I’ve known foreign correspondents who confess to becoming so addicted to war, they feel lost without a new one to cover. Although I spent a decade in and out of conflict zones, I never had that problem. The Fear Factor, as well as aging, saw to that. It never caused me to flee a war or dodge an assignment, but I sometimes worried my work might suffer after repeated exposure to conflict. There’s no point in going into a combat area unless you can perform exceptionally well – you don’t risk your life to do mediocre work. So if you’re honest you ask yourself if you’re still willing to face the risk, and as dangers to war correspondents increase each year, so does the Fear Factor.

Much has been written about the unprecedented casualties among such journalists in the past decade. There are excellent studies now emerging about post-traumatic disorders suffered in the profession. However, relatively little has been written about how one’s professional edge may be worn down by the Fear Factor. I’ve seen a handful of cases where nerves cracked and journalists or crews fled the field. I’ve also observed legendary veterans of rock-solid nerves like BBC’s Kate Adie and CBS’s Alan Pizzey – men and women who survived decades of wars and are still anxious to go where fighting is fiercest. I sympathized with the former, admired the latter, and increasingly sought to keep in the hazy middle ground. I would run what I calculated were acceptable risks, and a few times even bet my hide for exclusive coverage. But between the ages of 30 and 40, I saw enough and felt enough to lose any taste for heroics.

When I first covered wars in Central America and Lebanon in the 1980s, I went with a sense of adventure and purpose. I even found my first experience of lying in a ditch under mortar fire more fascinating than fearful. My innocence, like so many, was in believing that professional skill and common sense would be adequate armour for what lay ahead. In his 1932 masterpiece Death in the Afternoon, Ernest Hemingway was fascinated by the matador Cagancho, who was terrified of bulls, but had such faith in himself he felt invulnerable in the ring. In the early ’80s many of us were like Cagancho: ready to acknowledge fear, but dependent on survival skills and luck to see us through most circumstances. However, as journalistic casualties rose, we learned that no amount of skill guarantees survival.

Reporters I’d most admired began falling like rookies: in Beirut, Lebanon, the Associated Press’ Terry Anderson was the poster boy for the mature, war-smart survivor until he was kidnapped in 1985 for six years. The revered British reporter David Blundy survived 23 wars only to be killed in 1989 by two stray bullets in El Salvador. Since the mid-’80s, journalists have become targets. Teenage militia soldiers were ever more psychopathic; almost overnight, snipers and landmines were more commonplace and parcel bombs escalated to car bombs powerful enough to shred victims two blocks from a blast site. Moments of terror were usually brief. More common was the dread that could grind on for weeks: You dreaded seeing more human suffering, more dead children and mass graves, even though you knew it was critical to bear witness. You hated the mind trips that plagued war zone travel: Why were their no children playing outside and no farmers working these fields? Was this the same road a Norwegian crew was murdered on? Is that the same van in the rear mirror we saw yesterday? There were also moments of moral choice.

Deep in the El Salvador countryside, refugee families begged me to stay overnight, as my presence might protect them from massacre – but reporters were prime targets. I was still trying to think clearly when the last-minute arrival of a Red Cross team relieved me of the life-or-death decision. Canadian television reporter Clark Todd faced this same choice in Lebanon in 1983. He chose to stay, and was murdered along with scores of villagers. And so I ask myself years later, what will I do the next time I’m begged to stay the night?

It’s not all fear – war coverage can be fascinating. In the Gulf War, I made it in with the first armoured column to liberate Kuwait City – one of those exhilarating moments young reporters dream of. But war is incomparably more dangerous for correspondents than ever before, and ultimately there’s a professional conscience to be faced: will there come a time when you’re not so anxious to beg rides to the front lines, or willing to drive through no man’s land to reach an isolated village? Will growing caution make you a liability? When I glance over mementos, I ask myself if I’d cover another war. I find no easy answer: perhaps if the issue is vital, and my daughter is older. But if I do go back, it will not be with illusions of Cagancho or with the innocence of youth. I’ll know the Fear Factor is waiting to test me afresh and perhaps more powerfully each time I head out.

“I’ve been in journalism for 30 years and this past spring I had my first story rejected,” Roy MacGregor says in Kelsey’s restaurant in Kanata, the suburb just outside of Ottawa where he lives. The Western Alumni Gazette, the alumni magazine of the University of Western Ontario (where he attended journalism school) requested MacGregor write the back-page column for its 25th anniversary issue. MacGregor declined the offer repeatedly, but the Gazette’s student editor was persistent.

“So I said, ‘Just a minute, pal. Obviously the presumption would be that I’d say great things,’” MacGregor says. “‘The fact of the matter is I hated journalism school and I hated Western. You wouldn’t want that in the magazine?”‘ But it turns out, the editor did and was willing to pay $500.

After two weeks, MacGregor stopped arguing and wrote a column inspired by his own university experience. At Western, he says, he and his classmates “discussed taking legal action against the school on the basis of false advertising, false promises and absolutely failing to live up to their end of the bargain.” He claims most of his instructors were incompetent and gave students assignments to write things like horoscopes for Cosmopolitan. “My best friend at the school, now my brother-in-law, never went to a single class after the first one,” MacGregor recalls. “He wrote the exam and received it back with an A+ and a note saying, ‘Mr. Cox, as I will be retiring this summer, I was wondering if you would be willing to accept the teaching position of this course, since you know it so well.”‘

A week after handing in his column, MacGregor received a letter from the eager editor at the Gazette: the magazine regretfully declined his submission but would gladly pay a kill fee.

“Why didn’t they just listen to me in the first place?!”

Now 55, MacGregor has always had an instinct for what’s going to work in journalism and what isn’t. MacGregor jump-started his career in magazines, writing award-winning pieces for Maclean’s and The Canadian, but with the exception of his Cottage Life column, he’s left magazines behind. “I would like to think I was ahead of the curve in arguing that news magazines were not working and were a failure.” MacGregor says. “Everybody has finally accepted that.”

The folksy writer is now Page 2 columnist at The Globe and Mail, where he churns out 20 inches, five times a week — a burnout workload for most. His column, with the calculated title This Country (reminiscent of Peter Gzowski’s much-loved CBC radio show), is a place where he can write about whatever he wants. What readers will usually find are well-argued pieces about the outdoors, hockey, politics, family life and the little oddities of the everyday.

MacGregor is now back at his house, where the walls are adorned with beautiful, subtle paintings. There are gentle portraits of family members, like his only son, Gordon, as a blond two-year-old and his three daughters, Kerry, Christine and Jocelyn. Then there are the landscape paintings — one depicts a winter scene that looks cosy and warm despite the vast countryside captured — and paintings of lily pads and close-ups of flowers. They’re rendered in both watercolour and acrylic, and ooze unapologetic sentimentality and realism. They’re all credited to the artist Ellen Griffith, MacGregor’s wife, and show an eclectic mix of subject matter and tenderness reminiscent of her husband’s writing.

