Murdoch Davis is a company man. As he’d be the first to tell you, the paycheque buys his loyalty. It buys his opinions, his arguments, and his towering indignation. That dedication has elevated him to the top of the country’s biggest daily newspaper chain. From his office, high in the 33-storey Toronto-Dominion Building, the tallest in Winnipeg, he can see eastward over downtown factory tops to the fork of the Assinaboine and Red rivers. The 31st, 32nd, and 33rd floors of the building hold the company’s luxurious headquarters, the hub of a media conglomerate that, by its own estimation, owns Canada’s leading national television network and the leading newspaper in most of the country’s major cities.

CanWest Global Communications?more specifically, the company’s newspaper operations, of which he’s editor-in-chief?defines Murdoch Davis. He implements the company’s policies and defends its decisions. “If you take the cheque,” he says, “you have to loyally perform the duties.” Even if the decisions involve policies that are anathema to journalists worldwide. Even if they mean being disparaged as the CanWest poster boy or the Aspers’ loyal stenographer.

—

The Aspers, who own CanWest Global, surround Davis at the top of the TD tower. Izzy, the patriarch and putatively retired chairman, and Leonard, the CEO and president, are one floor up. David, the bumptious brother, is just down the hall. It’s almost impossible not to run into one of them in the hallway. But that’s not unnerving for Davis. “Murdoch,” says Neil Macdonald, the CBC’s Middle East correspondent who has known Davis since 1978, “is part of the system.”

Some system. CanWest Global’s holdings include 13 daily newspapers, the most prominent of which is theNational Post, and 17 weeklies; its Global Television Network, by its own reckoning, reaches 94 percent of English-speaking Canada. Half its dailies are among the country’s 10 biggest, and in most urban markets there’s a CanWest newspaper and a CanWest TV station. In British Columbia alone, the company owns the three biggest dailies and three TV stations. Now that’s reach, but it doesn’t come close to exceeding the Aspers’ grasp: their ambition is to crack the top five media companies in the world, to be right up there with News Corporation’s Rupert Murdoch in power and influence. First Canada, though.

“We have a special opportunity in advancing Canada’s destiny,” Israel Asper told the company’s annual general meeting in January. “We reach millions of Canadians every day of the week, and we must use that reach, that entr?e into the homes and consciousness of our fellow Canadians, to constantly express the restlessness, the challenge, the yearning and the drive to make it better. And we must communicate thoughts, opinions, views and comment on who and what can make it better.”

But just whose thoughts, opinions, views, and comment would CanWest communicate? The Aspers’, of course. This is what troubled?and, in some cases, horrified?so many journalists in December 2001 when CanWest launched its national editorial program. The editorials, which would establish the Aspers’ “core positions” on some of the most important issues of the day, were to be written or assigned from Winnipeg and were to appear in all their major papers. No unsigned local editorials dissenting from these core positions were allowed. The first Aspertorial, written by Murdoch Davis, trumpeted tax breaks for charitable foundations. Since the Aspers operate one of the largest such foundations in the country, the editorial seemed to advance the family’s destiny a bit more than Canada’s. “It’s a blatant and very worrisome effort to pressure the government into furthering a corporate goal,” John Miller, director of the newspaper journalism program at Ryerson University, said. “It’s lamentable that the Aspers are using their papers for this purpose.”

The potted editorials, which still occasionally run in member papers, declaimed on everything from health care to terrorism. “Companion to the mindless chant of non-violence is the idea that we should negotiate our way to safety. This is?nonsense,” Davis wrote, in support of hunting down terrorists post-September 11, 2001. Amid this barrage of rhetoric, three core positions stood out: Prime Minister Jean Chr?tien (from whose government regulators all broadcast blessings flow) was above criticism; business (from which all other blessings flow) was above reproach; and the state of Israel (over which Izzy Asper obsessed) could do no wrong.

Response to the editorials from journalists and media observers was fast and furious. They epitomized the worst abuses of media concentration. They defied the ethics of diversity and dissent. They were intolerant of the regional differences in Canada. They undermined the need for local autonomy on which the integrity and credibility of local papers stand.

“The Aspers’ mandatory editorial policy damages their own reputations, hurts journalism in general, cheats the public of divergent views and undermines Canada. But the Aspers don’t seem to care. And that’s the pity,” protested Peter Worthington in his syndicated column, which was quickly dropped from The Windsor Star, an Asper paper. Canada’s “outstanding reputation for freedom of the press had been badly damaged,” said the Vienna-based International Press Institute. The International Federation of Journalists accused CanWest of censorship: “Journalists within the group are rightly concerned that their newspapers?are being molded into a single voice for the company’s national corporate agenda.”

In the thousands of column inches chewed up by protesting journalists, one insight recurred: the Aspers just didn’t get it. They were TV people who understood dumping American programs onto Canadian airwaves for big profit. They knew nothing of newspaper traditions and the public-service role of the press beyond the bottom line. The Canadian Association of Journalists and the Quebec Federation of Professional Journalists censured the Aspers for their overriding corporate self-interest.

Murdoch Davis’s scorn for the protesting journalists was almost palpable. He kissed off most of the outcry as Central Canadian packthink. “Some of the reaction,” he said, “was precipitated because this was a new company run by western Canadian Jews.” He jumped to his company’s defence with blistering op-ed pieces and letters to the editor, accusing the critics of lazy, incompetent, inaccurate journalism. “I saw the pack in action and the group-think,” he says, his indignation soaring. “I saw several demonstrations of how quickly and easily inaccuracies get picked up and repeated. I saw people who were willing to be disdainful of truth because they felt what mattered was their opinion.”

Peter Worthington’s “disdain for truth,” it turned out, lay in a couple of factual errors, the kind of goofs that newspapers apologize for every day. Worthington was wrong, for example, when he claimed that the Aspers owned 60 percent of Canadian media. A sloppy mistake, but hardly enough, as Davis insisted, to wash out the opinions of a respected reporter, foreign correspondent, editor-in-chief, and award-winning columnist who has spent 40 years in the business.

—

In 2000, when CanWest purchased the old Southam chain from Conrad Black’s Hollinger International Inc. for $3.2 billion, the Aspers promised the papers would remain relentlessly local and fiercely independent. “CanWest understands the success of our newspapers is due largely to their ability, in their editorial policies, to mirror the interests and values of their local readers,” they declared in a written submission to a House of Commons committee in September. But with the introduction of the national editorials, those interests and values started to give way to the Aspers’ interests and values.

Worry spread through CanWest newsrooms across the country. Those who tried to speak out were quickly silenced. Their stories were modified, their columns altered to suit the Aspers’ views. Pieces were spiked, political cartoons yanked. Reporters were admonished when their copy didn’t comply with the company line. It was clear to the news staffs that the mandatory editorials were the first move in a plan to control editorial content throughout the chain?but there was little they could do about it. When Stephen Kimber, the respected head of the University of King’s College Journalism School, knocked the Aspers in a column for the Halifax Daily News, a CanWest paper at the time, his piece was killed. Murdoch Davis said it was a local decision. But the Daily News‘ managing editor, Bill Turpin, who made the call, said he phoned Davis beforehand for advice: should he let the column run? Not unless you’re looking for a hill to die on, Davis replied. Turpin later quit. So did Kimber.

The loudest dissent came from The Gazette in Montreal, where staffers withheld their bylines for two days in a long-established form of protest. Seventy-seven of them signed an open letter in The Globe and Mail andLa Presse decrying CanWest policies. Head office issued an internal memo reminding employees about the company’s expectations of proper conduct, that “case law supports sanctions, including suspension or termination, against those who persist in disregarding their obligations to the employer after warning.” In effect, a gag order that muzzled and outraged reporters. “We’re not allowed to speak out, we’re not allowed to talk about what’s going on inside the paper,” says Sue Montgomery, a Gazette columnist and one of the signatories. “My fear is that we’re losing credibility because of interference from Winnipeg.”

Indeed, that interference no longer needed to be direct. Nobody had to tell anyone at the Aspers’ Regina Leader-Post how to handle a speech that Haroon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star‘s editorial page editor emeritus, gave to the University of Regina’s journalism school last March. Siddiqui, as usual, slammed CanWest policies, yet the story that ran the next day, which had been rewritten by the desk, made him sound like an Asper apologist.

Though he didn’t order the whitewash, Davis approved of it. “All I will say is that Haroon said several things in his speech that were simply factually incorrect. The lead repeated a few of them and there wasn’t sufficient challenging of what facts he had at hand.”

Here’s the original lead, written by reporter Michelle Lang:

“CanWest Global performed ‘chilling’ acts of censorship when it refused to publish several columns containing viewpoints other than those held by the media empire, a TorontoStar columnist said Monday.”

Here’s the rewritten lead:

“A TorontoStar columnist says it’s OK for CanWest Global to publish its owners’ views as long as the company is prepared to give equal play to opposing opinions.”

Lang pulled her byline and was suspended for a week without pay. Yet where are these incorrect facts that Davis said her lead repeated? There were only two facts in her lead?that CanWest had killed columns that contained viewpoints other than those held by the company and that a Toronto Star columnist made the statement?and both are irrefutable. The rest is Siddiqui’s opinion. It goes without saying that the rewritten lead reflects neither the tone nor the content of Siddiqui’s speech. Yet Davis staunchly maintains that he’s seen no evidence of the Aspers’ viewpoints affecting editorial content. “If they’re still insisting that somehow the editorials went beyond just being editorials on the editorial page and started affecting the rest of the papers,” he says, “I just don’t agree and I don’t accept that.”

Davis doesn’t want to hear about sticky ethical points. Company loyalty comes first. By withholding their bylines, reporters “certainly behaved unlike journalists,” he says. “I know the proprietors were surprised by what seemed to them an act of blatant disloyalty.”

Davis isn’t much given to understatement, but that one’s a classic. “If those people in Montreal are so committed, why don’t they just quit and have the courage of their convictions?” said David Asper in a speech in Oakville, Ontario. “Maybe they should go out and, for the first time in their lives, take a risk, put their money where their mouth is, and start their own newspaper?”

Davis delivered much the same message in December 2001, when he visited the Gazette newsroom in an attempt to justify the national editorials. “He wasn’t threatening; he was just not giving any ground at all, and clearly he wasn’t interested in what anybody had to say,” Bill Marsden, an investigative reporter, says. “This was the way it was, and if you didn’t like it, go.” Like most of CanWest’s rank and file, Marsden is reluctant to talk about what’s going on inside the company. They’ve seen heads roll and they’re now in the compromising position of trying to do their jobs well and, at the same time, hold on to them. “It’s pretty sad that people who dedicate their lives to giving out information and seeking the truth are actually afraid to talk about their own newspapers,” Marsden says. “Now you’ve got all these journalists out there who don’t want to talk about things because they’re afraid for their careers. Isn’t that pathetic?”

The most prominent head to roll was that of Russ Mills, the publisher of the Ottawa Citizen, who was fired by the Aspers for letting his paper run an editorial demanding the resignation of their friend Jean Chr?tien over the Shawinigate scandal. In an interview with the Citizen, Leonard Asper at first said Mills was sacked because he violated “basic principles of journalism.” He later said that Mills should have consulted Winnipeg before allowing such a “major national policy statement” to run. Mills, like Murdoch Davis, was a good company man, but for the wrong company. He’d been in the Southam organization for 30 years before Conrad Black and then the Aspers took over. He was used to the local autonomy the Southams were famous for. Even though Mills was a good executive, he’d crossed a core Asper taboo and now all he had to look forward to was a large settlement. “There must have been a sinking feeling in the pit of every journalist employed by the Aspers,” wrote Peter Worthington in The Toronto Sun. “The message in Mills’s firing is clear: no one in the empire is safe.”

—

At 49, Murdoch Davis may be looking down from the executive suite in a Winnipeg tower, but for 27 years his home was in the newsrooms of the Southam chain. He is, by all accounts, a first-rate newspaperman. “He’s one of the best I’ve ever worked with,” says his old Citizen colleague, Neil Macdonald. “He’s razor-sharp and you can get absolutely nothing past him.” His company-man philosophy and his indefatigable hard work took Davis quickly to the top: he has spent 20 years in the upper echelons of the Ottawa Citizen,Edmonton Journal and Victoria Times-Colonist. Though he works for the Aspers now, his philosophy hasn’t changed. “As an employee and manager of the company, I support the company’s policies 100 percent,” he says. “That’s my job and I do it to the best of my ability. If there’s ever a policy I feel I can’t support and I can’t change, then I guess I’ll go and get a different job.” After almost three decades in harness, it’s likely, to say the least, that Davis will be staying put.

As a kid, though, he did anything but. He was born, the fourth of eight children, in the mining town of New Waterford, Nova Scotia, and raised as an army brat in British Columbia and Ontario. Davis was the first in his working-class family to go to college, where, driven and brash, he was the prize graduate of Ryerson Polytechnical Institute’s School of Journalism in 1975. His classmate, Valerie Hauch, now a reporter for theTorontoStar, remembers Davis from their days at campus newspaper The Eyeopener, where she was his editor. He was talented and ambitious, she says, and already working on his political smarts. “His interest in politics and the way things work in the political world?in my Eyeopener days I might have said knowing whose ass to kiss?has undoubtedly helped him advance in his career,” she says.

And advance he did. After three years as a reporter at the Star, he joined the Citizen and made city editor by the time he was 26. In 1980, when the morning Ottawa Journal folded, Davis and Neil Macdonald, night city editor at the time, were put in charge of the Citizen‘s new early edition, which was meant to replace it. “Murdoch was a very hot-tempered young man,” says Macdonald, who found himself temperamentally unsuited for management and soon moved on to a medium where his talents thrived, TV reporting.

Davis says now that he was the kind of boss he wouldn’t have liked to work for. “The clich?s of the city editor walking out of his office and bellowing across the room at people about how lousy their story was, well, we did some of that,” he says, shifting to the editorial “we.” Most journalists who were there at the time don’t want to go on record with stories about Davis’s outbursts, but a few offer anonymous recollections of this little guy?maybe five-foot-seven?screaming so loud across the newsroom that his voice cracked and of his swearing at reporters until some of them wept. “We yelled at people too much, and probably humiliated people more than we should have,” Davis says now.

Gordon Fisher, president of news and information for CanWest News Service, was the Citizen’s city editor when he hired Davis from the Star and became his mentor at Southam. “He was quick and bright,” says Fisher, whose advice helped Davis work his way up to senior assistant managing editor in nine years. By 1989, Davis was ready to run his own newsroom and became managing editor of the Edmonton Journal. He was brought in to help overhaul the Journal, part of a management team that infused new spirit into the staff, increased circulation, and generally enlivened the paper. He was promoted to editor-in-chief in 1992. When Duart Farquharson, chair of the Journal‘s editorial board, retired in 1997, Davis didn’t replace him. He chaired the board himself and wrote often. “Murdoch took the view that if he was the editor of the paper he didn’t feel there should be points of view that he didn’t agree with,” says Farquharson, who still writes a column for CanWest. “He either wrote the editorials that were on particularly important issues to him, or he made sure that in the discussion and editing process they did follow his line.” For a newsman who paid no attention to the editorial page until he put himself in charge of it, Davis was a quick study. In 1998 he won a National Newspaper Award for editorial writing.

Davis loved Alberta. He met his wife, Kristal, and moved onto a farm outside the city, where they had three children. “It turned out Edmonton was the perfect place to live,” he says.

