Cobi Ladner’s first inkling of the competition she was about to face came one night in the mid-1990s. Ladner, editor of Canadian House & Home, Canada’s preeminent decorating magazine, was attending the annualSaturday Night magazine Christmas party, where several hundred guests had gathered for an evening of schmoozing and free wine at the magazine’s Front Street offices in downtown Toronto.

While Ladner chatted with Mildred Istona, her boss during a three-year stint at Chatelaine in the mid-’80s, Telemedia publisher Maureen Cavan snaked her way through the crowd of guests until she came face-to-face with Ladner.

“Cobi,” Cavan said, “put on your running shoes.” Cavan-a well-respected publisher who has made a name for herself at magazines that include Canadian Living and Saturday Night-was slyly referring to the brand-new home and decorating magazine that Telemedia was launching the following spring. While many knew that a new title was on the horizon, details about the magazine remained top secret.

Cavan’s comment confirmed what Ladner had suspected: House & Home‘s position as Canada’s most successful decorating magazine would no longer be an uncontested given. Nonetheless, she hadn’t imagined that Cavan and Telemedia would have the gall to position Style at Home in direct competition with House & Home-after all, such a competitive move was virtually unheard of in the Canadian shelter magazine category. Up to that point, each title within the category had served very distinct readers: House & Home focused on decor, attracting a style-conscious, upper-middle-class audience, while Canadian Select Homes (Style at Home‘s predecessor) focused on a far less luxurious and stylish approach to home renovation and do-it-yourself projects, targeting a broader, less affluent readership. Newsstand competitors had run the gamut from the plush City and Country Home (like Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous but Canadian, says Ladner) to the comparatively unstylish Century Home, with its emphasis on the hand-crafted.

The majority of decorating titles had carved out their own narrowly focused niches, from the British Columbia-based Western Living to the log homes of Canadian Homes and Cottages. Now, suddenly, Style at Homewould be covering the same beat as House & Home, meaning that the two titles would have to duke it out for readers, advertisers, and content-in a battle that continues to play out both within the magazines and on the newsstands. “Maureen set the tone and it just hasn’t gone away,” explains Ladner. “The comment made it clear to me that we were about to enter some serious competition.”

Indeed they were. For now, five years later, not only are the two titles attracting the same readers, but they are also competing for advertising dollars and original editorial content. House & Home‘s declining market share-also the result of newer magazines elbowing into the category-speaks of a playing field dramatically altered. But undoubtedly the biggest thing to change that field is Style at Home, which, to the uneducated eye, looks a lot like a cloned version of House & Home: produced with some of the same contributors, offering similar editorial content.

But is outright copying just business as usual? “Sure,” says Doug Bennet, publisher of Masthead magazine, with a laugh, “stealing is a time-honoured tradition among magazines.” Many agree, however, that it may not be the smartest way to ensure a magazine’s success. “I don’t understand why you would elect to copy someone else’s concept,” says Michael Rosset, president of Homes Publishing Group. “It’s just boring.” Evidently, Cavan chose to take Style at Home on the surefire route to success. “It was really just a move toward the norm. Why wouldn’t you follow a successful formula?” Ladner, however, is doubtful. “There are more than enough readers in Canada for us all to be quite different, and I think that we should be.”

While Cavan acknowledges that “Style at Home was intentionally conceived as a direct competitor toCanadian House & Home,” she contends that there were subtle differences between the two. “Our strategy was to be a little more price conscious and a little less urban, giving us a broader appeal.” Telemedia had known that Canadian Select Homes just wasn’t stylish or inspirational enough to compete against the entrepreneurial powerhouse of Canadian Home Publishers. By the fall of 1996, following a year of tinkering, plans for a repositioned and retitled Style at Home were in place.

Style at Home editor Gail Johnston Habs, a former staffer at both Canadian Living and Canadian Select Homes, admits that the resulting publication bears substantial similarities to House & Home. “It’s a lot like a Venn diagram, where two circles link and the overlapped space is what is in common. We happen to have a large area in common.”

The magazine’s production values, however, may not be one of those similarities. House & Home-National Magazine of the Year award-winner in 1995-is a fat, luxurious, oversized book that caters to the higher-income 30- or40-something urbanite. It has become a commanding presence on the newsstand and an attractive outlet for advertisers, in part because of its glossy, well-designed covers. At three-quarter inches larger than the standard 8×11-inch magazine, House & Home oozes class, confidence, and style. Contrarily, the thinner Style at Home takes a somewhat more cost-conscious approach to its service pieces and sourcing, and avoids looking too luxurious. With comparatively lower quality stock, cliched covers-the vase of spring-fresh flowers is a regular May issue cover-and an often muddled design, Style at Home still manages to appeal to a broad national readership, likely because of the magazine’s practical, untrendy and affordable approach.

The Canadian competition doesn’t end with these two titles. In the past year, a slew of niche and special interest publications have drawn arms, ready to do battle with the behemoths. Century Home, now helmed by Erin McLaughlin, a former House & Home staffer, was repositioned in February 2001 as a rurally oriented alternative to the more urban style of both House & Home and Style at Home. That year also saw the launch by Rogers Media of Flare & Co., a young and hip lifestyle book, and the rise of the bicoastal decor and shopping mag yoursource, published by designer and editor Kevin Fitzsimons. In addition, the art and architecture trade publication Azure has recently broadened its readership to include the general consumer reader.

Then there are the titles from other countries to contend with. “House & Home may be our main competitor in Canada,” explains Style at Home‘s Gail Johnston Habs, “but we’re on the stands next to all of those major American and European magazines with huge print runs and budgets.” A daunting reality for the Canadian titles-newsstands are awash in international offerings as Architectural Digest and Dwell; drop into almost any Chapters and you’ll find well over 100 domestic and imported magazines in the home decor section.

But it’s the newer, smaller titles that may prove to give the bigger names a run for their money, by slowly drawing away loyal readers. Century Home has more than doubled its circulation (to over 62,000) in the year since its February 2001 relaunch, despite its rather limited focus on older homes. The 18-year-old country living magazine was bought out in 2000 by the Markham-based special interest publisher Avid Media Inc., which was quick to revamp the title and appoint former House & Home features editor Erin McLaughlin as editor, in the hopes of turning it into a leading Canadian decor book.

McLaughlin’s appointment raised more than a few eyebrows in the industry, mostly because of her age: at 28, and with only a few years of experience, she was hired to create an entirely new identity for the saggingCentury Home. Once a magazine for the genteel 50-plus, rural Ontario woman, Century Home has morphed into a bona fide 21st-century shelter book, complete with clean modern lines and trendy decor. House & Home gone country, some might say.

Back in 1998, McLaughlin-whose only other publishing experience at the time was a couple of years at TV Guide and some freelance work-had impressed the higher-ups at House & Home enough for them to hire her as features editor. “I loved working at House & Home,” says McLaughlin. “I had a great relationship with [the people there] and I learned a lot from Cobi…everything I do, I learned from Cobi and Lynda.” By the time she left House & Home in the summer of 1999, McLaughlin had spent almost two years working closely with Ladner (“She was my mentor,” McLaughlin says), developing a friendship while she learned the ins and outs of magazines and management, developing story ideas, and working with contributors.

“I think Erin is very bright and talented,” Ladner explains. “She thinks the same way I do and I think that is why we got along so well and why she did so well here.” It’s no surprise that Century Home, in its newest incarnation, looks a lot like a mini-me of House & Home.

Just how is it that Century Home and so many other titles can thrive in a single category? The success of the genre is directly related to the trend of home decorating, spurred by the likes of Martha Stewart and Ikea. Most general interest, fashion, and women’s magazines now include decor sections, and the subject’s popularity is spreading. “It’s finally cool to decorate,” explained House Beautiful editor Marian McEvoy to The New York Times last year. “Even guys don’t think it’s sissy to think about what kind of sheets they sleep on.”

Decorating magazines thrive, much like fashion titles, because of their skill at evoking fantasy. “I can’t always afford what I see in magazines,” explains Mary Woodrooffe, an Ottawa resident who routinely reads shelter books, “but they can inspire other, alternative ideas. At the very least they let me dream. I may not be able to afford a couture dress, but I’ll still read Vogue.”

It is this armchair decorator element that enables shelter magazines to often weather the storm of economic hardship: during times of prosperity, they inspire people to buy; during recession, to dream.

But for many, the appeal of decorating magazines is more complex. “There is an almost illicit appeal in witnessing the most intimate details of people’s identities,” explains Kerry Mitchell, a former publisher of Style at Home. “It’s house porn. Shelter magazines are the ideal guilty pleasure of the boomer generation who have grown tired of the narcissism of fashion magazines.” As their waistlines and wallets thicken, the boomer generation is less inclined to relate to 19-year-old fashion models but still wants to express a maturing personal style. What better canvas than the home?

And Canadians seem to agree that home is where it’s at. Each issue of House & Home and Style at Homesells more copies in Canada than the top eight American shelter magazines combined. Most likely that’s because the homegrown titles feature products available in Canada-unlike their international counterparts. As Woodrooffe puts it, “There’s nothing more frustrating than reading an American magazine and finding a product you love but can’t find in Canada.” With “Canadian” in its title, Canadian House & Home offers instant assurance of relevant content, explains Masthead editor Bill Shields.

But the overall success of shelter titles in Canada really comes from the home-centred nature of Canadians, says Johnston Habs. We entertain at home more and go out less than our American neighbours, and with the memory of September 11 still fresh, the trend is growing exponentially. “We are re-entrenching,” says Johnston Habs. Lynda Reeves, publisher of House & Home, adds that while Canadians had been “cocooning,” we are now, post-September 11, “hiving. People want to stay at home-they’re worried about what is going on out there. So we bring the community into the home.” Which explains, at the high end, the rising trend toward home theatres, gyms, and pools; and at the lower end, the interest in modest redecoration, renovation, and detailing. “People will put money into these things so they can bring their children and friends home,” says Johnston Habs. Which is just what the advertisers are banking on.

The cocooning trend has resulted in a surge in advertisers keen on getting onto the pages of shelter magazines. And advertisers-who pay anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 per page in House & Home andStyle at Home-are any magazine’s lifeblood. “We had been looking to reposition Canadian Select Homes by making it more stylish,” explains Maureen Cavan. “We soon realized that the only way to make the new magazine more commercially attractive was to attract a new category of advertisers: style, fashion, cosmetics, and fragrance advertisers were it.” And so, even as many of these advertisers are being forced to cut advertising in the current economic climate, they are shying away from general interest publications in favour of targeted advertising in categories like shelter, explains Debbie King, executive vice president and managing director of the Toronto-based media planning firm Optimedia. As well, shelter books are noted among ad buyers for having multiple readers per copy-a key factor in attracting advertisers and determining rates. “It’s often cheaper and more efficient for many niche advertisers to appear in shelter magazines rather than a general interest or consumer magazine like Chatelaine or Canadian Living,” King explains.

Those shelter readers are precisely the audience Lynda Reeves is targeting with her daily HGTV program,House & Home Television. With her successful ventures and coiffed blond hair, Reeves is continually compared to domestic doyenne Martha Stewart. (“I’m flattered,” Reeves says simply. “Who wouldn’t be? She’s a huge success story.”) Since the show began in 1998, Reeves has been criticized, like Stewart, by viewers, critics, and even colleagues for her stilted on-screen delivery and her steely cold disposition. At the same time, her quasi-celebrity status has fuelled rumours of a less-than-stellar reputation. While her staffers, both past and present, refuse to comment on Reeves, some have quietly admitted off-the-record to fears of crossing the boss.

Criticism notwithstanding, her success is burgeoning. Following the Martha Stewart recipe for success, Reeves is mastering the art of convergence, simultaneously publishing two magazines (House & Home andGardening Life), producing and hosting the television show and distributing a line of home goods available at Eatons.

Reeves didn’t fall into publishing until she approached the publishers of Telemar’s House & Home magazine about writing an “Ask a Designer” column in 1984. One year later, her then-husband purchased the magazine and Reeves took it over as publisher, launching her first major entrepreneurial venture: a revamped, retitledCanadian House & Home in October of 1986. Strategically, the 90-page bimonthly was positioned between the over-the-top extravagance of Maclean Hunter’s City & Country Home and Southam Communications’ building and renovation book, Select Homes. House & Home was an immediate hit with its more than 100,000 readers, who, to this day, continue to lap up the magazine’s stylish and can-do emphasis on service. Still, success was hardly a fluke. It took, says Reeves, a lot of hard work, good timing, and luck for the magazine to succeed. It launched just as the shelter thing was first taking off, giving readers exactly what they had been looking for. While the folks at House & Home were busy positioning the magazine as Canada’s definitive decorating title, their success was bolstered by Select Homes‘ misfortunes as it scrambled to find its footing. Telemedia’s 1989 purchase of Select Homes resulted in a title change and editorial overhaul not once, but twice within five years: first to Select Homes and Food in 1989, and then to Canadian Select Homes in 1994-a mark of desperation, since each change was bound to result in a loss of newsstand recognition and reader and advertiser loyalty.

House & Home continued to grow through the recession of the early 1990s, a recession so deep that it caused City & Country Home, and many others, to throw in the towel. By the time Cobi Ladner became editor at House & Home in 1992, the interest in home decorating was escalating-an interest that met its match in the magazine. Impressively, the book’s subscriptions nearly doubled between 1991 and 1993, despite the recession. Canadians were curious to see how other people lived, and were inspired by the homes and products featured in magazines. It was a simple recipe, explains Ladner: “I don’t want to see my neighbour’s house. I can see that whenever I want. Take me somewhere that I’m not going to go every day.”

Publishers at Telemedia were following their own remarkably similar line of thought. Though Cavan left Telemedia (to take top post at Saturday Night) just weeks before the Style at Home launch, by April 1997 the 144-page, perfect-bound magazine hit the newsstands. The launch followed an aggressive marketing and distribution campaign marked by strategic partnerships with television shows (like Kimberly Seldon’s Design for Living) and a heavy presence at renovation and home shows across the country. It also didn’t hurt that the magazine was intensively marketed through Telemedia’s flagship publications, including Canadian Living andHomemaker’s, through promotional advertising and discounted subscriber rates. With an initial paid readership of 140,000-the same as House & Home at the time-Style at Home proved to be an immediate and credible threat to Reeves and Ladner. Despite this, Canadian Home Publishers continued to coast on the success of House & Home, cross-marketing the magazine ? la Martha Stewart through its other ventures.

It wasn’t until late in 1999, nearly two and a half years later, that House & Home heard its wake-up call about the power of its competitor. For the first time, following an aesthetic tweaking of Style at Home involving a new logo and reorganized editorial, SAH eclipsed House & Home on the stands, sending H&H firmly into battle mode.

Newsstand sales are vital to a magazine’s success, explains Scott Bullock, vice president of Coast to Coast Newsstand Services (House & Home‘s distributor), largely because of the free marketing, branding, and advertising that it generates, not to mention that it is a cheap and efficient way to sell magazines. Numbers from newsstand sales are paramount in determining advertising rates, which is why magazines court the newsstand buyer so vigorously.

As a consequence of Style at Home‘s success, House & Home moved aggressively to shift its marketing and newsstand strategy, hiring Coast to Coast to place and promote the book across Canada. In just over a year, by the end of 2001, House & Home had firmly overtaken Style at Home, increasing newsstand sales by more than 45 percent, selling a whopping average of 51,000 copies per issue on the newsstands alone, nearly 12,000 more copies than Style at Home.

And now, says Bullock, “momentum is just carrying them” on the stands. Despite House & Home‘s premium cover price of $4.95-nearly 50 cents more than Style at Home-single-copy sales continue to increase. “In Canada they are selling more newsstand copies than Martha Stewart Living, which is almost inconceivable.”

Because both Canadian Home Publishers and Transcontinental Publications (which acquired Telemedia in 2000) are private companies, it is nearly impossible to determine how the magazines are faring financially, though calculations provided each year by Masthead magazine tell an interesting story. With numbers gathered from Leading National Advertisers, it estimates that House & Home‘s advertising pages grew by almost 27 percent last year, increasing the magazine’s annual advertising revenues nearly 30 percent to more than $9 million. Style at Home saw a 17 percent page increase in 2001, raising revenue by almost 25 percent to an estimated $6 million. Since these numbers are calculations based on the published advertising rate multiplied by the number of advertisements, they may paint a rosier picture than Style at Home actually merits. That’s because the magazine is reputed to discount its published advertising rates in order to attract advertisers, something that the leader, House & Home, is in a far better position to avoid.

Unfortunately, no magazine is immune to the effects of the current recession. Publishers are cutting editorial pages as advertisers back off. Even though House & Home‘s newsstand sales continue to eclipse Martha Stewart Living, it too is feeling the squeeze. “We’re not planning for huge growth this year,” says Lynda Reeves. “We’ll be prudent and try to control costs.” At House & Home, the February 2002 issue is the smallest in over three years at a measly 112 pages (down eight pages from last year, and down 24 from 2000) and Style at Home isn’t faring any better. Its February/March 2002 issue?also at 112 pages-shrunk 16 pages from the previous year.

In recession or boom, the two titles vie for far more than numbers. What it boils down to is the content coming off the press each month. “Let’s face it,” says Ladner, “we show houses, they show houses. We have do-it-yourself projects, they have DIY projects. We print recipes, they print recipes. There really isn’t that much difference.” So the struggle is over editorial content. And originality.

“We do fight over houses to showcase,” says Ladner, laughing from her bright orange second floor office on Toronto’s trendy King Street West. “Can’t you just picture all of us elbowing each other to get to the front door?” After all, there is a finite number of houses in Canada worthy of appearing in the pages of a decor magazine. It doesn’t get any easier to find content when the market subdivides further among the various niche publications.