MacGregor’s current fixation is nature. Not surprising, considering he grew up in Huntsville, on the outskirts of Algonquin Park. His father, Duncan, about whom he wrote the book A Life in the Bush, was a lumber mill worker and taught his children to appreciate the wilderness, small-town values and hockey. MacGregor excelled in athletics but never considered himself a good student. When asked what his strongest subject was in high school, he excuses himself and briskly leaves the room. There is the sound of a filing cabinet opening and the shuffling of papers. He returns a minute later with a yellow, folded cardboard paper. It’s his Grade 12 report card from Huntsville High School. Inside, in green marker, it reveals the 18-year-old MacGregor’s standing in the spring term was 29 in a class of 32. He flunked every subject except English, where his mark was 53 per cent. There is a comment scrawled on the paper: “Slipping badly.”

MacGregor repeated Grade 12 — not just to graduate but also to date Griffith, who had moved to Huntsville that year and whose father was the high school chemistry teacher. MacGregor applied for university halfway through Grade 13 but only two universities accepted him, Carleton and Laurentian. He chose the latter because it was where most of his friends were going. “I’m one of those people who does not necessarily go to university to get education, but to get over education, to not be afraid of it,” MacGregor says. “And not be intimidated by people who are lawyers or doctors.” MacGregor studied political science at Laurentian and graduated in 1970. He rode a motorcycle around Europe for several months and then returned to Canada, not knowing what to do. He and a friend decided to apply to Western’s graduate program for journalism.

MacGregor’s negative experience at Western wasn’t enough to convince him to abandon journalism altogether. Recently married and just out of school, he landed his first steady gig at the trade magazine Office Equipment & Methods, where MacGregor says he reviewed “staplers and coded paperclips.” He says standards there were so pathetic they ‘wouldn’t even look at the equipment they reviewed. “Honest to God, you would write a review without ever having tried the product,” MacGregor recalls, “just repeating the press release.”

The building MacGregor worked in housed Maclean’s on the seventh floor, but he worked in the basement. While the young man bitterly wrote about filing cabinets, he dreamed of taking the elevator up to Peter C. Newman’s publication. “We kept getting these plaintive notes coming up from a young man who was desperate to write for Maclean’s and desperate to get out of the trade magazine bullpen,” remembers 40-year magazine veteran Don Obe, who was then associate editor of Maclean’s. Obe encouraged MacGregor to send story ideas to the magazine, and not long after, he landed a freelance position writing small pieces about music. One of his first assignments was a general music column about a new album by The Who. “I vividly remember a fact-checker who is no longer with us,” he says, relaxing on the leather couch in his family room. “Every time I mentioned The Who, [the fact-checker] put the word ‘Guess’ in between, so it appeared in the pages of Maclean’s magazine as The Guess Who that had released Tommy!”

Newman sent the mortified MacGregor a present: letters from angry fans pointing out the error. The editor scrawled “Explain yourself!” on one and fired it off through interoffice mail. In response, MacGregor wrote a depressing reply that said he realized the error ruined his chance to doreal journalism at Maclean’s. Fortunately, Newman saw the unedited proofs and realized that it was a fact-checking error. He called MacGregor to his office and suggested he pitch a feature story on the spot. “Well, I’ve been toying with the idea of writing an article about a woman I knew who was engaged to Tom Thomson and how she had inherited all of these paintings,” MacGregor began. He told Newman about the woman he knew through his family. “I had helped clean out her house when she died, and she had all these Tom Thomson paintings. She wouldn’t even put hot water in her house. All her life she had been affected by his death.”

Newman assigned MacGregor to write about the tragic romance (he later wrote Canoe Lake, a novel based on the story). The article, published September 1973, created a sensation. “It really screwed me up,” MacGregor laughs, “because I got onto all types of television shows and got interviewed all around the country. I thought, ‘This is what it’s like to write a magazine article!’ and then it never happened again.” Maclean’s hired him full-time.

In 1975, when Obe left Maclean’s to become the editor of The Canadian, then Canada’s largest circulation magazine, he took MacGregor with him — much to Newman’s dismay. “I took him over as a staff writer,” Obe says. “Because I knew he was on his way to being the best magazine writer in the country.”

MacGregor says it was at The Canadian, a newspaper insert, where he learned the art of non-fiction writing. The magazine gave him the freedom to write concerned, somewhat scoffing and sometimes sentimental profiles about the likes of Bobby Clarke, Margaret Atwood and Ian Tyson. His less than flattering piece on Otto Lang, minister of transport under Pierre Trudeau, got MacGregor sued. The piece chronicled Lang’s embarrassing political foibles, like his assumption that his fired nanny could fly back to Scotland free on a government plane. The piece led the nightly news for two days and caused so much controversy that The Canadian did not appear in Saskatchewan again. “Christ almighty, was I ever scared!” he says.

David Cobb, who was also a staff writer at The Canadian, recognized the young MacGregor’s talent. “If I were a public figure — in sports, politics, the arts — and I had an opportunity to choose a profiler, I would choose Roy,” Cobb says. The first year the National Magazine Awards NMAs) were held, in 1977, MacGregor won two awards for his writing, his reputation growing as a poignant yet unpretentious magazine writer.

MacGregor stayed at The Canadian until1978, then jumped between Maclean’s and Walter Stewart’s Today, another newspaper-insert magazine. He now considers a Maclean’s piece, “Rumbles from the North,” his breakaway from shallow celebrity stories. He focused the piece on the Crees’ battle against the largest hydroelectric project in North America. The infant son of Chief Billy Diamond, then Grand Chief of the Cree Council, had suffered brain damage and nearly died as a result of open cesspools of waste, on land used bv the government for resource projects. Once the article appeared, the Crees got immediate attention in the House of Commons, and the government initiated a $61.5 million program to correct water sewage, sanitation and poor housing conditions on the Cree reserves.

It may have been a breakthrough story for him, but MacGregor thinks the time for that kind of writing has passed. He gets up from his leather couch and walks over to the window. “The hardest thing to say, really, and it will hurt some people, is that was a long time ago,” MacGregor says, choosing his words carefully. “That type of work isn’t done anymore. And it’s not going to be done anymore. And we all have to move on to different things. They were great, wonderful magazines, and I treasure every moment of being there, but I’m not nostalgic for it.”

MacGregor believes there are two new layers above the newspaper — 24-hour news channels and the Internet- that have forced publications to become more reflective and analytical, roles previously reserved for traditional magazines. The growing sophistication of print can clearly be seen over the last 15 years, when circulation was down and newspapers began producing style and feature sections to attract younger readership. “Newspapers knew that they had to produce something nearing magazine quality every day,” says Greg Boyd Bell, assistant city editor at the Toronto Star and media columnist for the The Hamilton Spectator. “So the kind and range of stories, including longer pieces, that you might see once a week if you looked at a newspaper 20 years ago, now you’re seeing every day.”