Things went smoothly until 1999, when a drive to certify the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers union shook up the Journal‘s easy-going newsroom. After a bitter campaign that lasted several months, the editorial staff voted 78 percent against joining the union. The drive ended in some bruised feelings and damaged careers. The organizers accused management, led by Davis, of borderline unfair labour practices, such as holding one-on-one meetings with employees, and putting out literature on the union. “It was a very difficult time but I came out of that still respecting him in some ways,” says Linda Goyette, a left-leaning columnist who worked at the Journal for 20 years. During the drive, Goyette, who was one of the organizers, ended up in lifestyle writing and copy editing. She eventually quit. Needless to say, Goyette and Davis often fiercely disagreed. “The one characteristic we have in common is a kind of stubbornness and inflexibility,” she said. “It’s a serious shortcoming in journalism and at different times we’ve both suffered the consequences.” Still, she says, the Journal became a better paper after Davis became editor. “This man knows the newspaper business and he was a hard-working editor. He demanded more of his staff than any of his predecessors and when we came through for him we were really proud of the results.”

Davis says he isn’t anti-labour, stressing that he comes from a long line of miners with a strong union background. Maybe, but the company man long ago took over. “When he changes his position, he goes from absolute to absolute,” says Macdonald. “He was a shop steward in the union; within two or three years he was in management and referring to reporters who were involved [with the union] as Wobblies.”

Davis’s next stop was a quiet year as deputy publisher and editor of the Victoria Times-Colonist to gain experience and prepare for the move to Winnipeg. His rise to the top has seemed as certain as his unshakable confidence. But at what price? “My association with Murdoch, even though it was a long time ago, left me with no doubt that when it comes to good journalism versus toeing the company line he would choose the company line at every turn,” says Tim Harper, the Toronto Star‘s Ottawa bureau chief, who worked with Davis at the Citizen. “I don’t deal with Murdoch anymore, probably by mutual choice. However, I can tell from comments I’ve seen attributed to him defending National Post decisions that his view of the bottom line hasn’t seemed to change over the years.” To such comments, Davis has a ready response: “I’m quite comfortable with myself and I will stack my credits and accomplishments up against theirs anytime.”

—

Last October, Israel Asper took on a new credential: international media critic. In a speech to an Israel Bonds fundraiser in Montreal, he lashed out in a spittle-speckled rage at Western journalists for their coverage of Israel. They were “lazy or sloppy or stupid?plain and simple, biased or anti-Semetic.” The guilty included a grab bag of media, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, The Guardian, CNN and the CBC (especially its Middle East correspondent, Neil Macdonald). Asper’s rant was published in theNational Post.

Robert Fisk of The Independent in the U.K., who has long been a fearless and honest voice on the Israel-Palestine conflict, called Asper’s speech “gutless and repulsive.” “These vile slanders are familiar to any reporter trying to do his [or her] work on the ground in the Middle East,” he said. “They are made even more revolting by inaccuracies.”

Asper accused Western reporters of being ignorant of the history of the conflict they were covering, but Fisk was able to find a number of “lazy, sloppy or stupid” mistakes on Izzy’s part. “That war began in earnest 85 years ago,” Asper held, “when, in 1917, Britain and the League of Nations declared, with world approval, that a Jewish state would be established in Palestine.” But, as Fisk pointed out, the phrase “Jewish state” was never used by the British in the Balfour Declaration of 1917. And the League of Nations did not exist in 1917?it was established in 1919. “Journalists are being attacked for telling the truth, for trying to tell it how it is,” Fisk said. “What is even more outrageous,” he told Ryerson University’s student paper, The Ryersonian, “is that the reporters, for the most part, are silent.”

Silent, or silenced? Sue Montgomery was the only CanWest writer prepared to speak out about her boss after his speech. “There’s not one journalist who’s not going to think twice about writing on these issues and what they are writing about them,” she told McGill Radio. “We’re seeing more overt pressures, in the form of the speech that was made, not to cross the line.” Montgomery said some of the same things in her Gazettecolumn, but they were cut. “We do not run in our newspaper op-ed pieces that express criticism of Israel and what it is doing in the Middle East,” Montgomery’s colleague, Bill Marsden, told the Index on Censorship.

Back at headquarters, Murdoch Davis sits in his tower office and wonders what all the kerfuffle is about. “I don’t see any reason that that speech should have caused a chill to anybody who’s confident and careful in their reporting,” he says. But Montgomery, who often writes about the tension the Middle East conflict has spawned in Montreal, is concerned. “You’re constantly second-guessing,” she says. “It almost comes to the point where you can’t be bothered because you’re just going to end up with grief. That doesn’t mean I’m going to stop, but it does wear you down.” After the Halifax Daily News was sold, columnist David Swick was free to say that his views hadn’t been considered pro-Israel enough for the company. Doug Cuthand, a freelance columnist for the Leader-Post and Saskatoon StarPheonix, submitted a piece comparing the struggle of the Palestinians to the plight of Canada’s aboriginal people; it was killed because, Davis says, the Middle East is not Cuthand’s area of expertise. Neil Macdonald suspects that if he were to write a column on the conflict, it too would be killed.

Still, Davis won’t comment on his boss’s words, the effect of them or the accuracy of them. “What’s the point? Is somebody going to say, well, because a person making a speech might have made a mistake, therefore it’s okay for reporters to make mistakes? Is that the point?”

Hardly.

Some 20 years ago, the Ottawa Citizen sponsored an amateur indoor track meet which wasn’t perhaps as amateur as it should have been?there were rumours that the athletes were being paid. The newsroom got wind of it but was told to lay off the story. An idealistic young editor named Neil Macdonald kicked up a fuss. The editor, one Russ Mills, called Macdonald into his office and chewed him out for his outburst. “If you don’t like it, fire me,” Macdonald lipped back.

That evening, city editor Murdoch Davis went out with his colleague for a beer and some advice. “There are two kinds of problems you have in this business,” Davis told Macdonald. “Problems you’re willing to quit over and problems you aren’t. If you’re not willing to quit, shut up and do it.” Macdonald wasn’t buying, then or ever, and the two went their very separate ways. “Murdoch is a company man,” Macdonald would say many years later. “He always has been.”

One evening last fall, staff members of Now, Toronto’s largest and most enduring alternative weekly, stood in the publication’s lounge armed with questions, comments, and drink tickets. But, compared to Now‘s boisterous 20th anniversary celebration in 2001, the mood at this gathering was restrained. If people seemed uneasy, even nervous, that’s because Michael Hollett, the paper’s publisher and editor, and Alice Klein, editor and CEO, were throwing a town hall meeting in the guise of a party.

Early in the evening, Hollett and Klein mounted the stage, microphones in hand. After some preliminary remarks, they began taking questions from the staff. The issues were clear enough: “Why is editorial staff lacking?” “Are there any plans for hiring?” “If so, when?” But Hollett and Klein’s evasive explanations?touching on the rigours of competition, the difficulty in finding the “right” people, and not making enough money in the last economic boom?were far from convincing. The pair only managed to confirm what was already suspected: they have consciously been making editorial cutbacks, and the news section has suffered the most.

“We’re forced to do more with less,” says Enzo Di Matteo, Now‘s news editor. “You don’t always get to do the stories you want to do because you don’t have someone there with a great amount of skill and expertise and experience. It’s made our mix a little less hardcore.”

Hollett and Klein’s actions run counter to a widely accepted convention in journalism. George Thurlow, former editor of the Chico News & Review, a successful alternative weekly in Chico Faze, California Faze, and current publisher of the Santa Barbara Independent, was quoted in a 1987 issue of Editor & Publisher saying “People who think they’ll be successful by cutting back on editorial are crazy, especially in a competitive situation.” That logic?”the more money you pump into editorial, the more successful you’re going to be”?may sound like a clich?, but by raising the Chico News & Review‘s editorial budget by 70 percent, Thurlow also significantly raised its ad sales and its profits.

This is a tactic that many American alternative weeklies use to compete with other papers, and they often win national newspaper awards as a result. New York City’s Village Voice, for example, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2000 for its provocative series on the AIDS crisis in FazeAfrica. Willy Stern, the Nashville Scene‘s investigative reporter, has won his paper many national and international awards for stories on subjects such as airplane safety and crooked charities.

But this is a logic that Now‘s Hollett and Klein seem to have forgotten. In a city where Toronto’s major dailies (The Globe and Mail, the National Post, the Toronto Star, and The Toronto Sun) are locked in the biggest newspaper war on the continent, Now and its competitor, eye Weekly, are engaged in an equally fierce battle?against each other as well as the dailies, especially the Star, which has strengthened its liberal-left character and poured resources into editorial.

In its early years, Now wasn’t considered a strong news-gathering force, but eventually its reputation grew. “When I first went there they didn’t have very much money,” says Stephen Dale, a freelance writer who worked at Now from 1981 to 1990. “But I was impressed by the fact that they had pretty ambitious editorial designs.” According to Dale, Now‘s mission was to keep powerful people honest and to expose injustices, discrimination, and abuse. In the mid-’80s, investigative stories about the conflicts in Central America, Canadian support of a corrupt regime in Indonesia, and antimilitarist movements in Toronto began to appear in the weekly.

Over the years, Hollett and Klein hired?and supported?reporters like Dale and Howard Goldenthal, now at CBC-TV’s the fifth estate, who were committed to hard-hitting news and willing to undertake investigations. But today, Now‘s news department has only two full-time staff members and a couple of interns. The paper has become a commercial success, but it’s missing one primary ingredient for producing a truly successful alternative weekly: a mission to run muckraking investigative news.

When it launched in 1981, Now wasn’t much bigger than a campus newspaper. Hollett, then 24, along with 29-year-old Klein and three other full-time staff members, operated out of Hollett’s apartment, holding meetings around his kitchen table. An editorial mandate in the introductory issue stated: “Now‘s stories will be prepared by writers who’ll spend many days, sometimes weeks, researching, creating and polishing their work,” and promised to hire “writers who are specialists in the area they cover.” Now would expose “what’s really behind the headlines we see in the dailies.”

“We had a huge sense of our whole generation and our culture being underrepresented, and we were outrageous enough to think that we were the ones who were going to do it,” says Klein nostalgically. “We had that sort of blissful ignorance.”

The idea of an alternative weekly wasn’t new. Between 1960 and the early ’70s, today’s baby boomers made up a large group of young people actively participating in a cultural “youth revolution”?one that loosely coalesced around rock music, sexual freedom, opposition to the Vietnam War, and a mistrust of the mainstream media. At the same time, technological advances in the printing industry had lowered the cost of producing a modest tabloid paper. Conditions were ideal for an antiestablishment press?one that ran highly opinionated, shit-disturbing journalism meant to challenge the status quo?to emerge. Soon papers like The Los Angeles Free Press, founded in 1964 and considered the first underground newspaper, and Vancouver’sGeorgia Straight, launched a few years later, began to spring up all over FazeNorth America. By the early ’70s there would be an estimated 400 of them in the United States alone, including the Berkeley Barb, San Francisco Oracle, Chicago Seed, and the renowned and widely imitated Village Voice.

Today’s alternative publications, like Now, can hardly be called “underground” anymore. They are essentially city magazines in tabloid newsprint format, and they vary widely in journalistic quality and ideological orientation. “A lot of the alternative weeklies are cookie-cutter,” says Alastair Sutherland, editor of theMontreal Mirror. “You’ve got a few news stories, you’ve got ‘Life in Hell,’ astrology, music stories, listings, and there you go.”

Indeed, listings and sex ads are the bread and butter for many of them, while others, like The Boston Phoenix, Halifax’s Coast, and Victoria’s Monday Magazine, have exceptionally strong news sections and owners willing to commit resources to investigative journalism. Robert Cribb, president of the Canadian Association of Journalists and an investigative reporter at the Toronto Star, points out that this brings prestige to a newspaper, be it a weekly or a daily. “It’s exclusive, and it’s the kind of journalism that gives any media outlet an identity,” he says.

What most alternative weeklies share is a business strategy that appeals to hip, younger readers as well as baby boomers, making them gold mines for advertisers. But some are more commercially successful than others.

Now is independently owned by Now Communications Inc., which co-sponsors the North by Northeast music and film conference, and owns small chunks of other alternative weeklies across Ontario, like Vue in Hamilton and Niagara Falls. At about 120 pages a week, with a circulation of 110,000 and a readership of 369,000, Now employs more than 80 full-time staff. And unlike its competitor, the 11-year-old, Torstar-owned eye, which you can fold twice and slip under your arm, it’s bursting with advertisements, ranging from Future Shop and Player’s cigarettes to Telus Mobility and HMV.

A private company, Now isn’t required to disclose its revenues, but it’s possible to estimate its size. Richard Karpel is executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Association of Alternative Newsweeklies (AAN), whose 118 publications across North America generate approximately U.S. $500 million annually. Karpel says Now sits between the 12th and 20th of the association’s top earners. Klein’s view is less modest: “I think Now is, in terms of size and revenue and readership, definitely well up in the top 10?maybe in the top five.”

In the days of the underground press, P & L statements, if they existed at all, represented a distraction from what was really important. Today, Hollett may not wear suits, but underneath his faded jeans and long, greying hair, he seems to be more interested in business than journalism. It wasn’t always so. Now’s relationship with its readers was built, in part, on running progressive news that Toronto’s dailies ignored?such as racial discrimination, affordable housing, and homelessness?as well as providing a uniquely left-of-centre angle on mainstream issues. Sure, the listings and sex ads were cash cows, but Now also broke stories.

For example, in the late ’80s, Now created a stir when it revealed that the federal government had created an unofficial detention centre in a hotel near Pearson International Airport to secretly hold refugee claimants from Iran. Another story, part of an investigative series on Central America, explored government-sanctioned death squads in Guatemala. Now was also a trailblazer when it came to racial issues, uncovering stories about First Nations’ land claim struggles and police corruption involving members of Toronto’s black community long before the mainstream media. And Now hired the likes of John Sewell, urban activist and former Toronto mayor, to provide incisive, behind-the-scenes commentary about Toronto’s municipal political world, and enterprising reporters such as Enzo Di Matteo, the current news editor, and Scott Anderson, a former senior writer.

But after eight years at Now, Anderson left in September 2002 to become associate producer at CBC-TV’s investigative program Disclosure. He says that although investigative journalism should be practised by all media, it’s especially important for alternative weeklies. While the big dailies sometimes get complacent or are compromised by corporate ownership, it’s imperative that alternative weeklies uncover wrongdoings and inform readers about the people behind the scenes?the wire-pullers, the fixers, the lobbyists. “That’s how I saw my role, anyway,” he says.

And that is exactly what Anderson did in 1999 when he exposed a scandal involving Wanda Liczyk, Toronto’s former chief financial officer and treasurer, and Beacon Software (currently the subject of a sweeping public inquiry). “For several weeks I’ve been tracking the history of a lucrative consulting contract between the city and an obscure U.S. computer software company,” wrote Anderson. “A contract that’s never been put to tender, and has remained largely invisible to city politicians.” In his story, Anderson asked tough questions nobody else seemed to be asking at the time, including the dailies.

Now was considered a credible voice on the local scene in terms of politics. “People looked to it to have a voice on a lot of issues in the city and when it didn’t, they let us know about it,” says Anderson.