Keeping the magazines visually distinct is another, perhaps even bigger, challenge, since editors are forced to fish from a limited pool of designers, photographers, and stylists. And the difficulties with carving out distinct identities doesn’t stop there. The trend toward themed issues-both House & Home and Style at Homeproduce variations on the themes of getting organized, compact living, and family decorating-only adds to the formulaic sameness of the magazines. This past June, House & Home staff were irked to find they had published an issue that was nearly identical to Style at Home. Both titles released “family style”-themed issues with nearly identical covers featuring a young child on a sofa in a neutral room with brightly coloured, geometric accents. Meanwhile, a quick flip through McLaughlin’s relaunch issue of Century Home reveals a piece on mantel decoration, complete with shots of artfully arranged china and collectibles?visually a near duplicate to one that ran under McLaughlin’s byline in the June 1998 issue of House & Home.

Being inspired by-or ripping off-another magazine is hardly new to the industry, especially the shelter segment. Editors constantly mine one another’s products for ideas, and they borrow liberally. “I can’t own an idea,” says Ladner. “I just don’t see how a magazine can be servicing the reader if it is giving the same message as their competition. Why wouldn’t you want to offer something different? Why wouldn’t you want to be original?”

It’s a question that might well be applied to Ladner’s own book, since House & Home is without a doubt modelled after top American decor titles. To be fair, when House & Home came along, there was nothing like it for Canadian readers. Still, it’s worth noting that House & Home‘s regular back page, Trend Watch, is a concept based on-and nearly identical to-the back page of Metropolitan Home, also titled TrendWatch.Metropolitan Home has been carrying the department since 1993, while House & Home picked it up nearly two years later.

“It’s a fact of life that there is a lot of overlap on the newsstands,” says Home Publishing’s Michael Rosset. “It’s unfortunate that people take shortcuts, that there is this lack of originality, but people do what they have to do to get the advertising dollars.” And as Shields adds, if another magazine’s formula is working, what editor would ignore that? After all, there may be demand for the same material.

“There is a formula to them all-and it’s not unique to Canada,” says Masthead‘s Doug Bennet. “Shelter magazines are basically pretty pictures that create desire, some decorating advice, and sourcing information.” True, but even with a clear-cut formula, the execution leaves plenty of room for originality. Unfortunately, that’s where most decor books come up as empty as an unfurnished room.

It’s a little before 10 a.m. on March 27, 2001, and more than 100 Maclean’s magazine employees are gathered in a reception room at the Sutton Place Hotel in Toronto. They’ve trooped up the sidewalk from company headquarters at 777 Bay Street for the long-awaited announcement: the unveiling of their new editor-in-chief. Excitement mingles with relief. Today marks the end of an extensive recruitment process that took more than four months, included approximately two dozen names, and carried a price tag said to be in excess of $50,000. Will it be Toronto Life editor John Macfarlane? Expatriate Canadian newspaperman John Cruickshank? Or maybe Globe and Mail columnist Margaret Wente? The people settle in their chairs asMaclean’s publisher Paul Jones makes his way to the podium. After a quick introduction he reveals his choice: Anthony Wilson-Smith. He’s the Maclean’s insider thought to be the lead candidate from the beginning. So much for suspense.

The next day, the Globe publishes an article on the front page of the Review section that had been in the works for months. Headline: “Can This Man Save Maclean’s?” The subtext is clear: this is a magazine that needs saving, but Wilson-Smith hardly seems like saviour material. Writer Sandra Martin assesses his articulated vision-to make the magazine more “Canadian” and to redefine news as “what’s new to me now” rather than what happened last week-as “bland” and “so last century.” In the National Post, columnist John Fraser isn’t much kinder. He’s skeptical that the new editor can do anything meaningful to change the general editorial texture and tone that Maclean’s has developed over the years. Less than 24 hours into his mandate and already Wilson-Smith is a bum. Fair? Probably not. Painful? For many incoming editors, yes. But not for Wilson-Smith. He shook off the critics on day one, and reflecting on their comments more than six months later, he’s still doing it. “How can I wail about taking a hit when I’ve dished out plenty in my column myself, including whacking the Globe a few times?” he asks as he sits back casually on the plump green sofa in his office, left foot propped on right knee, hands crossed behind his head. “They whacked me back. I understood that came with the job.” He stares out the window intensely with those bulging brown eyes and grins. “You just have to ignore it and drive on,” he adds nonchalantly, brushing invisible dust off his knee as if the answer is as simple as that.

Yet he should be a little worried. He has been chosen to lead what publisher Jones is calling the most radical reconception ever undertaken by a newsmagazine in North America. Success on that order will mean reversing a decline that’s been more than 10 years in the making. It also means outperforming infinitely richer rivals like Time and Newsweek going through the same process. “All magazine junkies know that the very concept of the newsmagazine died at an indeterminate moment some time over the past decade or so,” says the Post‘s Fraser. Even Peter C. Newman, who transformed Maclean’s from a general interest monthly into a weekly newsmagazine in the 1970s, admits that the format has been taken as far as it can go.

Unfortunately for Wilson-Smith, while Time and Newsweek have been working hard on new models?focusing on special reports, thematic issues, and investigative articles-Maclean’s has been spinning its wheels. By the time former editor Robert Lewis announced in November 2000 that he was stepping down, or up, to become vice president of content development for Rogers Media, the need for a new leader with a fresh vision was obvious. For the past decade, Maclean’s form of reporting what happened last week has been floundering. Since 1998, its newsstand sales have fallen 35 percent (64 percent since 1992) and annual advertising revenue is down $7 million. Less quantifiable-but just as palpable-is a widespread recognition that Maclean’sstature as a publication of national record that leads rather than follows is greatly diminished. Within the business itself, it’s getting harder to find anyone with anything good to say about the writing, design, story selection, covers…anything.

So what makes the imposing six-foot, five-inch 45-year-old Montreal native think that he-a product of the system that made the current magazine-holds the key to salvation? “It’s sort of like, ‘If not me, then who?'” Wilson-Smith asks. “I think, inevitably, when you’ve been around a place for a while you have certain ideas about how it should be run, and if you have an opportunity to implement them, then you do that.” Maybe. But being in sync with the publisher’s vision doesn’t hurt either. In Jones’s speech before he introduced Wilson-Smith as the new editor, he presented three major themes for the new magazine: building on the link betweenMaclean’s and Canada, redefining news, and “embracing” the virtues of a magazine-engaging design, arresting photography, and great writing. He says it was Wilson-Smith who won him over with his “enthusiasm” for these themes and for his “passionate commitment to the changes necessary to make them reality.”

What neither man is willing to confront directly is the likelihood that Wilson-Smith was also one of the few candidates willing to tackle these themes and challenges on a shoestring. Who else but a company loyalist would take on such a job when one of his first acts as leader would be to cut $2 million, or approximately 25 percent, from the magazine’s editorial budget? In this light, the critics may be on to something. Despite Jones’s lofty rhetoric, most of the visible changes at Maclean’s in Wilson-Smith’s first year in office have been less about making the magazine a must-read and more about making a mandated 10 to 12 percent margin on revenues. That assessment could change-the jury’s out until a completely redesigned and rebuiltMaclean’s debuts in July-but don’t hold your breath. “Almost nobody makes buckets of money and is a critical success,” says Wilson-Smith matter-of-factly. “To be well respected and to bring a good return to the company may sound like modest goals, but I think they’re pretty good ones.” Radical reconception?

Unlikely. More Canadian? Indeed.

Still, last year’s slowing economy and the fact that Maclean’s is competing for the same advertising dollars as national newspapers, split-runs, and international weeklies means the magazine has taken huge hits lately. “In the last three years, the advertising community has been consumed with the newspaper war,” says Jones, who speaks slowly, searching for the best words and pausing to consider them. “And my corporate masters are saying to me, ‘Golly, these margins are awfully thin [less than five percent] and we’ll be a lot happier if they’re more robust.'” Despite his bottom-line emphasis, Jones insists that the magazine’s problems are, at root, journalistic. Finding the perfect editorial pitch is what counts, he says, because you have to engage readers to attract advertisers. In the old days, Maclean’s had a relatively homogeneous audience with few other voices competing for its attention. Now that audience has fragmented, and so has the competition. While Jones boasts (repeatedly) that Maclean’s holds a glorious target audience for advertisers-readership is two-thirds urban and an average age of 41, has a family income above $100,000, and the majority hold university degrees-the notion that Maclean’s folk are aging and that newsmagazine numbers are down everywhere is cause for fresh thinking. “We have to be ahead of the curve, not behind it,” Jones says. The dilemma: how to add something new without alienating this aging core readership.

If Wilson-Smith wants help with the answer, he doesn’t have to look far. Within journalistic circles, almost everyone has an opinion on what’s wrong with Maclean’s and what needs to be done to fix it. A prominent view is one espoused by media critic, long-time journalist, and former Saturday Night magazine editor Robert Fulford. “Writing is their major problem,” Fulford says. “Lack of authorial voice and writers with unique personalities-that’s what is needed if we’re going to turn back to it every week.” Others agree, sayingMaclean’s should become more provocative, thoughtful, and opinionated, and should model publications likeThe Economist, The New Yorker, and Harper’s. It should be a magazine, they say, that requires reading rather than browsing; one that is worth rereading and consulting long after the shelf date has expired. Not everyone agrees with this thinking, but there is universal consensus that Maclean’s must shed whatever vestiges remain of the rigid newsmagazine format it adopted in 1975 under editor Peter C. Newman. While Newman’s now-legendary decision to boost frequency and change focus saved Maclean’s at the time, it wasn’t long before many began to view the newsmagazine approach and the subsequent editor’s strict language policing-including a list of more than 70 banned words-as a crippling burden. To cope, senior entertainment writer Brian D. Johnson says he would resort to “slipping secret puns and double entendres” into his copy, hoping his editors wouldn’t catch them. For the longest time, the rules remained stringent, perhaps because editorial management thought it was a style that readers liked and expected-homogenized prose, without viewpoint or voice-and because it made for what former editor-in-chief Kevin Doyle (1982-1993) described as a “recognizable mainstream magazine.”

Wilson-Smith willingly admits that he grew tired of using “indeed, clearly, for his part, moreover” and all the standard trademarks of newsmagazine writing. And while Doyle’s successor, Robert Lewis, made great strides to open Maclean’s to more opinion and analysis, Wilson-Smith, upon taking over, made sure to send a clear signal to the staff that his Maclean’s would be more open and relaxed. Staff would have more freedom to do their jobs, to collaborate and come up with their own ideas. Last spring, for example, he allowed Johnson to cover the Quebec City Summit of the Americas and to write whatever he wanted. “I loved the fact that he basically set the parameters as wide as humanly possible,” says Johnson. And unlike past editors, Johnson says Wilson-Smith doesn’t micromanage the prose. “It’s nice now to be able to write the same piece for the editor as you’re writing for the reader. In the old days, it would have been like, ‘Well, this is what I want to do, but how can I do it in a way that they’ll accept?'”

Whether Wilson-Smith will want to go as far as Fulford and others suggest is another matter. Given that at least two of the magazines that embody the latter’s ideals-The New Yorker and Harper’s-are perennial money-losers, it’s more likely that Wilson-Smith will attempt to meet them halfway. From day one, Wilson-Smith has said he wants to make Maclean’s more writerly, to bring in new voices and more styles. Early on, however, only the most attentive readers would have noticed much of a difference-fewer opinion columns freed up room for longer feature stories and for writers like Johnson to open up their beats, but that was about it. All in all, bylines and voices were little changed. By year’s end, Wilson-Smith became bolder. Columnist Allan Fotheringham, who had had a lock on Maclean’s back page for 26 years, was bumped inside to share space with other long-time columnists Peter C. Newman and Barbara Amiel. In Fotheringham’s place, Wilson-Smith plans to rotate a greater number of writers through the back page-some of those first “new voices” include Calgary writer Will Ferguson, Toronto’s Andrew Pyper, Elizabeth Renzetti, a formerGlobe reporter based in Los Angeles, and authors Taras Grescoe and Hal Niedzviecki. Other new features include essay space for guest writers and much more use of photography and illustration. From a content standpoint, Wilson-Smith believes Maclean’s should focus more on social trends, Canadian history and lifestyle stories, rather than the traditional politics and business news. His aim is to make the magazine flexible and “smarter.”

North’s comments hint at another widely known truth about Maclean’s-that it’s long been rife with factions, infighting, power struggles, and political intrigue. Wilson-Smith, it seems, has played the game well.

Since the late 1990s, the biggest internal rift lay between the news junkies, who wanted to continue summarizing the week’s big stories or use those events as jumping-off points for investigative work, and those who wanted the magazine to focus on new trends in lifestyle, health, and Canadian culture. For much of the time, the leader of the pro-news faction was managing editor Geoffrey Stevens. A seasoned journalist hired by Robert Lewis in 1997, Stevens leaned heavily toward a diet rich in politics, business, and news. During his four years at Maclean’s, he hired new journalists and set up an investigative reporting team. The stories they produced, such as “The Human Smugglers” and “The Smugglers’ Slaves,” won awards for outstanding investigative reporting from the Canadian Association of Journalists in 1999 and 2000. Stevens believes this type of news reporting is an important element of the newsmagazine culture. “There’s no reason why a newsmagazine shouldn’t be out there finding, developing, and breaking news,” says Stevens. “It has to have impact or it’ll lose readers.” Wilson-Smith and a number of executive staffers had other ideas. The consensus among this group, often referred to as the “Old Boys Club,” was that the magazine had to focus less on news and more on feature and opinion stories in order to fit into the changing media environment. The idea was that it should be more like a “current affairs magazine, for lack of a better word,” says deputy editor Peeter Kopvillem. Its hallmark would be writer-driven features not seen elsewhere. Kopvillem says the magazine has been trying to head in this direction for some time, and when Wilson-Smith became editor, “The decision was made that this is what we’re doing.”

Just three days after the new editor’s appointment, Wilson-Smith asked Stevens to resign, a move that was characterized by one insider as swift and brutal-and one Stevens well knew was coming. “The new editor wants his own people around him and he felt that I may be more of a threat than an asset,” says Stevens. Interest in the investigative team also faded, and some staffers within the group were laid off. Today, Wilson-Smith contends that these changes were needed. “They were the wrong people with the wrong talents for the direction in which we are headed,” he says.

Another anticipated clash that Wilson-Smith has apparently defused was the potential conflict between him and current editor-at-large, Ann Dowsett Johnston. In the race to succeed Lewis, the strong-willed Johnston was an active campaigner. As one of the few female managers at Maclean’s, Johnston wields considerable influence thanks in part to her stewardship over large, money-making projects?in particular, Maclean’s annual Canadian universities ranking issue and a separate publication, Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities and Colleges. When Wilson-Smith won the job, it was unknown what would happen between the two. But a few months later, Johnston professes happiness with the outcome. “It was clear from the minute Tony took over that we, as colleagues who have known each other for a long time, would have to make this a win-win in any way we could,” she says. According to Johnston, her largest wish-which Wilson-Smith granted-was to have the opportunity to do more writing.

“Buy a paper, support the homeless,” bellows Hubert Serroul against the cold wind that probably accounts for the unusually small crowd outside Toronto’s St. Lawrence farmer’s market this Saturday morning. Hubert holds a copy of Toronto Street News in one gloved hand. In the other he holds a cigarette bummed off a friend. It’s almost noon and he has yet to make $20 compared to last Saturday’s $40. Each copy costs him 25 cents and he sells the paper for $1. Some passersby gladly give him change but tell him to keep the paper. Others buy a copy and walk a few blocks to where they think he won’t see them throwing it away. Clearly, cold weather is not the only reason hardly anyone is buying.

So why are people disregarding, even avoiding, such an endeavour? After all, as ventures go, this is a commendable one: street papers often inform the public on poverty issues that are ignored by the mainstream media, and they create employment for the poor and the homeless through their sales. They can also provide a forum and a voice for homeless people. And by offering a role in their creation, the papers can give contributors a sense of empowerment and self-respect, which encourages them to rebuild their lives.

Worthwhile? Undoubtedly. Worth reading? Not likely. Run by people with little publishing knowledge, staffed by a constant turnover of homeless and unpaid workers, most street papers are either off-puttingly strident or wildly unfocused and poorly written. What’s worse, almost all of them depend on handouts to survive. The few that have managed to gain commercial success have come under political attack from their more ideological cousins. No wonder these papers are as vulnerable as the people they are trying to help.

The homeless paper movement first began in 1989 with Street News, founded by rock musician Hutchinson Persons in New York City, and it’s still published today. The socially conscious, 28-page first issue sparked massive media attention and led to the creation of dozens of street papers across the continent. Soon the trend went international, after Gordon Roddick, husband of Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, purchased a copy of Street News on a trip to the United States and decided to start up his own street paper with the help of his friend A. John Bird in London, England, in 1991.

Bird had an interesting background: in the ’60s he was a revolutionary Marxist who sold copies of theWorker’s Press in England and slept on the streets of Edinburgh while on the run from the police. By 1991 he was working in printing and publishing. Roddick knew Bird would be ideal as an editor of a street paper, and his instinct proved right. The result was The Big Issue, a paper whose mission was to set an example as a socially conscious business. It intended to provide an opportunity for homeless people to earn an income, to invest profits to benefit homeless people, and to give them a voice in the media with an informative, general interest magazine.

The Big Issue launched in September 1991 and has become the largest, most successful street paper in the world. All profits go into The Big Issue Foundation, which delegates more than 70 percent of its resources to direct charitable expenditure. In 1999, The Big Issue Foundation’s revenues totaled over ?850,000 ($2.23 million). Of that, over ?600,000 ($1.4 million) was dedicated to helping 141 people to be re-housed, 70 people to secure jobs, 782 people to meet emergency financial needs through the Vendor Support Fund, and 388 people to secure specific drug, alcohol, or psychiatric help. Bird has become the godfather of Europe’s homeless movement, responsible for creating a blueprint that almost every street paper since has tried to duplicate.