Twenty years ago, MacGregor landed his first newspaper job as a columnist for the Toronto Star, where he became deeply concerned and paranoid. He wanted to focus on daily columns, not on long articles reminiscent of his magazine writings. “They took away one of my columns and had me doing more features on Sundays, so I was doing two columns a week and features. It made me less effective as a columnist,” he says. “I thought they were trying to turn me into a feature writer.”

After two years he jumped ship back to Maclean’s to be its Ottawa editor. He now regrets the move, as it made him totally disenchanted with news magazines. It was his worst year in journalism. “I probably would have been fired,” he says. “I was in far too much disagreement with them. It was a very, very unhappy place. Writing was not being allowed. It was over-edited, hyper-edited, kind of Maclean’s-ish.”

In 1986, MacGregor moved to the Ottawa Citizen, where he was given a general column, and he has been in the newspaper business ever since. “Newspapers are the daily news magazines now,” he often chants. He finds himself attracted to the daily rush and believes that coverage of events like 9/11 in a weekly news magazine is “like reading about the Second World War.”

Boyd Bell disagrees. “I don’t buy that at all,” he says. “You go to magazines for writing that is crafted, that has a standard of excellence you don’t find in daily newspapers no matter how hard they try. Yeah, the Internet is more timely, but people sure as hell aren’t reading Roy MacGregor to find out what happened 30 seconds ago.”

Despite his success as a full-time magazine writer (four NMAs, along with many shared awards and nominations), MacGregor looks back on those years as slow-paced and lazy compared to his newspaper career. “I wrote 16 articles a year. The rate I work now, I could easily produce one of those magazine pieces in a week, maybe two.”

Some might argue the quick pace of newspapers doesn’t allow MacGregor to refine his writing. “Because he’s such a talented writer and has such an active mind,” says Jim Travers, his former editor at the Citizen, “he takes on a tremendous amount. The rush of writing for a daily probably doesn’t give him enough time to fully develop the ideas and the quiet, carefully formed sentiment that he builds around his characters.”

MacGregor claims he’s still able to write rich, detailed prose — not in magazines but in books such as A Lift in the Bush, Escape: In Search of the Natural Soul of Canada and The Home Team: Fathers, Sons and Hockey. However, he’s probably best known for his Screech Owls books: hockey-themed mystery novels for eight- to 12-year-olds. “I’m famous in Grade 5,” he jokes. And although he’s written 13 other books, including bestsellers, MacGregor still feels like an outsider in literary and academic circles. Once, on a book promotion tour, another writer asked him, “Does it ever bother you that there is a sports writer with the same name?”

When the Ottawa Senators started in 1992-93, MacGregor was asked if he wanted to cover them exclusively for the Citizen. This made him a lot happier than his first job there, covering Parliament Hill, a place he thinks is overrated and over-reported. He covered sports and special events like the Stanley Cup and the Olympics, finally winning a National Newspaper Award for his sports writing (he’s been nominated eight times). “The sports world is far more kind than the columnists’ world,” he says. “Sports people will actually help each other out. Sure, I want to be first, and I want to be the best, but it’s much more like family.”

Since writing the best-selling Home Game in 1989 (with former Montreal Canadiens goaltender Ken Dryden), MacGregor has gained a solid reputation as a sports writer, even though he had previously only dabbled in it now and then. He feels, “if you don’t understand hockey, you don’t understand Canada.”

It was something of a surprise, then, when MacGregor left the comforts of his Citizen job to be a general columnist at the newly created National Post. “It has been the greatest thing that has happened in Canadian journalism in my lifetime,” MacGregor says of the Post. “It doesn’t matter what you think of it. It has been the greatest thing. It just made things blossom. Good for business.”

Although he considers himself a “left-wing loony,” he felt a great sense of belonging at the conservative Post and thought he’d stay there a long time, despite the crazy requests the newspaper would sometimes make of him. He recalls being at his cottage at around 5 p.m. and receiving a typical, random request. This time they wanted a piece on the demise of Canadian Airlines. “I’d have to do a 1,500 word piece on a subject that I had never written about and never before given a friggin’ thought!” MacGregor says. The story required heavy research and he was on a punishing two-hour deadline. But by 7 p.m., MacGregor fired his copy off to his grateful editors.

However, in late summer 2002, MacGregor felt uneasy about the staff layoffs at the Post and “bailed” on them, joining his fourth newspaper, the Globe. He had been courted by its editors twice before, and this time new chief Ed Greenspon offered MacGregor the highly coveted Page 2 slot. The two came to the loose agreement that he would write five columns a week focusing on the country. “Eddie Greenspon at the Globe thinks that my column is the Peter Gzowski of print,” MacGregor says. An admitted sentimentalist, he is aware of the image he projects. “I could see that coming,” he says of the “Captain Canada” tag people slap on him. But he believes nobody is around to carry the torch after Gzowski as the next iconic Canadian journalist.

Oddly, MacGregor’s first assignment was out of the country, travelling across middle America on the first anniversary of 9/11, telling stories about his journey from the memorial in Oklahoma City to Ground Zero in New York.

Story ideas for MacGregor are obvious when he’s on the road, but at home he has to generate the majority of ideas for This Country. He says the main difference between the Post and the Globe is the latter’s editors give its columnists a lot of freedom — too much for his liking. “I hardly talk to them at all,” he says. “We used to talk at the Post. It was always talk, and then the agreement for the idea tends to filter down from the top. The Globe leaves you alone and you fill your own space. I’ve actually been encouraging them to try to go up the middle a bit more.”

If he’s not travelling for This Country to places like Newfoundland or Saskatoon, MacGregor usually wakes up at 6 a.m. and searches the Internet for inspiration. “Every day I wake up in a cold sweat, in a fetal position, crying like a little baby,” MacGregor says, smiling. “And I’m ready to go.”

He says he never has a back-up column — a pretty risky move for someone writing articles five times a week. “Fundamentally, at the core of journalism is insecurity,” he says. “There’s a psychological affliction, particular to journalists, this feeling that you are going to be found out … that someone is going to put his arm around you, take you aside and say, ‘Roy, we can’t figure out how you did it, we admire you hugely for pulling it off, but we’re on to you now. Basically, if you agree to go away quietly we won’t make a big fuss, but if you don’t agree to go quietly, we’re going to fire your ass!”‘

“If you didn’t have that desperate need for approval and recognition you wouldn’t work as hard as you do,” says MacGregor. “Insecurity is a tool in journalism — a feeling of inadequacy, a need for approval. Journalism school is a huge litter of puppies racing around for a pat on the head. It’s like a separate race of basket cases.”