But today, that credibility is strained. One story that appeared in a July 2002 issue investigated the potential rise of antiabortion demonstrations because of the arrival of thousands of Catholic pilgrims for World Youth Day. The headline alone, “Pushy Pilgrims,” made a sweeping generalization suggesting that all Catholics are antiabortionists, and the copy was severely unbalanced, the line between believer and activist blurred: “Clinic workers fear the more radical elements among the hundreds of thousands of Catholic pilgrims who’ll be in town for World Youth Day…they believe some are planning to use the Pope’s visit to put the abortion issue front and centre.” A quote from Maria Corsillo of the Scott Clinic in Toronto called Catholics “like-minded people,” which caused the next issue of Now to be filled with letters to the editor questioning the research that was conducted for the piece.

“It may be worthy of Now to do some true investigative journalism,” wrote one reader, suggesting that the weekly might have contacted Catholics for Free Choice and pointing out that Quebec?the province with the largest Catholic population?was a leader in legalizing abortion in Canada. “With a little bit of research,” she continued, “you may discover that I would not be the only feminist Catholic out there who is a pro-choice pro-lifer.”

Treated as a quick-hit news story, the piece was an example of Now squandering an opportunity to explore an issue the mainstream press usually ignores or underplays, the story itself weakened by sloppiness or, perhaps, by a lack of the resources necessary to do thorough research.

Although implicit in its original mission statement, it’s been many years since investigative journalism has formally been a part of Now‘s budget. (Hollett and Klein will sometimes fund investigations if a reporter proposes a sufficiently compelling story.) When Anderson is asked about how the recent cutbacks might affect investigative journalism, he says: “You just have to look at the people who have moved on and the people who they have hired to replace them.” Many replacements are young, inexperienced, freelancers. So it’s no surprise that there has been little investigative journalism since Anderson’s departure.

John Sewell eventually left Now as well. In 1999, he took a pay cut to move to eye, where he continues to write his columns. Given Now‘s reputation as a lefty alternative weekly and Sewell’s background in left-wing politics, it would seem an odd move. But Sewell increasingly felt that Now‘s editors weren’t taking his copy seriously. “They do not treat their writers well,” he says. His view on the weekly’s journalism is equally grim: “It’s lost its focus in terms of news in the last year. It’s such a pity. One of my great disappointments aboutNow is that the paper makes a lot of money off of its ads but, unfortunately, they don’t put very much of it into investigative journalism. What an opportunity they’re throwing to the wind.”

In Now‘s defense, Alice Klein insists that investigative journalism is difficult to finance, even for a successful alternative weekly. It lowers productivity?writers often work on one story for a prolonged period?and it usually involves travel, research, and legal expenses. “It is, in its truest sense, a hugely expensive endeavour,” she says. “I love our reporters who have the nose for it and still manage to write a story every week, but we don’t stake our reputation on it.”

But these are the stories that promote a better way of living and initiate positive change. Isn’t that what the alternative press is for?

Clif Garboden, senior managing editor of the Phoenix Newspaper Group, which represents three alternative newsweeklies in the U.S., is also vice-president of the AAN and has sat on its admissions committee since 1995. He says there are a number of criteria that an alternative weekly must meet before being accepted into the association, but doing investigative journalism is not one of them. He does, however, recognize its importance: “Investigative journalism is one of the most valuable things that we do, and we should get more credit when we do it.”

His own Boston Phoenix?as well as some of the other most respected alternative weeklies, like theNashville Scene and Halifax’s Coast?make it part of their mandate. “I think it’s a way to show that we’re a good alternative to the daily newspapers,” says Kyle Shaw, editor of The Coast. “For the news sections, it’s absolutely vital.”

One criterion for acceptance into the AAN is that the applicant newspaper must be independent. “We’re an alternative press,” says Garboden. “What are we an alternative to? We’re an alternative to the dailies. Therefore, if you have a connection with the dailies you can’t belong.”

This is a distinction that long-time staff members at Now pride themselves on. “Independent ownership is a very rare thing in media culture,” says Ellie Kirzner, the paper’s senior news editor. “Our product comes from our relationship to our readers. It doesn’t come from a balance sheet that we have to meet higher up the rank.”

But for the last few years, eye has been challenging Now editorially. “I think Now makes too much of the fact that it’s not owned by a corporation,” says Bert Archer, production editor at eye and former books editor for Now. “On a day-to-day basis, ironically, we are much lighter on our feet because we are run by a big corporation?a corporation that is, in fact, so big that it doesn’t really pay attention to us.”

Even though eye is owned by a big, prosperous daily, its news budget is much smaller than Now‘s. Still, the paper manages to run some investigative journalism. In a series of stories that ran from July 2002 to January 2003, eye exposed a black market hotel operation in Toronto?a group of approximately 20 firms selling condos to people unaware that their investments were underwriting the operation of illegal hotels, which resulted in a provincial private member’s bill. Another example is a recent story that thoroughly explored the local environmental movement’s fears that an advisory group appointed by City Hall would recommend a return to incineration in Toronto without making the information available to the public. “Nobody else in the city touched this,” says Jennifer Prittie, eye‘s current news editor, proudly.

Despite evidence of a muckraking spirit at eye, Hollett, who claims not to read his competitor, is dismissive because of eye‘s corporate connection. “Now wouldn’t exist if it were owned by Rogers or Torstar,” he says. But if Hollett and Klein aren’t reading eye, they should at least pay attention to the Toronto Star, which has been doing a lot of spirited muckraking over the past couple of years. Although dailies often avoid shaking up the establishment, one of many examples of the Star poaching on Now‘s territory was a 2002 investigation of Toronto police officers targeting black motorists, a story that caused so much uproar that Julian Fantino, Toronto’s chief of police, pleaded with Torontonians to boycott the paper.

In this case, which involved extensive research and computer-assisted reporting, it’s obvious that the resources of a huge paper like the Star give it an advantage. But other examples, like a series in 2000 revealing that more than 750 downtown Toronto restaurants had at least one critical food safety violation, or the undercover story that appeared last fall documenting fraudulent activities in the city’s telemarketing operations, are not necessarily costly and would seem natural territory for an alternative newsweekly.

“Any kind of investigative journalism is resource-heavy relative to quick daily news hits,” says the Star‘s Cribb. “But not all of it is terribly expensive. What’s really important is hiring people who have news judgment and the knowledge of which topics need to be tackled and how to tackle them.”

The question remains: if Now isn’t hiring experienced journalists and doesn’t have a budget for investigative journalism, where are all those ad revenues going?

Three years ago, Hollett, Klein, and the rest of the staff at Now made the expensive move from their crowded headquarters on Danforth Avenue in Toronto’s east end to spacious new downtown offices on Church Street. According to Hollett, the move cost Now millions. The ground floor of the building is dominated by a combination restaurant and lounge equipped with a bar and a stage. The menu is health-conscious; the stereo plays tasteful jazz at a comfortable volume; and one wall sports a listening booth equipped with headphones. Copies of old Now covers are plastered above exposed brick. The reception area opens up, making the location a venue of choice for both aspiring musicians and established stars like Tori Amos, who played a private show there in September 2001. The lounge is strikingly reminiscent, in fact, of several bars and lounges on College Street, a strip favoured by the city’s yuppies.

The upper two floors house Now‘s marketing, advertising, editorial, and design departments, and are as silent as a public library (partly a result of the building’s past as a recording studio, Hollett explains). Staff members work quietly at their desks with little interaction?an atmosphere that is eerily reminiscent of the newsroom at most major dailies and contrasts with the lively, clubhouse atmosphere characteristic of Now‘s recent past. Perhaps one needs only look at the paper’s owners. Although Hollett still wears his hair in his trademark hippie fashion and Klein still finds a protest or two to write about, these aging baby boomers are scarcely the young active leftists they once were.

As far back as the 10th annual AAN convention in 1987, there was a spirited debate among the many owners and editors about whether successful alternatives had gone soft. Tom Winship, former editor of theBoston Globe, urged the crowd?a mixture of grey hair and business suits alongside long hair and blue jeans?to “get back into investigative reporting,” to continue going “after corruption the way it used to,” and “not to be afraid to be different.” Former Now writer Stephen Dale echoes this opinion: “There’s always something that the mainstream press is going to overlook, so that leaves an important role for the alternative press. There’s a lot to do and the more oppressive the times are, the more the alternative press has to stand up and do things that are courageous.” Dale says that if Now has drifted away from its crusading roots, “I’d encourage them to get back to it because they have a long and proud history of doing really good critical journalism.”

Although Utne Reader, the Reader’s Digest of alternative publishing, awarded Now its 2001 Readers Poll Award for local coverage, most of its awards are for its layout and website. In the process of making Nowone of Canada’s top alternative weeklies, Hollett and Klein’s company may have become what they’ve always said they despise: a corporate giant that doesn’t consider editorial quality a priority.

Now has the attitude, but whether it has the substance is a different matter. And what’s the point in picking up an alternative weekly if it doesn’t provide an alternative? Ask many disgruntled staffers after last fall’s town hall session about it. Hollett and Klein may proclaim their alternative bona fides, but they can’t disguise that their paper has gone from being a left-wing hippie rag to a slick corporate money-making machine.

It may have been the most unusual editorial retreat in the history of Canadian publishing. Back in September 2001, fresh from buying Explore magazine, 60-year-old Al Zikovitz was climbing Mount Athabasca, near the Columbia Icefields in Alberta. Did it bother him that a strong wind was blowing snow off the glacier and that he lacked a familiarity with certain safety and rescue techniques? Not really. “I’d never been ice climbing,” he recalls, “and I thought this would be a fantastic opportunity. I love pushing myself. Not to the point of hurting myself, but pushing myself to prove, at least to myself, that I can do it.”

But James Little, Explore‘s new editor, who accompanied Zikovitz on the trip, which was designed to help them flesh out ideas and a vision for the adventure magazine, was a little less enthusiastic: “I was thinking, ?Gee, there’s somewhere else I’d rather be,’ but Al was really determined to do it and we just carried on up the mountain.” Though they were eventually forced to stop short of the 3,491-metre summit due to the risk of an avalanche, Little was impressed: “Al was just going to plow right to the top no matter how exhausting the conditions.”

Little could just as well have been describing his boss’s drive to the top of the Canadian magazine world, an adventure of a different type. In fact, it was several adventures. Like the time he sold ads for L’actualit?, though he didn’t speak a word of French. Or the time he did promotion work for the Canadian Helldrivers stunt car team when it toured Germany and South Africa. Or the time he landed a sales job in Bangkok to replace a guy who had been shot. Or?in perhaps the lowest moment of his career?when he was accused of stealing ideas from the Banff Publishing Workshop (a charge he denies). Or the time when Masthead magazine called him a “legend” because of Cottage Life, the publication he founded, which has become one of the most successful consumer magazines in Canadian history.

And now here was Zikovitz?at an age when many would be contemplating retirement and no more exertion than a round of golf?scaling an icy mountain as part of his planning for a new publication. It was, all told, yet another excellent adventure for a man who owes much of his high standing to luck, midlife professional anxiety, and an inner resourcefulness that helped him realize that ordinary municipal voting lists could be used to create what has turned out to be an extraordinary business venture in the avalanche-filled world of magazine publishing.

A pair of yellowing Apple SEs squats on a bookshelf in his Toronto office, keeping in line binders of files and magazines. They were top of the line 15 years ago when Zikovitz lugged one up to his cottage on Gull Lake, two hours northeast of the city. There, surrounded by stacks of voters lists?the secret weapon he would deploy for a direct-mail campaign?he wrote a business plan for Cottage Life. He keeps the computers and an old dot-matrix printer close at hand, mementos of that time, and you can imagine he looks at them often.

Cottage Life wouldn’t exist if Zikovitz and his wife, Wendela Roberts, had not, purely on a whim, bought a cottage in 1985. They already owned a house in the toney Toronto neighbourhood of Hoggs Hollow, when friends they were visiting in cottage country took them to see an unfinished cottage. Zikovitz was hooked. “It was gorgeous,” he says. “We stood at the edge of the rock and loved the privacy and the view.” In fact, Zikovitz loved it so much that he offered the owner 10 percent over the asking price: “Let’s just say it was a little over $100,000.”

Zikovitz quickly discovered there was a lack of reliable information for cottagers. Sure he could handle some of the carpentry jobs?he’d worked as a carpenter in the late ’50s?but when it came to septic tanks, outboard motors, and the like, Zikovitz was out of his depth. It was then, as he wrote in the premier issue of Cottage Life, that he “began to see a need for a service-oriented publication directed expressly at the cottage environment unique to Ontario.”

At the time, Zikovitz was vice-president of sales at Harrowsmith and Equinox. It had been a good job. He ran the Toronto office, while the magazines were published out of a farmhouse near Kingston, Ontario. But a 1986 buyout of the magazines by media giant Telemedia and his own sense of restlessness left Zikovitz looking for new horizons. In 1987, he quit.

“We had the cottage, we had all sorts of bills to pay, we had three kids at home. ?What do I do with my life?'” Zikovitz recalls. “To this day, I remember my wife saying, ?If you try and you give it everything you’ve got and you fail, there’s nothing to be ashamed of.’ I never want to go through life thinking ?I wish I had done that.'” The couple spent the summer at the cottage writing story ideas, fleshing out the magazine’s business plan, and?aided by local women he’d hired?hunting through those voters lists, which yielded the home addresses of nearly 250,000 cottagers. “I got the voters lists from pretty well every municipality in cottage country. You ask for it?you beg, borrow, buy, or steal the book, and that’s where we got it,” he explains. Next he called on people he knew?circulation experts, art directors, and even some editors at Harrowsmith?asking them all advice on how to run a magazine. “I pumped them for information: How do you pay these guys? What do you pay? When do you pay?” He put everything he learned into a five-year plan: “I spent the whole summer doing this business plan, and I had my business plan finished, and then along came Banff.”

The Banff Publishing Workshop offered an annual intensive two-week course on magazine publishing. Zikovitz was a member of the faculty in 1987, lecturing on ad sales. Faculty were also responsible for proposing magazine concepts that could be used by participants to create prototype publications. One of the ideas Zikovitz pitched that year was a magazine about cottaging. CottageLife‘s future editor, Ann Vanderhoof, was the magazine program director that year. Steve Manley, its future art director, was also teaching. “It kind of came back and bit me in the ass,” says Zikovitz, “because everyone said I stole this idea from Banff and Banff did the whole thing and Banff, da da, da da.” The incident certainly prompted discussion among the Banff faculty. “In hindsight, yes, I made a mistake, and in hindsight I think we all learned something from it.”

After the CottageLife controversy, faculty developed a new rule that any material produced at the workshop belonged to the workshop. But Zikovitz insists he did not steal any of the students’ suggestions. “I already had the story ideas, I had everything. There was nothing that I took from there.” For years, he adds, the experience at Banff was like a “bad smell that follows you around everywhere.” But these days he’s not too bothered by it: “I don’t give a damn anymore. Screw it.”

After Banff, Zikovitz began to pull an editorial team together. Vanderhoof was so impressed with his ideas that she left a comfortable job as the editor of Quill & Quire magazine, while Manley created dummy covers and layouts to add to the ones Zikovitz had already conceived. They worked on an office table made of boards that had been nailed together to make a dock for a photo shoot. Almost a year after the Banff controversy, the premier issue of Cottage Life hit newsstands. It wasn’t an instant success.

