For example, in October, Canadian Alliance leader Stockwell Day used giant prop markers to circle blown-up newspaper headlines about the auditor general’s report. “It was dimwittedly simple,” Doyle wrote of the tactic in his October 26 column, “and anyone who thinks this kind of unalloyed electioneering is too corny for a modern electorate is in for a surprise.” The mere fact Doyle wrote about the election in his television column at all is remarkable?even more so is the fact that his columns were sharper than those of many political reporters. “Sure, some of Stockwell Day’s antics look like cheap ads for an insurance company,” Doyle continues, “but they have a visceral impact, sticking in the minds of viewers.”

Because Doyle is the only TV critic at a Canadian daily today who writes about matters as complex as how an election plays out on television, sometimes he seems like the only critic who truly understands the power of television. And while there’s nothing necessarily wrong with the one-show-per-column formula, Doyle prefers to cover two or three shows each time. This format, in addition to allowing him to discuss several shows each day, gives him the opportunity to write about a TV-related issue (like the election) and still have space to squeeze in a proper review.

Reviews aside, the thing that makes John Doyle the most likely candidate to become a Great Critic is the fact that he doesn’t write about what’s on television; he writes about television itself. He, like Michael Arlen before him, uses the TV column to write about issues, something that has gone out of style with other TV critics. For Doyle, television is more than the idiot box, where the lowest common denominator can gawk at hokey reality programs or insipid sitcoms. Doyle believes that television is worthy of respect. “That doesn’t mean it’s the best,” says Doyle, “but it is the most important and influential.”

That John Doyle understands this is certainly a good sign. It means that someone is looking at television as a cultural force, that someone is looking deeper at the medium that most closely mirrors our society. It means that someone is finally producing truly important work about TV. John Doyle doesn’t just write about television as if it mattered; he knows it does.

Everywhere there are women wearing white shirts bearing personal messages: “I’m running for my mother,” “I’m running for my sister.” The women here are among the 96,000 people across the country who have come to act out their fear of a deeply distressing and potentially fatal illness that annually kills 5,500 Canadian women.

It’s hard not to be aware of breast cancer: the amount of press coverage it receives in the mainstream media is phenomenal. In the last six months, for example, The Toronto Star carried 57 articles about the illness. Such saturation coverage peaks each October, officially Breast Cancer Awareness Month since 1993: this year the National Post printed 12 articles about the subject in October, one fewer than The Toronto Star. The high level of reporting is not confined to the Toronto dailies: the Halifax Chronicle-Herald and The Edmonton Sun ran 10 and six respectively. Weeks after the fund-raising run, columns and articles about the breast cancer event were still appearing in major papers.

Given this volume of coverage, it would be easy to get the impression that breast cancer is the number-one killer of women. In fact, while it certainly is the number-one health fear, about seven times as many women die annually of heart- and stroke-related illnesses than of breast cancer. And yet these and other major health problems for women-such as lung cancer and thyroid disease-receive far less coverage. For example, theStar, with the biggest circulation of any paper in the country, ran just 30 pieces on heart disease last year, slightly under a third of the space it devoted to breast cancer.

This underreporting can have deadly consequences. Many women are still ignorant of the onset symptoms of a heart attack because women’s symptoms are completely different from men’s. Thyroid disease afflicts about eight percent of women; if undetected, this manageable condition can be fatal. So why are these problems that affect so many women getting so little coverage?

André Picard, who’s been covering health issues since 1981, most recently at The Globe and Mail, thinks underreporting of other women’s health issues is due in part to the relative success of breast cancer activists in getting their message across. “There’s an infrastructure there [in breast cancer] that makes it easy to get out information,” he says. “We tend to listen to people who crow the loudest.”

And in the case of breast cancer issues, there are a lot of people to crow. Although the Canadian Cancer Society and the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada each have roughly 450 full-time employees, it’s much easier to find support groups for breast cancer victims. These include such countrywide bodies as Look Good…Feel Better, which teaches women how to camouflage the effects of radiation and chemotherapy treatment, the Canadian Breast Cancer Network and Breast Cancer Action. There are also a number of regional and provincial groups, such as the New Brunswick Breast Cancer Network, the Burlington Breast Cancer Support Services and Toronto’s Willow Breast Cancer Support and Resource Services. Newfoundland even has an audio teleconferencing network for women living in rural areas. And as Sharon Bell-Wilson, until last January the executive director of the Ontario chapter of the Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, points out, “This list only scratches the surface. These are some of the ones I can name off the top of my head. If I took out a book I would find hundreds.” By contrast, groups for women with heart and stroke concerns are much harder to find. Heart to Heart and Living with Stroke exist, but serve both sexes.

The number of breast cancer groups has grown substantially since 1993, the year a national forum on breast cancer was held in Montreal. Organized by the Medical Research Council, other medical organizations and several breast cancer advocacy groups, the conference was the impetus for breast cancer awareness through a grassroots movement. “It was when the silence about this disease was broken,” says Bell-Wilson. “Years ago breast cancer was a taboo subject. Now we have survivors wanting to tell their stories.”

By comparison, other organizations haven’t been as successful in promoting their causes. Part of the problem is human resources. “I have a hard enough time organizing files, let alone advocating for thyroid,” says Barbara Cobbe, president of the London chapter of the Thyroid Foundation of Canada. “If you have a way we could get more coverage, I’d love to hear it.” Occasionally, her cause gets a boost when some high-profile person develops the disease. For instance, last year when Marilyn Lastman, wife of Toronto mayor Mel Lastman, underwent thyroid surgery, the disease hit the newspapers for a time. But Cobbe remarks in frustration that this kind of ink is an anomaly. “We got lots of coverage after that incident, but there was no consistent coverage afterward.” Part of the reason is that Cobbe and her colleagues don’t have time to stay in touch with reporters. Mary-Jane Egan, the only health reporter for The London Free Press, was unaware of an upcoming thyroid seminar. No one had told her about it.

And what reporters don’t know about they can’t write about. As Michele Landsberg, a Toronto Star columnist who specializes in women’s issues, says, “If you don’t have the time, you go on what the lobby groups give you and what the government hands out.” Asked whether she thinks breast cancer receives a disproportionate amount of attention, Landsberg identifies another reason other illnesses rate so little attention. “For years the heart disease organizations simply ignored women,” she snaps. “Now they are angered that breast cancer gets so much more attention. Instead of doing constructive outreach to women, by women, they spend a lot of misdirected energy attacking breast cancer coverage.” (Still, the breast cancer community has engaged in its own sniping: in March 2000, members of the breast cancer community asked the Heart and Stroke Foundation to abandon an ad it thought belittled the seriousness of breast cancer. The image showed a woman with her hands crossed over her breasts and the caption read: “Quick, what’s the number one killer of women? Here’s a hint. It’s not what you think.” The ad was pulled.)

Elinor Wilson, chief science officer for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, thinks Landsberg’s comment is unfair: “This isn’t a competition with which disease is the worst. Both diseases are devastating and we share a lot of common risk factors, so the objective is to work together for improvements in women’s health overall, not just women’s cancer problems or heart problems.” But she also inadvertently seconds Landsberg’s point about women themselves being the biggest advocates for breast cancer: “The grassroots movement, in my understanding, was not started by the Cancer Society, it was started by women connecting with women, and you haven’t seen that in heart disease. There are many questions about why that is the case.” She suggests one explanation: “We know from some of the literature that there is a stigma associated with heart disease. People with heart disease have sometimes been concerned that if, for example, employers know about a heart attack or heart disease, there might be implications for their employment. Women aren’t willing to come forward and say, ‘I’ve had a heart attack.’ It doesn’t seem to be that way in terms of breast cancer.”

Timing may be another factor. In late September, one week before the breast cancer run, the Heart and Stroke Foundation held its own fund-raising event. But in comparison to the 20,000 who participated in the Run for the Cure in Toronto, just 3,000 people turned out for the Heart and Stroke Mother Daughter Walk, raising $200,000, a little over a tenth of the $1.8 million that the breast cancer run netted in Toronto. While most major papers carried pieces about the walk before the event, there were no follow-up stories. Asked if timing was considered when planning the heart and stroke event, Barbara Steele, manager of communications for the Heart and Stroke Foundation, says no. “We’re not that strategic. If we avoided doing something because it belongs to another disease, we’d never do anything. If you look at the government calendar of organizations, you’d find every month has some disease.”

And while organizations are competing for attention, inside newsrooms, reporter cutbacks make getting news that is not from a wire service or from a press release harder. These days, many papers lack a dedicated health reporter or health editor. At the Ottawa Citizen, for example, there is no one full-time on the health beat. Last fall, former health editor Wendy Warburton noted that coverage had suffered since the two full-time health reporters who used to cover the consumer angle were moved to other positions during the summer of 2000. “We still have someone who covers national health issues and one reporter now covers the science angle,” she said, “but no one is writing about the consumer issues.” (Typical consumer stories are those on genetically modified foods or how boys who wear diapers may experience sterility when they’re older.) The other health positions were never posted and the paper resorted to using freelancers. Warburton noted, “There are certain stories that we can do a better job on than a freelancer. We just don’t have anyone whose job it is anymore to pay attention to that angle.” However, in the last few months, Warburton says things have improved: “One new woman we have on the desk is more interested in these topics, and a reporter who used to write a lot more science is doing more consumer-related health stories.”

According to managing editor Richard Hoffman at The London Free Press, “Health coverage is sacrosanct. London is one of the country’s top medical centres.” Still, the one dedicated health reporter at the Free Press, Mary-Jane Egan, is regularly assigned elsewhere. “We’re very tight, staffwise,” she explains. “Everybody doubles for everything. I do copy editing and I’m pretty well there all summer and over Christmas. And when an election comes we all get pulled off our beat to help with the newspaper.”

Not every paper is feeling the crunch. The Globe has an unprecedented five health reporters, and health editor Paul Taylor is proud of the investigative work his team has accomplished: “I report to David Ellis [Globebeats editor at the time] and his approach is that if there is something really important, we’ll clear the books and do it. In the spring of 1998, we put Sean Fine and Carolyn Abraham on the issue of Canadians going south for cancer treatment and they wrote a series of stories on whether people were getting better treatment. We devoted a considerable amount of space to it.” He also notes that his paper has given women’s heart disease prominence. Last year, the Globe carried 31 heart-and-stroke-related stories, of which five directly related to women. “We recognized the women and heart disease trend years ago and wrote about it,” says Taylor. However, he also points out: “Newspapers are about news events. Newspapers aren’t encyclopedias.”

Egan is a little envious of papers like the Globe that have better resources: “We’ve had a number of staff recently go to The Globe and Mail and they do talk about the difference in having the time and those extra people.” Calgary Herald health reporter Robert Walker, the only medical reporter at his paper, says that his coverage is generally limited to breaking news. “I come in and find Ralph Klein said something or other, there’s a crisis or there’s more money, and that kind of dictates where I go, but a paper like the Globe is probably different because if it has more reporters, it has the luxury of people making choices. It’s not as easy for a smaller paper to make those choices.”

Even at larger papers like the National Post, which has four health reporters, time is tight. Brad Evenson, one of the four, says that to cover something such as the relationship between poverty and health would take a couple of days, time he is seldom granted: “The data is not hard to find but the topic is abstract and a lengthy feature is the only way to explain it.” Nevertheless, Marilyn Linton, The Toronto Sun‘s health editor for the past five years, believes that journalists are not tenacious enough in finding their own stories, as opposed to those handed to them by advocacy groups. “Reporters aren’t good at chasing after the stories and the researchers,” she says.

The biggest issue, though, may be that heart disease, depression, lung cancer and other ailments just don’t generate the same emotions that breast cancer does. This was brought home during a phone interview with Valerie Hepburn, a public health consultant for Toronto. Hepburn began talking about the women she knew who had died of breast cancer. Soon I could hear her sobbing on the other end of the line.

“We prefer not to cover [an issue] unless there’s something new or something more sexy,” is how theCitizen‘s Warburton explains this factor. As she points out, health issues like clinical depression are not so “interesting.” Neither is heart disease, which can be prevented by a few simple measures: eat well, exercise and reduce stress. Brad Evenson agrees. “Healthy living is not newsworthy, it seems,” he says matter-of-factly. “Media are not in the business of reporting what is important. They are interested in what is new.”

The interconnection of poverty and health is an even harder sell. “That’s one of my largest problems with the press,” says Hepburn. “There are issues with no sexiness to them whatsoever and one of them is that women are living in poverty. Poverty is the greatest indicator of disease. That’s not interesting, but that is the issue we need to look at.” Dennis Raphael, an associate professor in the department of public health sciences at the University of Toronto, makes a similar point: “If you bring up the issue of income and point out that there had been a feminization of poverty, health reporters don’t feel prepared to understand it. For them, health is lifestyle and medical treatment. They’ll never make the link.” However, the Star’s Judy Gerstel says there is a reason for this: “Poverty, as a health issue, is covered as health policy, most of which goes into the A section rather than our lifestyle section. I think that they are two different subjects; they are certainly linked, but in terms of how beats are broken down, that rarely happens. It’s just politics of a newspaper.”

If poverty is unsexy, so are aging and the health problems associated with it, such as heart troubles, particularly since many health reporters are between the ages of 30 and 40. On the other hand, that is the same age group that is likely to have firsthand experience with breast cancer. “The baby boomers and their issues do get the disproportionate share of stories,” says Gerstel. She admits there’s a tendency among reporters to write what most directly affects them: “I tend to give short shrift to pregnancy issues just because that’s in the past of my life.” Dr. Jean Marmoreo, midlife health columnist for the National Post, echoes this point: “Breast cancer is touching our friends and our families. With heart disease, you’re getting frail, you have a little angina, you function less well and you need more drugs and a nitro patch. Where is the story in that?” she asks ironically. “We undervalue age so much that it is difficult to get the same kind of attention that breast cancer does and it’s very difficult to advocate for a bunch of 70-plus women. It’s much easier to advocate for a group of 50-plus women.”

As her comments hint, ultimately, the aging of the baby boomer reporters and their younger colleagues may solve the problem of older women’s diseases being poorly covered. As André Picard from the Globe says, “Elderly women’s issues will get covered in 10 years when we reporters are walking to work in the winter and it’s a hard chore, when it was easy many years ago.”