But MacGregor has no regrets. “I couldn’t recommend a better life.”

t’s a late November afternoon in 2002 and Banana magazine managing editor Kuan Foo is in Toronto to meet entertainment editor Christine Miguel and other contributors. It’s going to be a depressing meeting – the day before, Foo received a disturbing phone call from editor-in-chief Mark Simon in Vancouver. Simon delivered the bad news: Banana’s sixth issue won’t hit newsstands until early 2004. The Asian-Canadian lifestyle quarterly has already skipped its fall issue, and many of its ads, not to mention articles, are time-sensitive. Foo thinks this new setback will damage the magazine’s reputation.

At the meeting, Foo relays the message. Despite their questions, he has few answers. It’s an open secret among staff that owners Simon and Jory Levitt have been feuding, but other than that explanation Foo simply tries to be honest. “I’m going back to Vancouver,” he says. “If within a week I don’t have any confidence we can get our act together, I’m leaving.”

A few days later, Foo returns to Vancouver where he speaks to various staffers, ranging from Simon and Levitt (through a lawyer) right down to sales, as well as potential investors. Foo hears the same story – the magazine has an inadequate business plan, poor organizational skills and delusions of grandeur. Banana sustained itself for a year, but Foo says the success was “smoke and mirrors” generated by publicity, press and promotional parties. “People start ascribing to you more importance than you deserve,” he says. “You start believing that.”

The initial success may have been illusory, yet Banana received nibbles from corporate advertisers such as Coca-Cola and a Versace offshoot company. The catch was the magazine would have to increase its circulation from 15,000 to 60,000 copies and its frequency from quarterly to bimonthly. It was tempting, but Foo found it unacceptable that there were no plans to compensate the magazine’s writers. “I didn’t think it could continue,” he recalls. “Either you can sit there and ride it out as it dies a slow death or you can pull the plug.” Foo then resigned as managing editor. “It’s ironic, because the reason Asian-Canadian publications and voices are important is because there aren’t many out there,” he says. “Whenever there is one, it’s anointed flavour of the month. You have to take care of the details or you’re just dooming yourself.”

Being Korean-Canadian, I share the same love-hate relationship with Asian-Canadian magazines. I genuinely want to support them, but like any magazine, the editorial must be engaging, well-written and informative. Sadly for most Asian-Canadian magazines, aiming for a large readership means degrading overall editorial quality.

The lack of advertising is significant and needs to be addressed, though. Despite their strong consumer spending habits – not to mention that they comprise 10 per cent of Canada’s population – little research has been done on Asian-Canadians, particularly second-generation. Marketing agencies continue to employ a traditional strategy: mainstream media for second-generation Asians and “in-language” ethnic media (like Chinese newspapers) for immigrants.

“Many Chinese people are still very much influenced by, and still stick to, the Chinese medium,” says Elsa Lai of Koo Creative Group, a Vancouver-based marketing agency specializing in targeting the Asian niche market. Seventy-five per cent of Chinese-Canadians in Toronto and Vancouver are foreign-born and most are either fully fluent or somewhat fluent in Chinese. “It’s more efficient to reach them through Chinese media,” says Lai.

o o o

It’s been 10 months since Foo peeled out of Banana. On the other side of the country, both floors of Revival – a stylish lounge located in the heart of Toronto’s Little Italy – are filled to capacity. Over 400 twenty-somethings have gathered on a cool autumn evening in September to celebrate the launch of Jasmine, a new Asian-Canadian women’s magazine. Among those in attendance are Miguel, now a Jasmine contributor, and contributor Jaclyn Law, now Jasmine’s editorial consultant.

A Citytv cameraman films the fervent crowd from the balcony. Casually dressed guests, drinks in hand, mingle by the bar. A slim, attractive girl politely wards off the advances of a loud, obnoxious jerk. “I’m not into Asian guys anymore – they’re too possessive,” she says. On stage, local hip hop artist Masia One spits rhymes from her new single, “Halfway Through the City.” The Jasmine logo is projected directly overhead and a large catwalk lies perpendicular to the stage. Downstairs, hair and makeup stylists primp gorgeous models dressed in haute couture designed by fellow Asian-Canadian women. Their faces are painted in murky earth tones, while their hair suggests a kind of Stone Age sophistication. You can imagine them leaping with the gazelles in Africa.

Suddenly, one of the gazelles emerges from the herd. Dressed in an elegant black tube-top dress, Jasmine founder and publisher Amy Lan takes a schmooze break and sits next to me on a plush couch. She warmly tells me she hasn’t slept in 48 hours, yet shows no signs of fatigue. She wants to talk shop. “Asian-Canadian females are the most brand conscious, but the least brand loyal,” she says. “It’s because there’s never been a message catered to us in any medium. We never know if a manufacturer is talking to us, so we have to rely on our friends and our own wasted money buying stuff to know that it doesn’t work.” Lan has long seen the need for a magazine devoted to Asian-Canadian women. As a young Taiwanese-Canadian, She was disenchanted by the lack of Asians in pop culture and mainstream media. She turned to women’s magazines like Seventeen and Cosmopolitan for beauty tips, only to discover that her yellow skin tone and coarse Asian hair were not relevant.

A decade later, Lan decided to fill the void herself. Investing $25,000 in savings and applying knowledge gained from her previous job – marketing manager of Integrated Health Retailer magazine – she put together a group that researched the target market. Unlike other niches, Lan found there was little information on the Asian-Canadian community. While comprehensive subscriber lists were available for purchase from women’s magazines like Chatelaine, none reflected Jasmine’s target, 18- to 34-year-old Asian-Canadian females. So the group examined Statistics Canada findings, created online surveys, held focus groups and created awareness at special events like the Toronto International Film Festival. Eventually they built a list of 4,000 potential readers.

Lan then approached major clothing and cosmetics companies. Many viewed the Asian-Canadian market as a homogenous ethnic group fully assimilated into the mainstream. Therefore, advertising in magazines like Chatelaine and Flare would suffice. Additionally, Chatelaine’s cost per thousand is only $64, compared to Jasmine’s $333, because of Chatelaine’s higher circulation numbers (700,000 compared to Jasmine’s 15,000). Bill Shields, editor of Masthead magazine, says Jasmine will succeed only if “print advertisers believe they can’t reach [the Asian-Canadian women] demographic any other way.” Lan seems frustrated by the stubbornness of potential advertisers. “When I speak with you, I’m sure that a lot of people will agree that our complexions are different, our hair is different, our thoughts are different,” she says. “But when I’m speaking to advertisers, they don’t see it. There’s a lot of convincing to do.”