 CottageLife was not launched in the best of times. For one thing, the cottage real estate market was soft, and the boom was a decade away. In 1989, home and cottage sales reported to the Canadian Real Estate Association by the Bancroft and District Real Estate Board?which covers the area just east of Zikovitz’s cottage?were $10 million, representing 109 listings. By contrast, in 1998, 329 cottages and homes in the same area sold for $26 million (these numbers represent a fraction of the total cottage sales in the area, since many sales were exclusive listings, which aren’t reported).

If the slumping real estate market wasn’t problem enough, the Canadian magazine industry was hit hard by the recession of the late ’80s. “In 1990 we went out to try to find a buyer because my partner was going broke,” says Zikovitz. “We couldn’t find a buyer so we ran it on our own, strictly through cash flow.” He called his suppliers and asked them to take 15 to 20 percent off what they were charging him so he could keep the magazine running. “I went to everyone and said, ?Guys, it’s not a permanent thing. It may last a year, it may last two years, but I need your help.’ Basically, I was saying, ?You don’t have to take a loss, just cut your profits out.’ Not one said no.”

What also helped Zikovitz buck the economic trends was an unconventional direct-mail campaign in which he staggered the promotional circulation to ensure that no address received a free magazine twice in a row. From a controlled circulation of over 70,000 copies in 1989, CottageLife reached the benchmark 50 percent paid circulation in November 1990, selling 41,599 copies. By 1991, the magazine was making a profit. “What I was able to do was spend almost nothing to get to my readers in terms of promotion,” says Zikovitz. “And I was able to give my advertisers 70,000 guaranteed circulation to cottagers.”

There’s also some luck in the success of CottageLife. The fact that Zikovitz misjudged the sour economics of the time is a major reason why the magazine exists at all. “Had I seen the real numbers beforehand,” he says, “I’m not sure I would have launched it. I hate to lose?whether it’s my money or whoever’s money. It’s a business decision. I felt the numbers were there, and I went ahead and did it. And in spite of the fact that my original projections weren’t quite right, we made it.”

Few magazines do. Figures compiled by Masthead show that between 1990 and 2001, a total of 1,131 publications were launched in Canada, while 694 folded. The numbers also show an increase in magazine closures due to the recession of the early- to mid-1990s, years in which CottageLife showed steady growth. The difference in economic climates can be seen clearly in the magazine’s advertising base. The premier issue of CottageLife featured ads for retail businesses selling outboard motors, bug spray, and composting toilets. By contrast, the Winter 2002/2003 issue boasted six major automobile ads, a four-color full-page ad for a high-end American clothing label, and an ad for one of Australia’s most famous wineries.

But good luck, creativity, and some fast financial paddling aren’t the only reasons Cottage Life succeeded. Zikovitz’s passion also played a key role. “I think so much of it is that we just work on passion,” he says. “Not numbers, but passion?a firm belief in what we do, and goddammit, no one’s going to stop us, no one’s going to say no to us. And if anyone says you can’t do it, all the more reason why you want to prove them wrong.” More than anything else, Zikovitz is a masterful salesman. In his early days, he peddled ad space for L’actualit? and Montreal Matin, publications he couldn’t even read. At CottageLife, before the magazine had any real circulation figures to show prospective advertisers, Zikovitz sold the magazine as much by his personality as by its content. “Al is now, and was then, extraordinarily enthusiastic about the magazine, about the readers, and about how well the magazine reaches the readers,” says Manley. “In the absence of numbers he delivered his enthusiasm.”

In Grade 10 English Zikovitz was anything but enthusiastic. He flunked the course, and barely graduated from high school. He did, however, do well in his collegiate carpentry course, and one of his first jobs was helping to build such Toronto landmarks as The Colonnade. Other early jobs: delivering transport trucks from the GM plant in Ontario to British Columbia, though he’d never driven one in his life (“I think I was in Sudbury before I could really figure the damn thing out”); and working as a mechanic in a bowling alley. After taking a course in electronics at DeVry Institute, he took the advice of people who said his calling might be in sales, which brought him to L’actualit? for a short stint. After that, he says, “I went out on the highway and hitchhiked and came back four years later.” At the beginning he took a job washing cars in Frankfurt, Germany, but when the Canadian Helldrivers stunt car team passed through, Zikovitz signed on as the troupe’s advance man, arranging advertising and promotions. The Helldrivers were impressed enough with his work to fly him down to South Africa for their next tour six months later. In 1971, near the end of his journey, Zikovitz found himself in Bangkok, broke. He approached a local English magazine for a job, but was told the company didn’t need another sales guy. A few days later Zikovitz got a call from the publisher. The ad salesman had been robbed and shot while out on the town with his fianc?e. Was Zikovitz still available? (“He survived, and came back six months later, and I was best man at his wedding,” says Zikovitz.)

Returning to Toronto in 1972, he went back to his job at L’actualit?, which he found increasingly unsatisfying: “There was another boss and the two of us didn’t see eye to eye.” He was fired, and says of the experience: “It took me a long time to realize I like to be the boss.” He was looking for a challenge. “It’s not about money,” he adds. “Sure, you could make more money selling cars than selling ads in magazines, but I just wouldn’t find the same satisfaction in it.” His wife, Wendela, notes the irony of Zikovitz’s success as a publisher given that he couldn’t pass Grade 10 English?particularly, she says, as a “publisher of a magazine that’s got a reputation for its writing, not necessarily its ability to make money, but just for its sheer excellence. Maybe it’s perverse.”

Yet to hear Zikovitz talk of magazines it’s clear he has a reverence for the medium. “I think a magazine has a body and soul and emotion to it. I think I was also very, very fortunate,” he says. “I worked for what I felt were three fantastic magazines, TorontoLife, Harrowsmith, and Equinox. All three were run by publishers who had a passion for the editorial product.” Those publishers, Michael de Pencier and James Lawrence, became mentors.

“Toronto Life got me excited about magazines,” Zikovitz says. It was 1973 and de Pencier had just bought the then-struggling publication. “He taught me the old theory that if you produce great editorial that’s written specifically for that market, people will read it and pay for it,” says Zikovitz. “His philosophy rubbed off on me. We didn’t go out and sell against editorial. We sold the type of magazine it is and the passion that the readers had for the magazine.” He stayed for eight years, working his way up to national sales manager and publisher of the magazine’s travel guide.

After a brief run in advertising promotion at the industry association Magazines Canada, Zikovitz was lured by James Lawrence with the promise of working on Equinox, the discovery magazine he was planning to launch. Lawrence’s first title, Harrowsmith, had little in the way of national advertising. Zikovitz was hired to find some and to help with Equinox. Around that time, Lawrence and his wife separated. “We were just coming out with the first issue of Equinox, and she took over Harrowsmith and threw Equinox out of the offices,” Zikovitz remembers with a chuckle. It was from Lawrence that he learned a valuable lesson in magazine publishing. According to Zikovitz, Lawrence made a mistake by launching Equinox whenHarrowsmith wasn’t making a profit. “You can’t lose money on a magazine and then launch another,” he says. “They’ll choke each other and they’ll die.”

In the end Equinox survived for almost 19 years, despite Zikovitz’s assessment, but the lesson he drew about making sound business decisions must have been in his mind when he acquired Explore. Instead of launching an entirely new venture, he bought a “tired” magazine he thought had promise. “CottageLife was quite profitable and we had the money to put into Explore,” he says. “I think we need a magazine to serve all the people who love that lifestyle, whether they live it vicariously or actually live it.”

Strangely, for someone who has built an empire on people’s desire to explore and enjoy the countryside, Zikovitz keeps his business in the heart of the city. The Cottage Life/Explore office in Toronto is in a renovated Victorian house on a quiet street, west of University Avenue, just south of Hospital Row. Except for the green awning with the CottageLife logo, it’s an unassuming building surrounded by nondescript offices and parking lots. Inside, the office is open and inviting. Partitions are minimal and office cubicles are decorated with cottage paraphernalia. As Zikovitz takes me through the place, everyone is cheerful and talkative. One of his favourite maxims is that since life is made up of sleep, work, and relaxation, if you don’t enjoy your work you’ve wasted half your conscious life.

On a wall in the CottageLife trade show department there’s a map of the International Centre in Mississauga, showing the floor plan for last year’s show. The map is massive, over five feet long. Zikovitz points out the modest space originally booked for the first show in 1994, a quarter of what it takes up now, and even then it ended up needing more room. He hired veteran organizer Ian Forsyth to plan the event, but while most trade show exhibitors retain the same booths year after year, Zikovitz wanted to use a rotation system that would ensure no exhibitor got the same booth two years in a row. “I told him it would never work,” says Forsyth. “We discussed it for a couple days and decided that we’d try it Al’s way that year and if it didn’t work, we’d try it my way for the future. We’re still doing it Al’s way.”

To Zikovitz, booking the show is like booking ads in a magazine, placing everything where it fits best, where it’s the most accessible and interesting for the consumer. And while he sets the tone for the show, he also sets the structure, literally. Each year there’s a fa?ade of a cottage porch to act as an entry point to the show, and Zikovitz has helped build it every year since the beginning. “Here’s a guy who owns the company and he’s right in there with the tools and a tool belt,” says Forsyth. “It’s not the small company it was 11 or 12 years ago, but he’s still the guy who will get in there and get dirty.”

A common anecdote among those close to him is that Zikovitz insists on personally changing light bulbs in the office. When I ask him about this, he laughs, showing me a collection of long, suction-cupped poles he uses for the task. He’s also known for unloading fresh copies of the magazine off the delivery van and tidying up the storage space in the basement. “I want to be part of the gang,” says Zikovitz. “I want to keep changing light bulbs, picking up garbage, filling the fridge with beer, and just do what everybody does. When you become part of your team, you understand your team much better.”

In the small world of Canadian magazines, Zikovitz has become a big player. He has an impressive list of extracurricular activities?chair of the Canadian Magazine Publishers Association, board member of the Ontario Media Development Corporation and the Canadian Circulations Audit Board, and former president of both the International Regional Magazine Association and the National Magazine Awards Foundation (NMA)?to add to his reputation as a successful magazine publisher.

He is praised by just about everyone in the business, though some do so grudgingly. For example: Greg MacNeil, president and CEO of Multi-Vision Publishing. In selling the value of advertising in his magazine, Zikovitz is always touting the superiority of his paid-circulation model. Until last year’s purchase of Key Media by St. Joseph Media, which owns a big chunk of Multi-Vision, MacNeil had nothing but controlled-circulation publications in his stable. The difference between the two prompted Zikovitz to tell Report on Business magazine last July, “There’s the reader- driven magazine and then there’s the advertiser-driven magazine, and [MacNeil] would tend to lean more toward the advertiser-driven magazine.” When asked about Zikovitz’s comment, MacNeil says of his competitor, “For Al to say that he doesn’t rely on advertising is pure bullshit.” When asked to comment on Masthead calling Zikovitz a legend, MacNeil laughs: “Well, I’ve met very few legends in this business. Let Masthead call him whatever they want.” Finally, when I tell him that I’ve found very little, if anything, even remotely bad about Zikovitz and ask him if the CottageLifepublisher is perfect, MacNeil’s reply drips with sarcasm: “Well, lucky to find someone that wonderful isn’t it? Hard to believe.” To be fair, MacNeil also says that Zikovitz has “done an excellent job on the magazine.”

But at 62, how long will Zikovitz be doing so? “The ideal for my life is to carry on but bring more people in to help run the business so that I have the time for longer holidays and more strategic thinking,” he says. “I think this company still has a big, long-term future.” In a lower voice, he adds, “One day the right offer will come and I will sell. I have to. I don’t think I’ll be in this business when I’m 82 years old, hanging on to the bitter end.”

In the conference room of the Cottage Life/Explore office, dozens of awards line the walls. They’re stacked on the floor and piled on bookshelves. When I ask him how many there are, Zikovitz says he doesn’t know, but promises to find out. In his home office is the NMA lifetime achievement award he received last year. “It was probably the biggest emotional recognition I have ever had and that could ever be paid to me,” he says. And yet, like most of the awards Zikovitz and his magazines have won, it’s not hanging on any wall. “One day I’ll get around to putting it up.”

Levon Sevunts, the Montreal Gazette‘s foreign correspondent, felt lucky when Northern Alliance commander General Bashir offered to carry him and some other foreign correspondents aboard his armoured personnel carrier to some newly captured Taliban trenches. It was November 11, 2001, just after the fighting had subsided and the Taliban had begun their unexpected retreat from the Shatarai front, in northeastern Afghanistan. Sevunts, the other five foreign correspondents, and some Alliance soldiers stood atop the APC, hanging on to cannons and hooks to steady themselves, as it ventured into a densely mined territory. General Bashir boasted to Sevunts and the other reporters that all Taliban fighters had been cleared out and the ride was safe. “It felt as if we were offered a front-row seat to see evidence of war-Taliban positions before the Northern Alliance had a chance to plant some evidence or tamper with it,” recalls Sevunts.

It was already dark when the APC crossed the second line of vacated trenches. Then a group of Taliban fighters popped up on the right just 25 or 30 metres away and opened fire. The driver made a sharp left turn and headed down a steep hill. The reporters could see red trails streaming through the air in their direction. Some jumped off the vehicle. An ex-Soviet soldier, Sevunts flattened himself on the APC and held on to a cannon, opting to avoid the heavily mined roadside. He realized right away that they were being ambushed; after two more rounds of fire, three of his fellow journalists and some soldiers were missing, and General Bashir was on the radio shouting for backup. Soon the lost soldiers caught up with them. Later that day, when they were sent to comb the area, they found the body of Radio France Internationale reporter Johanne Sutton. The bodies of French radio station RTL reporter Pierre Billaud and German freelance magazine writer Volker Handloik were recovered the following day, their dead bodies stripped of their belongings. They were believed to be the first western casualties in Afghanistan since the American attacks had started on October 7, 2001. By the time the first American soldier was shot on January 4, 2002, nine journalists had already been killed, a further nine arrested, and others wounded. Later, on March 4, the Toronto Star‘s East Asia bureau chief, Kathleen Kenna, was seriously injured in Gardez, Afghanistan.

And right from the start of this spring’s Iraqi campaign, journalists came under fire.The first known casualty was Australian Broadcasting Corporation cameraman Paul Moran, who was killed by a suicide bomber on March 22; at the time, Paris-based media advocacy group Reporters Without Borders said the bomber appeared to have targeted the journalists.

Of course, war reporting has always been dangerous. But what has changed in the past decade or so is that reporters are increasingly targets rather than accidental victims on battlefields that lack clear front lines. The Committee to Protect Journalists estimates that of the 389 war correspondents killed between 1992 and 2001, only 62 died in crossfire; another 298 were direct targets, some shot at point-blank range.

In the days of Ernie Pyle, the quintessential American World War II reporter, things were different, and safer. Then, it was usually clear where the frontline was and reporters always accompanied troops. Few ventured behind enemy lines, since no one on “our” side questioned the justice of the cause against the Germans or the Japanese. But today’s wars are fought in unconventional ways. While western troops rely on air strikes and the opposition is often made up of irregular militias who do not like their activities to be observed, journalists roam the mined and lawless lands, expected to report both sides of a conflict. With few or no friendly troops on the ground, journalists can bear the brunt of the anti-western resentment of locals.