For nearly three years, I have been the editor of Le Journal de Montréal, a daily newspaper that since its foundation in 1964 has focused on local stories and court cases. It may seem an unexceptional form of journalism, but it still requires a good heart, a strong stomach, compassion and a sense of justice.

And nothing more? This is what we used to believe-until last September, when one of our crime reporters, Michel Auger, was the victim of a murder attempt on the newspaper’s premises. Since then, we have realized that it also takes courage and determination to do this type of journalistic work.

No one thought that it could be dangerous to be a journalist in this country. And whenever trouble erupted in the past, as in the Vancouver case where newspaperman Tara Singh Hayer was killed by terrorists from his homeland, it was blamed on political turmoil of an intensity that is rarely seen in Canada.

Michel Auger wrote about the Mafia and members of criminal gangs. He always assumed that the people most at risk were the subjects of his articles. Of course, he had been threatened and he took certain precautions to protect himself and his family-but he never really believed he was in danger. Who would shoot the messenger, especially in a peaceful Western country like ours?

Journalists and photographers sometimes have to work in difficult or dangerous conditions, such as countries in the grip of war. Some have been seriously wounded or killed or taken hostage by guerrillas. Others, and I’m thinking particularly of some Latin American journalists, have been tortured or murdered in their own countries because they tried to inform the public about embezzlement by government leaders or armed groups, or about the hold of organized crime on the public or private sector.

Who would have dreamed this kind of danger could exist here? Yet it does.

Here at Le Journal, we had to rethink the way we protect our journalists and help them to protect themselves. We already had certain measures in place, but we had to sit down with our people and reevaluate our approach.

An editor can never send someone on a dangerous assignment without first making sure that the journalist-and his or her family, as appropriate-wholeheartedly agrees with the assignment and is fully aware of its risks. Organized crime, the Mafia, terrorist groups, wars….When the reporter knows the danger involved, he or she will be more cautious and will take the precautions necessary for personal safety.

It’s never easy for an editor or a publisher to assign potentially dangerous work to a reporter. Only someone so insensitive as to be practically unconscious could fail to be wracked by some really fundamental questions: Is it worth it? Does the right to know, and the collective good, justify requiring a reporter to take such risks? Are there other ways to get the information? Just how far are we willing to go? Where do we draw the line and refuse to let our reporter pursue the investigation any further? There is no one clear answer: we face the questions anew, every time.

Management must also ask what security measures it can take to protect the journalists. Personal safety specialists can be brought in to meet with any journalists whose work is potentially dangerous. Once these experts have familiarized themselves with the journalists’ homes, means of transportation and activities, they can teach them what security devices are available and how to use them. There are many preventive measures that people can take to protect themselves; only in the most exceptional circumstances do they need to be armed.

A news organization, either through its editorial executives or its human resources department, must work closely with the police so that help will arrive quickly if needed. It must also, if need be, engage a private security agency to accompany a reporter to work or to protect his or her family.

The greatest danger facing reporters and their bosses is that of underestimating threats and attempts at intimidation. This is why the management must always be fully informed about the reporters’ activities. Reporters can very easily get carried away by their work, lose sight of the risks they run, or shrug them off as a minor nuisance. It’s up to management to show the prudence the situation requires, but without causing panic.

A good question to ask when faced with a dangerous situation is: Can we get this information or pursue this investigation in some other way? News organizations elsewhere, including ones in the United States and in Ireland, have worked with their reporters to come up with an interesting new approach: they put many journalists on a single story, so that no one person may be singled out by those who don’t want the information to be made public.

At Le Journal de Montr&eacuteal we have been using a similar method since last September. In the days and weeks following the attempt on Michel Auger’s life, a number of his colleagues took over his files and began writing their own stories about the biker gangs. We now have a greater variety of bylines than in the past.

Auger came back to work in January 2001. The paper’s management has provided him and other journalists with the safety measures I mentioned earlier. They feel safe and comfortable doing their work. But if any of them ever told us that they no longer wanted to take this kind of risk, even on a shared basis, or that it was just too stressful, we would immediately change their beat. Without a moment’s hesitation.

Paule Beaugrand-Champagne has been a journalist for 35 years. She has worked at La Presse, Le Devoirand L’actualité.

“IT ALL BEGAN A COUPLE OF MONTHS AGO,” Izzy Asper tells the audience at the July press conference announcing CanWest’s purchase of the Hollinger chain, “when Leonard walked by my door and said, ‘I’m going out for lunch. Can I bring something back for you?’ And I said, ‘Yeah, would you mind getting me a couple of papers?'” The people in the audience, some of them new employees of CanWest, chuckle at the obligatory opening joke. When the laughter subsides, Asper introduces CanWest’s newest CEO and, at 36, Izzy’s youngest child, Leonard Asper.

Leonard rises to the lectern and begins to read the company statement, outlining his vision for the new CanWest. Now, with the purchase of Hollinger’s 14 major dailies, including the Calgary Herald, The Gazetteand a 50-percent stake in the National Post, Leonard says he’s ready to lead Canada’s largest army of journalists beyond the confines of a single medium.

Although his speech is cluttered with buzzwords, Leonard’s strategy sticks to a single concept, a powerful bit of jargon that has taken hold with most of the big media players, namely “convergence.” He loses himself in enthusiasm when he talks about his convergence strategy, stepping from side to side as he answers the reporters’ questions. When he says “multiple media,” his hands fly apart. When he says “reaggregating,” they swoop back in to compact the air in front of him.

Izzy Asper watches the performance in bemused silence. Convergence, after all, was never a part of his strategy. Asper Sr. was relentlessly focused on broadcasting. When he started CanWest 25 years ago, he envisioned a television network spanning the country, a dream finally realized last year when the company acquired eight TV stations from Western International Communications.

Leonard, however, has his eyes set on a new frontier. Since being named CEO in June 1999, Leonard Asper has led CanWest on a content shopping spree, determined to transform the company from a simple rebroadcaster of American entertainment into a multimedia player. CanWest’s purchase of the Hollinger assets and WIC stations adds about 2,500 journalists to Global’s 443, instantly making it the largest owner of news content in Canada-content that Leonard hopes to “repurpose” for television and the Internet.

The trouble is, no one knows whether journalists can be repurposed. Can newspaper reporters be made to double as on-air announcers, creating a new and better sort of journalism and cutting costs as well? It’s a risky bet. The acquisitions have swollen CanWest’s debt, which in 2000 increased sevenfold to $4 billion. And that, combined with the looming economic downturn and an unproven convergence strategy, has scared off potential investors. CanWest’s failure to raise $800 million in a bond issue last October forced the Aspers to renegotiate the $3.5-billion Hollinger deal, reducing it by $300 million. And besides the financing debt, CanWest’s purchase of the WIC stations has finally made Global a real network, with the all-too-real burdens of producing unprofitable Canadian programming, not to mention its interest in the National Post, which is still losing money two years after its launch.

Despite assurances that the Aspers are looking to build, not trim, their empire, journalists fear CanWest’s debt load will translate into future layoffs. If Izzy Asper-whose raspy baritone still resounds within the company-senses the chill of economic winter, “redundancies” among CanWest’s news-gathering entities may become considerably less tolerable.

In the past, news was never a high priority for CanWest Global. Prior to the Hollinger deal, CanWest made tremendous profits by focusing on the lucrative business of rebroadcasting popular American imports, while spending less on Canadian programming and news. Friends of Canadian Broadcasting president Ian Morrison blames the CRTC for allowing CanWest Global to shirk its responsibilities to Canadian content: “If we were more naive, we would say, ‘Well, why aren’t they doing more for Canada? But we don’t expect any business organization to be in business to do something for Canada. They’re in business to do something for their shareholders and their owners.”

Not only is CanWest the most profitable broadcaster in the country, the company ranks as one of the country’s most profitable corporations altogether. Global has always had a knack for recognizing hit shows, like Friends, Frasier and Malcolm in the Middle, and outbidding CTV for the Canadian rights. But ratings aren’t the only reason for Global’s success, says Morrison. It also spends the lowest percentage of its advertising revenue on Canadian programming. According to figures released by the Canadian Association of Broadcasters, in 1997 CTV spent 33 percent of its advertising revenue on Canadian content while Global only spent 18 percent.

The Aspers, however, argue that those statistics are misleading. In Ontario, CTV owns several stations with separate news operations, whereas Global repeats its signal from one station in Toronto. Since, in 1997, Global didn’t have nearly as many news departments as CTV, it couldn’t be expected to spend as much on news. In a November 1999 letter to the Financial Post, Leonard wrote, “[Mr. Morrison] is omitting the fact that most of that excess is in news and sports, while Global in the same year spent more as a percentage of its revenue on Canadian drama than any other broadcaster in the country.”

The CRTC seems to agree. “Oh, the old Ian Morrison spin!” laughs commission spokesman Denis Carmel. “Let’s not compare apples and oranges. In the past, the requirements asked from CanWest Global were fewer than CTV. There’s a critical mass at some point where you can invest in programming and have it spread out through your operation. Global had eight stations. CTV had 25 stations. If you have eight stations, it’s difficult to have a national news organization.”

But Morrison isn’t convinced: “I don’t think it’s the amount of stations you own. It’s the amount of advertising revenue. None of the arguments holds up. They’re all just hogwash to try to camouflage that they have a very successful business model that has allowed them to spend less than others.”

Even breaking news doesn’t merit interrupting one of Global’s highly rated imported programs, says Antonia Zerbisias. The Toronto Star’s TV critic says CanWest is notoriously cheap on news coverage. While Global has run American news programs like 60 Minutes and 20/20 for years, the broadcaster has never mounted an equivalent of W-Five or the fifth estate. Asked whether Leonard Asper’s convergence strategy changes the equation, Zerbisias responds, “I doubt that Leonard’s vision is much different from his dad’s. It’s just more up to the times. I think Leonard is just as ruthless and business minded, and I very much doubt that his dad is giving him total free reign.”

Zerbisias, however, may not be giving Leonard the benefit of the doubt. While he certainly still must answer to his father, who at 68 has spent 25 years building the company, Leonard has played an important role in shaping Izzy’s attitude toward convergence. And for the time being, he has convinced his father that CanWest needs to move aggressively on the Internet. Izzy’s still somewhat skeptical, though, says Global president Gerry Noble: “Izzy has basically said, ‘Show me. I’ll invest, provided there’s a return.’ But Leonard’s driving.” In any case, Leonard Asper will someday be the unquestioned boss at CanWest, and there’s no doubt he senses a new media order on the horizon.

ON THE PHONE, LEONARD RUSHES THROUGH HIS answers, always rephrasing, always searching for the best words, though he seldom pauses to consider them. Consumers in the future, he says, will be inundated with media choices-scores of television and radio channels, several newspapers, countless websites. In order to rise above the clutter and retain some of that fragmented market, CanWest will have to own a multitude of media outlets, all cross-promoting themselves. Global news anchors will direct their viewers to the National Post, which will direct its readers to Hollinger’s website, Canada.com, which in turn will direct its viewers back to Global.

Another reason for CanWest’s rush to acquire content producers has been international competition. For the last decade or so, competing media companies have been buying content to distribute exclusively through their channels. This has sometimes had the effect of starving rivals for popular programming. When Rupert Murdoch, for example, made an investment in CanWest’s competitor in Australia, the Seven Network, CanWest’s Ten Network suddenly found Fox’s shows unavailable for rent. Leonard says owning the content is the only way CanWest can protect its supply. That’s why, for the last few years, CanWest has been steadily amassing a library of programming, boosting its production capacity and seeking alliances with studios.

CanWest’s content acquisitions have included Fireworks Entertainment, which has recently signed such big names as Keanu Reeves and Cameron Diaz to star in upcoming films, and a 20-percent voting stake in Alliance Atlantis, which it has since sold for an $8-million profit. CanWest has also purchased a 20-percent stake in Internet Broadcasting Systems, which specializes in news production on the Net, and a 32-percent interest in Medbroadcast.com, which provides health information to consumers. And with the Hollinger purchase, CanWest has acquired Canada.com, the country’s third-most-popular website, plus a host of other sites.

Like other media conglomerates, CanWest is prospecting for the cyber gold rush to come. When the technology that makes websites profitable becomes available, Leonard figures CanWest will be ready to stake its claims all over the Canadian new media landscape. That’s how he can get away with seemingly contradictory claims-a wealth of synergies in news production for shareholders without firing any journalists. The synergies he’s referring to have little to do with redundancies between Hollinger newspapers and Global news. Firing journalists might save CanWest money in the short term, but it will only limit the company’s ability to produce content, which goes against the Aspers’ strategy. Leonard’s more interested in the potential synergies resulting from a network of media outlets cross-promoting and sharing a central reservoir of content.

When asked where the synergies between Global and Hollinger will be found, Leonard is remarkably candid: “If we get a licence for, say, Your Money, which is a personal finance channel we’ve applied for, we have so much content for that channel that it’s already paid for.” Where will that content come from? “Well, it’s from the business writers, the business section of the newspaper, the business section of Canada.com or all the various creative talent that we have inside.”

While Leonard’s strategy suggests that journalists of the future will have to be more versatile-he imagines a world of reporters with on-screen presence who can write for the Internet, television and newspapers-he assures journalists that CanWest isn’t planning layoffs. In fact, CanWest is looking to invest in news: “We believe there are significant revenue opportunities, not cost-cutting opportunities. The Hollinger assets are run quite lean already. We didn’t look at this and say, ‘Boy, this is a fat organization, and therefore we can make some changes here.’ What do we know about the proper complement of journalists in a newsroom?”

But there’s a more ominous reason for CanWest’s recent interest in news. While Leonard understands the Internet’s potential, he also understands the threat it poses to the Canadian broadcasting industry. Indeed, Leonard is preparing CanWest for the collapse of Canadian broadcasting as we know it.

Today, Canadian broadcasters make their biggest profits from wrapping local advertising around popular American programming. They get away with this because Canadian laws protect them from American competition. But on the Internet, where all media is in direct competition and every outlet is just a click away, no regulation will protect Canadian broadcasters. “I think it is a possibility, and a real one,” says Leonard, “and therefore we are preparing as if it will happen and building our own library and factory that is able to produce world-class, quality television, so that we won’t be dependent on anybody else like a Fox or Warner Bros. should they decide that the Internet will be their distribution vehicle.”