Where Banana suffered from poor management – Foo says there wasn’t a detailed business plan in place until a year after the first issue – many industry insiders, including Rice Paper president Jim Wong-Chu, consider Jasmine’s business model “rock solid.” Law agrees. “Normally when people start a magazine,” she says, “it’s a bunch of editorial people who are really excited about a concept. Amy’s background is ad sales – that’s her specialty and she’s very good at it. We had a business plan in place before anything.”

o o o

On a chilly winter evening, Miguel and Corina MacLean are on a quest for smut at Video 99, a popular Bloor Street DVD and video rental shop. The two women, bundled in winter jackets, proceed to the back where makeshift walls fence off the adult section. They read out loud the names of Asian fetish titles like Sum Yummy Sluts and Touch My Tofu in the kind of monotone reserved for the ingredients listed on a cereal box. They’re less offended than bored and eventually migrate to Suspect Video across the street, known for its selection of hentai – Japanese animated porn. They find these films considerably more disturbing than the live-action variety. Despite the animated surrealism, the films feature graphic scenes of rape and violence.

Miguel and MacLean are researching an upcoming Jasmine article on the lack of pornography available for Asian females. The topic raises the obvious question of whether Asian women even view pornography. Similarly, are second-generation Asian-Canadians even interested in magazines like Banana and Jasmine? After speaking to many Asian-Canadian female friends, the general consensus is, despite being thrilled to see a magazine catering solely to them, most wouldn’t buy it. Criticisms include mediocre writing, uninspired or trivial topics and an overall lack of focus. Even Jasmine’s own Miguel is not impressed. “There’s no central article that makes me want to pick up the magazine,” she says. “[The first issue] was very scattered. Jasmine’s still trying to find its footing.”

Lan admits that the magazine is more of “a leisure read” than hard-hitting, because it is intended to be a fashion/beauty title. She wants readers to be “well-rounded” and to better themselves spiritually, emotionally, physically and professionally. “It’s something that you read to feel good about yourself,” says Lan. “If you want to read some hardcore news, you can go to Newsweek, you can go to Maclean’s.”

In its spring 2004 sophomore effort, Jasmine flexes more editorial muscle. The issue includes a young woman’s account of visiting her ancestral village in China, depression among young Asian women and profiles of Asian-Canadian women in the arts, including playwright Nina Aquino. Law cites Marie Claire, which has published stories about female genital mutilation and cosmetic surgery scams, as an influence. While it looks considerably better than the first issue, Jasmine has a way to go before it can compete with Marie Claire.

Providing relevant, appealing content is daunting for any Asian-Canadian magazine, from the lifestyle magazines of Banana and its American counterparts – the now-defunct aMagazine and Yolk – to the specialized niche magazines Jasmine and Rice Paper. Both aMagazine and Yolk (a Maxim-like magazine for Asian-Americans) underwent significant shifts in editorial policy and were criticized for appealing more to advertisers than readers. The once hard-edged, political aMagazine, which started in 1989, dumbed down its content after a couple of years to attract more advertising.

Banana, on the other hand, mutated into an edgier, socially conscious magazine. Foo developed editorial that appeased advertisers without compromising journalistic integrity. In what was to be its winter 2003 issue, the magazine delved into the parent-child conflict of intra-Asian dating, the controversial 2002 Vancouver police-inflicted assault of an Asian immigrant and traditional Japanese erotic art. Foo says Asian-Canadian magazines can fall into two categories: trivial and mindless, or serious and pretentious. He mentions the arts-literary publication Rice Paper as an example of the latter. Initially created by Foo in 1995, the then-newsletter was published by the Asian Canadian Writer’s Workshop. A few years later – long after Foo’s departure – Rice Paper got a government grant to transform the newsletter into a quarterly magazine. It became a dry read, covering mostly “academic” subject matter. “You have to maintain a sense of humour about yourself,” Foo says. “Otherwise you’re going to lose your appeal to a broader readership.”

Foo believes there are enough commonalities among Asian-Canadians to attract a significant readership for a general interest magazine, despite differences in ethnicity, income, age, politics and religion. “People who come from Asian backgrounds have some common experiences in terms of relationships with their parents and values,” says Foo. “We’re a visible minority that’s not represented in popular culture, despite our numbers.”

While Asian culture has surfaced throughout popular culture in film (Kill Bill), music (Emm Gryner) and literature (Memoirs of a Geisha), these images offer one-dimensional and sometimes racist depictions of Asians. Hollywood has reduced us to the kung-fu fighting, sexually-repressed, overly passive computer geek. This only reinforces the need for a strong Asian-Canadian perspective.

o o o

In December 2002, upon learning of Foo’s resignation, Miguel and art director Dennis Chui handed in their letters. The feud between publishers Simon and Levitt escalated. When Simon tried to fire Levitt as partner, Levitt threatened him with a lawsuit. In July 2003, Simon filed for bankruptcy after losing $240,000 of his own money. In August, Masthead reported Simon was seeking “sanity and contemplating several new business ideas, including another magazine.”

Meanwhile, the editorial and creative staff channeled their bitterness into a positive outlet. Former Banana writers – led by Foo – started a new Asian-Canadian lifestyle magazine called Bambooda. Although partial to the aesthetic and tangibility of print, they didn’t have the financial resources to pull it off. After brainstorming for low-cost alternatives, they settled on a portable document format-based (PDF) magazine. The political, tongue-in-cheek humour of the lifestyle quarterly received an encouraging response from readers in the U.S., Asia and Europe. The second issue reached 16,000 downloads after its first week.

Foo says Bambooda is meant to be non-profit and volunteer-run. He’s still not sure whether commercial success is realistic for an Asian-Canadian magazine. “You’d have to scale back your ambition,” he says guardedly. “If you’re trying to be big, you have to attract major league advertisers. And you don’t get major league advertisers without the circulation. And you don’t get money to pump your circulation without the major league advertisers. There has to be something there that will appeal to more than just your niche market.”

Allan Gregg dumps a thick file folder on an oval-shaped coffee table and seats himself in a cushy blue chair. It’s an October Monday and Gregg has taken time away from his money-making market-research business to talk about his “very, very serious hobby” – interviewing authors for “Gregg and Company,” his segment of Studio 2, TVOntario’s flagship culture and public-affairs program. Inside Gregg’s folder are assorted pieces of background information, many of them covered with yellow sticky notes, for an upcoming interview with John Gray, author of the recently released Paul Martin: The Power of Ambition.

The “poop from the publisher,” as Gregg calls it, includes reviews, interviews and suggested questions, which he routinely ignores. “These [writers] get out on the road and do interview after interview after interview, and they give canned responses. It’s like a rock show. They learn what works. If you ask similar, predictable questions, you’re going to get similar, predictable canned answers.” The type of show Gregg hosts is a rarity these days – a long-format broadcast interview, one that commits “double television heresy” because he and his producers invite intelligent people with something to say, and then let them say it – at length. “We’re not afraid of big ideas or big conversation or really smart people, and in that regard it’s probably unusual.” he explains. His ultimate goal: to draw out his subjects, to get them to give fresh, spontaneous answers that no one else – in print or broadcast – would garner.