The National Post’s Marina Jim?nez vividly recalls her experiences in October 2001, while reporting from the Pakistani border city of Peshawar on the Afghan refugee influx. She and her translator often found themselves among angry Muslim demonstrators holding effigies of George W. Bush and chanting anti-western slogans. “Young boys came close to us and spat on us, while organizers pushed us back,” says Jim?nez. Another time, when she was investigating a story at a truck stop where truckers from Kabul brought their produce to sell, her translator felt trouble in the air and urged her to get into the car. “I felt hated and angry at the same time,” says Jim?nez of these incidents. “They saw you as a representative of the west and not as an individual reporter seeking the truth. Being westerners and working for the western media, we were considered part of the package.”

Jim?nez was four months pregnant with her first child at the time. Would she consider such assignments now her son is born? “It’s problematic when you have a young child at home, but I wouldn’t completely rule it out,” she conceded in the fall. By late March, though, she was reporting from the Middle East.

Still, despite the increasing chance that a would-be scoop might turn into a deadly assignment, there’s no shortage of volunteers to cover wars, even if they’re inexperienced. In November 2001, for example, Montreal computer-programmer-turned-freelance-war reporter Ken Hechtman was captured by Taliban forces a little more than a month after arriving in the country. Hechtman, who reported for the Montreal alternative paper Mirror, was freed only after considerable diplomatic intervention. Stewart Bell, the National Post’s chief reporter, and others like him believe a committed journalist shouldn’t walk away from a story just because it’s a bit risky. As Bell, who has covered stories in Africa, South Asia, and Afghanistan, puts it: “Firefighters and soldiers don’t abandon their duties when it gets too hot for their comfort.” Sevunts speaks of the same dedication. “It’s like having one of your fellow policemen die in a shootout. Do you quit the job?” he says matter-of-factly.

I have asked myself much the same question.

A cold autumn breeze sweeps through the Caucasian landscape, and the echo of distant mortar fire punctuates the silence. The ill-fated Azerbaijani city of Aghdam, where fierce fighting between the Armenian and the Azeri forces had taken place months earlier, lies open to us, in ruins. It is September 1993, and three other journalists and I are in a convoy entering the newly captured Aghdam, just outside the eastern borders of the disputed enclave of Nagorno Kharabakh. Trying to avoid the mines strewn on the road, our driver follows a track left by the first Armenian tanks to enter the city. Sprawled on a barren stretch of land, Aghdam tells the story of its defeat: abandoned tanks on the roadside, burned out tires littering the road, blackened building fa?ades, and plundered one-storey houses. The city was set on fire by the retreating Azerbaijani troops and the looters have even scavenged its wires and pipes.

Next day, when I’m told an armoured personnel carrier has just exploded on the same road to Aghdam, a shudder passes through my body. “That could have been me,” is the most common thought a journalist has in those moments. But luck had been on my side again. It was the same luck that stayed with me during Lebanon’s civil war, while others ran out of it. No amount of precaution would have saved me from the bullet that pierced the hood of the car my friend and I were leaning on, outside our newsroom in Beirut, striking just two inches away from my right arm. It was 1990, the last phase of Lebanon’s 15-year-old war, during which two Christian leaders fought for dominance over Eastern Beirut.

At that time, I was a reporter for Aztag (“Factor”), the largest Armenian newspaper outside Armenia, published in Beirut. My job was not something distinct from my life as a citizen in a war-torn country. I had grown up witnessing the devastation of the land I was raised in, and after graduation, journalism seemed to be my natural calling. Like millions of others who have lived and worked in the heat of a civil war, I took for granted the ever-present danger-mined roads, the car bombs. Working as a journalist wasn’t much more risky than the life I was living already.

Then, in 1993, I was assigned to report on the war the Armenians and Azeris were fighting over the enclave of Nagorno Kharabakh, put under Azerbaijani control by Stalin in 1921. I looked on my assignment both as a life-changing experience, for I was going to witness history firsthand, and as a mission: I could bring into focus a war waged far away on the Caucasian mountains and ridges nobody cared about. I believed it was my duty to report on my people’s plight, which had been long forgotten under the tight Soviet rule. At the front, my fear dissolved in the face of the chance to make a difference in a war that was supposed to correct an injustice.

But those were my wars. I was, in a way, involved. I still wasn’t sure why foreign reporters risk their lives to cover other people’s conflicts.

Levon Sevunts has one answer. “Wars involve human drama; they are very compelling human stories,” he told me last October. At the time, he was on standby to leave for Kurdistan, as American troops prepared to attack Iraq. “When you go to cover a war, what you’re doing is witnessing turning points of human history, because wars are milestones of history.”

Sevunts has witnessed a lot of turning points. In the late 1980s, as a citizen of the Soviet Republic of Armenia, he served in the Soviet army. And when the Soviet Union started to disintegrate in 1989, he returned to Armenia. A year later he started to write for the country’s newly independent media. In 1992, when the Armenian authorities began to exercise direct control over the news media, he moved to Canada. He studied political science at McGill and started submitting stories to the Gazette. What propels him and others to the battlefields is the intense experience of being part of that raw form of human drama played out at the edge. “It’s been said that the war brings out the best and the worst in people. But I believe it brings the real people; it takes off layers of culture, customs, everything that you were brought up with and conditioned to behave.” In October 2001, Sevunts took up the Gazette’s Afghanistan assignment without reservation.

For NBC’s Jim Maceda, idealism is a motivating factor. He studied at Stanford and the Sorbonne and has been covering conflicts for over a quarter of a century, from Belfast and Beirut to Panama and Yugoslavia. “I come from a generation [the ’60s] that grew up with a sense of social commitment. I like to think that my work just might make a little bit of difference. That matters to me.”

Maceda challenges the idea that journalists are being deliberately killed because they’re journalists. “We do become targets, but that goes with the turf of warfare,” he says. He recalls one occasion when NBC’s armoured vehicle and body armour were stolen by Serb forces at a checkpoint outside Sarajevo. “That was banditry, not some anti-journalistic statement.” Another incident he remembers occurred in the Maglaj Pocket, toward the end of the war in Bosnia. An NBC News team he was with came upon a group of Mujahedin fighters-“the best fighters on the Muslim side,” he says. “We were nearly killed-not because we were journalists, but because we were western and arrogant.” Maceda suggests that if there appears to be a trend toward victimizing journalists in wars, “it’s more to do with their deep pockets than their journalism.” He points out that “we are known to carry large sums of money, travel with expensive equipment, and probably are inept at protecting ourselves,” by which he means most are unarmed.

The Ottawa Citizen’s Mike Blanchfield shares Maceda’s belief that reporters aren’t being purposely singled out. Blanchfield, who also reports for CanWest Publications, believes journalists, including himself, made themselves legitimate targets in Afghanistan after the fall of Taliban. When he climbed a hill overlooking Taliban positions with Alliance soldiers or when he crossed a stretch of land under snipers’ control to reach an Alliance bunker, he took what he terms “calculated risks.” “I got the material I needed and left because I saw no reason to remain in a place which was a legitimate military target,” says Blanchfield. As for the ambush that Levon Sevunts was lucky to survive: “When my friend Levon was ambushed, it was because he and the fellow journalists transformed themselves into a military target by riding an APC. They knew the risks when they did that and weighed them accordingly.” As in any risky situation, only in hindsight the picture becomes clear. I asked Sevunts why they trusted the commander. “At that time it seemed like a very safe trip; the fighting had died down. At no point was there a question that groups of Taliban were hiding in the bunkers.” And, of course, “the idea of being the first reporters to speak to actual Talibans, to see for ourselves, was tempting.”

British foreign correspondent Robert Fisk has worked in the Middle East for 25 years, first for the LondonTimes and, currently, The Independent. He suggests another reason why battlefields are claiming so many journalists’ lives: since the Vietnam War, reporters have increasingly behaved like combatants. As he wrote in The Independent in February 2002, on the occasion of the death of Daniel Pearl: “It was in Vietnam that reporters started wearing uniforms and carrying weapons-and shooting those weapons at America’s enemies-even though their country was not officially at war and even when they could have carried out their duties without wearing soldiers’ clothes.” He continued: “This odd habit of journalists to be part of the story, to play an almost theatrical role in wars, slowly took hold. When the Palestinians evacuated Beirut in 1982, I noticed that several French reporters were wearing Palestinian kuffiah scarves. Israeli reporters turned up in occupied southern Lebanon with pistols. Then in the 1991 Gulf war, American and British television reporters started dressing up in military costumes…as if they were members of the 82nd Airborne or the Hussars… In Pakistan and Afghanistan last year, the same phenomenon occurred. Reporters in Peshawar could be seen wearing Pushtun hats. Then Geraldo Rivera of Fox News arrived in Jalalabad with a gun….It was the last straw.” By “dressing up in combatant’s clothes” or “adopting the national dress of people,” Fisk warned, journalists were “helping to erode the shield of neutrality and decency which saved our lives in the past.”

Sevunts disagrees. Showing me his Afghan beret made of camel skin and an army camouflage jacket, he says, “These saved my life. The day I was ambushed I was wearing them and they made me look like an Afghan soldier atop the APC.” He says the cardinal rule while reporting from war zones is “Among civilians look like one of them or at least be an impartial presence.”

There will be as many points of view regarding what to wear and how to conduct yourself as there are journalists. “Who knows what works?” says Brendan Howley, a journalist based in Stratford, Ontario, who freelanced for Saturday Night in eastern Bosnia and northwestern Montenegro during the summer of 1993. He avoided donning military gear, instead preferring a flak jacket, but “the biggest fear I had had nothing to do with clothing-a mine will blow you to smithereens no matter what you’re wearing,” he says. “Chance is everything in these situations.” Maceda agrees. “No survival skill or body armour will work without sheer luck on your side.” Sevunts is equally fatalistic. “I don’t think we control what happens to us. When your time comes, you can’t do much about it.”

This philosophy will accompany him to Kurdistan, for which he was preparing to leave in late March. In the midst of danger, he will think of the people whose lives are about to change forever in a remote area of the world-and of his family. In 2001, the day he was ambushed, the first thing he did, before filing his now famous story, was try to find a phone to call his wife.

Recently, during some serious channel surfing, I discovered that there’s more to dull Saturday nights than infomercials and decorating shows. Way up in the gods of Rogers Cable TV in Toronto, on Channel 35, packaged between Country Music Television and the Learning Channel, there’s foreign-language television! Cash giveaways, salsa and tango interludes, and performances by international pop stars are all part of the extravaganza featured on what is called “just ethnic” television, flavoured with the musicality of Latin speech. On this particular Saturday night, the viewer hits the jackpot: a group of scantily clad dancers perform salsa while the two Italian hosts patiently stand by for the next segment. A musical trio from Spain performs its latest bubble-gum hit. The full three-hour show resembles more a Vegas-style stage than a demure production typically attributed to ethnic broadcasting.

Welcome to TLN Television, Telelatino for those of you who normally click on through. It is a bridge mix of some original Canadian production and a lot of overseas pickup from Italy (RAI International) and South America (Telemundo, Televisa, and CNN en Espanol) that is known outside of the Latino community?if at all?as the place to get soccer, soccer, and more soccer.

The little station that began on the advertising revenues of local pasta manufacturers and small furniture retailers offering half a lamb with the purchase of a dining suite has morphed several times to get to its position as one of Canada’s premier specialty channels. While it’s been growing up, ethnic broadcasting has multiplied, both in Canada and the United States. Huge waves of immigration have started to look like good pools of disposable income to pay TV, satellite, cable, and mainstream TV. When a mega company like Rogers Cable Inc. starts spitting out channels like OMNI 2, targeted to specific ethnic groups, even competing against its existing multilingual channel, CFMT (expected to be phased into OMNI 1 this year, focusing more on European, Latino, and Caribbean programming), you know it’s survival of the fittest time.

In TLN’s case that means more English-language programming (25 percent, approved by the CRTC). It means more market muscle and expansion through the promotional power of Corus Entertainment. And it means a fundamental shift away from its core programming, to reach outside the Latino community. Some call that maturing; others call it a big mistake.

In the lobby of Hamilton’s Sheraton Hotel, I meet the man who started it all. Sitting across from me is a man of gentle expression and winsome smile. Tieless and dressed in a navy colour suit, Emilio Mascia’s relaxed presence puts me at ease. I can’t quite guess his age, but rule out anything beyond 64 (turns out he’s 71). We talk briefly about Hamilton, his days as the barman at this very hotel, my interest in ethnic media, and, finally, his career. As he begins his story, his almond-shaped, brown eyes begin to sparkle even more behind his rectangular glasses.

Nineteen years ago, Mascia received the go-ahead from the CRTC to launch Telelatino. His second application to the CRTC (the first one was rejected) included a self-produced sum of $1.2 million and an extensive list of Italian and Spanish network contacts at home and abroad. In 1984, during its first year, Telelatino was available only on a pay-per-view basis, and secured just 7,000 viewers. Mascia knew that the $15.95 monthly service fee was the main culprit of poor viewership, but was powerless against the cable company that carried his channel. “For the first three, four years, it was just frustrating because of the attitude of cable companies, and there was nothing you could do about it,” he remembers.

But after a leak that a Rogers Cable employee was illegally decoding pay-per-view channels and selling them on the black market, Mascia got the break he was looking for. He invited the then president of the Ontario Cable Television Association, Stuart Coxford, to his office just to prove to him that Telelatino was in fact a victim of illegal decoders. Coxford and Mascia stood in silence during the operation, but once it was complete (and the independent decoder was sent home with $150 in cash), Coxford added Telelatino to Rogers’ extended basic cable lineup, prompting the ethnic station’s boost in overall viewership. “Everything became much, much easier after that,” recalls Mascia. With shows featuring news from the homeland, community highlights, and musical programs, the foreign-language TLN became a staple in Italian and Hispanic immigrant communities. Everyone was tuning in for a glimpse of this truly Latin channel.

In 1988, hoping to tap into the volatile market of second-generation viewers, Mascia introduced 15 percent English-language content into TLN’s programming. Viewers were regularly treated to show segments called “interficials” that featured everything from music to the history of Canada. On occasion, magazine-style shows were also produced on pressing issues with a guest panel discussing political events in Canada and abroad. Interpreting events occurring in the adopted homeland in Italian or Hispanic context helped promote a sense of belonging for these two expanding communities.

By 1998, TLN’s programming formula was embraced by 3.2 million viewers. But in 2001, during its biggest success, Mascia pulled out of the operation and sold the station to Corus Entertainment for what he calls “a good amount,” or $11 million, to be precise. “I was very pleased,” he says of the transfer. The content look on his face tells me that the timing of his clever move was just right. “There are two things in life that you don’t have to worry about because you will know when they happen to you: that is when you fall in love and when you’re ready to retire,” he says. Mascia now enjoys spending more time with his grandchildren, and he is still very active in the Italian community, especially at fund-raising and community events.

Since then, Telelatino’s programming directive has taken a number of turns. On October 30, 2001, Corus Entertainment (one of Canada’s leading entertainment companies) received approval from the CRTC to acquire controlling interest of Telelatino. As a result, its ownership rose to 50.5 percent, up from 20 percent. John Cassaday, the president of Corus, believes TLN is still “an excellent broad-based television network,” but wants its programming mandate to be even more inclusive to reflect the evolution of Italian and Hispanic immigration. “With many second and third-generation immigrants in Canada, our network must reflect the culture of our two primary targets and be less focused on language,” he says. The acquisition took place at the time when TLN’s annual profit figures were nearly $5 million. “The reason why I think Corus bought Telelatino was because it was making good money and it helped their bottom line,” says Mascia.