If American networks were to broadcast their shows on the Net, Global and CTV would no longer be able to bid for the Canadian rights. In a sublimely ironic twist, Global and CTV would have to become more like the CBC, which already spends a lot on news and Canadian programming, if they wanted to survive on the Internet. “As I say, that day is a very long way off,” Leonard continues, “but in recognition that that day may be here…enter Fireworks Entertainment, which is our vehicle for creating our own X-Files, our own The Simpsons, our own The Practice.”

Newcomers like CanWest, however, will never be able to compete with Hollywood studios. Although Fireworks Entertainment has shown some success with the critically acclaimed Caitlin’s Way and more commercial programs such as Relic Hunter, Fireworks has never had to compete head-to-head with the likes of Friends, The Simpsons or Frasier. If Canadian broadcasters are pushed out of the entertainment business, news then becomes one of the only reliable ratings winners for local advertisers.

A simple analogy can be found in the print media. While Canadian magazines struggle to compete with a glut of American titles, newspapers continue to attract wide audiences, unhindered by the threat of American competition. Newspapers, says Leonard, are “a more protected form of programming-not by regulation, but by consumer demand. Entertainment is a bit more fragmented, whereas news is not going to be something that American services focus on.”

As a result, news production has recently become a priority. Not only have the Aspers purchased the largest newspaper chain in the country, but as part of the benefits package to push the WIC deal through the CRTC, Global will introduce a national newscast based out of Vancouver and a Calgary news bureau. A national public-affairs program is also in the works, and Global will be looking to create new programs with the raw information Hollinger provides. “Global will lever off the powerful and very comprehensive source of news from the papers,” says Leonard. “There’s a massive store of talent within the newspapers that I think will make our electronic and TV news services much stronger.”

And if last year’s Globalization of the WIC stations is any indication, journalists can expect to see further investments in news. “We’ve never been number one in news,” says Leonard of CanWest’s traditional TV operations. “We’ve always been second or third place, and so one of the things that attracted us about WIC is that it had stations that, while they were not performing well in prime time, they were leaders in news, and we wanted to gain some knowledge, lever off their expertise to become successful.”

One of those newsy WIC stations was CITV, now Global Edmonton. After Global took over, Leonard assured employees that local news would be bolstered, not cut. He appears to have made good on that promise. Tim Spelliscy, the longtime news director at CITV in Edmonton, says Global has provided funds to expand news and upgrade the set. “We’re all adding and hiring. There’s a ton of jobs opening right now.” The station, which already airs six hours of news a day, is considering adding even more news on the weekend. “Global has said quite clearly that the future of the television stations out here is going to be news and local news, and that’s what they’re building around.”

WHEN LEONARD ASPER SAYS HE WANTS TO transform CanWest Global into the number-one news network in Canada, it’s hard to take him seriously. While Global has always been the place to find your favourite sitcom, Canadian news is still dominated by the other two networks. If Leonard’s plan seems audacious, though, it’s certainly no more audacious than what his father accomplished, turning a small station in Winnipeg into a network to rival the CBC and CTV.

In 1974, Izzy Asper’s political career was over. He had been the Liberal leader of Manitoba for a while, but after being pummelled in an election by Ed Schreyer’s NDP, Izzy was looking for something else to do. He and his executive assistant at the time, Peter Liba, decided to go into business together, buying the equipment of a bankrupt station from North Dakota, KCND, and setting it up in an empty supermarket building in Winnipeg. They switched the call letters to CKND, and the seed that would eventually grow to become the Global Television Network was planted.

While building his network, Izzy earned a reputation for being a shrewd businessman. He built Global’s success on the strategy of reviving ailing stations by cutting costs, reducing staff and cashing in on the most popular American imports. As a result, critics of Global have accused the Aspers of catering to advertisers without much regard for the programs aired on Global. When Izzy Asper says that “TV stations are gigantic advertising machines there to be filled with product” and that employees are “in the business of selling soap,” he does nothing to appease those critics.

Last year, Global news in Ontario changed its format in an effort to cater to a wider audience and compete with CFTO in Toronto. Consultants who had worked for CFTO were called in by management to boost ratings. As a result of those suggestions, Global news started to focus on more crime and entertainment, less politics. Management decided to invest in a helicopter to provide faster live coverage, while hiring attractive women from CFTO to read the news. Global’s employees started calling the station GFTO.

As news became fluffier, Global’s former Queen’s Park reporter, Robert Fisher, became more and more frustrated. Within the company, he voiced his disapproval, and when his annual contract came up for renewal in September, Global declined. “Obviously, there was a decision that I didn’t fit in,” says Fisher, “and some of that may be that I was too old or too expensive or perhaps the kind of anchor who would not wear the grass skirt and flower leis on the final episode of Survivor.”

To compete with CFTO, Fisher says Global’s strategy has been to “out-helicopter them, out-cleavage them.” He remembers feeling sick to his stomach the night after the MTV awards: “When I started at Global in 1988, I don’t think that the second story on the six o’clock news would be that Britney Spears had stripped down to this see-through outfit with a G-string.”

Global president Gerry Noble gets peevish when Robert Fisher’s dismissal is mentioned: “Robert Fisher wasn’t fired, and make sure you get that right in your story.” Noble says Global was justified in passing on Fisher’s annual contract because the ratings for his political panel show, Focus Ontario, weren’t up to par. And he defends the changes Global has made to its newscast: “Why would we want to copy the CBC? Our audience wants to know what their local news is, what happened at the corner store, what happened at the school, what’s happening down the road. That’s what they want to hear about.”

Noble isn’t the only one who gets defensive about Global’s reputation for pandering to the masses. There’s a whole institutional sensitivity surrounding the topic. With 45 percent of the equity and 86 percent of the voting rights, the Aspers run CanWest more as a family company than a corporation. Decisions that would normally be made around a boardroom table are, at CanWest, sometimes made around the dinner table. That personal attachment has made the Aspers sensitive to criticisms directed at Global. Currently, Izzy is suing film producer Robert Lantos for $7 million after Lantos, at a Ryerson awards banquet in 1998, made some unflattering remarks about the Aspers’ commitment to Canadian programming.

Leonard, too, has shown an acute sensitivity to criticisms of CanWest Global. Last July, he hired reporter Brenda Dalglish to investigate the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, an organization that has been highly critical of Global and the Aspers. “I was led to the conclusion that what they were looking for was some type of financial trail between CTV and us,” says Friends president Ian Morrison. “They might actually believe that CTV is bankrolling us to cause them trouble with the CRTC.” Morrison fears the Aspers’ sensitivity to criticism may lead reporters working for Hollinger to censor themselves. (Interestingly, the National Post refused to sell the Ryerson Review of Journalism reprint rights to photographs of Leonard Asper, for unspecified reasons.)

National Post media columnist Matthew Fraser, who now works for the Aspers, was often critical of them in the past. In response to one of Fraser’s columns, Leonard once wrote a furious letter demanding Fraser’s head: “He is so far removed from the industry that he shouldn’t be taken seriously, but nevertheless the national platform you have provided to him to pick his petty fights is something we would ask that you reconsider.”

Fraser dismisses the letter as mere posturing: “None of this is meant in a vicious way. He’s been mad at me now and then, yeah. But that letter predates their ownership of the paper, and now that they own the paper, I’m not fired.” Fraser is an old acquaintance of the Aspers and says that Leonard would never have written such a thing if he were an owner of the National Post at the time, and he certainly wouldn’t act out on his anger. “I don’t think anybody could accuse Leonard of having a big ego.”

DAVID KROFT, A LAWYER in Winnipeg, remembers growing up with Leonard. Izzy Asper and David’s father, Guy Kroft, would often bring young Leonard and David along to Liberal functions. “We were probably taken some place and given a few doughnuts and told to hand out flyers,” says Kroft. The two children would often play a game where they would pretend to be their distinguished fathers, conferring upon each other the laughable importance of adulthood. “I would call him Izzy, and he would call me Guy.” In the summertime, their families vacationed together at Falcon Lake, where David and Leonard would terrorize the other cottagers on their little power boats. Kroft remembers a horribly out-of-tune piano on which Leonard would play anything from rock anthems by Canadian bands like Styx and Rush to Broadway musicals: “He and I must know every word to Jesus Christ Superstar.”

Although Leonard admires his father and shares his drive, Kroft says he’s not as single-minded or ruthless as Izzy. Despite his position of power at CanWest, Leonard is a very down-to-earth person. “When we go out to dinner, discussion isn’t about acquisitions,” says Kroft. “We still come back to the same silly, boyish jokes we always used to laugh about and the things we were infatuated with. Leonard just doesn’t present on a lofty level. He can rise to the occasion, but you’re at ease when you’re with him.”

“Somebody once referred to him as the thinking man’s hoser,” says Leonard’s older brother, David. “He plays hockey, and we throw the football around and cheer for the Winnipeg Bombers.” David describes Leonard as a man with a love for sports and music, but a mind for business. His training for the chief executive position started long before anyone suspected his ascension. About 10 years ago, the Aspers as a family had to decide where CanWest was going. “Izzy put it to the three of us,” says David, “as to whether we were interested in trying to carry on the majority ownership of the company in the family. We all said yes.” So David and Gail left their law practices and Leonard went straight into the business after getting his law degree at the University of Toronto and articling for a year. While Gail became corporate secretary and David went into operations and programming, Leonard worked on corporate development, studying future directions the firm might take.

In the process of learning the business, Leonard was sent to Toronto to work in virtually every department of Global Television, including the news department, where the now-disgruntled Robert Fisher had a chance to talk to him about his news philosophy. “He and his dad are very different broadcasters, and my personal experience with Leonard has been that he cares a hell of a lot more about news than his father did,” says Fisher. “His father was a programmer. You know, give me The Love Boat, give me L.A. Law, give me the X-Files, because it makes me money. Leonard obviously wants to make money as well, but I really, truly believe that there’s a commitment by him to news programming.”

Fisher says Leonard was one of the few people within CanWest’s management to support Focus Ontario, and he believes Leonard may have intervened to keep it alive for over 12 years: “People are going to say, ‘Fisher’s off his rocker! He’s been unemployed too long.’ But I believe he will make the difference. I think there’s a different philosophy there.”

In 1994, Leonard was promoted to vice-president of corporate development at CanWest, and in 1998, he was named chief operating officer. So when Izzy asked his children who should take on the position of CEO, they decided that Leonard was best suited for the role. “Leonard has a much more deal-oriented, corporate-development, strategic-minded kind of approach,” says David, “and so that lent itself best to the kind of position that CanWest Global is in.”

Investors, however, haven’t shown the same confidence in Leonard’s strategic abilities. Since reaching a brief high in September, CanWest’s share price plummeted to a five-year low, from $21 to $12 in just a couple of months. Shareholders are annoyed by the fact that CanWest, known for its cautious deal-making and consistent profits, has entered the stagnant newspaper industry, burying itself $4 billion in debt at the outset of a recession. The price of newsprint has been steadily rising for over a year, and the ad market is expected to slump. Business writers, who have a genuine stake in the folly of their employers, point to the failed convergence schemes of the past. Media synergies are overrated, they insist, citing excessive prices that media moguls have paid for content providers that can’t be profitably merged.

Bob Bek, an analyst at CIBC World Markets, says that despite CanWest’s $400 million in annual interest payments and another $100 million in operating costs, the immensely profitable CanWest will be able to shoulder the burden: “We’ve done a scenario analysis that shows that even if the economy hits a brutal recession, one that we haven’t seen in our lifetimes, CanWest still probably generates about $600 million. So, you’ve got a decent buffer there.”

Bek does, however, acknowledge that Leonard’s plan to converge newspapers and television is questionable: “Leonard obviously believes that one plus one equals three. I would argue that one plus one equals more than two, but does it equal three?” While there are synergies to be found between newspapers and television, Bek says the Hollinger deal may be more about survival than convergence.

“I don’t believe these guys are introducing any new way of approaching the market,” says Bek. “I think what they’re doing is setting the stage to adapt to the market.” With the consolidating media landscape and the potential of broadband Internet, Bek says CanWest’s traditional business of rebroadcasting American imports is at risk of being marginalized. Imagine for a moment a portable flat-screen device through which you can freely connect to whatever medium you choose: news, e-mail or the latest episode of Friends. Such a device could be adopted as rapidly as the cell phone, turning the entire world of media on its head.

This might sound like science fiction. But as Nortel Networks and Sierra Wireless work together to develop high-speed wireless modems, telecommunication companies around the world are in the process of licensing the frequencies that will make the portable Internet a reality. When Canadian advertisers lose the privilege of wrapping their ads around Hollywood’s most popular shows, CanWest will be positioned to dominate the only game left in town: news.

By that time, Canadians in 13 cities will click to their local newspapers in the morning, and alongside the print, they will find much-improved Global news footage. The cost of personnel will rise, but the cost of production will drop. There will be more journalists, but fewer technical people, as CanWest takes advantage of technology that will eliminate many of their jobs. Already, CanWest is developing a station-in-a-box technology that will allow Global to reduce its tech staff by a third. One day, high-speed Internet will spell the end of expensive satellite hookups, and portable devices will end Hollinger’s reliance on newsprint.

In the meantime, however, journalists are going to have to undergo a frightening transition. While Leonard seems to understand the importance of news, reporters may find living up to his vision next to impossible. In a January speech to the Canadian Club of Winnipeg, Leonard said that “in the future, journalists will wake up, write a story for the Web, write a column, take their cameras, cover an event and do a report for TV and file a video clip for the Web.” While these new chores may be introduced in the guise of “opportunities for journalists,” it won’t be long before they become requirements.

For a look into Hollinger’s future, consider the Orlando Sentinel. The Florida paper’s owner, Tribune Co., which also owns the Chicago Tribune, The Los Angeles Times and 22 television stations, has been a leader in converging its news operations, and Leonard often holds it up as a model for CanWest. At the Sentinel, Keith Wheeler, the deputy managing editor for multimedia, coordinates the work of an online editor, photo editor, graphics editor and local news editor.