“The Big Issue is now a household name [in the U.K.],” says Layla Mewburn, secretariat of the International Network of Street Papers and international director at The Big Issue in Scotland. “It’s even featured on some of our soap operas.”

The magazine has received many high-profile media awards, including the Commission for Racial Equality’s Race in the Media Award in 1998 for best consumer magazine, and the International Federation of Journalists Award in 2000. Editor John Bird won the British Society of Magazine Editors Editor of the Year Award in 1993. With over a million readers weekly in the U.K., The Big Issue has also spread across the world. Besides regional editions in north and south west of England, independent editions of The Big Issueare sold in Wales, Scotland, South Africa, Los Angeles, and Australia.

So why would such success, coupled with a noble use of profits, attract fear and contempt from the paper’s competitors? It seems to boil down to one point: the limited participation of homeless people in the writing and running of the publication. The Big Issue considers itself a “hard-edged political, social and entertainment” magazine and it has just one two-page section, called Street Lights, that features the writing, poetry and artwork created by the disenfranchised themselves. The rest of the magazine is a mixture of celebrity interviews with the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger, Tony Blair, or U2, and hard reporting on social issues like poverty, prostitution, drug abuse, racism, discrimination, and criminal injustice.

Some members of the North American Street Newspaper Association, including L’Itineraire in Montreal, felt strongly enough about The Big Issue‘s deficiencies in these areas to oppose granting it membership in 1998 when Bird planned to start up a new edition in Los Angeles. Although NASNA, founded in 1996 with approximately 40 members, is still drafting a set of criteria for membership, it values vendor involvement-meaning vendors shouldn’t merely sell the papers, they should help create them-as an essential part of its members’ core purpose. NASNA’s mission is to “support a street newspaper movement that creates and upholds journalistic and ethical standards while promoting self-help and empowerment among people living in poverty.” It seems obvious that even though it lacks full partnership with homeless people, The Big Issueotherwise matches this mandate. The real problem appears to be the split that has developed between papers that operate as profitable commercial enterprises to benefit the disenfranchised, and grassroots organizations whose mandate is to provide a voice for the dispossessed.

According to Robert Norse, editor of Santa Cruz’s Street Shit Sheet, early on in the controversy NASNA’s executive steering committee voted unanimously to oppose The Big Issue‘s entrance into Los Angeles because of concerns that it would put Santa Monica’s Making Change out of business. NASNA even debated whether to oppose its entry into North America altogether. In a message posted on the International Homeless Discussion List in January 1998, Norse wrote: “The Big Issue, with its disproportionate resources, focus on glitz and fluff, and apparent obliviousness to existing activist papers (likeMaking Change) may be a real threat…to the quality of homeless journalism.” Rumours flew that Bird was trying to infiltrate New York, Chicago, and Montreal. After months of debate, he withdrew his application for membership and began selling The Big Issue in Los Angeles for a year before he changed it into a free calendar of entertainment events for Angelenos called Off the Wall. Now Bird is negotiating a new U.S. version of The Big Issue that hopes to amalgamate with the Utne Reader to create a new magazine. It should be available later this year on newsstands and by subscription, and is also to be distributed by homeless people across the U.S.

In an article published February 1998 in San Francisco’s Street Sheet called “The British Are Coming!” author Paul Boden wrote: “The Big Issue is about big bucks pure and simple. Dishing out a few nickels and dimes to some homeless people doesn’t change that and doesn’t make them any less of a ‘poverty pimp’…to claim, as they do, that they lift people out of poverty through the sales of their paper is nothing short of bullshit.” Similarly, some NASNA members, like Chance Martin from Street Sheet, think The Big Issue is a bully that is exploiting the poor in a sensationalistic publication that champions capitalism. Consequently, some feel it supports the agenda that creates homelessness by catering to the rich with its glossy cover, high-profile interviews and liquor ads.

“Even well-intentioned people get sucked into these political problems that undermine the overall goal of the paper,” says Norma Green, acting chair of the journalism department at Columbia College in Chicago, and author of a case study on Chicago’s StreetWise. “It’s typical of activists to have philosophical and ideological splits in groups where people are forced to choose sides. And it gets ugly, all to the detriment of what you think they are supposed to do, which is help the people for whom they started this paper.”

In its defense, Bird says The Big Issue prefers to produce a lucrative professional publication with paid journalists. This way, it can provide services to help vendors and build a business to respond to a social crisis rather than create another charity. He’s straightforward about how this is accomplished. To get noticed now, he says, “You have to be sexy. Everything is about packaging, sound bites, and sexiness. With The Big Issuewe’ve made homelessness sexy. We’re simply taking all the bad tools and using them for a good purpose.”

It’s no wonder The Big Issue has had plenty of opportunity to prosper. With a population of seven million, London was estimated to have more than 40,000 destitute households in 2000. Toronto, with its population of four million, also has the worst homeless problem in its country: nearly 30,000 people used emergency shelters in 1999-not including the scores of people sleeping on the streets. The number of children using shelters in Toronto rose by 130 percent over 11 years-from 2,700 in 1988 to 6,200 in 1999. With an underclass growing by alarming proportions, it is baffling that Toronto lacks a respectable and profitable newspaper for its disenfranchised.

While two are published in Toronto, neither is successful. The black-and-white 12-page tabloid called Toronto Street News claims to help the homeless and unemployed by providing them with an opportunity to make money-even though the paper itself barely breaks even and its content has little to do with the people who sell it. For instance, the cover story for the week of November 4, 2001, was about a hazardous pothole on the 401 entrance ramp at the Yorkdale Shopping Centre. The article warned drivers that police were ticketing vehicles for “crossing the line” to avoid this safety hazard. Other articles included a piece on the CIA’s UFO history and a weekly horoscope by astrologer, publisher, and editor Victor Fletcher, a former typesetter. “This paper is my therapy so that I can sleep at night,” says Fletcher, who started it in July 1999, and now has a current weekly distribution of approximately 3,800. “It is one corner of the world that isn’t controlled by corruption.”

Others don’t find his paper so therapeutic. “This is unbelievable trash,” says John Miller, director of newspaper journalism at Ryerson University and author of Yesterday’s News, a critique of daily newspapers. “Making up stories, spoofs, and taking stuff off the Internet and reproducing it is not journalism,” he says. “This has no editorial mission.”

Fletcher says that although his paper is not “big enough to be on much of a mission,” he still tries to expose overpaid bureaucrats and abuses of public goodwill by power-hungry government and corporate superpowers. No one, he says, wants to read about the issue of homelessness because it’s a “downer.”

Toronto’s other street paper, the Outreach Connection, appeared in October 1993. Publisher David Mackin put his own father, creator of Toronto’s first street paper, The Outrider, out of business. In its nine years of existence, Outreach has been openly criticized by advocates like Cathy Crowe, co-founder of the Toronto Disaster Relief Committee.

“I could pretend that I care about the homeless, and I do, but that’s not so much why I do the paper,” says Robert Callaghan, who was once homeless and is now in charge of production at Outreach. “I get a kind of ego kick out of doing it.” He said the paper began by focusing on homeless and poverty issues but readers found the content too boring and depressing. Unfortunately, its present material-Chuck Gallozzi’s column, “A Positive Place,” for example, deals with topics like road rage or how to find security in one’s life-is also of little interest to anyone. Neither, for instance, are the anonymous satirical news stories about a student’s dirty underwear or a businessman finding a cell phone in his ear. In the last three years, Outreach’s weekly sales have dropped from 10,000 to 5,000. In 1998, Mackin raised the vendor’s price of the paper from 30 to 40 cents.

Neither Toronto Street News nor the Outreach Connection is a member of NASNA, simply because they have no interest in applying. Yet they still consider themselves street papers, basically because homeless people sell them. Pat Capponi, former contributor for Toronto’s alternative weekly Now magazine and author of The War at Home: An Intimate Portrait of Canada’s Poor, Dispatches from the Poverty Line, and Upstairs in the Crazy House, views these papers as a huge waste of opportunity. Capponi, refered to as a “psychiatric survivor,” has become one of Canada’s leading mental health advocates. In keeping with the activist slogan “Nothing about us without us,” she feels that by not encouraging vendors to participate in the production of the papers, street publications are not helping the situation of the homeless, but are “cutting their legs out from underneath them.” Being part of the creative process for a well-read, respected paper that focuses on their issues would provide a form of therapy for people who have lost everything or have never had anything to begin with.

One Canadian street publication, an original member of NASNA, is impressive. Montreal’s L’Itineraire, a play on words that means both “life’s path” and “homeless person,” brings in volunteer professionals to train its 50 to 70 vendors in reporting and also offers them seminars and courses on writing and research. Vendor editorial contributions make up 60 percent of the magazine’s content. It offers team meetings, focus groups, and support services for all of its volunteers and paid staff, as well as plenty of vacation time to prevent burnout. With donated equipment, staff make a professional-looking, 40-page monthly for its roughly 50,000 readers.

L’Itineraire Community Group began as Cafe sur la rue, which was established in 1989 by homeless people as an opportunity to organize themselves without the involvement of social workers. It expanded into an Internet cafe that still exists today, providing the impoverished with invaluable access to information and resources that would otherwise be unobtainable. L’Itineraire, first published in 1994 by L’Itineraire Community Group, is currently under the editorial direction of Jean-Pierre Lacroix, a former drug addict who worked his way up through the organization. The street magazine-part financially viable publication and part struggling alternative press-brings in more revenue than the cafe and the Internet cafe combined. In its 2000 fiscal year, sales were $171,000. It has also been an active member in the poverty movement, helping to develop other street papers like La Quete in Quebec City. L’Itineraire now awaits the money from a federal government grant that will go toward buying the building it is currently renting and renovating one of the floors for temporary housing.

Our Voice in Edmonton also first appeared in 1994 and is proud that its vendors write 70 percent of the publication. Editor Natasha Laurence struggles to build Our Voice’s credibility by producing a readable paper that doesn’t pull back on the subjects that matter. “Advocates and homeless shelter workers have received reports of men and women who are set on fire, beaten, harassed, killed and even dragged to death,” says an article on aggression against homeless people. With pieces on everything from slumlords to squatters, Our Voice offers a mix of heavy issues, including local homicides, riots on Canada Day, and poverty statistics in Alberta. The paper is frank and unapologetic. “I want us to speak about the issues clearly and firmly without attacking the surrounding culture,” Laurence says. “I think that alienates people because you are yelling too loud.”

Our Voice writer and vendor Theresa McBryan believes people’s eyes glaze over when they read too much about the homeless issue. For three months last summer, McBryan, intending to write a book on the history of the paper, nosed through countless articles, many of which were hand-written on foolscap paper. She was touched by the stories of abuse, destroyed relationships, and lost children. “There is so much of a common thread that runs through all of these stories of genuine heartbreak, I’d find myself crying in the office.”

This type of content can, over time, prove to be too much for readers. “The thing is to convey the message without making people feel personally shamed by the information. People are overwhelmed by appeals for charity,” says McBryan. Now longtime Our Voice writers have moved on to ask larger questions about a society that creates these tales of tragedy, addressing issues like globalization, privatization of public services, and police brutality. “They have begun to realize,” McBryan says, “that their viewpoint is valuable.”

Getting people to read these kinds of cerebral takes on poverty issues can be a challenge for titles likeCalgary Street Talk. Jim Cunningham, a journalism instructor at the Southern Alberta Institute of Technology in Calgary, feels Calgary’s conservatism is behind the paper’s low sales figures. The former Calgary Heraldwriter says the city is overwhelmingly middle class and that some Calgarians have too much money and not enough sensitivity to the causes of homelessness. “Calgarians are not tuned in to the homeless issue. The city’s attitudes are more suburban than urban. You can’t carve that kind of a market out of a town like this.” Around 30 Calgary Street Talk vendors sell about 4,000 copies by donation every month.

While those problems are not unique to Calgary, others are more universal. As professor Norma Green of Columbia College says, “There are many things people don’t think about when they start street publications because they lack experience.” She explains that oftentimes the publishers are holding down other jobs, and without formal training they burn out. “People do this out of the goodness of their hearts, but that’s not always adequate enough to sustain it.”

Michael Burke, an engineer in Halifax, is a prime example. Wanting to create employment for homeless people, he decided to start a street paper. “It sounded easy at the time and it obviously wasn’t,” says the managing director of Street Feat, which first appeared in November 1997.

Other problems seem inherent to this type of paper: unpaid workers and transients don’t make for a permanent work environment. “A lot of the homeless are fairly dysfunctional and it is very hard to get them organized,” says Burke. Fifty percent of his newspaper team is made up of people he describes as poor. They have to struggle with the basics of daily survival, he says, so they have difficulty making a commitment. Housing, telephones, and computers-basic to most writers-are far beyond their reach.

Kevin Howley, assistant professor of communication studies at Northeastern University in Boston, conducted field research at Street Feat in Halifax between August and September of 2001 for his upcoming bookCommunity Media: People, Places and Communication Technologies. What Howley found was a fairly typical community media organization operating on a shoestring budget with old donated equipment and a skeletal staff, including four vendors who write fairly regularly for the paper. What’s missing, Howley believes, is the active editorial board it once had, made up of representatives from the health care field, church groups, and social service agencies, among others. “An editorial board is important to make connections within the community, to keep the paper in people’s minds, and to let people know that it serves a distinctive purpose,” says Howley.

Howley feels community involvement is essential for small papers like Street Feat. He’s witnessed publishing manager Juan Carlos act not only as an editorial supervisor but also as a quasi-social worker. “He’s helping these people out with their problems, making sure they get their bus passes or train passes, making sure they keep their court dates or social service agency appointments, or helping them find jobs,” he says.

Editorial boards are not the only thing communities can contribute: financial assistance is also desperately needed. Most street papers in Canada barely break even, surviving on advertising, grants, donations, or budgets from government-funded charitable organizations. If these assets were to dry up, homeless papers could be forced off the streets.

Another detriment to depending on handouts is that relying on the “big boys”-corporations and governments-can affect a street publication’s agenda. Rick Bell, columnist for The Calgary Sun, says it’s no wonder a paper like Calgary Street Talk isn’t hard-hitting-it is run out of an agency that receives funding from the government and corporate sector.

“If you run a paper that is constantly and caustically critical of the government, which is easy to do in Alberta, and is critical of the corporate sector, which in Calgary dominates, do you get to survive?” asks Bell. He considers Calgary Street Talk‘s soft approach to politics a result of its attachment to a charity, the Calgary Urban Project Society, though editor Paul Drohan, a former writer for the Herald, says he’s never had so much journalistic freedom. He even receives flak from readers about some of his critical editorials. In Bell’s view, “Street Talk provides a little window on a world that the self-satisfied suburbanites might not normally see. The difficulty is how far can you push it before you alienate your corporate and government patrons who keep you going?”

Soft or tough, homeless papers fill a very real need, especially when some mainstream dailies print articles dripping with contempt for homeless people. “Your gutless councillors can’t do enough to contain the so-called ‘crisis,'” wrote Sue-Anne Levy in a Toronto Sun article from September 16, 2001, titled “City Council’s Concept of ‘Disaster.'” “The only crisis, in my view, is that councillors have turned this city into the homeless capital of Canada. If only they’d spend as much time and effort solving the city’s financial crisis. Or the gridlock problem. Or what to do with Toronto’s trash.”

Such attitudes feed the creation of street papers, whose existence as a form of alternative press is imperative for those on the edge of society. There may always be conflicting ideas about what constitutes a genuine street publication, and that’s something Virginia Sellner, executive director of the Wyoming Coalition for the Homeless, applauds. Street papers all work differently, she says, but they all do good things.

Sometimes the good they do is painfully basic. That’s what Kevin Howley realized while researching Street Feat. Poring over back copies, he came across several obituaries of people who had died in shelters or on the street. Were it not for Street Feat-and the same can be said of countless other street papers-these human beings’ life stories, and endings, would have passed silently unrecorded.

Q:After dating this woman for a couple of months, I began to suspect that she was a bed wetter. Is adult bed-wetting more common than one would imagine? Would it be morally shallow of me not to want to sleep with her again?

A: Would it be morally shallow not to sleep with the woman again? Yes, I think so. You liked this woman well enough to sleep with her before you found out she had a medical problem; if you drop her cold now you’ll not only contribute to her feelings of shame (something bed wetters suffer from, according to mybladder.com), but you’ll wrack up some serious bad karma….Instead of dumping this woman, try to help her…..If she denies she has a problem, or refuses to get help, you can either dump her or invest in plastic sheets.

-Dan Savage, “Savage Love”

Q:Can a young male make a lot of money acting in straight, gay, or bi[sexual] porn movies? Where can males find such work in Montreal or Canada? Do requirements for gay and straight porn differ?

A: There is very little activity in Canada and most porn is shot in Los Angeles (the San Fernando Valley, to be more specific, according to one source). This same source says guys approach him all the time about doing adult films and he refers them to the World Modeling Talent Agency in L.A. Gay pays more than straight, so much, he says, that ?gay for pay? is a common saying in the industry….In straight porn, you basically have to be able to keep it up and come on cue….In gay porn you have to do all that and be gorgeous.

-Josey Vogels, “My Messy Bedroom”

Take one part advice, one part personal journalism, one part research, one part pop culture commentary, and you have the essence of the modern sex column. The hybrid form initially emerged in North America in the 1980s, when American writers began exploring the profound confusion surrounding roles and relationships following the sexual revolution of the previous two decades. In the last 10 years, sex columns have edged their way from the pages of alternative weeklies into prominent positions in American mainstream print and online publications such as the Chicago Sun-Times (Rhona Raskin?s “Ask Rhona”), abcnews.com (Dan Savage?s “Dear Dan”), and New York magazine, where, last fall, Amy Sohn began writing a self-absorbed saga each month about her sex life. The column serves as a springboard to explore the fluidity and uncertainty of sexuality among young urban professionals. Then there’s “Savage Love”-the most syndicated sex column in North America-which sprang from the same pen as “Dear Dan” but is more like its evil twin, providing a fascinating forum for the author to touch on sexual, social, and political issues.