Ethnocultural broadcasting is big business in Canada. It is especially important in a city like Toronto, home to people from 169 countries who speak more than 100 languages. One in every three Torontonians speaks a language other than English or French at home, reason enough for ethnic programming to be available on six radio stations, closed-circuit radio services on cable, conventional television stations, and specialty cable services, which collectively broadcast in 40 languages. The 2001 Statistics Canada figures indicate that there are close to 1.3 million Italians across the country and just over 200,000 Spanish-speaking people.

Although TLN programming still includes news, sports, drama, kids’, and variety shows, the number of its original productions has now substantially decreased. Turning to exports like RAI International for its Italian-language content, and Telemundo, Televisa, and CNN en Espanol for its Spanish-language content, Telelatino heavily relies on external sources. TLN’s director of network development, John Montesano, admits that 80 percent of its prime-time programming is derived directly from RAI International, but insists that Telelatino’s original productions require more time and cost more money.

Like all network execs who cry the blues about the expense of original programming, Montesano (the former editor of the now defunct Eyetalian, a glossy quarterly by and about Canadians of Italian ancestry) is quick to point to past specials like Pier 21: Una Vita Strappa in Due (an account of the journey made by Italian immigrants to Canada), Persona (a six-part series about influential Canadians of Italian descent), and weekly shows like Hispanos en Canada (about events within the Hispanic community). “These are all specials that we’ve spent years putting together,” he says. In the near future, Montesano will launch a six-part series on Italian weddings, a documentary on Italian gardens, a one-hour special on the Good Friday procession, and a six-part series on Italian fashion.

Still, some viewers say that TLN’s original programming lacks substance. For instance, the Hispanic lifestyle show Sabadazo, which features fluffy segments on pop culture themes, has been criticized as an effort on TLN’s part to quickly secure a more mainstream audience. And just in case viewers aren’t intellectually stimulated by Sabadazo‘s Valentine’s Day edition on seduction, there is always Graffiti, a show about Toronto’s club scene, where deafening music and mindless interview questions dominate. Club-goers are often pursued relentlessly until they weigh in on their favourite cartoon characters or the never-ending debate over boxers versus briefs. The TLN-produced programming medley would not be complete without GraffitiXS, a show on which a giggly host interviews quasi-pop stars.

Even to the untrained eye, these shows signify TLN’s efforts to include a larger, younger, and more mainstream audience. Angelo Persichilli, a political columnist for the Italian daily Corriere Canadese, says that shows like Sabadazo, Graffiti, and Graffiti XS are badly produced and do not reflect the experiences of the younger generation. According to Persichilli, “There is nothing there to capture the imagination of Italian-Canadians.”

But whether TLN is in fact a viable cultural outlet for the communities it claims to represent is still up in the air. Today, TLN is fighting an even bigger battle, one that could forever change the balance of “original” versus “imported” programming. RAI International, one of TLN’s main content providers, has threatened to pull out of the 20-year-old partnership unless the CRTC allows the state-owned television full and unfiltered access to the Italian community in Canada. According to Montesano, this politically motivated decision is intended to “discredit and embarrass Telelatino.” He insists that the dispute is about a foreign government wanting to control the ethnic media in this country for the purpose of political manoeuvring. “What they’re actually proposing is against the regulatory law in Canada. A foreign government cannot come in and pull all the programming from a partner they have in Canada and compete with them directly…the CRTC will not recognize that,” says Montesano.

But not everyone perceives this as political wrangling. Persichilli says that the clash is about the way RAI programming is treated once it has been purchased. According to him, TLN cuts programming on the hour without any regard for its completion: “The programs are not being treated diligently,” maintains Persichilli. TLN execs, however, insist that the content is only being standardized to North American standards.

On the debate of good versus bad programming choices, even the political community appears to be divided. The executive director of the Canadian Ethnocultural Council, Anna Chiappa, says that she is unhappy with the overall quality of programming featured on Telelatino. She is particularly dissatisfied with the imported variety shows because, she believes, they are irrelevant to the Italian community here. “What they should be doing is having more Canadian content rather than relying on the low-quality programming from overseas that has very little relevance here,” she says. And as for the 25 percent English content initiative, Chiappa feels equally let down: “I was disappointed to learn about that because they originally got their licence to fill a gap.”

But Felix Mora, the former president of the Canadian Hispanic Congress, feels that Telelatino’s ability to reach generations and cultures on a national level, and hence educate people about what it means to be a Canadian of Hispanic descent, is of benefit to both ethnic and mainstream society. Mora insists that the English-language component is necessary and inevitable in ethnic broadcasting, and says that it helps with the integration process. “That’s the main idea?to integrate into society and to share our culture with the mainstream society,” he concludes.

However, loyal viewers like Myrna Hernandez, a 64-year-old retired school teacher, are furious with the recent infusion of English-language content. Although fully bilingual, she is more interested in a truly Latin channel: “I think that TLN is no longer interested in its ethnic audience because one-quarter of its programming is already in English. Is that really the norm for an ethnic station? If so, can we even call it ‘ethnic’?”

Enrico De Dominicis, a 45-year-old independent pension consultant and a Canadian of Italian descent, typifies the core Italian viewer. A member of the Canadian-Italian Business and Professional Association and a man who is plugged in the Italian community in Toronto, he knows all about the many faces of TLN. “Telelatino used to be a strictly Italian and Spanish station, and now it looks like a regular channel.” A die-hard soccer fan who religiously watches Domenica Sportiva (RAI’s weekly edition of soccer highlights and commentary), he says he is particularly unhappy about TLN’s recent launch of the Anglo-packaged edition of the Italian sport: “I don’t mind some BBC guys talking about an Italian league, but it’s not my first choice. I’d rather listen to an Italian commentator,” he says.

But according to TLN president Aldo Di Felice, positive feedback has flooded the station since the launch. Viewers of non-Latin background have also been tuning in for the English play-by-play soccer commentary. “We’re pleasing our core audience because they want more soccer games, and they’re willing to listen to them in any language, and they certainly understand English,” insists Di Felice.

TLN’s recent initiatives have been mostly embraced by second and third-generation Italians and Spanish. According to Gina Carletti, a 25-year-old systems analyst and a Canadian of Hispanic descent, TLN’s current programming mix reflects the kind of shows people of her generation want to see. A fan of Spanish soap operas like Esmeralda and Entre el Amour y el Odio, and Latin video specials, Carletti is supportive of the station’s cross-cultural endeavors: “I think it’s great to have a station like Telelatino step over those rigidly defined ethnic boundaries. I don’t know many ethnic stations that bring together cultures and generations in a non-cheesy way.” Viewers like Carletti have had a huge impact on TLN’s current programming mandate and advertising choices.

Today, multi-million-dollar corporations like Italpasta and Sony Music Canada are two of TLN’s biggest advertisers?a good indication that the changing face of ethnic television is in fact under way. But what this might mean in the long run is anyone’s guess. As we continue to speculate whether an all-inclusive programming formula is suited for an “ethnic” broadcaster, one thing is for certain: lambs and dining room suites aren’t making a comeback.

Ceri Marsh looks like a giddy 16-year-old, with her high ponytail, sleeveless T-shirt, and long denim skirt. Sitting at the head of a long boardroom table at 59 Front Street East in Toronto, she welcomes guests to what is essentially her party. Marsh is actually 35 years old, the senior editor and powerhouse behindFashion 18, a magazine aimed at the lucrative teen market. The editorial team is here this morning to deconstruct the launch issue, which hit newsstands last summer. Page by page, they dissect what worked and what didn’t. Story ideas, layouts, captions, and models are all up for discussion. Teenage opinion is gospel; the oft-repeated “What did the readers think?” determines success and failure. But while the 30-somethings laugh and chat, three interns, the youngest people here by a decade, it seems, sit silent along the exposed brick wall like dateless girls during slow songs at a school dance.

When Leanne Delap, 35, editor-in-chief of Fashion 18 and its older sister publication, Fashion, walks into the room, everyone scrambles to find her a seat next to Marsh. An editor points to a photo of Cameron Diaz: the lighting was too bright, probably because it was a pickup shot from when Diaz was on TRL. “Sorry, what?” asks Delap. Total Request Live, a popular American music video show on MTV, is as familiar to Fashion 18‘s target audience as belly rings and Avril Lavigne. “Oh, I thought she was on some drug or something,” says Delap. Everyone laughs.

Unlike at other teen magazines, the staff of Fashion doubles as the staff of the teen book, and while that can mean a clique of talented writers and editors, even the hippest gen-Xers won’t be completely plugged into the teen scene. It’s a group with fickle members whose tastes change randomly and who, as Flarepublisher and vice-president of Rogers Publishing David Hamilton says, “are a hard bunch to reach. Teenagers are always striving to be something different.” Hamilton says that to his knowledge, Rogers has no plans to launch a teen publication, a decision that sets the company apart from the publishing crowd.

Since the launch of Teen People in 1998, it seems as if every successful women’s magazine has come out with a teen version (CosmoGirl!,1999; Teen Vogue, 2000; Elle Girl, 2001). And until recently, Canadian girls got their fashion content from those American titles. But this summer two Canadian books joined the race hoping to cash in??Fashion 18, published by St. Joseph Media (which, besides Fashion, also publishesToronto Life, Wedding Bells and Gardening Life), and Elle Qu?bec Girl, the fourth teen publication in the international Elle family. (Elle Canada Girl is slated to launch later this year.)

But so far Canadian teens seem satisfied with YM (Canadian circulation 119,000) and CosmoGirl! (Canadian circulation 60,000). The people at Fashion 18 are hoping to sell about 62,000 copies of their next issue. Still, Giorgina Bigioni, publisher of Fashion 18, believes there’s room for a Canadian teen book because Canadian teens want relevant content. “It’s clothes you can buy here in Canadian dollars, contests you can enter, prizes you can win,” she says. But the market may already be tapped out: American circ and ad numbers for this niche have been declining since last year. Hard to believe that home-grown contests will keep readers coming back. It hasn’t worked in the past.

In 1988, Michael Clarke, president of custom publisher Clarco Communications, launched Sass, a magazine for teenage girls. American publisher Matilda Publications launched Sassy that same month and despite a ruling by the Federal Trademark Tribunal that Sassy violated Clarke’s trademark, Canada only saw the one issue of Sass, while Sassy went on to become a magazine legend. Then, in 1993 Clarke teamed up with Maclean Hunter to create Ing?nue. Despite a multimillion dollar launch, the perfect-bound glossy ceased publishing after barely a year. An outspoken member of Ing?nue‘s teen advisory council wrote a piece forThis Magazine about her role at Ing?nue. Leah Ross, now known as Leah McLaren, the columnist for The Globe and Mail, was 17 at the time. She had hoped to “excite the substance-starved minds” of her peers. Instead, she found her job at Ing?nue was to shop and look at makeup. Teen Generation, a free monthly lifestyle magazine, was Maclean Hunter’s second foray into this genre. (Miss Chatelaine, now Flare, was the first.) Launched in 1940 by high school students, it was acquired by Maclean Hunter in 1978 and sold to Quadrelle Publications in 1982. It is now an online publication (funded by the federal government and organizations like TVO) called Tiny Giant.

While American magazines have no trouble pinpointing what teens are looking for, Canadians can’t seem to find the right formula. Sarah Bull, director of marketing and initiatives at Fashion and special project associate publisher for Fashion 18, thinks she knows what our teens want: “A thick, glossy magazine that can compete with U.S. magazines.” Bull was director of business development at Key Media Ltd. before it was sold to St. Joseph Corp. last year. “What that meant was essentially looking for revenue opportunities or brand extensions.” (Fashion started as a brand extension of Toronto Life in 1977. Originally a quarterly, it now comes out nine times a year, and annual ad revenues are over $6 million.) In 2001, Bull toured local schools, speaking to students about what they were looking for in a magazine. Bull also approached teens outside malls and movie theatres, interviewing girls who looked like magazine readers (those wearing trendy clothes).

A group of girls sporting the current teen uniform (sweatshirts and tight jeans or sweatpants and jean jackets) walks by Indigo at Yonge and Eglinton in Toronto. It’s lunchtime and high school students dominate the area. Inside Indigo, Laura and Sachi, both in Grade 9, stand in front of the magazine rack labelled “Young People.” They like: Britney Spears, Triple 5 Soul clothing, and hot boys, like Josh Hartnett. They hate: Christina Aguilera (“She’s slutty,” says Laura) and diet articles (“Because,” she says, “that’s really demeaning”).

Laura, in jeans and a hooded sweatshirt, points out her favourite magazines: CosmoGirl! and YM (the 47-year-old American monthly). Sachi, wearing sweats, reads Seventeen and Twist (both American). The arrival of Fashion 18 didn’t register with Laura, and the first issue didn’t impress Sachi. “I don’t like all the beauty stuff and the makeup stuff and the clothes stuff. I’m not actually gonna buy anything so it doesn’t do any good.” The numbers, however, tell a different story (North American girls spent $30 billion on cosmetics and fashion in 2000). Still, Sachi’s tastes could be more suited to Elle Qu?bec Girl than Fashion 18.

Unlike English Canada, Quebec has paid-circulation teen magazines: there have been three issues of Full fille, published by Amylitho Inc.; Cool! is a monthly owned by Quebecor Media (circulation 100,000);Adorable (circulation 45,000), six years old, is independently published. Suzanne Goudreau, editor of the first issue of Elle Qu?bec Girl (circulation 75,000), says that although some girls in Quebec read American magazines, Quebec culture is different enough to sustain its own uniquely francophone teen magazines.Cool! and Full fille, however, resemble Tiger Beat and other poster-filled pop-star gossip magazines more than fashion magazines, leaving even more room for the heavier editorial content Elle offers. “We falsely think that teens just want to take a look and turn the pages, but they do read,” says Goudreau. With stories like “Je suis homosexuelle,” about a young lesbian, and “Est-ce cool de fumer du cannabis?,” a compilation of teens’ opinions about smoking marijuana, Goudreau has included issues that other magazines wouldn’t touch. “A lot of girls have written, ‘Finally, an intelligent magazine,'” says Goudreau. It’s working for Elle, but intelligence may not be what the majority of teens are looking for.

Until Elle Canada Girl launches, Fashion 18 is the only paid-circulation English-language Canadian teen book, and, according to Bigioni, Fashion 18‘s competition is the American titles. But it’s not only teen magazines that pose a threat. The teen market is notorious for reading up (which is why Fashion named its teen version, aimed at the 12 to 17 market, Fashion 18); women’s magazines also steal teen readers. Sachi likes to read Cosmopolitan‘s Cosmo Confessions, where women write about their exploits (think sex in public places), the grown-up version of YM‘s Say Anything, where teens write about their embarrassing moments (imagine falling down the stairs at school or blood-stained white pants). In its January 2003 issue, Quebec’sAdorable, originally geared to girls 11 to 17 years old, included a sex how-to booklet in an effort to entice readers aged 16 to 24.

And while sex obsesses teens in a pretty universal way, Canadian kids do see cultural differences between themselves and their U.S. counterparts. In focus groups, Toronto teens explained them to Bull this way: Canadian girls generally are not cheerleaders, they have semi-formals not proms, and they not only watch hockey??not football??they play the game too. Despite these differences, Canadian teen magazines may be seen as uncool. “I just can’t think of Canadian magazines as being good,” says Sachi. When it comes to Canadian books she thinks of Maclean’s??the ultimate in boring. American titles, like lip gloss for 12-year-olds, have more glitter, and glitter sells.