When a story breaks in Orlando, reporters can be required to submit drafts throughout the day for Tribune’s websites, appear on Tribune’s television channels to update the story and still write a longer version for the next day’s newspaper. Although nobody gets paid any extra for having his work repeated throughout Tribune’s news operations, Wheeler doesn’t think that’s a problem: “If you got a reporter that comes back into the newsroom at two o’clock to write his report, and we say, ‘Hey, listen, we need you to do something for television,’ it’s based on one report. ‘Hey, listen, we need you to do something for radio,’ it’s still based on that one report.”

The major advantage of linking TV stations and newspapers, says Wheeler, is that it expands the television network’s operational force: “Let’s say you have a television newsroom that only has 16 reporters. You add to them the 350 editorial staff that I have here and you see how much you’ve expanded their production, their capabilities, their resources. Here at the Orlando Sentinel, we have 19 photographers, and all 19 have a digital video camera, so these are 19 people from whom I can also get video of a story that maybe the television station isn’t covering.”

Canadian journalists are bound to see that kind of cooperation between Global and CanWest’s newspapers. “What we would hope,” says Leonard, “is that journalists would take the opportunity to expand their horizons beyond simply writing for a newspaper and start to work with us on writing for television, maybe even writing for an information program.”

While journalists may not welcome the imposition of such “opportunities,” if CanWest’s purchase of Hollinger and its recent investments in news are any indication, it would seem that Leonard Asper understands that news, traditionally a weakness for CanWest Global, is going to have to become its strength, since that’s one of the few places where Canadians will be able to assert themselves. “Going into the future,” says Leonard, “when we have to look at what content will be winning content, we think that people in the end will always care about their news.”

Every Friday afternoon around four o’clock, 13-year-old Kelly Waugh picks up 80 newspapers, climbs onto her scooter and wheels her way through the neighbourhood delivering the St. Marys Independent. She cruises along Jones Street East and then Huron Street in the cozy, romantic town located 20 minutes southwest of Stratford, Ontario. Nestled quaintly in the Thames River valley, downtown St. Marys is dominated by Victorian-Gothic limestone buildings that reflect the town’s industrial heritage. Like other small towns in Canada, “Stonetown,” a not-so-booming community of 6,000 people, is a peaceful place where everyone knows everyone else, which means most townsfolk rely on each other, but of course, gossip constantly.

Homemaker Edna Black has heard her share through the gossip mill. One rumour involves Frank Doyle, owner and publisher of the Independent, having a mysterious backer for his new endeavour. Whether this is true or not, Black and other residents know for sure that ever since the Independent started appearing free on their doorsteps last summer, it has been a lively alternative to the stodgy, predictable Journal Argus, a weekly that has served St. Marys for over 80 years. “The Independent seems to be more family-centred. Each week they have ‘Family of the Week,’ which introduces mostly newcomers to St. Marys,” she says. “They have a kids’ page, they have jokes. It’s a lighter paper.”

Meanwhile, the commonly held view is that in the past few years the Journal, which was purchased in June 1999 by Metroland, the Torstar subsidiary that as of March 2001 owned 69 community newspapers in Ontario, has been losing touch with its readers. As Doyle says: “It’s a big company newspaper now”-a view frequently expressed by St. Marys residents ever since Lorne Eedy, the local owner, sold the paper that his family had run for four generations. “Lorne used to deliver the papers to our store himself and chitchat a bit,” says Bev Thibodeau, co-owner of West-End Variety store. “Now the owner seems so impersonal.” Richard Stevenson, a cement chemist who also referees minor hockey, becomes poetic when describing what’s happened to the Journal. Likening its new ownership to a tree, he says, “As the tree gets larger it takes more effort to reach the fruit on the outer limbs, which means good fruit is ignored and lost.”

It’s no coincidence that the Independent emerged shortly after the Journal‘s change of ownership. In several small communities across Ontario, dissatisfaction with chain-owned weeklies has inspired town members to launch newspapers of their own or run ad campaigns protesting the quality of their local papers. The Crier in Port Hope, for example, appeared in March 1999 in reaction to the Port Hope Evening Guide‘s dwindling editorial quality. The Evening Guide, formerly locally owned, became a community embarrassment after Conrad Black’s Hollinger purchased it as part of its 1996 deal with Southam. In June 2000, after The Crierfounders heard the Evening Guide would not be part of CanWest’s acquisition of Hollinger properties, they suspended publication to support the Evening Guide‘s search for a suitable new owner. If The Crier crew find the new owner satisfactory, they plan to put their time and talents toward news coverage and staff development. If not, they may publish again.

Not so the Pelham Herald. The weekly served the tiny community of Pelham, Ontario, for 40 years, but was closed in the wake of the 1996 Hollinger deal. In response, 50 shareholders created the Voice of Pelham, a weekly that continues today. And early in 1999, the 30-year-old Brighton, Ontario, Independent ran a three-week-long ad campaign denouncing its competitors for becoming vehicles for ad inserts rather than news: one recent issue of Hollinger’s Apple Gazette, for instance, had eight pages of news and 170 pages of inserts. The Independent also sponsored a presentation where John Miller, founding editor of The Crier and a Ryerson journalism professor, talked about his own community’s attempt at improving news coverage. He told the group: “We’ve made a serious point. We’ve gotten some notice from a high level in the organization. That shows that individual citizens acting together can still do a lot.”

There’s no question that Doyle has done a lot: his Independent has set off a small-town newspaper war that’s as significant in St. Marys as the Globe versus Post rivalry is in Toronto. The real question is, can theIndependent last? The changing landscape of the weekly newspaper industry has already forced many independent papers to downgrade in size and upgrade in costly technology as they face competition from large chains like Metroland. Seven corporate groups own nearly 40 percent of community papers in Canada; as a result, more and more papers like the Independent are struggling to keep from toppling off the cliff’s edge. As Bev Thibodeau observes, “[Doyle’s] gotta have rocks in his head for starting an independent nowadays.” But Frank Doyle remains confident: “We’re way ahead than where we thought we’d be.”

While I leaf through the current issue of the Journal at the St. Marys Museum, a converted 1850s limestone house perched on a knoll overlooking Cadzow Park, curator Mary Smith brings me a mug of steaming Earl Grey tea. At first, I couldn’t see why residents were disappointed with the recent Journal-it seemed fine to me. It has a professional appearance, well-written stories about community and regional news, acceptable photography and few typos or corrections. But after examining pre-Metroland issues on microfilm, I realized how much the Journal had changed over the past two and a half years, and also how out of touch I had become with the small-town mind-set from living in Toronto for four years. Thinking back to when I lived in Pelham reminded me of the things I looked forward to reading in the Herald. I didn’t expect it to look like The Toronto Star or focus on national and international news, but I did want to read about the people in my community and local news. As Smith says, “You should be able to capture the flavour of the town by reading its paper.”

The old Journal oozed St. Marys flavour. It was a 26-page broadsheet with a somewhat old-fashioned look that offered engaging photography, lots of local stories and a modest amount of regional news. Spontaneous-looking photos of children throwing leaves or playing in the snow were common. Typical front-page stories included “Arthur Meighen Added to List of Possible School Closures,” and “Put Your Name on St. Marys Newest Walkway.” Today’s Journal, a tabloid averaging 32 pages, has mostly posed pictures, fonts similar to that of the Star and a larger typesize, which makes pages look untidy and leaves less room for content. Of course, modernizing the format of any traditional weekly is tricky-readers are stubborn when it comes to change. But the changes were more than cosmetic. Long-running columns like Don MacDonald’s “With a Jaundiced Eye,” Dorothy Eedy’s “Eat at Our House,” and Eric Dowd’s “A View from Queen’s Park” still appear in every issue. But Don Van Galen’s political column “For What It’s Worth” has been dropped, while Val Thompson’s monthly family living column “Plain and Simple” now only appears sporadically. Fewer letters to the editor are published-an average of four per issue in 1998 compared to the present two. As before, there’s lots of sports coverage, but it doesn’t make up for the rest of the paper, which began dwindling shortly after December 1998, when Eedy realized he wanted to sell his mini-chain of 10 weeklies.

During this time, the masthead diminished from 15 employees to 11-one of the people let go was the photographer, which explains the poorer quality of photos. Since Metroland took over, full-time staff has dropped to 10; meanwhile the proportion of advertising has risen. “It’s not really community-focused anymore,” says Doyle. “It’s more like an avenue for ads.” Lori Black, Edna’s daughter and a high-school teacher at St. Marys District Collegiate Vocational Institute, believes the paper caters less to the elderly and young people of the community even though they make up a large part of the St. Marys population. “TheJournal is published mainly for people between the ages of 30 and 45,” she says, “and it’s those people whose views are expressed, whether it’s having their kids’ hockey pictures published or whether it’s only reporting on events that suit them.” Lorne Eedy agrees that the paper is predictable. “If you look in the paper now, you see peewee hockey, Don MacDonald’s column, always the same stuff,” he says. He also believes that without his “Rambling Reporter” column, a weekly discourse on practically anything that often took on controversial subjects like poor local banking services and Quebec separatism, the Journal has lost its edge. “It’s now more it’s-great-to-live-in-St. Marys kind of coverage,” he says.

On the other hand, Doyle’s personality is thoroughly present in his 18-page tabloid. His nine-year service on town council is evident through Independent editorials about local elections, drinking and driving and the importance of small businesses. His determination to succeed is apparent in the house ads that can appear as many as five times in each issue: The Stonetown’s Most Read Newspaper, Reaching More People. No Doubt About It. These self-promoting ads play around miniature sections including Religion, Kids Stuff and Chris Blackman’s political column “The Red Tory” (“While Clark has his heart on his sleeve, and has fought his way through his entire career, Day gives off the impression he simply isn’t willing to go into the corners”).

The Independent also has the advantage of publishing on Fridays, two days later than the Journal, which makes it possible to include more current town council news, since meetings are held on Tuesday evenings. Despite Doyle having no background in journalism, which means quite a few typos, grammatical errors and layout weaknesses, the Independent still seems to have more connection with St. Marys readers than theJournal does these days. As Richard MacPherson, owner of the M & M Variety store, says, “It has a lot of silly things from a journalistic point of view that are interesting to small-town readers.” “Celebrity of the Week,” for example, is a photo of two community members with their names melded underneath to create a famous person: John Boonstra and Wayne Cooper become John Wayne. “We want to get the community involved so it becomes their paper,” Doyle says with a slight Irish accent. This vision includes uncontrived photography and sections designed to appeal to various age groups. The kids’ page, for example, has word searches, riddles and craft ideas. The Independent also does investigative work, such as last summer’s stories on the possible contamination of St. Marys water wells in the wake of the Walkerton E. coli tragedy. One result is that even people from surrounding townships continue to seek the Independent out. “The people want Frank to succeed,” says MacPherson. “And if he has that, his paper has a half-decent chance of survival.”

Not surprisingly, Bill Huether, general manager at the Journal, is equally optimistic about his paper’s future. “If anything, the Independent will make our customers realize what a quality paper we put out,” he says. His relentlessly upbeat comments remind me of St. Marys mayor Jamie Hahn, whose booming voice fills the 19th-century town hall’s boardroom with unending praise of anything Stonetown. Huether believes the new format makes the paper modern and easier to read. And, as he points out, having a big corporate owner also frees the paper from the many financial constraints independent newspapers face; for example, the Journal‘s aging computer file server was replaced when Metroland acquired the paper. Being part of a chain also means the Journal can secure advertising deals that are rarely available to independents. “Some advertisers like to be given package deals,” says Metroland president Murray Skinner. “They don’t want to see every different paper individually.” It’s Metroland’s strategy to accumulate a number of weeklies in adjoining markets, which allows it to offer attractive group buys and provide efficient distribution of flyers. It’s hard for independents to compete. “This way, other competitors don’t have a toehold,” explains Serge Lavoie, executive director of the Canadian Community Newspaper Association.

But just because a corporate owner has more revenues doesn’t mean its papers’ editorial budgets are any bigger. Indeed, the two editors, Laura and Pat Payton, who have both been with the paper for over 15 years, have noticed differences working under the wing of a large, penny-pinching corporation. Laura caught herself hesitating to buy cheese trays for last fall’s all-candidates meeting, an event the paper has traditionally sponsored, because she didn’t know if the newspaper could afford them. “Sometimes I’m not so sure how much Metroland even cares about what’s in the paper,” she says. “But they would care if the ad revenue started to fall.”

Still, Pat puts part of the blame for the new austerity on Lorne, who he thinks was greedy for selling his papers. As Laura Payton says, there wasn’t much for Metroland to cut after Lorne was through. On the other hand, having a new owner has also given her more editorial freedom now that the “Lorne influence” has disappeared. “Lorne was right here and had ideas about how things should be done, so in a way we’re freer than we were before,” she says. The downside is that while Lorne was very hands-on with the Journal, he also tended to motivate his staff to get more stories, something the new owner doesn’t seem to spend much time doing.

The differences in attitude toward and commitment to the community at the two papers are reflected in their circulation strategies. The Journal is not home-delivered and costs $1, although recently ads have appeared in the paper for newspaper carriers. The Independent, on the other hand, is free and delivered to almost all St. Marys residents. The Journal still contributes to the museum, sponsors all-candidates meetings and creates a special issue for the homecoming festival, but in other ways it’s less connected to the community. The Journal used to employ handicapped teens from the local high school to insert flyers and deliver papers to selling points, but now Metroland takes care of that. And Stevenson can remember a couple of times where Journal employees said they would be covering an event only to pull a no-show. Eedy, by contrast, was a constant presence in St. Marys, participating in the group that worked to preserve the limestone Opera House and volunteering for the Rotary Club and the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame. Such visibility was part of the family tradition. Edna Black remembers how Lorne Eedy’s father, John, “would walk the streets and pick up the sentiment of the community.” It’s hard to imagine Metroland execs engaging in the same type of walkabouts.

But while readers appreciate Frank Doyle’s connection to their town, advertisers were initially less willing to embrace the new paper. Doyle found he had to constantly fight the perception that the only place businesses could advertise was in the Journal. By March, though, Doyle was saying, “That’s not the case anymore.”