Sex columns have also arrived in Canada-occupying a place of honour in the back sections of virtually every alternative paper in major cities across the country, and cropping up with greater frequency in mainstream markets. Hundreds of thousands of devoted readers read them to demystify ever more complicated questions of sexual etiquette. With good reason. A cultural barometer of constantly shifting sexual mores in an increasingly disconnected culture, the sex column not only brings the health class home, it provides readers with a comforting sense that they are not alone. It quells fear and embarrassment about matters of the heart, and opens lines of communication about stuff down there. Perhaps most significantly, it helps to normalize behaviour that would have been unthinkable to read about even 10 years ago.

Sex column aficionados, for instance, still chuckle over the “bob versus peg” debate, which raged for weeks last spring in “Savage Love.” The argument erupted over what to name the act when a woman had anal sex with a male partner using a strap-on. “Peg” grew from a highly misinformed reader suggestion (the man apparently thought that young male prostitutes used pegs to keep their nether orifices flexible). Even after Savage put this myth to rest (he argued that it was illogical, as loose orifices are a detriment rather than advantage when it comes to anal sex), the term’s popularity gave “bob” (which stands for “bend over boyfriend”) some real competition. “Peg” eventually took the prize, with 5,216 votes, while “bob” attracted a mere 2,721. And so “pegging”-a new word for a previously in-the-closet sex act-was born. This level of interactivity is typical of sex columns.

Columnists field questions ranging from the benign to the bizarre. Readers ask anything from the best way to hit on a waiter to the exact definition of “clit pumping.” The columnist, in turn, acts as collective group therapist. Or, as Dan Savage puts it, “Troubled/ bemused/perplexed person submits deeply personal/embarrassingly revealing/totally humiliating question, and wise/tolerant/benevolent advice columnist writes remarkably insightful/slyly amusing/completely unambiguous answer for all to read/apprec-iate/marvel at.” Generally, columnists won’t judge the reader, and there’s a comforting assurance that no matter how weird his or her question, someone else will always write in with a more bizarre problem. Indeed, half the fun of reading a sex column is the voyeuristic thrill of finding out what kind of kinky inclinations your next-door neighbour is into.

In the post-’60s era, when the borders of “conventional” sexuality were continually expanding, agony aunts like Ann Landers and Dear Abby were simply no longer relevant. A new generation no longer worried whether it was acceptable to wear white after Labour Day; they wanted answers to more pressing issues, like how to negotiate casual sex with an ex, how to shop for a vibrator, or how to feel less alone during a sexual dry spell. People were starting to talk about sex in a take-no-prisoners way; advice columnists and mainstream journalists simply weren’t speaking their language.

In 1980, 52-year-old sexual therapist Dr. Ruth Westheimer changed all that when she brought Sexually Speaking to New York City radio and became a North American celebrity by talking about sex in a smart and sassy way. Dr. Ruth set the stage for the modern sex column, but the younger generation still clamoured for someone who could empathize with their trials and tribulations. She offered a voice less intimidating than their gynecologist or family doctor, but more authoritative than their best friend.

Enter Cynthia Heimel, a hip, divorced, 30-something single mom, Playboy columnist and author of Sex Tips for Girls, a hilariously cheeky guide for women attempting to negotiate the minefield of sexual relationships in the ’80s. Readers were drawn to her raunchy tone, hysterical humour, brazen honesty, and, above all, earthily human approach to topics like “Zen and the art of diaphragm insertion.” By addressing readers as if she were talking with girlfriends about sexual exploits and dilemmas, Heimel trailblazed a new way of discussing sex in a public forum. Moreover, through her irresistible character Dr. Eva Rosa Anna von Sex Tips, the author created the template for a column about sexual etiquette that relied heavily on humour, a device which remains a keystone for sex columns today. Heimel also paved the way for the sharply observed social anthropology of Candace Bushnell’s 1990 “Sex and the City” column in The New York Observer, which sparked a hit HBO television series.

While Heimel was mining the culture at a grassroots level by probing the always confusing, often hilarious dilemmas of sexual etiquette, and Dr. Ruth was dispensing her no-nonsense advice on the radio, over at The Village Voice, Richard Goldstein, the voice of gay America, was reporting at a more macrocosmic level. Goldstein trenchantly probed the relationship between sex and pop culture at a time when gay culture was increasingly gaining acceptance in the straight world, AIDS was decimating the male homosexual population, and homophobia was on the rise again. Throughout that manic-depressive period for gay men, Goldstein viewed and interpreted significant cultural events through the filter of sexuality. By 1992, the trend was showing itself in Canada, too, with Wendy Dennis writing the best-seller Hot and Bothered: Men and Women, Sex and Love in the ’90s. Together, these voices gave eloquent expression to an important and emerging new form of journalism.

Against this backdrop, in 1994, Josey Vogels was asked to write a column about women’s issues for Hour, one of Montreal’s alternative weeklies. She decided that writing strictly about women would be too limiting, “too ’80s.” By broadening her focus to sex and relationships, she could more effectively tap into the zeitgeist. Thus, Canada’s first sex column, “My Messy Bedroom,” was born-a place, says Vogels, “where contradiction sits on the dresser right there with the tube of lipstick and the jar of cellulite cream.”

Today, her wildly popular “My Messy Bedroom” is syndicated in 10 alternative papers across the country. In addition, Vogels writes “Dating Girl,” a Q&A column she conceived partly to deal with the flood of letters she receives seeking advice on a broad range of topics. Until March, she hosted My Messy Bedroom TV on WTN, a television show where she and her girlfriends engaged in animated girl talk about breasts, blow jobs and bubble baths. She is also a frequent guest on TalkTV, publishes additional material on her website, mymessybedroom.com-which receives over 1,000 hits daily, a huge following for a Canadian sex columnist-and has just finished writing her fourth book. In the rarefied world of Canadian sex columnists, Vogels is a star.

Vogels, who graduated from Concordia University with a bachelor’s degree in journalism and communications, thinks of sex in our time as a “nice mix of openness, repression, confusion, pierced body parts, and Guess jean ads.” She credits feminism, ’60s free love, Hollywood, therapy, self-help and how-to books, radical primitivism, and a renewed conservatism with creating contemporary attitudes toward sexuality.

Vogels often melds a reporter’s research skills with a personal approach. In a column on the drastic reduction in male fertility, she cited one study showing that long-term prisoners were “regular sperm factories” thanks to their highly regulated and relatively stress-free environment. “Of course, if testosterone and subsequent sperm production keeps dropping in men,” she wrote, “violent crime will go down and prisons will no longer be necessary. Come to think of it, more feminized men could mean less rape, war, and more legroom when you sit next to them on the metro.” Recently, when investigating the etiquette of the orgy, Vogels talked to Kristine M., a premiere sex party planner who doesn’t allow booze at her sex parties. “Well, if I found myself in a roomful of people I was expected to have sex with,” the columnist wrote, “I think I’d be wanting at least one cocktail to calm the old nerves.” That comment is classic Vogels. While some other writers jab more harshly, she diffuses awkward subjects with gentle self-mockery.

As well, she often offers intimate glimpses into her own sex and fantasy life. In one column, about the death of a friend from AIDS, she wrote, “It hit me like a ton of latex [but] fear does not necessarily curb promiscuity. Let’s get real here: if casual sex is a vice, anxiety will only send you seeking more of it….For me to sit here and say that I still always practise entirely safe sex would be like me saying I’ve never faked an orgasm.” When a writer exposes herself so intimately in print year after year, a bond of trust develops with her readers. She has similar experiences to yours, understands your problems, and though initially as perplexed as you are, is more likely to come up with some explanation for why the world of sexual interaction is so damn confusing. She explores the brain and the body with equal aplomb. “I’m bored with my sex life. Not the one that happens in my bed, or whatever other convenient location presents itself, but the one that happens in my head,” Vogels writes of her mental sexual health. “I don’t think it’s any coincidence that common fantasy lists for women involve some form of exhibitionism, while men’s lists usually include some sort of voyeuristic Peeping Tom-themed scenario. After all, if you look at sexuality as it’s often depicted in our culture, women are watched and men do the watching.”

Although sex columnists play a significant role in identifying trends and informing public opinion on many aspects of modern sexuality, writing about sex and relationships is still considered a “soft” subject in journalism. Often sex writing is viewed as self-indulgent, irrelevant, or silly. Vogels says that she’s used to confronting this prejudice. She’s often asked if she worries about becoming pigeonholed as a sex writer. “They wouldn’t ask me that if I were a political columnist,” she says, “but writing about sex is viewed as frivolous.” And yet, why should it be? What other subject goes straight to the heart and soul of who we are as human beings? What else so intimately affects our thoughts and emotions? There’s no subject in or out of mainstream media that so clearly connects us to each other on all levels. What’s more, it’s clear that audiences are rabid for information about relationships and sexuality. Sex guru Sue Johanson’s Sunday Night Sex Show is WTN’s highest rated show. The Sunday Night Sex Show is just one of the five information-based television shows devoted to all things sexual, like Sextv on Citytv, The Sex Files on CTV, and Eros on Life Network, all of which air in Canada. According to Robert Fulford, a National Post columnist and one of the country’s most distinguished journalists, “Anything that conveys ideas and information is journalism. Sex is as much entitled to its place in journalism as gardening, sports, interior decoration, or politics. More, probably.”

Part of the reason that sex columns don’t garner the respect they deserve is because sexuality is such a messy area for writers to explore, and many are afraid of intensely personal journalism. Exposing one’s sex life in print requires courage and an utter lack of inhibition. Still, not all sex columns do qualify as journalism-particularly in the under-30s market. Some are more brash reminiscences, playing on shock value to entertain rather than inform. That type of writing, drawing readers seeking a quick laugh, has a definite appeal, although it lacks the necessary underlying substance to function as an anchor.

For seven years, Sasha Van Bon Bon has been shocking the otherwise unshockable young, hip urbanites who read “Love Bites” in Montreal’s Mirror and Toronto’s eye. Among the cooler-than-thou in the downtown alternative crowd, Sasha’s column has a certain cachet. Still, “Love Bites” reads like a caricature of a sex column. It’s often less informed journalism than an aggressively juvenile rant. While using graphic language to communicate and entertain is standard practice for sex columnists, Sasha, whose credentials for writing a sex column include stripping and writing pornographic comics, often goes overboard, occasionally to the point of cruelty. When a reader, worried about his girlfriend’s greater sexual experience, judged the woman for her past choices, Sasha attacked him with an equal measure of judgement and scorn: “Won’t you be a marvel of understanding toward her when you come-and you’ll be lucky if you last this long-in under five seconds?”

While other sex columnists rely on research and professional medical advice, Sasha more often seeks answers from unreliable Internet sources, uninformed sex store employees, and porn stars like Nina Hartley-further reducing her credibility. Moreover, she often brags about her ignorance, almost demanding readers keep their expectations low. When a reader who was dissastisfied with her advice wrote to complain, Sasha told a story about one of her best friends whom she put on the pill when she was 15. (She’d obtained the prescription from her own doctor.) “She now has chest hair, which she blames on me. Just keep that in mind when you ask me medical questions.” Still, Sasha does have a loyal readership, for whom she reliably provides cheap laughs, a seedier perspective, and a peep show in print.

Although her sex-diva persona can become tiresome, she is an entertaining writer. When a man asked how to cope with a girlfriend who’d had more sexual partners at one time than he’d had in his whole life (male insecurity due to inexperience is a common theme), Sasha retorted that he was face-to-face with an all-too-common sexual malady: the World-Weary Demi-Mondaine. “She’s been mauled in Marrakesh, pissed on in Peru and had orgies from one end of the Orient to the other, darling-she has seen it all….How do I know? Who the hell do you think you’re talking to? I’ve now parlayed the WWDM into a fucking job! Sometimes I think the only reason I’ll have kids is so they can have kids and then my grandkids can go around telling everyone that their grandmother was a scandalous woman.”

At 61, with style and grace to spare, Valerie Gibson speaks to a rather different demographic. When she beckons you into her office at The Toronto Sun, she’s instantly recognizable from the headshot above her column, frequent appearances on the society pages, and regular sexpert appearances on local television. Her cultured British accent, cheeky grin, and coiffed mop of red hair are practically trademarked. Gibson began her career at 16 years of age as a copy girl at The Southern Evening Echo in Southampton, England. After working her way up from covering dog shows, she came to Canada in 1974 and worked as a fashion editor at the Sun prior to assuming the mantle of sex columnist at the newspaper in 1997. In Gibson’s “Intimacies,” her thrice-weekly column, the writer, whose fans range from teenagers to senior citizens, not only talks openly about her five failed marriages, her fondness for young men, and her beloved cats, she brings her idiosyncratic point of view to bear on timely topics: badly botched blind dates, hopelessly horny husbands, and steamy romances with younger men.

On that last topic, Gibson is particularly expert. She spent the last few months of 2001 promoting her latest book, Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men. It’s her second on the joys of sex and relationships with men half her age. In her books, Gibson is freer to playfully explore the lighter side of sex than in her columns, where she advises on the more mundane aspects of relationships. However, her distinctive tone-an easy authority tempered with perspective-resonates in both.

“Intimacies” is much less graphic in tone than most other sex columns and offers more balanced discussion of relationships. The reason is twofold: she writes for a mainstream daily, and she simply has more relationship experience than other sex columnists. She’s gone through (at least) five falling-in-loves, five engagements, five weddings, five honeymoon periods, five falling-out-of-loves, and five divorces. And now she can laugh. That’s experience and wisdom. In a recent column about a cheating spouse, the reader who’s going through hell can take comfort knowing that Gibson has clearly been there: “I’ve done the deny, deny, deny bit. It works for a while, but once a partner’s suspicions are aroused, they rarely disappear. It’s inevitable, however, that those suspicions will be confirmed as the unfaithful person usually makes a bad slip at some point,” she writes. “Sometimes it’s just carelessness or overconfidence, sometimes it’s unconsciously deliberate as, deep down, they want to be found out and get it all out into the open. Ah, yes. There speaks the voice of experience….” This tone is typical of Gibson: not enough bizzaro sexual highjinks to make her a grande dame of World-Weary Demi-Mondaines, but enough mileage to give her perspective.

Gibson’s gentle authority comes from age, but there are other ways to achieve that kind of sensitivity and understanding. Rebecca Rosenblat’s background in psychiatry, for instance, has enriched her viewpoint. Rosenblat, whose “Ask Dr. Date” column graces the pages of the Canadian version of Hustler, spent six years working with schizophrenics at Toronto’s Clarke Institute of Psychiatry before turning to sex writing. After publishing three erotic novels, each of which sold more than 10,000 copies in North America, she became a sex columnist for Touch magazine, a now defunct sex monthly. In 2001 she vastly expanded her audience, taking on the role of Dr. Date at both Canadian Hustler and Toronto’s Mojo radio. On the radio, Dr. Date was wildly popular: a sexpert with a husky voice as suited to phone sex as commercial radio. Her midnight time slot made her popular with truckers, and she managed to talk the “manly” men into a more sweetly sensitive style of lovemaking with their wives and girlfriends. Through the gig at Mojo, a station marketed as “Talk Radio for Guys” with billboard ads announcing “It’s okay to be a man again,” featuring lingerie-clad women holding power tools, Rosenblat proved she could crack male bravado, break through to the squishy emotions underneath, and handle some tricky situations in between. At the same time, she was gaining notoriety outside the GTA through her monthly column in Hustler. In the Christmas 2001 issue, her double-page column is sandwiched between “Carnal Carnaval”-a raunchy memoir of boinking prostitutes in Quebec-and a photo spread of a m?nage ? trois. In it, Dr. Date dispenses advice about easing into group sex (“Spark it up with some threesome porn”), woman-friendly porn (“Feminists have fought for…freedom of expression. It is our right to view it”), and bathtub sex safety (“No pumping in the tub”). But she also stresses that communication is the number one aphrodisiac and encourages men to treat their partners with respect. She’s clearly having an impact. To her surprise, much of Rosenblat’s fan mail comes from women, who say that they use her column as a forum for discussion with their mates. A further surprise: her blurb announces that “Hustler is proud to present author and sex therapist Rebecca Rosenblat, who will answer your questions about love, sex and intimacy.” Who knew that Hustler‘s editors had even heard of intimacy, let alone the idea that sex had anything to do with love?

Rosenblat had an opportunity to speak directly to her middle-aged fan base at Toronto’s “Everything to Do with Sex Show” last fall. The couples who flock to hear Dr. Date’s marriage-saving wisdom packed the curtained-off seminar area where she was giving explicit instruction on “How to talk dirty” and “How to drive your partner wild with pleasure.” Five minutes into her lecture, the only spot left to sit was a small patch of concrete behind a 50-something couple who couldn’t keep their hands off each other, obviously affected by Rosenblat’s talk of “fuzzy, sweet peaches” and “steely hard cocks.” Her fans didn’t seem to mind the standing-room-only conditions as they crowded in behind the hundred or so plastic chairs the more punctual couples had snagged. They listened, completely rapt throughout the half-hour speech, and lined up afterward to buy copies of her instructional booklets. Dr. Date chatted amiably with her fans, shifting easily, like many of her colleagues, between sex goddess and sex therapist.

It’s characteristic of her craft for Rosenblat to consider her work as a sex columnist an essential public service, as valid as her earlier work with the mentally ill, though much more fun. Her individual brand of do-it-yourself sexual healing has an informal tone that belies the seriousness of the information she’s providing. As with her colleagues, years of probing the eccentricities of human sexuality haven’t affected her passion for her work. They all simply love sex, and writing about sex.