Gregg, who co-authored The Big Picture: What Canadians Think About Almost Everything, knows through experience just how hostile interviewers can be to thoughtful, extended answers to their questions. “I’ve done enough interviews where the interviewer’s eyes turn upward into his or her skull when you get beyond two and a half minutes,” says Gregg. It’s as if they’re thinking, “‘Enough. You’re boring the shit out of the audience.'” By contrast, crew members at Studio 2 have T-shirts that read, “Death to the sound bite.”

Five nights a week, after his kids are in bed, Gregg goes upstairs to his home office, pours a glass of Italian red wine, lights a Montecristo #4 cigar and starts to read. Some well-known thinkers have appeared on his program – Allen Ginsberg, Jane Goodall and Noam Chomsky among them – and it is Gregg’s job to prepare himself by learning about his subjects and reading their books. “For me, it’s almost recreation rather than work. I would read anyway. This just makes me read more purposefully.” Gregg spends four to five hours preparing; most interviewers, he notes, won’t read beyond the publisher’s two-page press release, either because of time constraints or slacking off. Gregg has observed this firsthand on his own book tours. “I actually had someone tell me, ‘I’ve been so busy, I didn’t get chance to crack the dust jacket,'” he says. “You think: You lazy son of a bitch.”

o o o

What led me to Gregg’s earth-toned, softly lit office was a quest to assess the state of interviewing in Canada. Was it good? Okay? Awful? The general consensus among the experts I interviewed: somewhere between okay and awful. Ian Brown, a respected writer and the host of CBC Radio’s Talking Books, for instance, thinks part of the problem is that most journalists are just too afraid of looking dumb – so they don’t probe deeply enough. “You have to be willing to be an idiot and ask a stupid question,” he says. “It’s a case of, ‘I’ll show you mine if you show me yours.'”

Another perspective comes from Paul McLaughlin, author of How to Interview: The Art of Asking Questions. He points out that none of Canada’s university journalism programs offer credit courses on communication and interviewing skills. “This is not a business that trains people that well,” he says. When McLaughlin set out to write his book, many colleagues told him there wasn’t enough material to fill it. “Imagine being told, in this business, that there isn’t enough to write about,” he adds. “I was stunned. The police get more training [than journalists do overall] on interviewing someone whose child has just been sexually abused and murdered.”

But even when journalists have the skills, says Don Gibb, who teaches journalism at Ryerson University, they often have huge problems getting anything out of subjects who have undergone media training and know how to tiptoe around even the most carefully constructed questions. Overall, concludes Gibb, “we suck” when it comes to getting good stuff out of interviews.

So how can we do better? In these pages you’ll read tips and techniques from McLaughlin as well as from Johanna Schneller, who has written for numerous publications, including GQ and The Globe and Mail, MuchMusic’s Nardwuar the Human Serviette and John Sawatsky, author and an acknowledged interviewing expert. But to get an in-depth look at what it takes to get consistently good interviews, I went to Gregg, one of the few interviewers who works under ideal conditions: lots of time to prepare, a rich variety of guests and lots of time to probe his subjects.

o o o
Gregg’s background is in public opinion and market research, not journalism. Nevertheless, in 1994, then-TVO chairman and CEO Peter Herrndorf approached him: “You’ve made your living asking questions in the intermediary of survey research. You obviously know how to ask questions to get very precise answers. Why don’t you try being a host?'” Gregg, not the biggest fan of TV, was hesitant, but gave Herrndorf a loose commitment, saying, “If I stink the place up, you can fire me and we’ll still be friends. And if I don’t like it, I’ll walk and you won’t resent me.”

Gregg feels he’s gotten better at interviewing by virtue of doing it over and over again. “In the early stages I was trying too hard to show I was smart,” he explains. “The questions were too long, almost as if I was trying to state people’s cases for them.” He points out that some of the great interviewers, like Barbara Frum, have no qualms about asking a question when they already know the answer, even if it means risking appearing stupid. Another early Gregg mistake: he was afraid to interrupt interviewees who blathered on. CBC anchor Peter Mansbridge, he notes, tells his interviewees he will drop his pen when it’s time for them to shut up. Now, Gregg says, he has no fear of saying things like: “Stop one second there.” He does feel that taking a practical course would be beneficial for journalists. He mentions “John’s course,” a reference to the seminar Sawatsky gives to journalists from all over the globe.

“An interview is not a package that comes from FedEx,” Sawatsky says on the phone from Ottawa. “It’s a resource.” A big part of his course is “the granddaddy of all principles”: the concept of output versus input, or what interviewers put into the interview versus what they get out of it. Many journalists, he says, are too heavy on the output, asking overloaded or close-ended questions or making remarks instead of questions.

Schneller can certainly speak to over-reliance on close-ended questions. One of the few times she gets to observe how other celebrity interviewers ask questions is at the Toronto International Film Festival during the “round-table” discussions. What she hears consistently shocks her. “I watch them and I just can’t believe it,” she says. “I see them over and over again – the yes or no questions and the ‘I am so smart. I want to show you how smart I am’ questions. It’s like, are you not listening? Do you not realize you’re asking yes or no questions? To me that’s just such a huge waste of time.” Schneller feels that too many celebrity interviewers are content asking fawning, sycophantic questions like: “How did you make such a great movie?” and “Why are you so brilliant?”

The easy question is anathema to Nardwuar the Human Serviette, who interviews bands for MuchMusic’s Going Coastal and has his own radio show in Vancouver. He spends hours preparing for an interview, surfing the Internet, reading music magazines and listening to music. “I’m lucky enough that I have the time, whereas other people could probably create the time but they’re too lazy or too busy doing other things,” Nardwuar says. “I won’t take on an interview unless I think I can do enough research for it.”

These are sins Gregg seldom commits. In terms of structuring questions, he says, “The more pointed the question, the better the answer. You can really get into trouble when the question is too vague.” As a result, he avoids, say, asking authors to explain their major thesis. The rambling result that usually follows, he says, “is an invitation for disaster.”

Gregg may be a good interviewer, but he doesn’t do it without help. Once a guest is booked for the show, it is the job of his associate producer, Vittoria Iozzo, to quickly turn around a research package. Since the show is not just about the book, she digs up broader conversation topics (breaking news in the writer’s area of expertise, for example), which she constantly updates until the day of the show. “Allan will read anything you send him,” says Iozzo. “He devours info. He really makes the job rewarding. Sometimes I’m surprised by his knowledge of the subject – a lot of hosts just skim through it.”