Still, his cramped, gaudy green office on Water Street symbolizes how hard it is for independents to exist in the face of a chain-owned competition. Laura Payton and Lorne Eedy suspect Doyle is deep discounting his ad space. Other people in the community think Frank has a silent partner. If so, that may explain his free classified ads. But Frank is a private man who wouldn’t answer certain questions and wouldn’t let me dig too deeply by talking to other Independent employees. “We are very busy,” he said, obviously annoyed. “And I don’t want to bash the Journal.” Eedy isn’t so reticent: the Independent, he maintains, is “worse than a high-school paper.” Laura Payton is similarly open with her views. Last November she published an ad titled “Price vs. Cost,” touting the Journal‘s high quality-it has received CCNA awards in the past-compared to its price, which was a shot in Doyle’s direction. And in late fall she was predicting the new paper wouldn’t last much past January because, she explained, advertisers get stingy after the Christmas holidays.

I’m not so sure about the Indepedent‘s fate. After conducting a survey of 50 St. Marys newspaper readers, I discovered how much the Independent has already had an effect on the town. Despite its shortcomings, people are reading it and hope it succeeds. “This new paper is down to the needs of the town people on a whole,” wrote one respondent. “It covers community news on a regular basis,” said another. More importantly, almost all the surveys came back favouring local ownership of community newspapers.

“The Independent isn’t fully developed but has the possibility of becoming one of the papers in St. Marys,” says Richard MacPherson. And as of March, young Kelly Waugh was still delivering the Independent every Friday after school.

~~Bourque Exclusive~~ Trudeau back in hospital. Breaking: Former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau is back in hospital. This afternoon a source reported that the ailing 80 year old statesman had been admitted to Montreal’s General Hospital yesterday.

Before running this item in mid-September on his website, Bourque Newswatch, Pierre Bourque says that he received a tip via e-mail from a Trudeau family friend and confirmed it via e-mail with a top Liberal insider. Patient Services then confirmed Trudeau’s status to Bourque over the phone. A short time later, after Ottawa Citizen national editor Anne Trueman read the report on her daily trip to Bourque Newswatch, she called reporter Zev Singer and asked him to look into it.

At the time, Singer happened to be sitting in his car in the parking lot of Montreal General Hospital where wounded Journal de Montr&eacuteal reporter Michel Auger was being treated. He spoke to a PR person at the hospital, who told him there was no patient registered under the name “Pierre Trudeau,” but couldn’t rule out the possibility Trudeau was registered under an alias. After spending about 20 minutes fruitlessly surveying the hallways, he concluded that Trudeau wasn’t there, although he admits, “It’s not impossible that he was tucked away in some corner.”

Another source, a well-placed political operative, reported that a number of street-level news hounds are worried that their corporate masters may be preventing them from fully investigating, indeed even repeating, what was reported exclusively by Bourque Newswatch last week.

According to our source, “it is likely that the Prime Minister’s Office has exercised every means, including direct approaches to the owners of Canada’s national media properties, to ensure that Mr. Trudeau is afforded every privacy.”

While no press outlets reported Trudeau’s being back in hospital, those who followed up the story denied they were prevented from investigating. CTV senior vice-president of news Kirk LaPointe, who was then editor ofThe Hamilton Spectator, doubts the mainstream press buckled under pressure from the PMO, though he concedes that “it’s plausible.” If Bourque is right and a website reported a story that the mainstream press knew to be true but refused to print, it wouldn’t be the first time. Two years earlier, Matt Drudge became a household name after breaking the Clinton-Lewinsky story that would have been a Newsweek exclusive had its top brass not withheld the story. Although Trudeau’s second hospitalization pales in comparison to Drudge’s story, which ultimately resulted in the impeachment of a president, the principle is the same.

Drudge has been an idol of mine ever since I ended up on his e-mail mailing list in 1997. Having been interested in politics for most of my life, and in the Internet since I first logged on in ’94, I was intrigued by the idea of a career that combined both. The notion that one man, in a seedy Los Angeles apartment, could expose what became the biggest story of the decade, despite the efforts of a major newsmagazine likeNewsweek to conceal it from the public, was mesmerizing. Drudge’s track record wasn’t perfect, and sudden prominence brought high-profile criticism (Drudge prides himself on being the only reporter ever to be sued by the White House). But Drudge persevered and continued breaking stories about the Lewinsky saga, being first to reveal the existence of the now-infamous dress and Lewinsky’s intimacy with Clinton’s cigars. More recently, he was first to report that Clinton was negotiating with NBC to host a TV show following his presidency. Drudge landed a TV show of his own on Fox News, though he eventually walked off the set to protest what he regarded as editorial interference, never to return. Following his TV debut, Drudge began hosting a radio show. After being booted off ABC Radio by top network executives, Drudge continues to host a nationally syndicated radio show, now on the Premiere network. But despite dabbling in other mediums, Drudge remains renowned for the stories he breaks on the Internet.

In the fall of 2000, I set out to find a similar citizen-journalist in Canada who would dare to print what others sought to withhold. I began logging on to Bourque Newswatch, hoping to find Canada’s Matt Drudge. Instead I found Pierre Bourque, a man who has adopted the Drudge persona but lacks his credibility and investigative zeal.

Pierre Bourque launched Bourque Newswatch in 1998, shortly after Drudge broke the Lewinsky story. The layout of the site, bearing the slogan “Tomorrow’s News Now,” is similar to that of the Drudge Report. Both provide headlines linking surfers to current stories reported on other websites, permanent links to news organizations, columnists and other Web-based resources, and original reporting. While Bourque says he was “very inspired” by Drudge, he shies away from calling himself “Canada’s Matt Drudge.” However, a quote he posted on his site by literary agent Lucianne Goldberg refers to him as such. Bourque’s site eventually acquired a feature that the Drudge Report lacks: a chatroom.

Bourque has never had a story on the scale of Lewinsky to put him in the category of Drudge, whose site was named one of the “10 Web Sites that will change the world” by global leaders at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in January 2000. But the Drudge Report has been online since 1994, and initially, Bourque seemed to be well positioned to equal Drudge’s accomplishments.

At first, Bourque’s background appeared to offer more opportunities than Drudge’s. Growing up in a middle-class Washington suburb and abandoned by his father when he was young, Drudge finished high school and was a nobody who launched his career while working in the gift shop of the CBS building in Los Angeles. (His first scoops consisted mostly of being first to publish box office returns and overnight Nielsen ratings obtained by rummaging through trash bins at CBS and salvaging memos before they hit the shredder.) Bourque, on the other hand, grew up in a more privileged environment in Ottawa. His politically connected father, a wealthy real estate developer, was close with top aides to Brian Mulroney, including Patrick MacAdam, and was a major fund-raiser for Jean Chretien in the ’97 election. (Not that Bourque’s family is without tarnish: in January 2000, his father pleaded guilty to tax evasion.) As a young man, Bourque gained political experience as an Ottawa alderman and candidate for MP, and journalistic experience writing a column for the parliamentary weekly newspaper The Hill Times, as well as publishing four books.

But to my surprise, further research revealed a less-promising side of Bourque. A year before graduation, Bourque dropped out of business administration at the University of Ottawa and took a job as an overnight weekend DJ at a local radio station. While studying real estate at Algonquin College, longtime family friend Pat MacAdam recalls Bourque’s father sending him to a car-racing school. Bourque’s latest co-written book,Car Buying Online for Dummies, mentions that he’s competed in Canada, the U.S. and Europe “at a high professional level.” However, when I asked him about it, he couldn’t name a single race he’s won. After working in the family real estate business for a while, The Globe and Mail reported, Bourque acquired an electronics repair company in partnership with his father and became its president. Two years later, the company was bankrupt and the Ontario Labour Relations Board found it in violation of Ontario labour law for its negotiating tactics with the union. The board’s majority decision also held Bourque personally liable, finding him to be “an evasive and untruthful witness, whose testimony was highly influenced by self-interest.”

In 1991, Bourque was appointed an interim alderman to fill a vacancy on Ottawa city council. The reporters I spoke with who covered local politics for the Ottawa Citizen at the time couldn’t recall a single legislative accomplishment of his, although to be fair, Bourque only served for eight months. MacAdam recalls Bourque’s father assisting in Bourque’s subsequent election bid. Nonetheless, Bourque lost his seat and didn’t fare any better as a candidate for the federal Liberals in the ’93 election.

It was during this campaign, communicating via e-mail with party headquarters, that Bourque first became interested in the Internet. Six months later, after losing another run for Ottawa city council, Bourque combined his new interest in the Internet with his love of politics by writing a column about the Net for The Hill Times, a weekly that serves as the newspaper of Parliament Hill. Hill Times editor Jim Creskey remembers meeting a “buttoned-down kind of guy. He looked like a politician.” As Creskey explains, Bourque’s column is basically a listing of websites with Bourque’s opinions about them. Later, his name appeared on two books about the Freenet, but according to co-author Rosaleen Dickson, he didn’t actually write them, he only participated in the research phase. The only book Bourque ever wrote on his own, Government Online in Canada, features a two-page preface by Bourque, some guest columns, and 303 pages listing URLs, with occasional descriptions of sites.

Contrast that with Matt Drudge, whose recent book, Drudge Manifesto, deals with the impact the Web is having on the mass media through his experiences as an Internet-based “citizen-reporter.” This illustrates a significant difference between these two men: Drudge is eager to express and exercise his vision of how the Internet can empower individuals to take on the powers that be, while including some links to relevant websites. Bourque is primarily a lister of links, who sprinkles a few reports of his own on the side.

Bourque told me that Bourque Newswatch gets over 100,000 hits per day, although he refuses to release exact numbers. Considering that Canada has about a tenth the population of the U.S., this would make him competitive with Drudge, whose site receives over 1,000,000 hits per day. When I contacted Media Metrix, a company measuring Web traffic whose press releases Bourque links to, its figures revealed that out of the 6,500 randomly sampled Canadians’ home Internet use it tracked during September, none had logged into Bourque Newswatch.

Perhaps Media Metrix’s sample was too broad to gauge its readership among journalists. After all, at the beginning of my research, National Post columnist Paul Wells told me, “If you throw a brick in Ottawa, you hit a Bourque reader.” Indeed, finding political PR people who log in wasn’t difficult. However, among daily reporters, I discovered that while almost all of them had heard of it, finding ones who use it often proved more elusive than Wells suggested. Some journalists who didn’t log in regularly thought they were the exception. “Now you’re going to use me as the example of the idiot who doesn’t read him,” said Ottawa-based Canadian Press reporter Nahlah Ayed. She wasn’t the only one, though. CBC-TV parliamentary bureau chief Chris Waddell has heard of it, but never logs in. National Post Ottawa bureau chief Robert Fife rarely does, and then, it’s only for the links. The same goes for former Sun Media parliamentary bureau chief Sean Durkan and Globe and Mail Ottawa bureau chief Shawn McCarthy. When I asked Globe and Mail reporter Paul Adams about it, he told me: “I don’t hear it coming up frequently in conversations I have with other journalists and with political people.”

A few journalists did tell me they logged in regularly; however, it was usually for the links to other sites. Michel Vastel says he finds Bourque’s links to headlines useful, particularly early in the morning before reaching his office, where the newspapers arrive.

Richard Madan checked in at least once a day while an assignment editor at local Ottawa station The New RO, but he doesn’t consider Bourque a reporter. “I consider him a news provider,” says Madan. “Meaning he spends a good four, five hours scanning the papers and scanning the wires, which is something that’s vital to me.” A former political aide, Madan believes that most Bourque readers are low-level staffers and aides to backbench MPs.

CTV commentator Mike Duffy, to whom Bourque would later suggest I speak, also told me he uses the site primarily for the links. “It’s not critical to me. If it disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn’t be a big deal.” Bourque himself told me that he doesn’t mind if people ignore his content and only use the links. “Ninety-nine percent of what I do is make sure that I have appropriate news links,” says Bourque. “As long as they come, I don’t care why they come.”

Not that Bourque isn’t sensitive about his site. “I think it’s a great lead provider to a lot of legacy media journalists,” Bourque would later tell me. “Journalists have a public stance and then a private one.” Indeed, some journalists need to be off the record to fully explain why they don’t visit the site, as the following exchange with a veteran Ottawa reporter who agreed to be quoted on condition of anonymity demonstrates:

“Is this on the record?”

“I’d prefer it that way.”

“Then, I can’t really tell you that-I’m indifferent.”

“Okay, off the record” (He later agreed to my use of the conversation.)

“He’s wrong at least half the time and it’s busy enough in here without having to chase down erroneous rumours.”

Throughout these interviews, I remembered journalists attacking Drudge’s credibility on television talk shows. Yet in the end, Drudge was right: there was a dress containing physical evidence. I wondered if, perhaps, journalists are trashing Bourque because they’re jealous he’s breaking stories they haven’t. After all, CTV’s Kirk LaPointe, with whom Bourque would later suggest I speak, says that while he logs in mostly for the links, Bourque’s accuracy is “no worse than the typical Ottawa pundit.”

As I fact-checked Bourque, I discovered that he has broken a number of stories and gotten them right. Mainstream news outlets like the Vancouver Province credited him with being the first to report that Jean Charest was moving to the Quebec Liberals. More recently, he was first to reveal that Brian Pallister would make the move from the federal Conservative Party to the Canadian Alliance, and that House Speaker Gilbert Parent would retire, both two days before the fact. Bourque also beat the rest of the pack by a few hours in reporting that Tom Long was a dual citizen and calling the date Saskatchewan Premier Roy Romanow announced his retirement. His biggest scoop, however, was his September report that Prime Minister Jean Chretien was going to call an election in the fall.

Notwithstanding these triumphs, it’s easy to see why some are less than bullish on Bourque when one considers how many stories he’s gotten wrong. A day before reporting that Chretien planned to call a fall election, Bourque boasted about being first with the news that there would be no fall election. Bourque’s July reports on who would get which post in Stockwell Day’s shadow cabinet managed not only to get all but two of the positions wrong, it also misreported the date Day was supposed to announce it. Bourque’s August 14 report that CA leadership hopeful Keith Martin would end up sitting as a Tory or an independent when Day won the by-election proved false, as did his September 27 item that “lovestruck” Ontario Premier Mike Harris would announce his retirement by the end of the year. Tory MP Elsie Wayne did not resign the following Monday and accept a Senate appointment, as Bourque suggested on October 13. And contrary to Bourque’s October 16 report, Liberal MP Mac Harb was not appointed to the Senate later that week, nor did Penny Collenette, “wife of Chretien stooge David,” replace him in the House.