In one column, Josey Vogels sends up our culture’s obsession with sex by offering her readers a multiple choice quiz. “What’s become more popular than having sex?” she asks. “A) talking about it, b) writing about it, or c) responding to questions about it.” As the Oprah-inspired compulsion to talk about everything, all the time, with anyone who’ll listen takes an ever firmer hold on the mass unconscious, sex columns provide a much desired fix for pop culture junkies. Of course, sex columns also formalize our neuroses about sex and sexuality into a neat and tidy package, providing answers for the great unanswerable: why do we do the things we do?

Sex columns name our sexual neuroses, literally and figuratively. They create the capacity for discussions where before there was none. They help create the language that enables us to talk about our sexuality in an entirely new (and ideally improved) way. They shine a light on the dark corners of the human sexual experience, providing readers with a forum for exploring those dark places, without seeming freakish. The research, the advice, the humour, the personal tone, and the cultural commentary have all combined to create what is now an essential function for the legions of adherents.Sex columns self-perpetuate their cycle of popularity; the more people read about sex, the more they wonder about it, and the more comfortable they feel going beyond the conventions that dictate sexual relationships.

The sex column is a reflection of modern attitudes about sex and sexuality. It is not a passing fad with a definite shelf life. Instead, it’s a trend that is helping to change the tone of modern media, and is gaining greater acceptance among writers, readers, and editors of all ages and disciplines.

Christie Blatchford lives in a 105-year-old house near the eastern fringe of Toronto’s Little Italy, where the right half of her bedroom functions as a small home office. Hanging over an old wooden desk, where her Macintosh PowerBook G3 lies, is a pencil sketch of a judge watching a man give his testimony. The judge is Justice Edward Then, the witness Taghe Savojipour, who in September 1999 would go on to receive a life sentence for first-degree murder. Though the case had no historical significance and received little media attention, it marked a crucial moment for Blatchford; it was the first time in her career that her reporting was put to trial.

The crime in question was a particularly brutal one, in which 16-year-old Mehdi Amin Mohammadi was raped and stabbed, and his body was hacked to pieces and dumped in various parts of Toronto. Savojipour testified that two anonymous armed goons forced him to rape the boy before they killed him. Fearing that the law would hold him responsible for the murder, Savojipour-a butcher by trade-claimed he dismembered the body to better hide it.

About nine months into the trial, and mere days before the jury was set to retire for deliberation, the National Postprinted Blatchford’s report, headlined “A Butcher Asks Jury to Believe His Story.” Describing the defence in her trademark sarcastic, conversational prose, she made no bones about her incredulity about Savojipour’s testimony. “He had to stroke himself and ‘imagine one of the most pleasurable sexual scenes I could’ in order to get aroused, but by golly, it worked, and he had anal sex with Amin for between six and 10 minutes,” she wrote. “A man does what a man has to do.”

This was too much for David Bayliss, Savojipour’s defence lawyer. In the days after the column went to print, Bayliss insisted the jury might have been tainted by the piece, and urged the judge to slap either Blatchford or the Post with contempt charges. Justice Then decided it would be out of his jurisdiction to penalize remarks made outside the courtroom. However, he did agree to poll the jurors one by one to assess what influence Blatchford’s column may have had.

Anxious about the implications of the decision, the Post‘s legal advisor, Stuart Robertson of O’Donnell, Robertson & Sanfilippo, hired criminal law expert Alan Gold to represent Blatchford for the trial’s duration. What Robertson and Blatchford didn’t realize was that Gold had previously slammed Blatchford’s work on the Alison Parrott trial in an article for a lawyer’s trade paper. Bayliss knew it, though, and read excerpts of Gold’s piece to the court. Gold soon withdrew, and left Blatchford feeling alone in the near-empty courtroom. She watched from her usual spot (right side, second row, aisle seat) as the individual jurors stepped to the witness stand, each time praying, “Please God, say he didn’t read it.”

Blatchford’s own defence of her actions in this and other cases-and it’s a damn solid one-is that jurors are reasonable individuals who bring a lot of common sense to the courtroom and take their jobs very seriously. If they go behind the judge’s back and read the news, it should not substantially influence them, since the writer can report only what the jury has already heard. At the crucial moment of deliberation, they’re sequestered anyway. Is their integrity so fragile that an ordinary journalist, one clearly expressing her opinion, can prejudice their opinions over the facts of a case?

Staunch as her argument is, it only covers one facet of her work. From councils to colleagues, Blatchford’s writing has a knack for bringing out the most impassioned emotions from readers. But Blatchford is not a case of “you either love her or loathe her.” Most readers do both. But when she is criticized, the condemnations cover a short range: from harsh to brutal.

Her strongest opponents aren’t interested in bashing her personality or prose, but rather focus on the process she uses to get the story. From what I’ve heard from lawyers and reporters who have studied her actions, it goes like this: Blatchford generally makes up her mind about the accused on day one, after the initial questioning by the Crown. The severity of her indictment is proportional to the brutality of the crime. At the same time, she may write favourably, flatteringly, even flirtatiously about the defence lawyer, playing to his vanity in hopes of gaining his confidence and perhaps an exclusive interview. Then she sits down to pen her column, which is invariably entertaining, meticulous, and thought-provoking, as her detractors always make sure to point out. But the end product is a bastard hybrid of highly persuasive op-ed and factual reporting that’s just newsy enough to confuse her less sophisticated readership. A brief outrage may ensue, but it’s the kind of controversy the Post expects and hopes to get from its marquee columnist, the country’s most devoutly read.

A decade ago, Blatchford’s gutsy, combative take on the courts would have virtually guaranteed her a citation for contempt. By the time of the Savojipour trial, though, things had changed. Thanks to relaxed contempt laws, rather than facing judicial censure, Blatchford is now winning awards, loyal readers, and salary offers rumoured to hover in the $200,000 range (which Blatchford staunchly denies). But what’s good for Blatchford may not be so good for court reporting-or the court system itself.

Forming short, choppy sentences between quick bites of Nicorette gum, she tells me about her love for the stuffy mannerisms of legal hotshots, how she agonizes over her copy, constantly seeking perfection and worrying about being repetitive or self-aggrandizing. She tells me how excited she still gets to finish writing her pieces so she can start thinking about the next, how she sees each case as an individual tale, a two-way power struggle that, she says with a shrug, is not much different from a hockey game.

She’s not the first journalist to get caught up in the drama of the courts-or to transmit her personality through her coverage-but Blatchford is at the vanguard of the current crop. Several court and crime reporters in the post-World War I era took on personae, sometimes betraying opinions along with their sensational reportage. But by 1960, the mythical hard-as-nails reporter/pulp writer had all but disappeared from our cultural consciousness, while investigative journalism was becoming a respected staple in the daily news. Meanwhile, legislatures began toughening their already strict stances on libel and contempt law. As a result, much of the court coverage throughout the ’70s and ’80s was relatively bland and by-the-book.

By the early 1990s, a new reporting style was emerging. Writers like Larry Still of The Vancouver Sun veered from the conventional 10-inch summary of court proceedings by providing more context and analysis of relevant issues. Editors, perhaps responding to pressure to be more competitive, were increasingly making risky decisions to publish potentially incriminating information and photographs. And while the practice of “columnizing” coverage wasn’t invented during the trial of Paul Bernardo, it was greatly augmented, most notably in the work of Blatchford, then at The Toronto Sun.

Blatchford didn’t start out on the court beat. Her writing career began during her second year studying journalism at Toronto’s Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. She spent a year on the city desk at The Globe and Mail, followed by a year of sports reporting. When she graduated in 1973, managing editor Clark Davey offered her the fashionable position of “chick sports columnist,” which she held for four years. Blatchford primarily covered hockey, which she had grown to love as the daughter of a hockey-rink manager in Rouyn-Noranda, Quebec, a working-class town whose chief exports are copper and hockey legends. Tired and lonesome from the long hours and travel, Blatchford’s last straw was the Globe’s employment of a “writing coach” in 1979. “We didn’t get along at all, and one day I quit in a huff,” Blatchford says. “I’ve never been very good at being edited. If I have a reputation for being temperamental and bitchy, it’s because I can’t stand to have my copy touched.” Ironically, she ended up at the heavily edited Toronto Star, where she spent the next three and a half years as a news reporter, until pitching the idea for a topical humour column to the Sun in 1983. In her 15 years at the Sun, Blatchford’s work evolved from personal observations on relationships and acne to a more general opinion column on current affairs.

Blatchford had first dabbled in court reporting in 1979, during the murder trial of 12-year-old shoeshine boy Emanuel Jaques. Blatchford found herself enthralled by the sense of tradition and community in the courts, early on demonstrating an unusually keen eye for detail and drama. Her later work stood out even among the frenzied coverage of 1995’s ultra-sensational Bernardo trial, where reporters competed to provide the most lurid account of Canada’s grisliest crime in memory. For the 65 journalists who suffered through five months of awful testimony, at least one small reward materialized: they were allowed to write practically whatever they wanted, with little fear of contempt charges. Nothing written of Bernardo could have been more incriminating than the infamous tapes of him and ex-wife Karla Homolka committing unspeakable acts. Presiding Justice Patrick LeSage even declared that he wouldn’t want a jury so oblivious that they hadn’t previously read anything about the case (the same judge later spoke out against the opinionated tone of court reporters in a January 2000 public address).

“We were very lucky there because the chief witness, Homolka, came before the court as an acknowledged, convicted party in these killings,” says Blatchford, whose account of the proceedings was at times particularly graphic and damning. “This gave us the freedom to describe her the way we did-we didn’t have to say ‘allegedly’ every second paragraph. You could say she was a slut, you could say she was a murderingslut, and it was true. And it was defensible.”

The trial was at first considered a shocking but brief ripple in the tradition of justice reporting. It turned out to be a watershed that would change how journalists across the nation cover the courts.

When Blatchford joined the Post in 1998, she became the country’s first columnist writing exclusively on the courts, and arguably the country’s most popular columnist, period. After a few years of covering high-profile cases, she quickly emerged as the leader of a trend of sorts. For example, the Globe‘s Erin Anderssen was assigned a beat similar to Blatchford’s, albeit without the running commentary. And after Kirk LaPointe left thePost to briefly sign on as The Hamilton Spectator’s editor, he made Susan Clairmont the city columnist. Clairmont had done crime and court reporting for 10 years, and now covers high-profile cases in a scrappy, outspoken manner that sometimes emulates Blatchford’s.

LaPointe’s other major change at the Spec-one that has been far more common in newspapers across Canada, particularly Ontario-was to overhaul the typical court story to be more narrative-driven, informal, and descriptive. One inevitable side effect was that the writer’s opinion would sometimes show. Like the addition of columnists, it was a change that benefitted readers, many writers, and newsstand owners alike, because it often made for a better overall read. Less pleased were the lawyers and judges, who felt that this kind of reporting poisons the minds of jurors, incorrectly colours the public perception of justice, and generally makes a mockery of the law’s presumption of innocence. Even some journalists from the “old school” of reporting joined the backlash, notably Post media columnist John Fraser, who has debated with Blatchford on these issues both in print and in person, while walking their dogs side by side across the University of Toronto football field. Her columns, he wrote in December 1999, “could be considered in contempt of court according to all the rules journalists and judges have abided by since the Criminal Code began in this country. What’s changed is reporters and editors have become bolder while judges and lawyers have become more forbearing, even timid.”

Others have expressed concern that the function of the court columnist, essentially a cross-examiner with a national audience, is far too powerful to be left unaccounted for-especially in hands less capable than Blatchford’s. “Christie is a master at what she’s created as her own art form, but a hell of a lot of other people shouldn’t even be trying,” says the Globe’s Kirk Makin, a veteran legal affairs reporter and a highly respected practitioner of the classic style of reportage. “Christie, because of her ability, the authority of her name, the force of her personality, and what is frequently the eloquence of her pieces, can get away with a lot of things that I think other people would get called on very quickly.”

But lawyer Alan Young thinks Blatchford should get called on it too. In October 1999, Blatchford wrote a series of columns for the Post about Young’s client Amina Chaudhary, a woman who 15 years earlier received a life sentence for strangling her eight-year-old son, Rajesh Gupta. Though Chaudhary had always maintained her innocence, having already appealed the decision once, she was applying for a possible sentence reduction under Section 745.6 of the Criminal Code, the so-called “faint hope clause.” During her time in jail, she gave birth to four children, married another inmate, and earned two university degrees. One prison psychiatrist stated that society would gain nothing by Chaudhary’s continued incarceration.

Whereas most court reporters would have strictly recounted the facts of the trial, Blatchford let her coverage betray her personal feelings, as she often does. Her articles described Chaudhary, then 35, as “vacant,” “patronizing,” a “child-killing, baby-making sex machine.” She wrote, “It was all I could do, while watching her testify, not to leap into the witness box and slap her hard across her pretty face.” Several times, she noted how strong and broad Chaudhary’s hands looked as she gesticulated throughout her testimony.

The faint hope application was eventually dismissed, but with the chance to apply again after five years. Young says he was stunned by the decision. Not only did Blatchford’s words personally devastate his client, but Young believes her one-sided account may have swayed the jurors’ votes as well, despite the judge’s orders to disregard media reports. “It was a horrible distortion of the reality of the situation, bordering on mean and vindictive,” says Young. “There are people in this country who believe that prison should be something like Dante’s hell, and you shouldn’t have any opportunities to better yourself. Christie’s an important journalist, because on occasion you need somebody who has that abrasive, tenacious tone. I just think she picked the wrong case.”

But aside from a few warning shots and some private grumbling on the other side of the bench, the legal community has been reluctant to clamp down on Blatchford and her imitators. The explanation has little to do with a sweeping sensation of untouchable celebrity columnists and much more to do with a gradual relaxation of contempt laws and a slow, inexorable move toward an American-style court system.

The landmark 1994 Supreme Court ruling of Dagenais v. Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (better known as the Boys of St. Vincent case) established the strict need for proof of a “real and substantial risk to a fair trial” before a judge can impose a publication ban. Previously, judges would grant media bans seemingly at whim. “Dagenais suggested that the rights of the press are not to be trumped by the rights of the accused,” says Bryan Cantley, director of editorial services for the Canadian Newspaper Association. The same principles may soon also apply to the act of publishing criminal records before trial, provided the Alberta Court of Appeal decides in favour of The Calgary Sun and The Edmonton Sun.

Interestingly, media lawyers have noted that the likelihood of a newspaper being prosecuted for contempt or violation of a ban depends largely on the time zone you’re in; authorities in Western Canada, particularly Alberta, tend to take a harder stance against pretrial publicity than anywhere else in the country. “Maybe there’s something in the air or water or the beef, but they have a very protective notion that the court system has to be enveloped in a special skin,” says lawyer Stuart Robertson. On the other side of the spectrum, Ontario newspapers seem to be the least prosecuted, even though they take the most risks in reporting pretrial information. Robertson says it might be because there’s less danger of an unfair trial in larger, high-crime cities. Or perhaps the current Ontario attorney general simply thinks the Crown has little chance of winning.

Still, we’re not fully Americanized yet. Some aspects of Canadian media-law relations seem draconian compared to the Land of Milk and O.J.; access to court documents or sensitive police files, for instance, can be very difficult even for well-known reporters, whereas in the United States documents are typically available online. Donovan Vincent, a justice reporter at the Star, told me how a court officer once interrogated him and asked for credentials, just for sitting in the public gallery. And for better or for worse, Crowns are very restricted in what they can say to the media, though defence lawyers are not. Barriers like these explain why the court beat is considered among the most demanding. Faced with so many barriers of law and attitude, it’s no wonder some court reporters and media lawyers applaud Blatchford for trying to break through a few.

Of the 12 jurors in the case, two had already been dismissed for personal reasons, and any further dismissals would have caused a mistrial. The remaining 10 were polled, one by one. Five said they had heard about Blatchford’s call-it-as-I-see-it article. Of the one or two who had actually read it, Justice Then was assured it would not affect their view of the existing evidence. In a later column, Blatchford quipped, “It was the first time in memory I was thrilled to hear that something I had written didn’t amount to a hill of beans.” Bayliss, who even today believes the piece biased the jury, eventually gave up the fight.

Blatchford says she couldn’t have-and shouldn’t have-written the story any other way. Her argument, one she’s used to defend similar pieces, is that a straightforward account would have given Savojipour’s testimony more credibility than it deserved. Blatchford penned an equally snide assessment of Francis Carl Roy’s flimsy-sounding alibi against the charge of raping and murdering young Alison Parrott. Two years after the trial ended, Blatchford recalls the testimony. “He woke up, masturbated, went out for a run, then saw this dead body and thought: ‘Hmmm, I think I’m going to stick a finger in the body.’ And wouldn’tcha know it, the bad luck was, that was the very same hand he used to jack off-and as you know sperm lives forever-and that’s how the DNA got in the little girl’s vagina,” she said. “So that’s how I wrote it, and if people concluded at the end that he was lying, I think that’s fair. People did report it straight, and that’s more misleading than any other way you could’ve covered it.”

Accuracy, thoroughness, and insight: if Blatchford didn’t possess these qualities in spades, her words might never make it to print. She always arrives at the courthouse at least one hour before proceedings begin, paranoically securing “her” seat. When she can’t follow a trial from beginning to end (as was the case with Savojipour), she makes sure to obtain transcripts. Reporters who have sat next to her on the public bench have admitted to reading her column the next day, just to make sense of the bewildering spectacle that the courtroom can be. Like most journalists covering the courts, she keeps close ties with her publication’s lawyers. However, her understanding of the legal system is so thorough that they rarely have to tinker with her work. The same was true during her days at the Sun. Despite the oppressive task of working around four individual publication bans, Blatchford’s coverage of the Bernardo trial broke journalistic ground while avoiding legal trouble.

“She is a wordsmith,” says Alan Shanoff, media lawyer for the Sun Media Corp. “A lot of times there wouldn’t be even a single word that I would suggest changing, and other times maybe one or two in 1,000. She’s careful with her language, she sweats over her words, and she’s famous for getting pissed with editors who want to change them. Even to change a preposition or a comma was something you didn’t lightly do.”