Elle Girl launched in the U.S. a week after September 11, 2001. Brandon Holley, editor-in-chief, says that despite the dismal economy, Elle Girl managed to find a readership and keep advertisers. She explains the magazine’s survival in the crowded teen market by pointing out Elle Girl’s differences. It’s aimed at 16- to 20-year-olds, an older audience than most, it’s fashion-heavy whereas most teen mags, she argues, are lifestyle-based, and it’s global, covering trends in other countries. As for brand extensions, Holley says there is no research proving readers will move through the magazine family, but she points to success in the fashion world to back up the theory. Calvin Klein seduced young shoppers with his CK Jeans and cK one perfume (hipper, cheaper knock-offs of the main lines), until they were old enough for the adult versions and hooked on the Calvin Klein label.

Despite Elle‘s successful launch, CosmoGirl! is still the most popular kid in class. Launched in August 1999, it already has a monthly circulation of one million. Executive editor Susan Schulz attributes this success to the magazine’s credo “The reader is queen.” (She also points out that the staff of CosmoGirl! are mostly under 30.) Schulz says that both CosmoGirl! and Cosmopolitan are “relationship bibles.” The women’s magazine focuses on sex and men (with a nod to friends, family, and work); CosmoGirl! focuses on friends, fashion, and self-esteem.

The original magazine was repositioned during the sexual revolution and was supposed to empower women, but became a “how to please your man” manual. Cosmo may be a curious role model for teen empowerment, but the magazine makes loads of cash (U.S. $274 million in ad revenues last year), so it’s a strong business model. The teen book is a slightly confusing compromise??a mix of standard Cosmo-type fare (Boy-O-Meter, where girls rate a boy based on a photograph) and esteem-boosting sections like Girl Talk, where girls write about pet peeves, what they wish they knew in high school, and what being aCosmoGirl! really means. (A London, Ontario, reader answered this way: “Being able to eat a pint of ice cream and feel no guilt after.”) There are also sections on finding jobs and managing money.

Even Fashion 18 focus group participants were captivated by CosmoGirl! The girls were asked to bring examples of what they liked and didn’t like from magazines they had at home. CosmoGirl! was the favourite. Marsh admits she was happy about that?she likes CosmoGirl! too. “It’s not saccharin. It’s not overly prescriptive and teen readers really appreciate that.”

On the second floor of the Royal Meridien King Edward Hotel on King Street, in Toronto, the Knightsbridge room is full of round tables covered in white tablecloths, crystal water glasses, and silver decanters. This is definitely not the mall. Potential Fashion 18 advertisers are here to study the spending habits of the teenage girl.

They learn that teens spend for the sake of spending. Teens love extravagance and magazine readers spend more money than non-magazine readers. (There are 938,000 12- to 17-year-old girls in English Canada alone.) Approximately 70 percent of them read between six and 10 magazines a month. One presenter changes his tone and reminds the advertisers to be careful. Young girls are very vulnerable. Companies should be responsible in the way they advertise and the products they promote. (According to Statistics Canada, over 400,000 girls between the ages of 12 and 19 are regular drinkers.) The last presenter is a teen psychologist who stresses the importance of giving teens the chance to “be true to themselves.”

This is what Marsh hopes to bring to her readers. “We just want to tell girls how fantastic they are and that the world is wide open to them and to go ahead and be a weirdo,” she says. The first issue of Fashion 18included articles like “Globetrotters,” about exchange programs, and “You Are Dead at Recess,” about bullying and how it affects people. The issue also featured teen girls who design their own clothes or run small businesses. It may not be the kind of hard-hitting content that McLaren would ask for but it’s more intelligent than “Survival of the Sexiest” (from CosmoGirl!).

Sharlene Azam, former editor of Reluctant Hero, a Canadian quarterly, and editor of several books for teens, states the obvious: being a teenager is a strange place to be, because you’re not only striving for individuality, you’re also hoping to fit in. Reluctant Hero, no longer in print (but soon to re-emerge as an online publication) was written entirely by teens except for Azam’s editorial. Topics varied from politics to sex to beauty. “Teens are interested in reading what other teens have to say. It’s kind of like validation and that validation is so crucial,” she says. Azam acknowledges the importance of a grown-up voice in teen magazines since teens are looking for a nod from the adult world that confirms what they are saying is important. But she says the fastest way to lose their trust is to pretend you’re like them.

Another way to lose their trust is to tell them which celebs aren’t worth idolizing. “Is it our place to be saving girls?” asks one editor at the Fashion 18 planning meeting. The editor is wondering about how far they should go when making fun of celebrities. In the first issue, the caption under a picture of Christina Aguilera (the pop diva best known for her risqu? music video “Dirrty”), with bright red lipstick, white-blond hair, and thick black eyeliner, reads, “Whoa. Does she own a mirror or what?” It may have been catty but readers didn’t seem to mind.

They did mind editors poking fun at the more innocent Olsen twins, who have a financial empire, a TV show, a cartoon, movies, their own dolls, and a fashion line. The editors complained that the fresh-faced sisters showing up at the Oscars was inappropriate and that they should “just go away already, because they make us really hostile.” E-mail poured in. It turns out that girls love the Olsen twins. This is taken very seriously. “So I guess that’s the rule: we can rip on Christina, just don’t touch the Olsen twins,” says one editor. “We just have to remember that we’re trying to tell these girls ‘Don’t get bullied’ and yet we’re basically bullying other girls.”

Before becoming a staff member at Fashion 18, Leah Rumack, who wrote “Who Says Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend?” for the magazine, about the benefits of having a guy as your best friend, acknowledged the difficulty of writing for teenagers. “You just Toronto Star it,” she said then. “You can’t be too raunchy or too ironic or too clever. I don’t think 17- and 18-year-old cool chicks are reading teen magazines. I think you’re probably talking about 13- or 14-year-olds.” Since becoming features editor, Rumack looks at it differently. She says you have to go back in your mind to when you were 17 and couldn’t wait for your Sassy to come in the mail. “You try to write to the girl who was cool, who was you,” she says. Rumack says she’s doing her best to make the second issue as radical as you can make a publication that is heavily dependent on advertisers (the second issue had a story on the first gynecological exam and a feature on the word “slut”). “And you can’t piss off too many parents.” They write letters to the editor and cancel subscriptions. (One mom was disappointed with the prices of the products featured in the beauty section; her daughter could not afford $25 Chanel lip gloss.)

For Marsh, it was important to have contributors like Rumack and Lynn Crosbie, a feminist writer, poet, and cultural critic who wrote a quiz for the magazine called “How Do You Know if He Likes You?” “We all seemed to have a similar vision and the most important thing to us was to keep the magazine as smart and as good and as beautiful as the main magazine,” says Marsh.

Posters of pop idols ripped from the pages of magazines adorn the wall above Laura’s bed. The black-and-white shot of a young shirtless hunk came from CosmoGirl!, her favourite magazine. Sitting on her bed, a Tiffany bracelet dangling from her wrist (she used all her Chanukah and birthday money to buy it), she talks about the first issue of Fashion 18 months after it was released. Laura is impressed. She’ll buy the next issue. Still, Fashion 18 and Elle Canada Girl are up against some established glamourous titles. Their audience is smitten. Despite all her praise, Laura still ranks her top five magazines this way: CosmoGirl!,YM, Teen People, Fashion 18, and Twist. “Fashion 18 is really good,” she says, “but I am addicted to CosmoGirl!“

Custom publishing has no integrity. Or at least that is what I used to think. After nearly four years in the journalism program at Ryerson University, I was left with the impression that integrity could not exist within the pages of a custom publication. I assumed that after my university education there was no way I would let myself end up at “one of those custom places.”

So I decided to write a feature on the topic. And, since I believed so strongly that there was no integrity in custom work, that is what I set out to prove. I researched, I interviewed, I wrote endless drafts?and, along the line, my thoughts shifted drastically.

Gary Butler was one of the first interviewees on my hit list. As editor of Rev and Pursuit, products of Multi-Vision Publishing and funded by Imperial Tobacco, he’d surely be a great source of information and opinion.

We meet in a small coffee shop. Butler surveys the space, searching out the location of the best table. Finally he sees it: the window seat. Two wooden chairs at a small round table, next to white blinds letting in the sunlight from Bay Street, downtown Toronto. “This is the seat,” he declares, with a triumphant smile and a double thumbs-up.

A few minutes pass. He is full of energy?straightening his green shirt, sipping black coffee, gesturing as he speaks. Then I ask the question he’s been waiting for: Does custom publishing have integrity? His hands stop moving, he looks me directly in the eye, and he answers: “Absolutely.

“I don’t think Canada has been ready to feel the impact of custom publishing,” he says. “I think they’re still trying to figure out exactly what it means.” And I think Butler has hit it right on the money. Even within the industry, they’re still grappling with it. Perhaps that is why the debate about integrity rages on, but doesn’t seem to go anywhere.

No one really knows what custom publishing is or what it means to the magazine world. The publications are not magalogues, and they are not magazines. So what are they? People can’t even agree on how to define custom magazines, let alone on whether they have integrity or not.

According to Butler, “A custom publication has a client who wants some sort of lifestyle entertainment magazine that will also double as a catalogue. The magazine is not reliant on advertising, because the client is paying for that magazine to exist in the first place. The client also furnishes a database of people that are in the demographic of reader interest.”

This database is handed over to a magazine, which delivers instant readership. In the cases of Rev andPursuit, clientele is established through surveys which ask subjects if they smoke. If so, they have the option of receiving a free magazine. If no, they say good-bye to the subscriptions. Motion, published by Redwood Custom Publishing for General Motors, follows the same target readership principles. Owners of GM cars receive the magazine, and GM gets additional exposure to an audience it values.

Eric Schneider is Redwood’s president and CEO. He offers a different definition of a custom magazine, couched in marketing terms. It is not simply a catalogue, he says; it is “much more of an exercise around customer relationship management, which is really a business perspective of understanding your customer, building a relationship with the customer, and catering to your customer’s needs?recognizing that the customer controls that relationship, not the other way around.”

Both Schneider and Butler use the term “catalogue,” despite the fact you cannot order merchandise from most custom magazines. Each custom magazine does, however, usually advertise many products that can be purchased from the company or client funding the magazine.

Since there is no industry-wide agreement on terms, I have to choose my own. For the purposes of this article, I am combining the explanations offered by Butler and Schneider. A custom magazine is one that is sponsored by a company and contains a mixture of “catalogue” and editorial content. This mix is created to provide an engaging read for a target audience, and, as a result, to serve the company’s marketing objectives.

Of course, some people don’t waste time trying to define what kind of magazine a custom publication is. In their view, they are not magazines at all. One apparent member of this camp is John Macfarlane, editor ofToronto Life and a former member of the National Magazine Awards’ board of directors. He believes that custom magazines have no place in the awards. When asked why not, during an interview for a Ryerson Review article in 2000, he was quoted as replying, “Do you let a cat into a dog show?”

Once I realized that my interviewees did not even share a common definition of terms, I no longer expected a cool, analytical debate. I was right. Each person on each side was firm in his or her own arguments, and defended them passionately.

Yet, even though they couldn’t agree on what conclusions to draw, they were in surprising agreement on what issues to consider. The same three arose in each case: editorial control, objectivity, and responsibility to the reader. As people argued their cases, I made yet another discovery. “Integrity” was as hard to pin down as “custom magazine.”

The Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines integrity as “adherence to a code of values.” The first definition in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary calls it “moral uprightness; honesty.”

James Chatto, senior editor of the Liquor Control Board of Ontario’s Food & Drink and Harry Rosen’s Harry, has another explanation. “Integrity, I suspect, cannot be defined by consensus,” he says. “It’s a private notion and relies on a certain level of self-awareness and candour in the inner monologue, combined with a desire to live up to one’s own moral standards.” Chatto, who’s also an award-winning food writer, goes on to say that it also means never jeopardizing those values just for the sake of an assignment or paycheque. Above all else, though, integrity is about not compromising honesty or morals, and that is an individual judgement call.

As I found out, every individual can make a very different call.

For example, Felix Vikhman, currently a freelance writer for publications such as National Post Business, equates integrity with pure journalistic purpose. That’s why he believes that no one should even claim to think that custom work possesses integrity. Vikhman was once a part of the custom industry, working onBrowser, a custom mag briefly published by Redwood for Dell Computers. That experience led him to believe custom work “can’t ever pretend to be equal in journalism.” He explains that “all those founding principles of honesty and fairness and research and doing a service to your reader and all that stuff?they are not the founding principles of a custom magazine.”

The trouble is, applying those founding principals is not as simple as it may seem. People on both sides of the debate refer to them equally when defending their opinions. Consider the first of the big three issues: editorial control. It is a touchy subject in all areas of print journalism. The distinctive nature of the touchiness in custom publications is that in their publications, editorial content relies heavily on a third party: the client for whom the book is published. That means the client ultimately controls editorial range, issue lineups, even the fate of individual stories. I discovered, though, that different clients exercise different degrees of control.

The LCBO’s Food & Drink, for instance, limits its critiques to products that readers can find and purchase in its stores. While Chatto is a wine connoisseur who would love to regularly review the most expensive wines on the market, he says he has absolutely no trouble working within the defined range. His client, he explains, limits the subject matter but doesn’t dictate content within that range. “There is always a sort of mandate to do what the client wants,” says Chatto. “I don’t have a problem with that.”

Jane Francisco must also answer to a client’s mandate, for she is the editor of Glow, the beauty and health service magazine brought to readers by Shoppers Drug Mart. Her client, like Chatto’s, limits editorial range. The agreement is that 90 percent of health and beauty products covered in Glow will be Shoppers Drug Mart merchandise. She points out that the involvement ends there (another similarity with Chatto’s situation).

Francisco’s client does not dictate content, or approve any of the story ideas. This is why she says that, despite the third-party involvement, Glow is very much like a traditional magazine.

Not all clients behave like these two. Francisco has also been involved in other custom magazines and agrees that the level of integrity drops whenever you have to run articles past the client. “Is limiting content in a specific article making the article less useful?” she asks. “Probably not. Are they hiding something? Probably not. But at the same time, it just means they have control, not the editor or writer.”

On the other hand, when you look carefully at journalism, do you see any magazine where the editor has total control? No. Publishers, ad-sales directors, bean counters, major advertisers?all kinds of interests may come to bear on editorial content, even in traditional titles. So perhaps those who say custom content is dishonest should take a look at other media outlets as well.

The second key issue in this integrity debate is objectivity. How objective can the articles be in a sponsored publication? How honest is the magazine?

No custom publication is going to run negative reviews of a sponsor’s product. For example, Motion would never bash the newest GM car?it will always feature the company’s best vehicles instead. The question is whether or not this is dishonest. No, it’s not, say the writers and editors of custom publications I spoke with, as long as these criteria are met: first, they are free to include any negative points about an otherwise good product; second, they personally feel that emphasizing what’s good truly serves their readers; and third, readers have accurate expectations of the publication. Under those conditions, they say, they can remain honest and true to their moral code.

Chatto, for example, is free to criticize LCBO items that do not meet his standards of quality, but he prefers to focus on ones that he can honestly recommend to his readers. His readers are happy about this, he says, which means that he is too. He explains, “Everybody else is out there badmouthing people. I feel very fortunate that I can pick and choose what I write about. And what is there on the page has integrity.”