“It’s almost like a stock rumours board,” says Globe and Mail reporter Mark MacKinnon, comparing news tips on Bourque Newswatch with stock tips on the Internet. “Sure, if you went and sat on Yahoo Stock Chat, you’d eventually hit gold, but if there are 10 rumours and you bet $10 on each of them, your odds aren’t that strong.” MacKinnon chuckles while skimming through Bourque’s archive of notes, “If he was a mutual fund manager, I wouldn’t recommend him to my friends. It’s just better to do your own research.”

If Bourque were a funds manager, he would specialize in small caps and penny stocks. Most of Bourque’s reporting deals with such mundane matters as party youth squabbles, the musings of backbench MPs, nomination battles in remote ridings and appointments to obscure committees. I’ve been called a political junkie by many, but even I don’t care about University of Toronto student and PC Youth member Patrick Brown “eyeing” a run for Barrie city council, as Bourque reported on August 24. It’s as though Bourque is more concerned with quantity than quality. Drudge, on the other hand, often goes for a week or two without filing any reports, but when he does, the reports are often accurate and always interesting. Also, Bourque’s frequent spelling errors-including cabinet ministers’ names-and his often ungrammatical sentence structure demonstrate carelessness. Would anyone blame readers if they wondered whether Bourque is equally careless when it comes to his reporting?

October 26: Harris to Endorse Day?

“Absolutely no supporting information and it turned out to be completely false,” says Glen McGregor, Ottawa Citizen reporter and editor of the paper’s “What the Gargoyle Heard” gossip column. “In fact, that very day Harris was giving a speech kinda making it clear that he was staying out of the federal election.”

Actually, there was some supporting information, though it wasn’t posted on Bourque’s site. I know. I was the source. I needed to know for sure what kind of standard Bourque applies to his sources and their stories before posting them, so I set up Hotmail account under the pen name “Brother Blue” and e-mailed Bourque a fictitious “tip.” It claimed that at the previous day’s PC party convention, at which I was an “observer,” I’d heard that Mike Harris was facing increasing pressure from his cabinet to endorse Stockwell Day. I didn’t identify myself and Bourque never asked. After posting my tip on his site, he replied to the Hotmail account saying: “Thanks for this!” When most journalists attribute information to an anonymous source, generally they at least know who the source is. If Bourque had done even a cursory follow-up on the tip I sent him, he would have immediately realized it was baseless.

The following day, when I looked for the item in Bourque’s archives, the story wasn’t there. It’s a good thing I had kept the e-mails Bourque sends out periodically, because when I later looked for Bourque’s erroneous item predicting that Chretien was not going to call a fall election, it too had disappeared.

When I began work on this story last fall, Bourque agreed to cooperate. After I briefly interviewed him over the phone and began my research in earnest, however, most of my e-mail requests to schedule interviews went unanswered. When he did reply, he wrote, “What’s in it for me?” or “I’ve been trying to figure out how this interview request is in my best interests.” To me, his indecisiveness and concerns about his “interests” suggested a sense of angst. His steadfast refusal to send me a copy of his archive of reporting going back beyond what was on his site also suggested to me that he lacked pride in his work. Finally, he agreed to an interview, but an hour was all he could spare over a period of weeks. When the big day came, Bourque didn’t answer the phone. He e-mailed me later that day with another phone number and told me to call him the next day. Again there was no answer at the time we’d agreed, but I kept calling and eventually got in touch. Though Bourque never apologized for his abuse of my time, he did threaten to cut the conversation short when I asked him to provide details about his car-racing career. He wouldn’t refer me to anyone who knows him personally, and his brother, whose car dealership for a time was Bourque’s only sponsor on his site, refused to return my calls. Other than Rosaleen Dickson, who worked with Bourque on two books about the Freenet, I couldn’t find anyone who knows him well and often spends time with him socially. “He’s a bit of a Howard Hughes,” said Kirk LaPointe.

As long as he doesn’t have to provide too many details, Bourque likes talking about himself: “I’m not a journalist by profession, I’m just a news junkie,” he told me. “And their [news junkies’] tips are as important to me as a tip I get from an operative in the parliamentary press gallery, and I get a lot of those.”

When confronted with the critiques of his site by members of the press gallery, Bourque provided substantive answers to only two of them. To the question of his archiving policy, Bourque made it clear that 99 percent of what he posts on his site can be found in his archives. He defended his report claiming there would be no fall election by insisting that he was asking a question: Would there be a fall election?However, I’d kept his original e-mail, marked “urgent.” Though it ends with a disclaimer reminding readers that “with Jean you never know 100%,” no question mark appears in the entire e-mail.

Bourque couldn’t think of any stories he’s posted that in retrospect he wishes he had waited on, or not posted at all. He responded to the rest of the criticisms by dismissing the reporters making them, rather than on the substance of the critiques. “I think Globe and Mail reporters hold themselves in a high opinion and it behooves them not to lend any weight to others who are outside their immediate sphere of camaraderie,” Bourque told me. “What’s happening here is going to transcend them and they’re ill-prepared to adapt to it.” A little later, he added, “I mean, if you’re a Mark McKinnon or Paul Adams, you’ve gotta be defecating in your pants if you’re on the Internet.”

Putting others down is one of Bourque’s least-charming characteristics. After the National Post published an unflattering story about Bourque’s father’s financial dealings, Bourque struck back, posting personal financial information about the real estate holdings of a number of journalists in the Southam chain. When he actually gets a story right, he isn’t above using his site to jibe reporters who write it up the next day. Perhaps putting down others is Bourque’s way of elevating himself. But when it comes to put-downs, the savagely satiricalFrank, located right in Bourque’s hometown and a must-read around Parliament Hill, is king. Frank has taken to pointing out Bourque’s factual foul-ups for fun. When I asked him about it, Bourque denied having heard ofFrank, which is like a member of the Hollywood paparazzi claiming he’s never heard of The National Enquirer.

Perhaps a more constructive approach might be for Bourque to formulate a detailed plan of how to run the site and follow through in a consistent manner. When I spoke with him, he told me that he decides whether to post a tip on his site by “gut instinct.” As he says, “It just follows from how I particularly feel. Y’know, do you like the colour blue, over red? It just depends.”

When I asked Bourque what goals he hopes to accomplish with his site, he told me, “The mission of my site is to provide as complete a list-. I don’t really have a statement, except that my statement is ‘Tomorrow’s News Now.’ That’s my slogan, ‘Tomorrow’s News Now.’ So it’s the site you go to to read about news first.” Is it any wonder that in three years, Bourque has not come near to enjoying Drudge’s success?

Bourque’s dismal batting average would likely not have surprised famed Yankee outfielder Joe DiMaggio. “A ball player’s got to be kept hungry to become a big leaguer,” observed DiMaggio in the spring of ’61. “That’s why no boy from a rich family ever made the big leagues.” Maybe Bourque just isn’t as hungry as Drudge. It’s not inconceivable that Bourque will one day stumble upon a major scoop. However, according to Stockwell Day’s former communications director, Phil von Finkenstein, Bourque doesn’t even have to because, von Finkenstein believes, Bourque already is “the Matt Drudge of Canada.” Yet not only could von Finkenstein not think of a story Bourque has broken that comes close to the Lewinsky scandal, he couldn’t name a single story Bourque has broken at all.

Dave Mitchell, program director of Ottawa talk radio station CFRA, who hired Bourque to replace Dr. Laura during last fall’s election campaign, points to Bourque’s reporting on the ailing Trudeau. While a number of journalists acknowledge Bourque being first with the story that Trudeau had cancer (it was already known that he had pneumonia, Parkinson’s and a few other ailments), no one was able to confirm that he was in hospital, as Bourque reported. As for Bourque’s allegation of a conspiracy to pressure media outlets into withholding the story from the public and preventing journalists from investigating, most think it far-fetched and bizarre, since those who pursued the story say they did so without interference.

But some will defend Bourque to the bitter end. “Maybe he [Trudeau] had been there and then gone home,” speculates Mitchell. Maybe. Or maybe it was just the contents of an anonymous e-mail prank.

Joe Fiorito has spent the morning working on a follow-up story about two bickering parking lot attendants in downtown Toronto. Since his first column about the lots, the feud has escalated and one of the attendants, an Ethiopian immigrant named Gashaw Mequanent, now has a broken wrist. It’s a typical Fiorito piece, a tiny urban story about the lives of people who are usually overlooked in the media. We are standing on the corner of Wellington and John streets at lunch hour and the sidewalk is streaming with pedestrians. “I’m going to get philosophical now,” he warns. “People get caught up in stuff. Shit happens. Not everyone knows how to avoid it, but it’s how people deal with things that I find interesting. I like all of it because it’s about being human.” Suddenly, he motions toward the sidewalk and says, “Look.” There, in the midst of the flow of human traffic, a scrappy pigeon is trying to peck a discarded peanut butter sandwich out of a sealed Ziploc bag. Eventually it wanders off, leaving the sandwich unopened. “Stupid pigeon,” Fiorito says. “You gave up.”

Pointing out “stuff”-a word he uses constantly-that people are too busy to notice themselves is pretty much all Fiorito says he wants to accomplish with his thrice-weekly column in the National Post. By combing the city streets looking for slice-of-life stories about the working class and the underclass, 52-year-old Fiorito has carved out a niche for himself as Toronto’s tough-talking, old-style reporter. His columns have covered a diverse range of subjects: the building at Bloor and Lansdowne that houses both a church and a strip club, for instance, or the Tibetan man caught shoplifting fade cream to make his skin lighter. Like other city columnists of his ilk-most notably Jimmy Breslin?he possesses an unwavering compassion for the underdog, a storyteller’s instincts and an ability to portray the dignity of everyday people.

It’s a rare combination and one that some say is lacking in Canadian journalism. “There’s a very important spiritual aspect to life that we tend to grind out of journalism, and that is that each human being is unique,” says journalist and media critic Robert Fulford. “That human uniqueness is something we beat out of newspapers because it’s so hard to report, it takes so much sensitivity and you can’t assign it. As a result, even the arts get covered in a very brutal, simpleminded way. Fiorito doesn’t do that.”

Readers have sometimes criticized Fiorito’s tendency to ignore the middle and upper classes. But ask him why he doesn’t broaden his scope and Fiorito doesn’t back down. “Rich people don’t need anyone to stick up for them. So, I’m a bleeding heart, so what?”

So, at last count, Fiorito was the only working-class bleeding heart with a regular column at the National Post, a paper that often reads like an advertisement for the Canadian Alliance in the front section and a how-to-be-hip manual in the rest. And although he writes more about people than politics, his columns definitely carry the underlying message that society should take care of its weaker members-a sentiment distinctly out of step with the overall tone of the Post. “From a social perspective,” he says. “I still think that the best measure of any society is how well it takes care of its weakest members. We don’t take care of ours very well.”

Given his politics, he must have been apprehensive about writing for the Post. Did it bother him? “No,” he says firmly. But when pressed, he concedes. “Yeah, at first I was concerned about it because I didn’t know what direction the paper what going to take. But [editor Ken Whyte] said he just wanted me to do what I do, the way I do it, and that’s the only direction he’s ever given me.”

“He’s a populist, it’s not a right-wing, left-wing thing,” says Barry Brimbecom, t0he Post’s Toronto assignment editor until last November. Fiorito more or less agrees. “I don’t see myself as occupying any particular role politically. But I have some personal inclinations that lead me into certain territory.” The territory he explores certainly doesn’t provoke much criticism from other journalists. Most of my attempts to find other writers?including Globe columnists Peter Gzowski and Allan Fotheringham and National Post media critic John Fraser-who would say anything negative about Fiorito’s column proved futile. And even the usual right-wing suspects such as David Frum declined to comment. “I can’t think of anyone who will criticize him,” says John Fraser. “His edge is his own personality-he is basically just a decent person trying to tell people’s stories. Usually the people he gets angry at [in his column] are pretty loathsome. So, you’re going to dig up your dirt with people who are themselves kind of foul.”

I am on the verge of succumbing to such desperate tactics when I find Don Obe, a writing professor in the magazine stream at Ryerson’s School of Journalism, who describes Fiorito as “a poor man’s Jimmy Breslin” and says he finds his column too sentimental. Without naming names, I run this past Fiorito.

“Sure I’m sentimental,” he says. “I would use a different word. I’d use the word empathetic.”

“This person used the word corny.

“Fuck him. Seriously, fuck him. That’s fine. Anyone can think anything they want. Some people think any kind of sympathetic light cast on the underdog is corny. Let them read Joey Slinger. Let them read Robert Fulford. Let them read Rebecca Eckler. I don’t do that stuff. I do my stuff. And there is a place for my stuff in the paper.”

The only other criticism I can dredge up comes from a business writer and friend of mine who doesn’t want to be named. Although my friend leans to the right, he says that’s not the reason he doesn’t read the column-he just finds Fiorito too predictable. “It’s always the same,” he groans. “It’s always about some crack-addicted whore on the corner.” I hesitantly repeat this to Fiorito. “Fuck him,” he says offhandedly. “There aren’t very many other columnists who actually get out on the goddamn sidewalk and talk to real people about what the fuck they’re doing.”

The first time we talk, Fiorito is a little guarded. I leave a message at the National Post and when he returns my call I’m engrossed in The Closer We Are to Dying, Fiorito’s moving and honest memoir. I’m reading the part where Fiorito explains why his ancestors fled to Canada from Italy-his great uncle had just killed a man. He tells me he doesn’t give out his home phone number-even though he’s only been to the National Post offices four times in two years. He seems so apprehensive that I ask him if he wants to know anything about me. So he quizzes me on why I want to be a journalist, what I have done with my life so far and why I have chosen him as a subject. I tell him it’s because he’s an old-school city columnist who actually spends time on the streets of Toronto, which he seems to find amusing. “I can’t act cagey or you’ll write I acted cagey,” he says, and eventually hands over the number?but he is acting kind of cagey, no question.

We agree to meet for coffee at the Lakeview Lunch, an old-fashioned diner on the corner of Dundas and Ossington. He shows up right on time and orders his coffee black. He has combed-back dark hair and is wearing Levi’s, a leather bomber jacket and a light-coloured shirt. He looks like a middle-aged version of “The Fonz.”

Initially, he seems to take himself too seriously, only lightening up once during a two-hour interview when I ask what kind of car he drives (“It’s a Subaru, very middle-class, with two airbags and four- wheel drive”). He cracks only one tiny smile, when he leaves me to pay the bill, walks away, and then comes back to check if that’s okay. “You pay’n’?”