Gregg feels an obligation to ask the tough questions that are on his viewers’ minds. That is why he seldom misses the chance to ask a question that begins with: “Your critics say” or “You say this, but others say.” During an interview with Naomi Wolf, author of The Beauty Myth, he asked her if it was harder to be taken seriously because she was attractive. The feminist was outraged, he recalls, though most subjects are prepared to handle views that counter their own.

o o o

Three months after I first meet Gregg, I listen in on a conference call between him, his producer Nancy Hawkins and Iozzo as they discuss tomorrow’s interview with astronaut Chris Hadfield. They do this for every interview, and it gives the three a chance to go over the topics Gregg will cover. For Hadfield, they want to focus on missions to Mars and Canada’s role in future space exploration.

“Keep in mind Chris Hadfield is not political,” says Hawkins. “We don’t want to touch the politics of it. Keep it very circumspect in terms of logistics, the benefits to us on Earth.”

“It’s worthwhile going through fundamental questions. You’ve got the issue of space travel…” says Gregg. “Another aspect that’s central is the manned mission. Why do we need a much more expensive and dangerous mission? Since he went up there, he can explain it to us.”
Nancy agrees. “He can give us perspective on how daunting a challenge that is – what it’s like to be up there.”

“There are all kinds of issues,” Gregg adds. “Radiation, the psychological issue…”

“Looking at the same face for six months,” Iozzo pipes in.

“We can ask how they poop and pee,” volunteers Gregg. “And whether they might turn gay and would that be a good thing or not.”

They all share a chuckle. And after bouncing a few more ideas off one another, they say goodbye and hang up.

o o o

The Acrobat Lounge at Yonge and Eglinton, one subway stop north of Gregg’s office, leads a double life. By night, the upstairs space – with its intricate chandeliers, large gold-framed mirrors and velvety chairs – is a swanky bar. Today, as on many Fridays, the empty venue is the scene for the taping of a Gregg interview. On tap: Hadfield. The pressure is now on Gregg, after all that preparation, to pull off a successful interview.
At precisely 3:30 p.m., Hadfield strides in, wearing a dark blue astronaut jumpsuit. “I just came from a public school,” he explains. “I’m still dressed for entertaining a bunch of elementary school students.”

“Lookin’ good,” Gregg says with a grin.

Gregg tries to keep everything casual, so the guest feels relaxed. That’s the main reason why they tape the show in a bar. “We did the first two shows in the studio,” he says, “and realized, ‘This isn’t working.'” The environment enables guests to feel more comfortable and relaxed enough to converse in hushed tones with Gregg while the makeup artist powders his face and fusses with his hair, while the camera crew sets up, and while Hawkins flits around making sure everyone is on track. On this afternoon, Gregg gives the astronaut some background on the show, and assures him that if he screws up, they can stop taping and start over.

Hadfield is a far from hostile interviewee. For every one of his type, there are hundreds of subjects who hate being interviewed and who try to avoid getting caught by journalists. In the past, a journalist often spent days with a subject, making it easier to earn the subject’s trust and get him or her to open up. Nowadays, an interviewer is lucky to get an hour over lunch. “It’s almost impossible to get past the initial ‘Getting to know you’ questions and ‘You can trust me’ questions and the ‘I’m not out to get you’ questions,” says Schneller.

Being prepared is especially important nowadays, notes Nardwuar, when a typical interview might be done over the phone or over the span of eight minutes. “The good ol’ Cameron Crowes of yesterday could get on a plane and hang out with the band. It was easier to get the information. When you have only eight minutes, you know exactly what you want to ask. You don’t have time to go with the flow.” He even resorts to what he calls “Norman Schwarzkopf-style” interviewing, a reference to one of the military leaders of Operation Desert Storm, who stressed the importance of knowing what you need, getting it and getting out of there.
Another problem for interviewers is that publicists now wield more control than ever before. If an interviewer offends a celebrity, the publicity firm might cut off access to all of its clients. As a result, timid journalists, too afraid to ask the questions that will get the important answers, often resort to softball questions.

“Many journalists don’t let the interview get to what I call ‘Level two of an answer,'” says McLaughlin. When a subject is giving a pat answer given to them by their PR firm, journalists tend to get angry. To get a better response, he explains: “I just wait and look at them, nod and smile, which says, ‘Go on.’ Now they’re going into Level Two of their answer, which is less packaged, less rehearsed and often way more revealing.” Gregg, because of his research and the relaxed atmosphere he provides, can often get those Level Two answers the first time out.

o o o

Okay, are we all set? Because we want to use the time,” Hawkins says momentarily. The cameras start rolling. Gregg begins with, “Why all the big emphasis on space right now?”

“It’s a matter of technology,” Hadfield replies. “We couldn’t have done this 40 years ago.”

Gregg then demonstrates the depth of his research with bits of historical information when he asks: “In 1960, when J.F.K. announced the Apollo probe, it was a different time. Today there is a very pragmatic population. What’s your argument for the incredible risk to investing in space?”

Hadfield sidesteps the question: “During the first 10 days after the Spirit [rover vehicle] landed on Mars, a billion people went to the website to get information. So when you say there’s a more pragmatic society, I have to disagree with you.”

Unfazed, Gregg steers the conversation back to his original question, the one geared toward a more thoughtful answer. “To the less romantic among our audience, what are the practical benefits?” “Well, let’s see…” says Hadfield.

Later in the interview, Gregg takes on the role of devil’s advocate. “What’s your response to cynics who say, ‘This is great, but what about health care?'” Hadfield responds by pointing out that “for every $1,000 of government money spent, $140 of that is spent on health care, and only $1.30 is spent on the space program.” The proportion, he thinks, “is probably right.”

Hawkins, dressed in a smart black suit, wields a fat black marker. In front of her is a small stack of letter-sized paper. These are the tools that will help her communicate with Gregg during the interview. At one point, when Gregg is questioning Hadfield about the psychological dangers of space travel, she scrawls “Scariest time on shuttle?” on a piece of paper and holds it up. This prompts Gregg to ask, “Any scary times on the shuttle?” Hadfield goes on to describe the time a meteorite nearly hit his shuttle.

The interview flows fluidly. Gregg asks open-ended questions and always gives his questions context. In response, Hadfield gets into the spirit, and gives viewers a compelling perspective on the importance of space exploration.

After the filming is over, Hadfield, who is pressed for time, shakes hands with Gregg and rushes off. It’s one of 700 interviews Gregg’s done for Studio 2.

o o o

A few weeks later, back at his office, Gregg tells me he “thought Hadfield spoke very well, presented himself well.” As for his own performance, Gregg remembers it as at least “competent.”

His comment reminded me of something he mentioned in our first meeting in October. He was saying that one of the reasons why many journalists are poor interviewers is that they don’t know they’re poor interviewers. “A lot of journalists don’t get feedback,” he says. He then went on to mention that in market research they employ a tool that measures people’s reactions to a variety of things: product, message, politician.
But failing a rheostat machine in every media outlet, what can interviewers do to improve?