Along with her copy, Blatchford is equally famous for protecting her reputation. The first time I challenged her on the issue of her writing’s influence on jurors, I was reprimanded like an unhousebroken puppy. And our final moments of discussing the Chaudhary case were among the iciest two minutes of my life-until she hung up on me. She seemed completely convinced that my sole motivation was to attack her.

Though her guard was often up, my time with Christie Blatchford taught me a moral: Like the sketch of the glowering judge and the gesticulating accused murderer that looms over her writing desk, Blatchford’s colourful writing often serves, ironically, to reduce the courtroom battle to black and white, good versus evil, our team against the bad guys. What readers must decide is whether the role she plays-a self-appointed 13th juror with a front-page column-is one that serves justice, or merely caricatures it.

FADE IN-int. movie theatre Amid a cluster of teenaged contest winners sits a group of middle-aged men with pens in hand. They are lined up along the aisle so as not to elbow anyone while they scratch away at notepads.

ZOOM IN-on right side of room Blue light flickers across the men’s faces in a strobe-like effect as they stare up at the screen, transfixed. We can see they are watching a fight scene. Bodies fly across the screen and some audience members wave their arms, excitedly egging on the cinematic rumble. But one tall, shaggy-haired man doesn’t flinch. He sits up straight with his neck flat against the high-backed theatre chair, arms resting at his sides as though preparing for liftoff. Staring blankly at the screen, he jots down a note every now and then.

LIGHTS COME UP The tall man turns to his guest, a diminutive dark-haired woman, who looks at him and shrugs. The man lets out a long sigh as though he’d been holding his breath through the entire movie, hoping it would get better.

EXT. THEATRE The tall, shaggy-haired man, who happens to be a film critic for The Toronto Star, steps out through the theatre doors and slinks quietly through a lobby bursting with the noises of synthesized video games and exploding popcorn kernels. As he walks away, the words “The One,” the name of the new Jet Li action flick, and the movie he’s just seen, glitter on the marquee just above his head. He turns to his guest, the journalism student following behind him.

PETER HOWELL (scowl of disappointment on his face): I’m really surprised at how bad that was.

You’d think film critics would get used to lousy movies. Truth is, most of them go to theatres praying the trip will be worth more than a one-star rating. This is what film critics do for a living: spend their days sitting through a lot of crap, all the while hoping they’ll unearth a few sparkling gems each year to make their jobs worthwhile.

Beyond wading through the muck of mediocre movies, a critic’s job is to examine films and write sharp-eyed explanations of how they fit into our culture. Jay Stone, film critic for the Ottawa Citizen, says his role is all about adding to the reader’s experience. “Reviews are part of a discussion you have with your friends over coffee later, with the critic ideally being the smartest guy at the table,” he says. “After you read a good review, you should be able to say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s the way it was.'”

But that’s not the way it is. In fact, the kind of criticism Stone describes is disappearing from our daily newspapers. While most Canadian critics are giving decent performances, true criticism is taking a supporting role to quick-hit reviews and simple “I liked it” plot summaries. And it’s not necessarily the critics’ fault. With two or three (and sometimes four) papers to scan every morning, readers don’t have the appetite for a lengthy dissertation on the use of sound in the latest David Lynch flick. “You need a lot of space and detail to talk about movies in a critical way,” agrees Scott Feschuk, the National Post‘s irreverent film critic. “If you’re going to do that you’re going to waste a lot of space in the newspaper on something that maybe two percent of people are going to read.” The thinking at dailies seems to be that readers are looking for advice only on whether or not to spend their $12.

Sure, some critics-like Katherine Monk of The Vancouver Sun, Geoff Pevere of the Star, and Rick Groen ofThe Globe and Mail-are doing their damnedest to give this trend the finger and continue to write smart, provocative film columns. But is anybody reading?

Scott’s reign started in 1977, when he started writing for the Globe, and continued until his death in 1993. Bart Testa, a senior lecturer on cinema studies at the University of Toronto, claims that the Globe never recovered from its loss, and many others share his lament. “What he did made the whole country pay attention,” says Geoff Pevere. “He was a considerable stylist and his reviews conveyed the excitement that he felt while watching something.”

Funny to think Scott didn’t discover movies until he was well out of his childhood-his Seventh-Day Adventist parents wouldn’t think of letting him near a theatre. Another funny thing: the man who grew to be known as our country’s best critic wasn’t even from Canada. Scott was actually an American draft-dodger who crossed the border in 1969 and started working at the Calgary Albertan a few years later. This is where Scott’s love of movies flourished, and where he won his first National Newspaper Award for critical writing in 1975.

In 1977, he moved to Toronto and started working at the Globe, where he won two more National Newspaper Awards in the same category. But just what was so great about his writing? “It was playful, it was sexual, it was funny,” answers Liam Lacey, film critic at the Globe and an admitted Jay Scott fan. “So, you read it and you think, ‘This person who has these admirable qualities cares about this film; maybe if I care about that film I’ll gain some of those qualities.'”

But it wasn’t only Scott’s admirable qualities that made him stand out. He wasn’t afraid to let his personality seep through in his writing; in fact, he wanted the world to see Jay Scott-not Jeffery Scott Beaven, the name he was born with but changed periodically through his career. No, a man like Jeffery Scott Beaven needed something a little catchier when he started his high-profile gig at the Globe. Scott was always attracted to stardust and spotlights. In fact, in the book Brave Films, Wild Nights: 25 Years of Festival Fever, Maclean’sfilm critic Brian D. Johnson describes Scott as “a critic who behaved like a star.” Scott’s former Globecolleague, Rick Groen, agrees. “He liked the glitz and the glamour,” he says. “He was perceptive enough to see through it and be critical of it, but at the same time it was an environment I think he enjoyed.”

Anyone with eyes could see this was true from the way Scott acted. One year, when he was covering the Cannes Film Festival, he showed up to a cocktail party wearing a Speedo. Yet his importance didn’t just come from his flamboyance or his tendency to bare his soul, among other things. When Scott wrote a film review, he wasn’t just writing about the film on the screen, he was writing about the world. You could see that he wasn’t living in a film-land bubble; he was putting films into the context of the current culture and showing their importance in a larger landscape. He used his extensive knowledge of film, politics, literature, and history to write informed reviews. In his 1978 review of Superman, Scott wrote: “When Pa Kent dies of a heart attack in the yard of his home, the demise is treated as it would be in Sophocles. When Superman stands in a field and bids Ma Kent farewell, the leave-taking is mythologized; the camera moves back and up from the pair, taking in the field, the horizon, the world. John Williams’s music rises to a crescendo.”

While readers and fellow critics alike continue to put Scott on a pedestal, some feel his work is not the last we’ve seen of good film criticism in Canada. “I think there’s a cult around him that is not entirely deserved,” says the Star‘s Peter Howell. “I don’t want to take away from him because he was a really important voice and he’s definitely missed on the landscape. But I don’t think people should look at it as something they could never aspire to or never exceed.”

The Vancouver Sun‘s Katherine Monk is another critic who is doing something right. Though she admits, half-jokingly, that she tries desperately to be like Scott, her critical voice has a refreshing originality. And her flair for words shines through whether she’s taking on a movie she liked or loathed. In her review of America’s Sweethearts, she wrote: “Satire rides the razor’s edge, farce trips over it and tragedy slices its wrists on the blade. America’s Sweethearts hides it in the centre of a candy apple and asks us to swallow.”

Like Monk, the Star‘s Geoff Pevere isn’t afraid to attack popular culture-he went a step further than Groen and wrote an anti-Harry Potter editorial. He also has the nerve to use his newspaper columns to talk about films in a more academic way. Trained in film studies at Carleton University, Pevere points out the nuances of art direction and cinematography. He doesn’t rush to tell readers what he thinks of a movie. Instead, he puts them inside the film, making them feel the movie before they feel the presence of the reviewer.

While Groen, Monk and Pevere are taking the analytical route, others are more focused on entertaining readers with sardonic reviews. Monk says some critics seem to go to bad movies simply so they can slag them later in their review. She could be talking about the Post‘s Feschuk, who thinks sarcasm is all some movies deserve.

“The ultimate date movie for ugly guys,” wrote Feschuk in his review of Angela’s Ashes. “Gals will be so moved and humbled by Frank McCourt’s torturous tale of abject poverty, alcoholism, and unemployment in Ireland that they’re all but guaranteed to leave the theatre with a sympathetic, charitable mind-set, if you catch my drift.” This appeared in a section on the new movies set for January 2000 release, where Feschuk instructed his audience that January movies are often the worst films of the year. A lot of his writing may be entertaining, but it’s not really saying anything. “You don’t really earn your salary when you say a bad movie’s bad. You earn it when you’re dealing with something that is lukewarm and you try to write excitingly about it,” says Lacey.

Feschuk, of course, disagrees. “Sometimes a sarcastic and flippant reply is what a flippant and thoughtless movie deserves. I’m happily a purveyor of that kind of writing.” Indeed, even Feschuk’s illustrated byline sports the boyish smirk of a class clown. Feschuk has a point. Maybe there are just far more bad movies out there today. Now, films that get a big promotional push in theatres also splash big ads all over the newspapers, making it hard for critics to ignore those movies. It’s just unrealistic to think that critics could write about only the films that inspired and interested them-those aren’t necessarily the movies their readers want to see on a Friday night. That’s why Feschuk takes a populist approach to his stories-he doesn’t think a critic has to be film literate to write good film reviews. He thinks anybody can write about movies because everybody has opinions about movies.

Not only do the critics in our dailies have to deal with the opinion that just about anyone is qualified to do their jobs, they also have to put up with criticism from people who think they don’t know what they’re talking about because they’re Canadian. In November 2001, Canadian filmmaker David Weaver publicly attacked Canadian critics, accusing them of not thinking about films before they review them. In particular, he was referring to the reviews of his own film, Century Hotel, which was called everything from “slow and cliched” to a “dog” of a film. Pevere wrote: “Despite the evident pain of many of these characters you may envy them, for at least they get to leave the Century Hotel when their dramatic business is over. We’ve got to stay.” Though Weaver’s gripe against Canada’s critics sounds more like sour grapes than a critical analysis of his own, he’s not the only one to give the critics a hard time. Lacey says the public tends to get angry when our critics pan a Canadian film if, say, the New York critics praise it. “You get people saying, ‘Canadian critics are always hard on their own,'” says Lacey. “If you think Canadian critics are hard on their own, you’re a good example of that because your assumption is that Canadian critics don’t know what’s right and only the New York critics do.”

Beyond all of these obstacles, perhaps the tallest building critics have to leap over is the limitation of their own imaginations. Watching upward of five movies a week and trying to think of something original to say about each of them is a thankless task. But hey, it keeps the job interesting. And thoughtful film criticism is still worth the work.

“It’s challenging and liberating to know that the battle you’re fighting is with yourself,” says Groen. “You can control that battle. If you succeed, you succeed. If you fail, it’s your own damn fault.”

The small staff at This magazine have kicked it into high gear, as usual, but it’s not really evident from the noise level. Other than the rapid hammering of computer keys, an occasional sneeze, and a random phone call, the staff-editor Julie Crysler, associate publisher Joyce Byrne and an intern are quietly plugging away on an issue devoted to travel. Crysler wears jeans and a sweater, but she knows it is best to dress in layers, since she can never tell when the heat will be on or not. Her wooden desk looks as if it has been in the This family for years-every time she opens or shuts its drawers they squeak like a machine in need of oil. And the computers look as if they are barely new enough to understand the Internet. She is on the phone trying to strike a deal. After hanging up, Crysler excitedly breaks the low hum: “Gregory Boyd Bell just said he’d do a piece for the insanity issue! I think I’m going to have to do a happy dance!”

As the editor of Canada’s longest running alternative magazine, Crysler has the name of an established and respected publication to drop when recruiting writers. Unfortunately, she’s also got shallow pockets and can’t afford to pay the big bucks an editor would normally offer someone of Boyd Bell’s status. But she knows some writers don’t necessarily write for This for the money; they do it because they believe in the magazine. As an established writer, Boyd Bell isn’t starving for assignments, especially low-paying ones, but says, “I feel good about being in it, because it’s a magazine of ideas and there aren’t a whole lot of those.” He’s willing to take a significant pay cut because he respects the magazine and thinks the writing is good.

Now a national magazine with a political focus and a paid circulation of over 5,000, This was once distributed in an ice cream shop in Toronto’s Cabbagetown. Known simply as This since 1995, it started out as This Magazine Is About Schools in 1966. Bob Davis, Satu Repo, and George Martell, a trio of radical teachers, put the first issue together in the basement of an alternative school on a farm near Guelph, Ontario. “The pages were crooked, the middle stuck out, and I’m sure there was the odd magazine that was out of order,” laughs Davis. It had a North American scope and fairly large U.S. readership. The name changed to This Magazine in 1973, after Repo and Martell became Canadian nationalists and wanted the magazine to have a broader focus on issues concerning Canada. The shift led to a drop in American readership, but there were few financial problems then because no one got paid to write.

With the appointment of Lorraine Filyer as managing editor in 1976, This achieved a certain level of stability, as she guided the magazine all the way to 1991. In the past decade, though, real money concerns have begun to creep in, and have never really gone away. “We were so broke,” remembers Clive Thompson, who was editor in the mid-’90s. “When I arrived at work, Trevor Hutchinson, the publisher, basically spent about half his day fielding calls from collection agencies that were trying to turn off our electricity and repossess our photocopiers because all these bills hadn’t been paid.”

Readership in Canada has not usually been kind to homegrown political magazines. The closest comparison to This may have been Canadian Forum, a left-wing magazine that began in 1920. Three years ago, theForum attempted a relaunch to give its academic image a face-lift, only to go under the following year. Fredericton’s Mysterious East, another effort from the left, lasted only three years, from 1969 to 1972. On the right, The Idler had a run from 1985 to 1993, while Gravitas published from 1994 to 1997 but folded after losing its funding from the Donner Canadian Foundation.

Given the poor success rate of most alternative political periodicals, This magazine’s most impressive feat so far may be its 35-year life span. Constantly strapped for cash, it has nevertheless been successful of late by sticking to a simple formula: hiring a steady stream of young and talented editors; finding and developing the best young writers first; and staying relevant to the left.

In the past 10 years, the magazine’s editors-with the exception of Moira Farr, who was 34 when she took over-have been younger than 30. Still, the long hours and meagre annual salary of roughly $20,000 have almost inevitably ensured burnout within 18 months or so. “You couldn’t survive on that salary,” says Thompson. Besides, with a stint at such a well-respected bastion of the literate left under their belts-connections established and alliances formed-all the editors had bright futures. Farr freelanced and wrote an acclaimed book called After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale. Naomi Klein soon gained international stardom with No Logo. Thompson went to Shift, and is now in New York, freelancing for a number of different publications. Andrea Curtis left to be a freelancer and a mom; Sarmishta Subramanian went to Saturday Night, and currently works on the Saturday Post section of the National Post.

The rapid changeover of editors has meant lots of fresh ideas. Hoping to reach younger readers, Klein pushed pop culture, identity politics, and globalization-often to the dismay of older readers, who also sent letters complaining that the print was too small. “It was a bit paradoxical,” says Doug Saunders, who worked at the magazine during Klein’s tenure as editor, “because at the same time that Naomi was making an effort to make it more youthful, we were realizing just how old our readers were.” Thompson devoted a lot of coverage to technology, which raised a few eyebrows on the editorial board and also raised hackles with various union members who saw technology as a job killer. Curtis and Subramanian zeroed in on labour issues, which weren’t covered much in the mainstream media. And Crysler, who took over in November 2000, has broadened the focus of the magazine with her introduction of theme issues on topics such as education, local politics, travel, and insanity.

While it is true that constantly adding and deleting names from the masthead may cause instability in a publication, the flux has also kept This from going stale. “Canadian Forum had the same people for the last 15 or 20 years and it became like a group of friends writing. This is a magazine that introduces new people,” says Jeet Heer, a culture reporter at the National Post, former contributor to Gravitas, and also an occasional writer for This. Saunders says one of the goals they had was to look for new writers, and This soon became known as a welcoming place for the young and hopeful. Hal Niedzviecki, for example, wrote his first article forThis in 1998 and now appears regularly as the magazine’s culture columnist.

In addition to Niedzviecki, This has helped launch the careers of many of Canada’s best writers. Rick Salutin, who is now a columnist at The Globe and Mail, first appeared in This Magazine Is About Schools in 1966. Margaret Atwood wrote about Canadian humour in 1974. John Ralston Saul wrote and served on the editorial board in the ’70s. Dennis Lee, Michael Ondaatje, Dan David, Kim Pittaway, R.M. Vaughan, and Linda McQuaig are just a few of the magazine’s usual suspects past and present, and most of the recent editors-including Farr, Klein, and Thompson-wrote for This before becoming editor.

Rather than nurturing new talent only to see it move away from the magazine, the editors have tried to maintain an “alumni system,” something Klein began to establish. “We did a lot of work to set it up so it’s almost like a fraternity in that people don’t just disappear from the magazine,” says Saunders. “They stay in orbit.” Those still involved include Vaughan, McQuaig, Sarah Elton, Sam Gindin, Mel Watkins, Jason Sherman, Gordon Laird, and many former editors.

As convenient as it sounds, the alumni system depends on the editor being able to find good writers who will work cheap. Sometimes the editor gets lucky and picks up an article originally destined for another magazine. In 1997, Saturday Night axed an article about prostitution by National Magazine Award-winner Gerald Hannon. Although he took a huge pay cut, Hannon was delighted to have his piece published in This. Most of the time, though, the editor has to convince writers to work for little money. When Boyd Bell agreed to write a piece on the drugging of patients in mental hospitals, he knew the money was small, but he liked the fact that Crysler trusted him and gave him a lot of freedom. “It doesn’t pay very well, but there are other publications that pay better money and extract far more aggravation,” he says.