He continues to seem wary about the piece for our first few interviews. “There’s an element of risk to it,” he says the second time we meet, while walking from Queen Street East to the parking lot on Wellington Street.

“What is it that you are you nervous about specifically?
“Off the record?”
“Okay.”
“I don’t want to look like a pretentious jerk.”
“Have you been called a pretentious jerk?”
“No, it’s my worst nightmare.”
“Why is that off the record?”
He laughs, “Okay, you can write that.”

Weeks later, when I summon the courage to tell him I didn’t like him at first, he smiles. “I might have been a little diffident because I wasn’t sure what you were after,” he says. “I take what I do very seriously, and when you transcribe passion into print, it can come across as goofy.”

You think this is just a simple story about a couple of guys slotting cars in a parking lot? Shows how much you know. This ain’t simple, this is war and it’s every bit as vicious as Chapters v. Indigo, or Onex v. Air Canada. This is Gashaw v. Tim. See, there’s a little parking lot on Wellington, close to the CBC, patronized by the downtown crowd. For the past few years, as far as anybody knew, it’s been the bailiwick of Gashaw Mequanent, a sweetheart of a guy. As far as any of the customers knew the little lot on Wellington was just one lot, and Gashaw was the man. Then suddenly a couple of weeks ago, one of my informants pulls up and finds Gashaw, as usual, directing cars in the cold grey inner-city morning. But he’s not smiling. And he’s not alone. Over there, on the west side of the lot, stands a new guy, a guy named Tim, and Tim is hustling cars over to his side and nobody knows who he is or why the lot is suddenly split in two, but Tim’s charging a buck less.

Describing the feud as vicious is no exaggeration. Gashaw, his mangled wrist in a cast, is now sitting across from Fiorito in a coffee shop on Queen Street, east of Yonge, close to Gashaw’s apartment. Unable to park cars, he has been fired by his boss, whom Fiorito refers to as “the Old Greek.” Gashaw hasn’t been able to collect employment insurance, welfare or worker’s compensation, his wife is unemployed and their rent is coming up due.

“What happened? Set it up for me,” Fiorito says, scribbling in a little black notebook.
“How can I explain,” Gashaw says. “Something is wrong with his [Tim’s] mind. He’s moody. But I never saw him like that before. He was very aggressive.” Gashaw explains that it was a busy night with a baseball game on at SkyDome. Tim thought Gashaw was gaining an unfair advantage by placing his sign too close to the road, so he kicked it over and punched Gashaw in the neck. Tim hit him again and Gashaw fell over and landed on his wrist, spilling the change he was holding in his hand. When he tried to pick up the change, his hand wouldn’t cooperate.

“I said, ‘My hand is broken.'”
“What did he say?”
“He said, ‘I don’t care.'”
“I’ve got some more calls to make on this one,” says Fiorito and we head off to pay Tim a visit.

When we arrive at the lot, Fiorito checks in with Gashaw’s replacement, before he heads over to the other side. Tim Mielen, a white guy probably in his late 20s with small teeth, is wearing a baseball cap, green-tinted sunglasses and a CBC Sports bomber. He has his own version of the story: Gashaw took a swing at him and then tripped. “They’re not the angels they’re making themselves out to be,” he says and accuses Gashaw and another parking attendant of rusting the keyhole of his booth by urinating on it. Tim says both sides hurl insults at each other constantly but denies he has said anything racist. “I lived in Jamaica for a year. So I know how to deal with them,” he says, even though Gashaw is Ethiopian.

“Keep your cool,” Fiorito says and walks off. “We’re trying,” Tim calls after him, grinning. “We’re trying to be one big happy family.”
“It’s a ‘he said, he said,'” Fiorito comments as we leave.
“But who do you believe?”
“Gashaw.”

Fiorito’s compassion for the underdog and determination to show readers what daily life is like for those who don’t have a voice in the mainstream press are the direct result of being raised in a rough family and neighbourhood in Fort William, Ontario. “Everything I know, I learned there,” he says of the hard-drinking, blue-collar town that merged with Port Arthur to become Thunder Bay in 1970. “I learned it in part by seeing what my parents did and in part by seeing what other people did. I learned the value of standing up for myself because that’s what people did there.”

Before he was old enough to attend school, Fiorito stood up for his mother by leaping onto his father’s back, saving her from being strangled to death. He describes the experience in the first few pages of his memoir:

I was sitting on the couch with my arm around my brother; he was too afraid to cry. My father tore off his belt and began to whip her. He hit her arms, he hit her shoulders, the thin belt raised red welts. Grace fought back. And then he dropped his belt and his hands were at her throat and he was choking her now. She was a fish out of water in his hands, wriggling, gasping for air. He squeezed her neck, and she made a choking sound and then she weakened and her legs began to buckle. And I knew he was killing her. I jumped from the couch and ran across the room and leapt on his back. Don’t hurt my mother, don’t hurt my mother, don’t you hurt her. I clung to his shoulders. He tried to shake me off. I wasn’t sure if he’d turn on me but I didn’t care if he did. She might be able to break free. And then he let her go.

Having to be on guard in his own home taught Fiorito to observe. “And I began to study him,” he writes. “If I sensed a certain brooding, if the air around him was charged, if there was a scent of alcohol in his sweat, I hushed my brother and plotted the route of my own escape. I glanced at my mother every time he came home. We shared the intuition of prisoners.”

And although his father had what Fiorito refers to as “complications,” he refuses to demonize him. “It’s only WASPs that want to turn him into a villain,” he says while standing in the kitchen of his Parkdale home, chopping vegetables for the spaghetti sauce many of his friends have raved about to me. His home is simply and tastefully decorated. More than 200 cookbooks line the shelves of his kitchen. And not far from where he is standing, a poster advertising the German edition of his book-of a man wearing a white undershirt in bed, propped up against the bedpost, clarinet in hand-hangs framed on the wall. “I can’t condemn him, what’s the point of condemning him? I made an unconscious decision early on that I wasn’t going to be a victim of a whole bunch of stuff. Do I look like a victim to you?”

“Yeah, but if your dad beats up your mother, is that all right?”
“It’s who he was. I don’t do that. I wouldn’t do that. I’m not condoning it. I don’t condone it. But I refuse to judge him. Anyone is capable of doing anything at any given time. You just don’t know.” “So it was the circumstances he was under?” “The circumstances of who he was, the circumstances of his time, the circumstances of his generation, the circumstances of what happened to him in his life. That’s what it did to him.”
“So, he’s the victim, not your mother?”
“What’s with this victim stuff?”
“You brought it up, I didn’t.”
“Listen, we’re all a product of the things that work on us.”
“But we’re still responsible.”
“Sure, but you do what you can. And some people are capable of doing more than others, and some people are capable of doing less. I’m not going to run around condemning everybody who I think is less than Mother Teresa.”

Fiorito credits his father-a postman who moonlighted as a “bushtown bandstand idol,” playing the trombone and singing in bars around Thunder Bay-with teaching him the art of storytelling. They would sit at the kitchen table together late at night and his father would tell him stories about the family. Today, Fiorito believes that because every person is capable of a wide range of human behaviour, judging anyone is hypocritical. And so he shines a sympathetic light on the lives of shoplifters, drug addicts and prostitutes. In the process he often discovers what drives them.

The security guard has all the information he needs, but I have some questions of my own for the small man.

“Please tell me why you took the cream?” No answer. “Why did you take the cream?” “Please, forgive.”
“Yes, but why did you take the cream?” The small brown man looks at me pleadingly. He touches a hand to his cheek and says, “Because of this.”
“What do you mean?”
“To make lighter.”
“Your skin?”
“It will be better, sir.”
He thinks it will be better for him if he has lighter skin. He’s new here. He doesn’t know. He must have thought. He didn’t think.

Although Fiorito didn’t write his first column until he was 43, he first realized he wanted to write at age 16 after reading the poetry of William Carlos Williams. “That he made art out of people’s lives really struck a chord with me,” he says. “That’s when I had the first real glimmer of wanting to be a writer.” That summer, because he couldn’t find employment and couldn’t stand hanging around the house, he rode the bus around Thunder Bay scribbling surreptitious notes about who got on and what they looked like.

After high school, Fiorito attended Lakehead University for a few months. “I was only there long enough to inhale,” he writes. He dropped out and moved to Toronto, working in an ad agency as an office flunky for nine months, doing the usual photocopying and errand running. From there he went to Manitoba, where he spent four months as a labourer on a dam. Next stop was the island of Ibiza in the Mediterranean, where he spent almost a year “learning how to drink bad wine and write bad poems.” Soon after he moved back to Thunder Bay, a shotgun marriage at age 23 delayed his writing aspirations.

The marriage lasted roughly two years?during which time he worked as a surveyor?and when it ended, he got custody of their two-and-a-half-year-old son. “She had her own demons to deal with,” he says of his first wife. Around this time, Fiorito worked as a regional consultant for the Ontario Arts Council and then as a community developer for the city of Thunder Bay, reviewing local theatre for CBC Radio on the side. The freelance work led to a job managing a CBC Radio station in Iqaluit, Nunavut, for five years. Then, in 1985 he moved to Saskatchewan, producing Saskatchewan Today at CBC Radio for three years before a two-year stint as network producer. After that, he produced a show about food for six months and worked on the executive of the now-defunct CBC national radio union. It was at union meetings that Fiorito met his second wife, Susan Mahoney, now a senior producer at CBC Radio’s This Morning. “She’s really smart, she’s got a good heart and she’s got a really good bullshit detector,” he says proudly.

His son, now a punk-rock musician and silk-screen printer in Vancouver, moved out at 17. “We went through his teens like a pair of Shermans burning down each other’s South,” Fiorito writes. “The civil war is over now, thank God.” Friends of Fiorito say he was a strict father. “Was I strict?” he considers the question. “I suppose I was. Why? Have a kid and tell me. Nobody knows better how to break your heart than your kid. I was afraid that he was going to take some wrong turns that were irreversible. He’s such a beautiful kid and he’s turned out to be really thoughtful. He was just a rock at both my father’s death and my brother’s.” Having a child young worked out for the best. “By the time he was old enough to pack up his guitar, tell me to fuck off and head for the coast, I was still young enough to start a second life.”

In 1990, one year after his son left home, The Food Showwas cancelled. So when Mahoney received an offer to produce CBC’s Cross Country Checkup in Montreal in 1991, Fiorito took his settlement package from CBC and they moved east. After spending two years in Montreal writing poetry and “getting paid five bucks for something that took me two weeks to write,” he walked into the office of Hour, a new alternative English language weekly just starting up, armed with three columns about the emotional and sensual role of food in people’s lives. “I said, ‘Here, this is what I can do. If you need them, call me.'” The editor called him the night before the first issue hit the stands and asked if Hour could use one. The next week, Hour asked to use the second one. After that, the paper ran the third and wanted more. He was paid a mere $70 a piece.

Then, in 1994, Comfort Me with Apples, a collection of these columns, was published. The book was well received and the Montreal Gazette tried to lure him away from Hour to become its food columnist. Fiorito turned the paper down. “I said no-with great trembling because I wasn’t interested in writing about food anymore and because I wasn’t interested in leaving the paper that had given me a bit of a break.” TheGazette responded by offering him a position writing a weekly column about anything he wanted. This time he accepted, and he continued to write his food column for Hour. He was still getting paid a pittance at theGazette, $250 for his weekly column-eventually that went up to $350-for writing so good that it won a National Newspaper Award in 1995.

Although he loved Montreal, when his wife was offered a job too good to refuse in 1997, the couple moved to Toronto. Less than a year later, Ken Whyte, who says he was a big fan of Fiorito’s, called and offered him a column in an upcoming new paper, the National Post.

Joe fiorito leaves a message on my machine. He is working on a story about an after-school program in St. Jamestown. He gives me vague directions, tells me it’s hard to find and hangs up. I give myself enough time to get lost.

The Homework Club takes place in two adjoining rooms in an apartment building on Bleecker Street. There are only three tutors for almost 40 children. It is complete chaos. Kids are goofing around, asking questions, competing for the tutor’s attention. But in the midst of the commotion, the majority of the kids are getting things done. “Will you check this for me?” one little girl asks me, holding up a math sheet. She drags a chair loudly from across the room for me to sit on. The program leader stops her, gives her a little lecture, and then apologizes when he realizes why she took the chair. There are no extra chairs. There are few extras, period. All the peeling cabinet doors in the room are padlocked except one. It contains the things most people get to throw away, washed and rewashed plastic cups, bowls and spoons. Nothing brightens up the faded mint-coloured walls except a torn map tacked onto a bulletin board. For two hours Fiorito sits there watching and taking notes.

Every so often, the program leader runs kids downstairs to the basement. I go downstairs to see what’s going on. A chubby black guy is directing the children as they bang away on steel drums. Some of them aren’t much taller than their drums, but they play really well. The last song I hear is an upbeat version of “Amazing Grace.”

When we leave, it’s starting to get dark. “Look,” Fiorito says and motions toward one of the most decrepit apartment buildings in Toronto. I take a mental step backward and really look at it. “It gets really hard to break out of this,” he says. “I have no hope the column will make a difference. But what it may do is make people a little bit smarter about what happens in St. Jamestown. Life is hard, and when people are busy, they tend to pigeonhole stuff. It is my privilege to say, Wait a minute, this is what is happening here. It’s not violence and it’s not gangs. It’s something reasonably positive.”

BACK WHEN FIORITO was living in Montreal, his poker buddies had a custom of razzing whichever one of them might be, say, moving or publishing a new book. “So we wouldn’t take ourselves too seriously,” he says. Just before he left for Toronto, the guys-including writers Mark Abley, Trevor Ferguson and Bryan Demchinsky- composed several columns that parodied Fiorito’s tough-talking style. In his dining room after dinner, Fiorito shows them to me. “Can I copy some of this down?” “Ouch,” says Mahoney, who is lying on the couch reading the paper.