Several other writers gave me this theory of positive reviewing as well. I considered it, but I didn’t really go for it. As a consumer, searching for bargains and quality merchandise, I would rather be alerted to products not worth purchasing. That way, I would save time and money.

But is that reaction just a matter of personal reader preference or is it an integrity issue? This raises the last of the three criteria that my custom-publishing interviewees suggested: reader expectations. A policy of true-but-always-good news, they argue, has no integrity problems?as long as that is what readers expect from the magazine. What it all comes down to is not deceiving the reader.

Redwood president Schneider says custom magazines are very honest with their readers. They don’t hide their affiliations, and readers?who are smart people?know exactly what to expect from a client-based mag. They don’t open up GM’s Motion to uncover the gems being produced at Ford, for example. There is no trickery involved.

And that brings us to the key issue of responsibility to the reader. Here, at first, everyone agrees. A magazine should serve the reader. But what serves the reader? Now the camps quickly go their separate ways.

Jennifer McLean, former vice-president of marketing and new business at Redwood, starts by reinforcing Schneider’s point: “If readers are getting a custom magazine, they recognize that it is a marketing tool, and they recognize there’s a product being sold because right on the cover they see logo identification for a client.” She then points out that readers not only know what the magazines are, they value them. Which means their interests are being served. Under these conditions, says McLean, “the whole integrity issue is ludicrous.”

Felix Vikhman has other thoughts. Though he gives much credit to Redwood for really wanting to put out good products, he can’t agree that they have integrity. “This is why custom magazines can never, ever, ever have editorial integrity, no matter what they say,” he begins. “It’s because with a regular magazine, its responsibility is to the reader. That’s it. And in a custom magazine environment, responsibility at the end of the day is to the client.”

Vikhman makes a good point, I think. The whole idea of a custom magazine is to promote a company, which logically suggests that the company’s interests will take priority over those of the reader. Even though editors and writers gear their pieces toward the reader, the client is the publication’s main concern.

I had to stop and think about whether this meant the editors and staff were truly serving those readers. Again, I believe that can only be decided on a case-by-case basis. If a magazine is honest and a reader is not being fooled, then, yes, the reader can benefit from the publication.

One of the frustrating things about the debate is that it seems to be never-ending. Dr? Dee has been in both worlds in the magazine industry and is tired of the way people look at the custom side. Currently an associate editor at Saturday Night, she was once co-editor of both Rev and Pursuit. She enjoyed her work with those magazines and was always proud of the editorial quality. That is why she found it so discouraging whenever people dismissed Rev and Pursuit as “just” custom publications (or, worse, magalogues) and refused them the respect she felt they deserved.

So, after all this research, what is my conclusion about integrity and custom publishing? I now think it all boils down to honesty. If a custom-magazine team is producing an honest publication, then all power to them. But if they are lying to readers, then no, they don’t deserve respect.

Perhaps I am ignorant in the world of journalism, having not entered it yet, but I would like to begin, and finish, my career with honesty. When I applied to the journalism program, I wrote an admissions essay that revolved around honesty. And now, in my graduating year, I still hold that value close.

I have therefore decided that I will gladly work for a custom publication, as long as I can remain honest. And I think that it is possible. My view now is that integrity issues exist throughout the industry, not just in custom magazines, and that it is up to us to maintain our own standards and evaluate each publication on its individual merits.

“Grey? I can picture the logo—lower case, sans serif type, widely spaced. Very clean look, very sharp,” says Doug Bennet, publisher of Masthead magazine. “I would bet you 50 bucks someone’s going to do it at some point.”

There’s a reason Bennet can envision this sort of general interest publication, aimed at older people simply because they’re older: it’s been done before and more than once. Today, several magazines are targeting an over-50 readership in precisely this way. But for so many reasons, it’s a wrongheaded approach that will never really fly. Why ghettoize readers according to age? Even in the teen market, such a strategy would spell death. You wouldn’t find a Goth reading Seventeen or a young feminist reading Tiger Beat. So why do publishers think a 50-year-old is going to read a general interest senior’s title? Especially when it lumps together a diverse assortment of readers based on one weak link: a vague age group.

After all, it’s not as if people’s interests evaporate at a certain age. “When you turn 50, you’ll still want to read Atlantic Monthly, and still want to buy Chatelaine and still want to read Saturday Night. Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you’re not going to read those other magazines. It just doesn’t make any sense,” says 43-year-old Bennet.

It’s no wonder publishers are eager to profit on the huge swell of Canadians who are aging. In 2001, according to Statistics Canada, 29 per cent of the population or approximately nine million Canadians were 50 or older. By 2021, this group is likely to soar to more than 40 per cent or approximately 14 million Canadians. For the first time, the old will outnumber the young?and publishers see vast demographic potential. Or maybe not.

No one likes to be categorized by age, and a title aimed at older people simply because of their age is, to put it mildly, off putting. “I’m 62, but feel 45,” says Cottage Life publisher Al Zikovitz. “I still go ice climbing, heli-skiing and scuba diving. I don’t think about all of the ailments that come along with what seniors’ magazines are talking about, I don’t have any ailments, I’m very healthy. And I don’t want to think about it. I still play hockey every week. I still do all those things. So, my head is really in the 40 plus sort of group. I think a lot of people don’t want to think of themselves as being old.”

And there’s the catch. Senior magazines are targeting an audience that doesn’t see itself as the target. “I think boomers specifically are going to be very resistant to the notion of being pigeonholed as seniors. Anything like that will probably be a turn off,” says 56-year-old D.B. Scott, a magazine consultant.

Regardless, there are 29 magazines listed under the mature market category in the January 2003 edition ofCanadian Advertising Rates and Data. Two of them boast hefty circulation numbers. Good Times, produced by Seniors Publications, a division of Transcontinental, had a circulation of 152, 637 in 2002. Not available on the newsstands, the magazine relies on direct mail campaigns and word of mouth to bring in subscribers.50Plus readers, who in 2002 numbered 207, 722, receive the magazine in the mail as one of several benefits of membership to the Canadian Association of Retired Persons (CARP)?along with discounts and special reduced rates on travel bookings, car rentals and insurance.

Despite healthy-sounding numbers, both magazines’ circulations pale beside those of other Canadian broad general interest magazines. In 2002 Canadian Living came in at 540,224 and Maclean‘s, at 450,615. Readership numbers tell a similar story. While Print Measurement Bureau (PMB) readership results for 2002 listed both Good Times and 50Plus at a respectable four readers per copy, PMB readership for Toronto Life and Canadian Business rated, respectively, 10.1 and 12.1 readers per copy.

Zikovitz says the relatively low numbers for seniors’ titles aren’t surprising: “What you have here is an age group, but you don’t have a lifestyle.” True, although even that age grouping doesn’t gel. The 50Plus market includes people born at the beginning of the baby boom?which, according to demographer David Foot, spanned 1946 to 1966?and those born just after the turn of the 20th century. As Scott points out, “A 70-year-old now was born in the early ’30s, entirely different circumstances from someone who has just turned 55 who is just in the leading edge of the baby boom. They could come from different planets.”

And indeed, when 50Plus was revamped to become “more sophisticated, younger and to appeal to the needs and the concerns of the aging baby boomers,” as the late 50Plus editor/publisher David Tafler described it, the magazine upset its older, conservative readers. A 2002 cover story on interracial families in50Plus drew angry responses.

“We got letters about that rainbow family cover from people saying ‘why would you put those people or people with turbans on the cover? Why do you promote those kinds of things? Cancel my subscription.’ But you get ten or twelve of those. It’s not a significant number and even if it were we have a responsibility to represent everyone in our demographic and we try very hard to do that.”

So, how do you position the editorial for such a disparate lot of readers? Here’s where stereotypes rear their heads. Judging from the soft middle-of-the-road content and age-related service pieces, readers are mainly ailment-plagued blue-hairs with very conservative values. They want advice on how to manage everything from their health to their finances, and plan to while away their vacations aboard cruise ships.

A closer look at the two biggest titles backs this up. 50Plus magazine emerged from CARPNews, a newsletter sent to CARP members when the organization began 15 years ago. It then evolved into a tabloid newspaper and finally, in 1999, became a standard-sized glossy magazine. The October 2002 issue paints a pretty clear picture of what the magazine is all about. Devoted to the topic of health, it ran with a cover story called “Aging Well?Guaranteed.” On the cover shot, a fit-looking gray-haired man in shorts sprints across the page. It includes pieces such as “Tests to Take at Every Age” and “Get Physical,” outlining medical tests seniors should have done and exercises that are good for the heart, flexibility, balance and posture. The magazine is heavy on service journalism, whether it’s focused on health, finance or travel.

Good Times targets those who can afford a comfortable retirement. With a light blonde bob hairstyle and pink blazer, editor Judy Brandow is as upbeat as her magazine. “Our mission is to help readers make the best of this time of their life. The person we’re thinking about when we’re pitching a story is the 60-year-old. A person planning to retire or who has already retired.”

The magazine began in 1990 as the English-language sister publication to Le Bel Age. This French version of the magazine was started in 1987 by publisher Francine Tremblay, who felt that people like her then 58-year-old mother didn’t have any magazines to read that reflected their lifestyles. The fact that Brandow is the former editor of Canadian Living is not surprising since she describes Good Times as a retiree’s Canadian Living. Almost 70 percent of Good Times‘ readers are female. A typical cover image shows the smiling face of a stylishly coiffed older woman who has a few more wrinkles than the typical women’s magazine cover girl.

Even stories with the potential for political edge are soft. In November 2002, a feature profile on 64-year-old Roy Romanow followed his life story from a personal angle. “We did touch on the health report, but that’s not the story,” says Brandow. “The story is ‘who is this man that’s going to be shaping our health care?”

“Keeping the Faith and Your Health Too” discussed how religion can help some people recover from illnesses more quickly. Service pieces covered online collectibles auctions as well as financial matters like life insurance and retirement savings. Travel and recipe sections are regular sections, but Brandow is especially proud of the magazine’s beauty and fashion coverage. “We do beauty. People want to look their best?and I don’t think you’d find any other magazine, anywhere that does beauty stories on women in their ’80s.”

But many women, even those well into their ’70s, don’t identify with their age group. As June Callwood, now 79, wrote in the 2001 book Dropped Threads: “The face I see in the mirror is that of a very wrinkled, very spotted old woman with loose skin under her jaw and teeth shading to orange. This apparition never gives me a moment’s pang because she clearly isn’t me. This is not denial on my part: I simply feel no connection to that elderly person. In my mind’s eye I look the way I did for most of my life, with a face and body neither so beautiful nor so ugly as to require upkeep.”

At 62, Toronto Sun relationship columnist Valerie Gibson doesn’t identify with the target audience for other reasons. The author of Cougar: A Guide for Older Women Dating Younger Men, Gibson is known for debunking the stereotypical look of older women. Her criticism lies in the magazines’ lack of attention to dating and sexuality and alternative lifestyles. “They prefer that you’re in a couple and you’re going off on cruises. There’s a sort of average happy North American life aspect to these magazines, that everybody is nice and comfortable financially and comfortable in their relationships,” says Gibson, explaining what she calls the Disney version of life these magazines project.

“There’s still the general idea that when you get to a certain age you’re supposed to shut down and knit your grandkids booties and put a shawl on your shoulders and forget you’re desirable.”

Advertisers, too, would appear to accept this stereotype. Like the readers themselves, advertisers don’t want to be ghettoized and have their products associated with a stereotypical image. But perhaps most importantly they don’t seem to register the spending power of many seniors.

In “The portrayal of older characters in magazine advertising,” a study published in 1998 by the Journal of Marketing Practice: Applied Marketing Science, authors Marylyn Carrigan and Isabelle Szmigin would beg to differ. “Estimates suggest that the over-45s have nearly 80 percent of all financial wealth in the U.K. and are responsible for 30 per cent of consumer spending.” According to the United States Census, 50-plus households control 41 percent of all discretionary income, totaling $169 billion, while Canadians over 50 spend $35 billion a year on retail goods and services and control 55 percent of discretionary dollars.

The disposable income of seniors notwithstanding, advertisers are unconvinced that this demographic can be influenced by advertising. Traditionally the most sought after advertising market is the 25-to 49-year-old. “Most of the activity tends to be directed towards the lower end of the age spectrum, because many consumers have not really established their buying patterns or their brand loyalties. They’re moving into income groups where they have to start experimenting. So it is better to spend dollars against an age group where you do have a better chance of impacting them as far as their brand loyalties are concerned,” says Hugh Dow, president of M2 Universal, a media buying and planning firm.

But Joy Sanguedolce, who has worked as a media planning supervisor for the last two years at Cossette Media, disagrees. It’s her job to figure out what media outlets a client should advertise. Recently the 26-year-old handled a campaign for Shopper’s Drug Mart to find media outlets to promote the chain’s senior’s day. “The myth that older people are set in their ways and don’t want new products is incorrect. They have the money and the time to investigate new products?any good media planner knows to look beyond the numbers.”

But stereotypes about older consumers still exist in the advertising industry. Companies that produce cars, alcohol and tobacco spend lots on advertising, but little of it is placed in senior publications. For example there is only one ad for a Chevrolet Impala in the October 2002 issue of 50Plus. However, there are ads for Exlax and One Touch Ultra hearing aid.

An even better way to analyze how these publications are faring is to take a look at their editorial/advertising ratios. While a 40/60 editorial/advertising split is considered healthy, 50/50 is considered the minimum ad ratio for a magazine’s survival. Any ad percentages that dip below 50 are troubling at best. 50Plus clocks in at roughly 62 percent editorial, 38 percent ads; Good Times at 68 percent editorial and 32 percent ads. Perhaps even more revealing are the publications’ ad rates. The cost-per-thousand for a full-page, four-colour ad in Maclean’s is $72 and $58 in Canadian Living, while the CPM for Good Times is a modest $52.

Another reason advertisers aren’t flocking to these publications is their general-interest positioning. Sanguedolce notes that many advertisers prefer vertical publications?which focus on one subject such as cooking or golf?for promoting their products because the target audience is more sharply defined.

In the U.S. some publishers are pointing new seniors’ titles in that direction. In September 1998, Moremagazine was launched as a fashion, beauty and lifestyle book for women over 40. Best Life debuted in November 2002 as a health magazine targeted to boomer men. Still, it is too early in the game to know if these titles will flourish or flop. In the general-interest category, the market is pretty much the same as in Canada. 50Plus‘s U.S. counterpart, Modern Maturity, published by The American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), has a circulation of 20.5 million, although, again, the magazine is just one of several benefits of membership in AARP. In 2001, AARP made a stab at publishing a general-interest senior’s title with My Generation, a magazine that hoped to take advantage of AARP’s younger boomer membership. It died in 2002 and has since been integrated into Modern Maturity.

While vertical publications that interest seniors may be one way to reel in that fast-growing grey demographic, there’s another solution that makes solid editorial and advertising sense. In the future, suggests D.B. Scott, we may see broad general interest magazines simply adjusting their editorial content to accommodate the oncoming “gray revolution.” This change could occur subtly?by adding subject matter relevant to older people or covering general topics from a more age-inclusive perspective. Or it might take place more obviously, with special sections. Either way, it makes eminent sense to take advantage of an existing loyal readership?not to mention an established advertising base.

As things stand now, general-interest seniors’ publications are facing a difficult and daunting task. With a target audience that doesn’t want to think about getting old, the biggest obstacle these titles face?demographic denial?may never change.