While This treats its writers fairly well, it continues to dole out chump change for stories. Niedzviecki likes having the opportunity to write things his way-with his personality-but his first piece, “Stupid Jobs Are Good to Relax With,” generated more money in second rights fees from Utne Reader and a U.S. anthology than Thisoriginally paid him. Niedzviecki jokes that if he were paid more, he could write better articles. He says, “It’s a question of…see, I have to make a living.”

Low pay for freelance work is one of the magazine’s shortcomings, according to contributor James MacKinnon, who is also managing editor at Adbusters. He knew This was the only publication that would print his “I Am Anti-Canadian” essay, but he got just $150 for the piece, which later earned him an honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards. He spent countless hours reviewing about 15 books, interviewing sources, and writing more than 2,500 words-and then had to pay his own entry fee to the awards. “Now I don’t even ask about the rate because it’s essentially insignificant,” says MacKinnon. The first time he wrote for This, Subramanian’s tone was apologetic about how much he would receive. After that, it was understood. “I never felt like anybody was misleading me and I’ve never done any work for them unwillingly,” he says. “But what those kinds of rates represent is a significant problem for This magazine. It’s an indicator that they aren’t taking that side of the business seriously enough.”

But associate publisher Joyce Byrne says the magazine is serious about the business side. “We’ve eradicated our historical debt and are now running like a well-oiled machine,” she says. Although every dollar that Byrne is responsible for is well spent, everyone involved with the magazine must accept the low rates-Byrne and Crysler included. Grants and donations help, but the shortage of funds comes from the lack of advertising and a relatively low subscriber base. Each issue contains roughly 15 percent ads, compared to at least 40 percent in mainstream magazines. Subscriptions are also a concern of Byrne’s, as she believes Thishasn’t expanded its readership to its full potential yet.

In the magazine’s office, several subscription cards are stuck to a wall. Five of the cards have been filled out with “Legaliza Dopa Nowa! Doa it!,” and several others are obviously bogus as well. Byrne suggests with a laugh that it might be culture jamming. She may laugh about it, but targeting younger readers may be difficult for the magazine. “It’s very frustrating marketing the magazine,” says Judith Parker, Byrne’s predecessor. “You’re marketing anti-marketing stuff to people who don’t want to be marketed to.”

The new generation of readers is a tough audience, even for a magazine that prides itself on being able to stay relevant to the left. According to This, the right wing is on drugs, work sucks, and culture is for sale. The magazine blasts and condemns a lot of what is important to the establishment-the government, the police, the World Bank, Nike. On trade, for example, This has consistently stayed ahead of left-wing thought. Mel Watkins first mentioned the perils of free trade in a 1979 column-almost a decade before politicians fought an election over the issue. In April 1986, Watkins returned with a cover story called “Ten Good Reasons to Oppose Free Trade.” The issue was definitely the magazine’s hot topic during the late ’80s, making the cover several times. While Watkins and Salutin kept writing about North American free trade, This began covering globalization in 1994, long before it became a fashionable subject. Trade coverage in This has also included pieces on how Canada sold arms to Third World countries and continued to maintain good trade relations with Indonesia, despite that country’s oppression of East Timor.

In its efforts to raise issues left untouched or forgotten by others, as well as provoke and challenge its audience, This has given much broader meaning to the words “left wing.” When unions disapproved of the magazine’s coverage of technology in the mid-’90s, This tried to show what good technology could bring to the workplace. “Funny Money” by Bret Dawson, for example, questioned whether digital money would start an underground economy, and “Keeping Score” by Andrew Struthers and Simon Archer discussed how technology changed the job market. In the ’70s, This had a revolutionary image; some covers even bore a resemblance to movement posters. The September/October 1981 cover recently won an award in the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association’s Great Newsstand Contest, now part of a travelling exhibition called “On the Cover: A Nation as Seen Through Its Magazine Covers.” It featured a man with a black bag over his head, holding a folder with a protruding issue of This Magazine. The coverline, promoting Ian Adams’ national security column, read: “Introducing the Igor Gouzenko Look-alike Contest.”

Although a small magazine with limited resources, This has managed to break stories for mainstream media. Thompson recalls, “This would publish features, and the CBC would call writers and get them on for interviews, and we’d have TV pieces done on stuff.” Thompson himself appeared on TVO and CBC for pieces he wrote about the Internet and its relation to the right wing. But while the magazine can be successful in bringing important issues to the mainstream, it isn’t always well read in mainstream media circles. John Fraser, until recently the media columnist for the National Post, says it’s been a long time since he’s looked atThis seriously. Edward Greenspon, political editor of the Globe, says he hasn’t looked at it enough to comment. David Beers, a longtime subscriber, appreciative reader, and former editor of Mother Jones, who only discovered This when he moved to Canada from the U.S. in 1991, says that it wasn’t influential in The Vancouver Sun newsroom when he was there. He doesn’t think the media looks to it because of the magazine’s overall style. “It obeys a completely different rhythm. A little magazine filled with creative non-fiction writers coming out once every two months is not news,” explains Beers. “They’re not making news, they’re conversing about general ideas usually.”

To some extent This preaches to the converted, but it gets its message across. Beers says that unlike American counterparts such as The Nation and Mother Jones, This doesn’t try to be what it’s not. “It didn’t make the mistake of being a boring bulletin board for activist events and causes,” he says. “You could tell that there were living, breathing people there.” Although the look of the magazine is “text-driven and not pretty,” Beers explains that This is “truth in advertising. It’s got a two-colour cover, small format, and doesn’t have many ads, so you can understand that right away they’re not trying to be commercial.” Mother Jones, on the other hand, “makes the mistake of trying to look all glossy, like it’s trying to muscle Vanity Fair aside on the newsstand.”

Because it will never sell out its content, This may forever be forced to grapple with financial uncertainty. “The economics of it never did work,” says Farr, “and perhaps never will unless one of us wins the lottery and decides to form a rich, philanthropic, charitable organization where we’d put a lot of money into the magazine.” Until then, Crysler may have to keep dancing for writers-but that’s about all she’ll dance for. “What’s the fun of having a small magazine if you can’t push the envelope?” she asks.

Against long odds, This has been in business for 35 years. The frequent turnover of staff, the bargain basement rates, and the constant worries over budgeting would be enough to sink most magazines. But Thisseems to hold an ace card: its reputation for publishing strong features with a left-wing sensibility has exacted a certain loyalty from various contributors over the years. And though it doesn’t appear that these dedicated scribes will be enjoying a rate increase any time soon, it is also the case that they don’t mind being exploited for a good cause. After all, as the magazine’s tagline says, everything is political.

Tucked into the corner of a green-and-yellow-walled Mexican restaurant, James Chatto, Toronto Life‘s multi-award nominated food columnist, is the picture of grey England: black pants, black shirt, black-and-white tweed blazer, salt-and-pepper hair. His small black notebook is concealed under a rather large menu and he furiously scribbles, recording every ingredient in the three appetizers, three mains, and two desserts he’s selected. As the waitress walks out of hearing distance, Chatto explains his rating system while scanning the small room like a shopper at a Boxing Day sale: “There’s ‘wow wow wow,’ which I use for certain dishes but rarely an entire meal, ‘wow wow,’ ‘wow,’ ‘yum,’ and ‘oh dear.'” Unfortunately, the meal that follows is full of oh dears-a series of mushy samplings punctuated by a 20-minute interval of piercing sirens as the restaurant’s fire alarm malfunctions. “How long will this go on for?” Chatto cheerily asks a waiter. “The fire trucks are usually here by now,” the staff member answers, as though this is a routine question.

Chatto’s distaste for the meal is evident. “There’s a skin on my soup,” he says somewhat triumphantly as he examines a bowl of vibrant green liquid. “It’s terrible,” he says with a slight grimace, replacing fork with pen and opening his notebook. He examines each successive course like a detective at a crime scene, taking notes before, during, and after each bite. Eventually he concludes, with a hint of sadness in his voice, that he won’t be able to use this restaurant in his upcoming column on King Street West eateries. “I’m happier being positive,” the critic explains.

What does appear in Toronto Life is a succinct, 286-word unsigned review at the back of the book, giving the restaurant a disapproving one and a half stars: “While the dishes are more interesting than the usual Tex-Mex hybrid, they are a far cry from alta cocina.” Chatto offers a series of mild complaints, citing the restaurant’s “oddly rubbery” tortillas, “watery, bland red snapper,” and “Pablum-soft vegetables.” There’s no mention of the fire alarm-an experience many fellow reviewers surely would have highlighted.

While other food critics-for example Joanne Kates of The Globe and Mail and Jacob Richler of the National Post-write with caustic wit (Richler once referred to a restaurant’s vichyssoise as a “recipe out of the Weight Watchers’ cookbook,” while Kates has described another’s curried corn soup as bearing more than a slight resemblance to Dr. Ballard’s), Chatto is what another critic calls “an oxymoron, a gentlemanly journalist.” His style is more M.F.K. Fisher (a five-star legend in the food writing world) than Gael Greene (the acerbic New York magazine reviewer whose work Joanne Kates once modelled her own after) and his talent has earned him enormous respect across the industry. “He’s really the best in the business,” says Michael Totzke, who edits Chatto’s Gardening Life food column. Michael Stadtlander, proprietor of the critically acclaimed Eigensinn Farm, is equally positive: “He is very passionate about food.” Even Joanne Kates concedes that she loves his column. Only Steven Davey, food critic for Toronto alternative weekly Now, disapproves of Chatto’s style. “He writes like a prig with a pickle up his butt,” says Davey. He also suggests that Chatto accepts free preview meals in order to get his reviews out in a timely fashion, an accusation of ethical laxness that might drive another critic into a rage, or libel court. But Chatto just laughs off the accusation. “The last thing I need is a free meal.”

Today, it’s true that a free meal would hardly pose a temptation for the 46-year-old Chatto, arguably Canada’s most learned and literary food writer. In 2001, his Toronto Life writings on foie gras, roasted squab, and grilled filet of fluke garnered him two prestigious nominations. The first, for a James Beard Foundation Journalism Award, was an honour he shared with food writers from The Atlantic Monthly and Vogue. The second came from the Jacob’s Creek World Food Media Awards, the food and wine media equivalent of the Oscars. Chatto’s work made the awards’ final cut of 12 out of more than 1,000 entries. His 1998 memoir, The Man Who Ate Toronto, won a Heritage Toronto Award and was shortlisted for the 1999 Toronto Book Awards. A 2002 James Beard nomination has just been announced, and a new memoir about his experiences living in Corfu should be out in 2003. However, the route to becoming, according to wine journalist, author, and Jacob’s Creek awards judge Tony Aspler, the best writer on food in Canada, began with a serendipitous meeting over a free meal back in 1987.

As a young boy in England, James Chatto’s tastes tended to vanilla ice cream and yellow vanilla custard. His first restaurant meal was a dinner of fried chicken, corn fritters, and fried banana. Growing up in 1960s England, the son of an actor and a theatrical agent, Chatto and his family lived on London’s Kings Road. “It was quite hip and happening,” he recalls. Chatto’s father, Tom, died at the age of 62, but his mother, Ros, now in her mid-70s, still works as a theatrical agent in London. His younger brother Daniel, 44, also lives in London and is married to Lady Sarah Chatto, daughter of the late Princess Margaret. His palate expanded through the adventurous cooking of his mother (a Majorcan mixture of kidney and liver was a favourite dish) and visiting the various eateries lining the busy street. Chatto’s penchant for both food and drama was further nurtured by his godfather, actor Robert Morley, who at one time penned food columns for both Playboy andPunch magazines.

After studying English at Oxford on a scholarship, Chatto found success in a variety of fields. A stint as a saxophonist earned him a hit instrumental record (For the Love of Money) in 1976, and a year later he played Pontius Pilate (“I worked my way up from one of the apostles”) in a West End production of Jesus Christ Superstar. He also appeared in commercials for British Airways, Lux Soap, and Rice Krispies. Aside from the theatre, book publishing was also in Chatto’s blood. He’s related to the Chattos of both Chatto & Windus publishers and Pickering & Chatto booksellers, and he has written fiction since childhood. Chatto first turned to food writing after a friend in publishing rejected one of his novel manuscripts and suggested he write a cookbook instead. “She said, ‘We can always publish a cookbook at Christmas time,'” Chatto recalls. An avid cook (up until recently he did the majority of his family’s cooking), Chatto gathered together 60 of his best recipes-such as “Dragon’s Tail,” a rolled shoulder of lamb, and “Tongue in Cheeks,” a dish of sliced ham or tongue, wrapped around leeks and baked in cheese-which appear in 1981’s The Seducer’s Cookbook. However, Chatto admits that recipe-writing is not his forte. “I hate following recipes,” he says.

Working for his godfather as an assistant stage manager on one of Morley’s productions, Chatto first visited Toronto in 1977, immediately prior to his gig as Pontius Pilate. On this trip, he met his future wife and dining companion, Wendy Martin. Suitably, the two met at a King Street West restaurant and bar called Peter’s Backyard, where Wendy-a fine arts and English undergraduate student at Carleton University-was waitressing for the summer. Though Chatto returned to England soon after, the pair eventually reunited in London and returned to Toronto in 1981. To earn the rent for their St. Jamestown apartment, Martin worked at the Art Gallery of Ontario while Chatto wrote fiction. They married in Toronto in 1982 and relocated to the Greek island of Corfu to seek “a life of ease” in 1983.

Chatto’s philosophy of food and life was greatly shaped as a result of this five-year sojourn, where he grew olives and made wine. Chatto and Martin worked together on 1987’s A Kitchen in Corfu, which Chatto describes as a book of “food and place.” (He has also written two short stories, which have since been anthologized in American school textbooks.) During this time in Corfu, Wendy gave birth to two sons, first to Joe, and 18 months later, to Ford. Tragedy brought an end to the idyll in Greece when Ford died of leukemia in 1986, at the age of 16 months. The family returned to Toronto shortly after. Today, James, Wendy, 18-year-old Joe, and 14-year-old Mae live in north Toronto with two cats and an ever-evolving assortment of fish. Joe, who skipped three grades, is now studying archeology at the University of Toronto. Mae, who perhaps inherited some theatrical genes, wants to be a comedian and studies improv at Second City. Chatto recently brought her along on an interview for Toronto Life with former Kid in the Hall Mark McKinney. “I got big Daddy points for that one,” he says with a smile.

Following Ford’s death, Chatto ceased writing fiction. “It just felt wrong to make up emotions and to pretend pain and sorrow,” he says softly. Upon returning to Toronto, his first writing gig was a freelance piece for Flare magazine. Chatto was casting around for additional work when a friend introduced him to Tim Blanks, then editor of Fashion magazine. Blanks commissioned Chatto to write three food columns for Fashion, but the articles were killed after parent magazine Toronto Life vetoed the idea of a food section in Fashion. “James reminded me a bit of a hobbit,” says Blanks. “His laugh and his rosy cheeks hinted at Rabelaisian undercurrents-and I like a good undercurrent.” Impressed with Chatto’s work, Blanks introduced Chatto to Joseph Hoare, Toronto Life‘s widely loved and wholly eccentric food editor. “I thought he was a fastidious and charming man,” says Chatto of the man to whom he dedicated The Man Who Ate Toronto.

After lunching with Hoare at the King Edward Hotel’s Caf? Victoria in September of 1987, Chatto began writing for Toronto Life almost immediately. Marq de Villiers, at the time the magazine’s editor, introduced Chatto to readers in the April 1988 issue as an “author, actor, cook, sometime olive farmer and bon vivant.” In “Hello Trolley,” Chatto’s first column that appeared in the same issue, he rhapsodizes about dessert trolleys: “Theirs is an old-fashioned flamboyance, a style that now seems mannered and theatrical.” “Chatto Dines Out” became a regular feature, but Chatto has also written over a dozen non-food-related articles for Toronto Life, pieces whose topics range from Ronnie Hawkins to Elvis Stojko to Paul Bernardo. He has also written extensively on wine and travel in Toronto Life, enRoute, Food & Drink, and others.

Chatto’s great interest in not only food, but life, presides in his style. “Food historian” is a more apt approach than “critic,” as he’s as much concerned with the genealogy of the meal he’s eating as he is with its quality. “It’s English in a way, looking for the [professional] lineage of the chef,” says John Allemang, former Globefood columnist. “It’s more interesting than focusing on whether the salad is crispy or moist.” In almost every column, Chatto laboriously plots the origins of a particular dish or chef, interviewing, on average, six to 10 people. A 2001 piece on sushi is typical; Chatto excitedly wrote of the arrival of a new supply of wild Copper River salmon in Toronto, then traced what each sushi chef he featured created with the delicacy.

Chatto’s style also reflects the influence M.F.K. Fisher has had on his work. “There is a communion of more than our bodies when bread is broken and wine drunk,” wrote Fisher in The Gastronomical Me, over which Chatto admits he’s cried while reading. Fisher’s writing weaves together stories of food and human experience, as does Chatto’s. “He brings so much style and texture into the piece, it’s not only about food, but about life,” says Michael Totzke. Chatto agrees. “Food writing is like a diving board for me,” he says. “I use food as a platform to talk about many other things.” Aside from Fisher, Chatto also admires the work of British food writer Elizabeth David (“She really did change everybody’s ideas about food”) and Sunday Times food writer A.A. Gill. “He has a fabulous turn of phrase,” says Chatto with enthusiastic admiration, recalling one of his favorite lines. “He once described ice cream as being as smooth and cold as a Jesuit’s blessing.” While Chatto’s comparisons often favour the humorous (he’s described street food as the “cannabis in the stodgy brownie of life” and a venison shoulder overpowered by a crushed juniper berry crust as “conjuring visions of gin-guzzling Bambis”), their originality is refreshing. As food writer Lucy Waverman says, “James has the imagination to take food writing a step farther.”