Monday morning and the first light on the plateau cracks through the eyelids of bums and the city awakes. I step outside, looking for a story. If you think it’s easy being the one who must shoulder the burdens of the poor, the miseries of the working class, the pains of the destitute and sick, the worries of the abused, the complaints of the cheated, the howls of the robbed, the cries of the misunderstood, the shouts of the deaf, the thirst of the drunkards, the hunger of the famished, the anxiety of the old, the impatience of the young, the kindness of the unfortunate, the ambitions of the besotted, the breasts of the unclothed, the rancor of the brokenhearted, then ask Christ how much he enjoyed the experience. And he didn’t have to write a column every week.

So, the guy can laugh at himself. He can also be both humble and proud?often at the same time. He isn’t falsely modest, which is refreshing. When he deserves it, Fiorito gives himself credit. He tells me he does his job “really well” and that he can turn a phrase, but then adds, “Not all of my columns are brilliant. But over the course of a given month, there will be something in there that touches your heart, something that pisses you off, something that makes you smile and something that makes you go, Yeah, that’s what I think too.”

Still, what emerges more powerfully is his passion for the people he writes about. He’s quick to point out that there’s already an abundance of columnists in Toronto who write about social issues from an official, bureaucratic point of view. “I’m the only guy that I know of who is actively, three times a week, on the sidewalk. There’s a handful of notes that I ring, and I’ll go on ringing them because nobody else is doing it.”

Jean Paré once dreamed of being a conductor. From his podium, he would guide the orchestra through magnificent symphonies and transport the crowds with a touch of his baton. Sleek and proud in his black tux, he would uncover the mysteries of the likes of Mozart and Beethoven.

Unfortunately, Paré doesn’t have much of an ear. But this didn’t prevent him from composing and conducting his very own symphony-one made up of great stories by talented journalists that, twice each month, captivates over half a million people. Paré’s symphony is L’actualité, the French-language, general-interest magazine he helped found 25 years ago. It quickly became one of the most successful publications in Canada, and it still is, even though Paré himself stepped out of the spotlight last November.

Back in 1976, nobody would have predicted a brilliant future for the new Maclean Hunter publication. It was the merger of two shaky partners: Le Maclean, which had accumulated close to a $4-million deficit over its 15-year history as the French-language equivalent of Maclean‘s, and Actualité, which was Le Maclean‘s main competition, despite its own struggles as a small, general-interest magazine out of Drummondville. Its circulation strategy might have had something to do with its financial straits: Paré remembers that Boy Scouts sold the subscriptions and kept all the money. He was managing editor of Le Maclean at the time; Maclean Hunter gave him the task of inventing the new magazine.

From this unpromising material, Paré created a magazine that never lost a penny after its first year. And it not only made money, it became the most prestigious magazine in Quebec, the one that attracted the biggest names in journalism and as a result garnered 300 awards over the next 25 years. But L’actualité‘s greatest accomplishment is that it has become the barometer of Quebec society. It feels the society, listens to its pulse and reflects it like a mirror-not for Quebecers to admire themselves, but for them to analyze, question, appreciate and debate where their society is heading.

L’actualité is in a class of its own. It’s the only general-interest magazine in Quebec and it successfully targets a sophisticated audience, composed almost equally of men and women with post-secondary education. It has the largest readership in the Quebec market, printing almost 200,000 copies twice monthly, and reaching 524,000 readers with each issue. Circulation is about 95 percent subscription-based: high anywhere, but an even more telling sign of reader loyalty in a market that generally favours newsstand sales.

It’s by far the most influential magazine in the province. Credibility is what it’s all about. People feel they can count on it to tell them what’s going on, to give them an accurate portrait of Quebec society. “A magazine has to be essential in order to sell,” says Pierre Sormagny, a former longtime contributor. “When I don’t read L’actualité, I’m missing something. It really feels the pulse of Quebec society.”

Right from the start, Paré had tremendous ambitions for the new publication and a vision of how to achieve them. His premise was simple: Quebecers should be proud and aim high. “The fact we’re a small people doesn’t mean we must have lousy publications,” he says. He wanted to publish a world-class magazine-maybe smaller, but just as good as the magazines in Paris and Lyons. His editorial vision had a strong business-side component. A 20-year journalism veteran by the time he took on L’actualité, Paré had already seen many publications fold. He knew that financial success was his passport to journalistic freedom, and he was determined to ensure that the new magazine would be profitable.

“We didn’t have the budget of L’Express, France Soir or Time,” he says, “but there are all sorts of tricks for publishing a magazine when you don’t have too much money.” Paré’s philosophy was to make the most out of what he had and to never assign a story unless he was absolutely sure that he would publish it. He also tried to hire multilingual journalists who could travel on the magazine’s behalf, which would provide international coverage without the expense of foreign bureaus. As he says, “It’s all about finding the right people and sending them to the right places.” The trick, of course, is to know what’s “right,” in both tone and content. Paré relied on two main convictions about his audience and their responses. First, he respected his readers. “He thought that his readers were intelligent, and that they wanted to be made to feel more intelligent as a result of reading the magazine,” says Brian Segal, president of Rogers Media Publishing, which bought Maclean Hunter in 1994. Second, he knew he had to keep those readers interested. Le Maclean had failed to do that and paid the price. So before launching L’actualité, Paré retired to the country with all 15 volumes of its predecessor and analyzed them. “It was a great magazine in the history of magazines and journalism in Canada,” he says, and then adds, “but it was a magazine for its time.” It had been a “loudspeaker” for Quebec’s Quiet Revolution, he explains, and it remained true to that mentality. “It would find problems in society and ask for government intervention.”

Paré felt that it was time to move on. He wanted L’actualité to break new ground. Instead of pointing out problems, he decided to focus on something more universal: the people who were pushing society forward. This was not only a big change, it was a real gamble because it had never been done before. As a result, it had a tremendous impact on Quebec society, says Jean-Fran?ois Lis&eacutee, former political editor atL’actualité. “Quebecers had not been accustomed to boldness and success in their history,” he explains. “They are very much driven by consensus. L’actualité, instead, became a voice for individual achievement, for distinctiveness within the crowd. This is the greatest gift Jean Paré could give them, to push them along the path to success.”

To achieve his great ambitions for the magazine, Paré needed talented journalists. “He wanted to have big names in his magazine as well as beautifully written stories,” says Michel Vastel, a contributor for more than 20 years and political columnist for several Quebec newspapers. “He wanted journalists known for having independent minds, great writing and credibility.” And he got them. “Paré’s stable,” as many Quebec journalists refer to L’actualité, is home to the most influential and talented journalists in Quebec. Michel Vastel, who has turned political profiles into an art and written a novel as well as biographies of Trudeau and Bourassa, is one of them, along with award-winning reporters such as Luc Chartrand, Louise Gendron, André Ducharme, Jacques Godbout and many others. In fact, most of L’actualité‘s staff writers and contributors have also written books, both novels and nonfiction.

L’actualité was also a stepping-stone for writers who were still relatively new to the business. “Paré has always had a gift for spotting talented journalists at the beginning of their career,” says Sormagny. Carole Beaulieu is a good example of his talent-scout eye and his persuasive ways as well. At the time Paré decided to bet on her, she was a reporter for the Montreal newspaper Le Devoir. “I was stuck on a treadmill, always running,” she says, looking back. At the time, she didn’t even read magazines, but she did write features forLe Devoir and they caught Paré’s attention. He went around asking her friends and colleagues what would make her leave the paper. The opportunity came when Beaulieu, an avid traveller, desperately wanted to go back to Turkey to write a story. Le Devoir couldn’t afford to send her, so Paré offered to pay half the expenses if Beaulieu would write a piece for him as well. She started to freelance for L’actualité upon her return and became a staff writer a couple of years later. She is now its editor-in-chief.

Paré was always deeply involved in every aspect of L’actualité. Throughout his tenure he was both editor and publisher-a logical situation for a man convinced that editorial freedom is based on financial success. “Jean had the luxury of talking to himself,” jokes Segal. “He could wake up in the middle of the night and decide if he was editor or publisher at that point in time.”

Paré downplays the significance of his dual role. He likes to say he was “an editor who managed not to have a publisher.” The quip establishes his priorities. He was more of a journalist than a businessman, he says, so he never had a conflict of interest: readers and editorial quality always came first.

Colleagues agree that it wasn’t always easy to work with Par&eacute. As Lis&eacutee explains cryptically, “When you work with a brilliant individual, there’s all that comes with it.” L’actualité‘s staff had to have strong personalities in order to be able to confront Paré, disagree with him and survive the disagreement. “Doubt has never been one of his values,” says Pierre Sormagny. “He has very firm ideas and he maintains them with tremendous confidence. The problem is, even though he’s often right, he is also sometimes wrong, but he maintains all his ideas with the same confidence.”

“Headstrong” is a word that many people use when describing him-but, then, that’s how leaders tend to be. Paule Beaugrand-Champagne, former managing editor at L’actualité, thinks his style had a very simple explanation. Paré demanded a great deal of himself, and he expected others to demand just as much of themselves.

Paré has a somewhat different analysis. He admits that it takes a very convincing argument to make him change his mind, but insists that it can be done. As for being headstrong, well, so was the rest of the team-otherwise, they wouldn’t have stayed around for 10 or 15 years. “I can be insistent, maybe heavy sometimes, but I’m not brutal,” he says, “and I have no regrets about that.” He agrees that he was always very frank and that some people couldn’t handle it, especially writers who submitted stories that didn’t make the cut. He would send them letters explaining why he could not publish their pieces, because he felt they had the right to know. And if he thought they didn’t have what it took to become good journalists, he would tell them that as well. But he wouldn’t tell them twice. Anyone foolish enough to ignore that dismissal and keep submitting would have a miserable time of it. As Louise Gendron, a staff writer for eight years, says, “If he didn’t think you were good, you had better go somewhere else.”

Paré might have been intransigent with people, but he was more flexible when it came to story ideas. While he had his biases, he was generally aware of them. “He’s an open-minded man, and freedom is very important to him,” Gendron says, adding that he rarely rewrote her stories. He proved it dramatically in the weeks leading up to the 1992 referendum on the Charlottetown Accord.

Paré was in favour of the accord and so was the publication’s then-owner, Maclean Hunter. Jean-Fran?ois Lis&eacutee obtained what came to be known as “the secret files of Bourassa,” internal memos drafted by the premier’s constitutional experts who said that the accord should be rejected because it was not in the interest of Quebec. “What I brought to Jean contradicted his own views and the parent company’s views,” says Lis&eacutee, “but he didn’t hesitate for even a split second. He published the file, in the middle of the campaign.” It proved to be the turning point, and it spelled defeat for the pro-accord side.

In the end, it also gave L’actualité such extraordinary publicity in Quebec and in the rest of Canada that Maclean Hunter congratulated Paré and his team for their boldness.

L’actualité‘s great and continuing success at reflecting Quebec society is due to its ability to perceive trends and social movements before they become mainstream. This is Paré’s flair at work. “He’s a classic visionary,” says Segal. “He believed that L’actualité should be an early warning system on major issues, and I think he was very successful.” Vastel, like many others, believes that Paré could predict what was going to happen. “He would decide which major stories we should work on a year ahead of time, what should go on the cover, and he was always right,” he says.

Sormagny remembers the time Paré assigned him a story about a young man who was winning go-cart races. “His name was Gilles Villeneuve,” he adds, “and a month after we published the story he became a Formula One driver.” C&eacuteline Dion first graced the cover of L’actualité back in the mid-80s. The headline read: “C&eacuteline Piaffe.” The clever pun was also a prediction. It implied that she was going to be as great as Edith Piaf and that she was stomping like a horse (piaffer in French) because she was impatient for stardom.

Paré doesn’t agree that he has flair. Instead, he talks about intuition, “something that comes with time when a person has had to make choices and has learned not to make too many mistakes.” According to him, if other magazines did their job, they could see trends as well. “Everything that happens has consequences,” he says. “It’s the work of good journalists, of good papers, to put all of this together so that people can use their media as a map, not just as a postcard.”

The quality of the writing is an important factor in L’actualité‘s popularity. A 1999 survey by the magazine showed that it was the primary source of satisfaction for 68 percent of its readers, and that it mattered more to them than the quality of the stories.

This, too, reflected Paré’s own convictions. The French language means a lot to him because it’s at the heart of Quebec culture. For him, there’s only one French language, and that’s what he calls international French. Quebec French doesn’t exist, he says: it’s just a matter of accent and regional vocabulary. Canadian English doesn’t exist either, he adds, for the same reasons. In an effort to preserve the French language in Quebec, which he thinks is under considerable pressure, he always wanted everyone at L’actualité to write it properly. Every contributor remembers this demand all too well. Beaulieu talks about her years as a freelancer, trying to write the perfect piece, linguistically speaking, the piece in which every word she used was exactly the right one. She is a great writer, but she says that she never succeeded. Sormagny describes the time, years ago, when he and Paré wrote about the same topic for different magazines. He says that comparing his story with Paré’s was his first lesson in journalism. Later, when he worked at L’actualité, Paré’s lessons were more direct. “He would mark my stories with a yellow pen, underline sentences and tell me, ‘Come on, Pierre, read this over, it doesn’t make any sense!'” Though Paré was harsh, Sormagny admits he was always right. “He’s one of the greatest writers we have,” he says.

As deeply involved as Paré was with L’actualité, he knew that he wouldn’t be there forever. In fact, he knew that he shouldn’t be. He therefore began thinking about his succession six years ago, and prepared it carefully and well. As Sormagny says admiringly, “By the time he left, he had managed to make himself superfluous.” For the last five years of his tenure, Paré was putting together a jigsaw puzzle of the people who would lead L’actualité into the future. During that period, he didn’t hire anyone without seeing precisely how that person would fit into the puzzle.

Carole Beaulieu was the first key piece he put into place two and a half years ago. While she learned her job as editor, he continued working as publisher. He also used the time to work on finding his replacement as publisher. This piece dropped into place in November 2000, when he appointed Marc Blondeau to the position.

It’s now up to the new team to deal with the rest of the puzzle, he says. “L’actualité is going to represent somebody else and it’s going to be different. And I hope it’s different, because life and people change.”

Paré may not have much of an ear but he has an outstanding sense of music. In his own way, he wrote a 24-year symphony, relating the history of the people he loves so deeply. He found accomplished musicians to play his symphony and an audience to listen to it, larger than any concert hall could ever contain. In the end, he showed Quebecers that nothing is beyond their reach, and that not only can they enjoy beautiful music, they can create it as well.