Imagination is a definite asset in the dream job that is more job than dream. “You wind up having to find new ways to describe boiled carrots, and it’s not fun,” says Charles Oberdorf, a former restaurant critic who also edited Chatto’s work at Toronto Life. Some writers resort to overheated allusion.

“There’s a certain amount of pornography in food writing,” says Joe Fiorito, former food columnist for Hourmagazine and author of Comfort Me With Apples, a collection of his food columns. As Chatto tartly observes in The Man Who Ate Toronto, “Personally, I have no trouble telling the difference between chocolate cake and making love, but a surprising number of writers seem to get them confused.”

Chatto himself leans toward the intellectual, not sexual, in his references. In a January 2001 column on bistros, he devoted more than 100 words to the linguistic history of the term: “On March 31, 1814, while Napoleon and the remnants of his army gnawed their knuckles at Fontainebleau, Czar Alexander’s forces entered Paris… the Russian troops headed straight for the restaurants. ‘Food!’ they yelled, and when the chefs took too long (fussing with presentation, perhaps), they added a further imperative: ‘Quickly!’ In Russian: ‘Bistro!'” “You have to know a lot to get anything out of it,” says Allemang of Chatto’s work. Chatto’s columns can include references to Shakespeare, Michelangelo, and other historical figures-for example, he opened a column about restaurant suppliers with an anecdote about Giotto hanging himself due to poor-quality paints. “You have to try to be inventive without being too strange for the editor’s liking,” says Chatto. On at least one occasion he’s crossed over the strange line: a Toronto Life column he once wrote as a parody of the cryptic style of Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges never made it to print.

Negativity is as noticeably absent in Chatto’s work as erudition is present. “His one fault is that he doesn’t know how to be mean,” says Michael Totzke. In a rare, critical column on things he hated about restaurants, Chatto fretted about his nice-guy style:”No one will take you seriously as a critic until you savage a chef or two.”Chatto honestly tried to deride pepper-mill-toting waiters, patio dining, and the ubiquitous background music of the Gipsy Kings. While Totzke loved the piece, he “didn’t find it nearly as wicked as I wanted it. James doesn’t want to tear anybody down.” In turn, the most negative thing he can summon up about Chatto is, “I always wanted to tell him, ‘You could trim that hair a little bit,'” Totzke says with a laugh.

Chatto’s theatrical background may partly account for his forgiving views on the restaurant business. “For a restaurant to work, everyone involved, from customer to cook, must play his part according to the rules, dutifully contributing to the harmony,” he’s written. Toronto Life‘s mandate is also a factor: “The magazine is about service, and most people want to know where they should go, not where they shouldn’t,” says Oberdorf.

Chatto confirms this theory: “I’ve got four weeks to write a column, and if I go to a restaurant that’s disappointing, and I often do, I don’t give it space.” By contrast, the weekly food critics are limited to writing about only where they have eaten that week. “The frequency of publication has everything to do with the difference in reviewing styles,” says Jacob Richler. “If I give a bad review one week, it’s no big deal to the reader, but no one wants to wait around for the new Toronto Life and find that Chatto says, ‘Stay home-this place is awful.'” However, Richler believes there’s some room for criticism in Chatto’s reviews. “He could write about the nature of failure now and then, too,” he says. “Too much praise cheapens the commodity.”

Others question the propriety of interviewing the chefs whose work Chatto is reviewing. The Globe‘s Joanne Kates says she adamantly avoids interacting with those in the restaurant business, ditto for food critic Steven Davey. “Our readers know that, and respect my objectivity,” Davey says. On the other hand, the Post‘s Jacob Richler says getting acquainted with a chef enhances his reviewing. “It allows me to better understand the industry.” Still, after eating out night after night, year after year, it seems inevitable that any food critic would become acquainted with those on the other side of the kitchen wall. “If Joanne Kates is being honest, she’s made some friends in the industry too,” says Charles Oberdorf.

Some may speculate that Chatto’s tendency to accentuate the positive has led him to his current editorial positions at both harry and Food & Drink magazines. “I was kind of surprised because no one cares less about clothes than he does,” says Michael Totzke about Chatto’s 2001 debut as editor of the classy matte magalogue for the Harry Rosen menswear chain. “But he can write about anything.”And John Allemang worries that Chatto is selling himself short as senior editor of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s Food & Drink mag. “He hasn’t been given the opportunity his talent demands,” he says. “Why isn’t there a novel by James Chatto now, or more travel writing?” Chatto’s eyes are wide open to the restraints of magalogue writing. “I went into harry on the understanding that this is a client-driven magazine,” he says. “With Food & Drink, it can be more frustrating, because I’m always obliged to write only about the wines that the LCBO carries.” Nonetheless, Allemang concedes that Chatto’s talent lends legitimacy to both publications.

As the fire engines recede and the Mexican restaurant is momentarily silent (except, of course, for the ringing of our ears) the “oh dear” evening ends with a half-cooked banana flamb?. Chatto, as always, is gentle in his criticism: “When a meal could be wonderful and it’s not, it disappoints me,” he says with a shake of his head. The waitress brings a brown paper bag of leftovers. “It was lovely,” Chatto declares gallantly as he heads for the door, bag in hand. Then he tosses the doggy bag in the closest trash receptacle. “I feel so wicked when I do that,” he says, grinning like a school boy who is trying hard to be bad.

Kevin Smith stays close to the action. He hovers unobtrusively near the black-clad activists and watches intently while one anarchist shatters a McDonald’s window and another is tackled by riot police. It’s a chilly Friday in mid-November, and more than 500 protesters have gathered in downtown Ottawa for the first day of demonstrations against the weekend-long meeting of the world’s most powerful finance ministers. Placards painted with anti-International Monetary Fund and anti-World Bank slogans ripple over the crowd and, in a scene now commonplace on the six o’clock news, protesters tear down fences and clash with police.

In contrast to the dazzling red anarchy symbols and black balaclavas of the anarchists, 31-year-old Smith is unobtrusive in his jeans, hiking boots, and blue fall jacket. Instead of spray paint and street chalk, Smith carries an Indymedia press badge, a camera, and his ever-reliable notepad and pencil. It’s almost impossible to keep up with him as he darts around, weaving through bodies in motion, stopping abruptly to take pictures of people dancing in the middle of an intersection or of an anarchist chalking “CNN = Death” on the side of the National Press Building.

“Mainstream media is biased in favour of the interests of large corporations, which often run counter to the interests of the people of the world,” Smith would later tell me, explaining why he helped found the Ontario chapter of Indymedia (also known as Independent Media Centres, or just IMC), one of more than 70 that have sprouted across the world since the organization’s inception at the “Battle in Seattle.” Empowered by the Internet, thousands of Indymedia devotees from Windsor to Argentina have become activist-journalists, two roles that leave many struggling to reconcile being the mouthpiece of a cause and providing fair and balanced coverage.

In Ottawa today, Smith is just one of dozens of Indymedia reporters. Everywhere I look there’s some young activist scooting around with a digital camera, or a cell phone, or a notepad and pencil. They’re filming from atop National Post boxes, shooting pictures from partway up lampposts, and fearlessly approaching police lines. An Indymedia journalist standing close to the front line raises a small camcorder to the eye of his gas mask and points the lens at the police in riot gear in front of him. Suddenly, the police charge and pin him to the ground. They pull his hands behind his back and confiscate his camera. Other Indymedia journalists on the scene immediately use cell phones to call the newsroom where the story is quickly uploaded to ontario.indymedia.org. Later, when other random acts of police violence erupt, Indymedia journalists lock their cameras on the commotion while the crowd chants, “The whole world is watching.”

Smith spends most of this Saturday working the phones, keeping in contact with a legal aid group, street medics, and protesters who phone in reports throughout the day. Between calls, while he updates the newswire, I ask him whether he’s a journalist or an activist. “At this point I consider myself primarily a journalist, although I certainly came out of the activist tradition,” he replies.

Smith, who has been involved in protests since 1995, encountered Indymedia at the Washington, D.C., protests in April 2000, where he was impressed by the scale of the media centre. There was a rack of TV sets and VCRs, all showing different media coverage. The room was buzzing with intensity as the volunteer staff tried to keep up with the day’s events. Protesters were divided into teams-including print, photo, audio, and video-with each group assigned upwards of 12 computers. “The idea of ordinary, everyday people doing interviews and making news was exciting,” he remembers.

Smith left Washington knowing he’d found a challenging new channel for his activism. Less than two months later, Smith and the tech team founded IMC Ontario to cover the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty march against homelessness in Toronto.

Indymedia is based on the Internet concept of “open publishing,” which developed out of online community discussion boards where moderators aren’t allowed to change, edit, or delete posts. Anyone can upload audio, video, photos, or print to the umbrella Indymedia site at indymedia.org or to any of its local affiliates that have emerged in countries such as Germany, Mexico, India, Australia, and Nigeria. In the United States, video footage from Indymedia sites is shown monthly on the national satellite station Free Speech TV. Canada has over 10 Indymedia working groups, with sites established for Alberta, Quebec, Ontario, and many cities.

All IMC news sites are standardized. The banner features the logo’s small “i” with sound waves radiating from both of its sides. An icon is prominently displayed that, when clicked, leads Indymedia journalists through the simple procedure of uploading their material. The layout of the site is divided into three main columns. On the left there are links to IMCs around the world, while the right-hand column is known as the newswire and links to recently uploaded material. The central column is reserved for especially poignant or timely articles from the newswire.

Although Smith hopes that Indymedia will one day replace traditional “corporate” news sources, typical reports on IMC Ontario do little more than chronicle the actions of different activist groups. There is little in the way of investigative reporting, while many of the stories are nothing more than incoherent personal rants. Checking the site one day, I clicked onto an audio clip of the Dope Poet Society singing a song called “Fuck Mike Harris.” I then moved on to a photo of activists carrying a banner with the words “Fuck Corporate Media. We Want the Truth” splashed across it while they protested outside of MuchMusic in downtown Toronto. Finally, I pulled up a video featuring the Raging Grannies, a group of vivacious old women who sing anticapitalist songs like “Democracy’s a Dream.”

The falling cost of technology means that groups like TVAC and Indymedia now have access to sophisticated cameras and computerized editing suites that were once the monopoly of professional journalists working for well-monied organizations. In his 1996 book Media Virus, media theorist Douglas Rushkoff argues that the power of elite media is diminishing in the face of a technologically empowered citizenry. One of the seminal moments in this shift in the media landscape occurred in 1991 when George Holliday, an onlooker who just happened to have a camcorder in hand, taped the brutal beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers. The footage was used to charge the officers and was the catalyst that eventually triggered a major riot in Los Angeles. Soon after, a number of other crimes and abuses were caught on tape, and were bought by major networks to broadcast around the world. “The Rodney King beating, gay bashings, police brutalities, and neo-Nazi attacks. It seemed that home video had emerged as the great equalizer,” Rushkoff wrote. “Wherever an injustice occurred, there was a camcorder rolling. No one could get away with anything.”

Following the King beating and the L.A. riot, activists around the world began to realize that they could use these same tools for direct action. Rushkoff chronicles how, in the U.S., AIDS activists started taking video equipment to demonstrations (where they were usually harassed by police) and soon formed a group called DIVA-TV, or Damned Interfering Video Activists. In Amsterdam in 1993, several hundred media activists met for “The Next Five Minutes,” a conference about using video as a political tactic. And in Canada, the CBC hired Toronto-based media activist group Channel Zero to produce three segments for The National.

Indymedia was created to cover the November 1999 anti-World Trade Organization demonstrations in Seattle. Eight weeks before the WTO summit, a half-dozen people, most of whom worked in media, decided to pool their resources to document and post the events of Seattle on the Web in realtime. The idea snowballed immediately. Within a few weeks, more than 50 people were working on the project. “Techies” began to develop the site’s front and back ends. People started fund-raising, eventually collecting more than $75,000 in cash and equipment. Other independent media activists like Paper Tiger TV, Free Speech TV, and the Direct Action Media Network came together to help the fledgling organization with materials and expertise. Volunteers nationally and internationally began calling people in Seattle to say they were bringing camcorders, editing machines, computers, and audio equipment. Seattle’s Low Income Housing Institute donated a 2,700-square-foot storefront to the cause, asking only that the group clean out the space. Weeks were spent frantically plastering and painting the walls, putting in plumbing and wiring, and disposing of junk on the ground. On November 28, the day before the protest, the doors were opened to independent media makers from across the globe.

At the height of the protests, IMC Seattle was a buzz of chaotic but passionate activity. More than 450 people used the centre while more than 100 videographers were on the streets shooting footage. Radio stations across the U.S. picked up Indymedia’s live audio feed. Satellite TV stations aired its video footage. Mainstream news organizations like CNN and Reuters linked to the IMC website from their own. By the end of the demonstrations, seattle.indymedia.org had received about 1.5 million hits. One of the reasons for its instant notoriety was the fact that Indymedia was countering deliberate government disinformation that mainstream news organizations were airing. For example, all the major news networks carried a clip from Seattle’s police chief denying the use of rubber bullets. At the same time, Indymedia was posting photos of people with welts all over their bodies and holding the rubber bullets that inflicted the wounds.

Sheri Herndon, one of the co-founders of Indymedia, still gets emotional when remembering how the Seattle Indymedia newsroom came alive. On the second day of the protests, Herndon stood in the middle of the centre watching the chaos and commotion swirl around her. For the first time since she’d begun working on the project, she realized the magnitude of what the volunteers had accomplished. “All of a sudden I realized that the dream that we had-to have a public media centre in Seattle-had happened,” she says from IMC Seattle, where she is now a full-time volunteer.

Indymedia’s global reach is what Shift senior editor Sarah Elton finds most compelling about the organization. “That we can disseminate video taken by independent videographers around the world-they have a Chiapas Indymedia, a Hawaii Indymedia-just blows my mind,” says Elton. “That I can watch video filmed in these remote locations that I would never ever have seen otherwise, that’s amazing. And in that respect, Indymedia’s fantastic.”

Ronald Deibert, associate professor of political science at the University of Toronto and author of the bookParchment, Printing, and Hypermedia, says he’s been waiting a long time for something like Indymedia to emerge. “It’s straight from the people who are there on the ground. Even people who just have opinions on things can share the information they have without worrying about corporate filters or commercial constraints through advertising that might prohibit some types of stories from being written.” Deibert explains that most people are frustrated with news organizations like CNN, and that the real-people, real-footage approach of Indymedia provides a refreshing alternative. “People are craving some sort of unmediated, unfiltered, unpackaged news information.”

But for The Hamilton Spectator‘s media columnist, Gregory Boyd Bell, the resulting amateurishness that is a direct consequence of Indymedia’s open approach is one of its greatest flaws. While he considers Indymedia a valuable source of information that mainstream media overlook, he says the disappointing quality of the editorial and lack of ethical standards limit it from reaching a wider audience. “We would be poorer in terms of knowledge if we didn’t have the high standards that have come to be expected of what is called mainstream media: balance and caution about reporting rumours.”

There can be no argument that Indymedia undercuts its own cause with pat-on-the-back stories and knee-jerk reactions to social issues. The problem is compounded by the fact that Indymedia sites are awash with inaccurate information and conspiracy theories, something that leaves the governing local editorial collectives frustrated as the open publishing convention forbids them from removing stories they know to be wrong or, as in the case of IMC Israel, even racist. On the website israel.indymedia.org, racial slurs fly back and forth across the Israeli-Palestinian divide. People identifying themselves as “Anti-Arab” and “Anti-Jew” post horrifying rants such as: “Death to you, your whore mother, your rapist father, your assassin brothers, and your cheap slut sisters.” One such article was posted and the editorial collective took the unorthodox step of removing it from the main page. Heated debate ensued, with one Indymedia activist writing that by removing the post, the site should be disqualified from being an IMC. “What gives you the right to tell us what we can and cannot read? You cannot censor articles or posts because they simply offend you,” the post read.

Situations like these have lead Julie Crysler, editor of This magazine, to believe that Indymedia is often more dangerous than enlightening. “I think it’s great that a broader base of people now has access to media and are able to do this kind of reporting. The difficulty is that Indymedia often becomes a clearinghouse for rumours, unsubstantiated attacks, and rants that aren’t supported by facts.”

Take, for example, a post-September 11 story that claimed a CNN clip showing Palestinians singing and dancing to celebrate the collapse of the Twin Towers was file footage from 1991. The rumour quickly spread around the world and prompted people to flood CNN and other online discussion boards across the Web with e-mails of “shame.” The claim was false, of course, and sparked a chain of angry correspondence between CNN’s vice president of international public relations, Nigel Pritchard, and a number of Indymedia volunteers. In one of his e-mails, Pritchard quotes the Indymedia mission statement: “Indymedia is a democratic media outlet for the creation of radical, accurate, and passionate telling of the truth.” He then responds: “Really? You could have fooled me.”

When I ask Kevin Smith if, for all its good intentions, Indymedia has become a propaganda tool for the activist community, he answers: “We believe that complete objectivity is impossible. So all journalism is propaganda to some extent. We try to be honest about our biases, unlike the corporate media.” Smith, like many in the Indymedia organization, believes that corporate media cloak a right-wing, big-business ideology behind a facade of objectivity. The fact that Indymedia wears its bias on its sleeve, he says, makes the organization a more credible news source.

The biases of Toronto’s media activist community were on display at a journalism conference organized by Ontario Indymedia in Toronto last September. More than 100 activists filled four rooms in the Bissell Building of the University of Toronto to loudly debate topics ranging from “Countering the Mainstream” to “Getting the Story: Research, Contacts, and Interviewing.” A video workshop, lead by Jonathan Culp of TVAC, highlighted some of the basic elements of shooting: the best type of camcorder to use, potential problems, and reminders to bring lots of tape. One person in the workshop asked if there was anything that shouldn’t be taped at demonstrations. “Well, it’s probably not a good idea to tape things like people destroying bank machines,” Culp replied. “Remember, you are working in solidarity with the protesters.” In other words, don’t record anything that could hinder the movement.