He pauses. “Listen.”

SIDEBARS:

TRADE SECRETS
Paul McLaughlin
Paul McLaughlin is passionate about interviewing. You can sense it in the way he talks. “One of the goals of interviewing is to be 100 per cent alert,” he says. When interviewing, he uses a tape recorder and takes few notes because he wants to be able to make eye contact with the person and deeply relate to them. “It’s supposed to be a conversation. You’re supposed to connect with the person as a person.” When his students come to him and say a subject was boring, his response is always: “Were you fascinating? Maybe you bored them. Maybe you asked them questions they’d heard over and over again, you asked them in a dull way, you put out no energy. You put up nothing, you expected them to perform for you and when they didn’t, you didn’t like them.” One thing he teaches his students is to note their subject’s body language, because he is a firm believer that “the body will not lie.” A subject may say that he or she is not bothered by a certain question, suggests McLaughlin, but their folded arms and legs might speak otherwise.

TRADE SECRETS
John Sawatsky
The infamous “Sawatsky method” was developed when John Sawatsky started teaching investigative reporting at Carleton University in 1982. Now, his in-demand workshops focus on the “seven deadly sins” of interviewing, which include the “big enchilada” – closed queries. He
also talks a lot about input and output, and asking the kind of questions that get the most output possible.
Sawatsky shows a lot of video clips illustrating common gaffes made by broadcast journalists – even seasoned ones like Larry King. Most people see the clips as the key to the course’s success, but Sawatsky calls them “icing on the cake.” He used to do the workshops without any clips, then moved on to videotapes. He now has a laptop with all of his clips stored on it, and a PowerPoint presentation. “It’s clearly become more slick over the years,” he says. “I’m not slick, though, I’m still the same stumbling old guy.”
To get the most out of interviews, Sawatsky advises journalists to keep their questions open, neutral and lean. “Keep the question physically short,” he says. “Longer questions lead to more screw-ups. It’s like Newton’s law in science.”

TRADE SECRETS
Johanna Schneller
When the Globe’s “The Moviegoer” columnist and freelance writer Johanna Schneller was a judge in the profile category at the National Magazine Awards, she noticed a disturbing trend, one in which the journalist would write something like, “I couldn’t bring myself to ask so and so about his crumbling marriage.” Says Schneller: “To me those are the questions you’re there to ask, not exclusively, but eventually. For me that was instant grounds for rejection.” Schneller has perfected the art of relaxing her subjects and, eventually, gaining their trust. When she has to ask a difficult question, as is often the case when interviewing celebrities, she’ll say something like, “You don’t have to answer anything you don’t want to, but I have to ask you some questions.” She also breaks the Sawatskian taboo of talking about herself too much, but she finds it can be a helpful technique. “If I’m going to ask someone about their parents’ divorce, I’ll say, ‘My parents got divorced when I was a kid and I felt like this.'”

TRADE SECRETS
Nardwuar the Human Serviette
Throughout his career as an interviewer for both CiTR and MuchMusic’s Going Coastal, the Vancouverite has amassed a goldmine of interviews, and his doggedness has played a part in many of them. For instance, in November 1997, Nardwuar traded in his trademark plaid tam for more conservative attire and talked his way into a post-APEC press conference. It was here that he elicited the famous sound bite from Jean Chrétien: “For me, pepper, I put it on my plate.” It’s one thing to get an interview, but Nardwuar has a way of getting good stuff once he’s there. He impressed James Brown with the knowledge that the singer played drums and owned a restaurant. “He lives, breathes, sleeps and eats research,” says Bryce Dunn, programming coordinator for CiTR. That’s the beauty of a Nardwuar interview – something so prepared can come out sounding so conversational. Part of that is because of the questions he asks – researched, engaging and, sometimes, just weird. The most famous example is probably the time in 1993 when he asked former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Of all the political figures Dr. Gorbachev has encountered, who has the largest pants?”

It’s 5:30 a.m. and Anna Maria Tremonti is singing at the top of her lungs. As she drives to work, she warms up her voice by belting out the words to “Romanza,” which blares from the stereo of her 1997 Honda Accord. Andrea Bocelli’s ballad is perfect for the job because it has lots of trills. This is a routine the host of CBC Radio’s The Current follows Monday through Thursday, but when she did it one day in mid-April 2003, she had no idea that a few hours later she’d help make a decision that would create so much controversy.

After hosting her national show that day, Tremonti met with then- executive producer Jamie Purdon and senior producer Cathy Perry to discuss an upcoming interview with Henry Kissinger. The three of them sat around the huge table that takes up most of the editorial room and decided they wanted the interview to explore an op-ed piece the former U.S. Secretary of State wrote for The Washington Post about the damage the Iraq War will do to America’s European alliances. If some countries saw the U.S. as arrogant, they reasoned, shouldn’t the powerful and controversial Kissinger take some of the blame himself? The question had, after all, been a hot topic among experts for the previous year. So the following Monday, after discussing war crimes with him, Tremonti asked the celebrity statesman: “Couldn’t you also be vulnerable to those kinds of charges?”

“Who?” Kissinger responded, sounding surprised.

“You.”

“Me personally?” His surprise had turned to anger.

“Mmm Hmm.”

“That is one of those questions on which one ends the interview, but just for your information, if you read the provisions of the International Criminal Court, it does not have retrospective jurisdiction – and on this we’ll end the interview.”

“Well, can I talk to you, sir…”

Click.

“Hello?”

Tremonti knew he wouldn’t be happy, but she didn’t think he’d hang up the phone; nor did she think such a question would inflame her critics. Jonathan Kay, for example, appeared as perturbed as Kissinger. The editorials editor at the National Post considered it another example of Tremonti’s left-wing anti-Americanism. The next day, the paper ran an editorial entitled, “Ambush on the airwaves” that called the interview “an adolescent act of on-air activism.” About two weeks later, a Washington-based journalist known for his conservative and pro-American views joined the attack. In his daily U.S. radio commentary called Media Monitor, Cliff Kincaid claimed Tremonti was misinformed because she didn’t realize the International Criminal Court couldn’t prosecute Kissinger for anything he did as a U.S. official. “Those actions were before the court was established,” he complained. Even some CBC listeners weren’t impressed – one admonished her with an angry email that read, “Shame on you!”

Though blaming the news media isn’t new, in the past decade journalists have been under more scrutiny. David Spencer, a professor of journalism and media studies at the University of Western Ontario, thinks the epidemic of unfair criticism is the result of an increase in everything from poverty to terrorism in the world. “It’s much easier to blame journalists rather than believing the bad news,” he says. And it’s particularly easy for those in power – last October, for example, U.S. President George W. Bush publicly complained about what he perceived as negative coverage of the Iraq War. “There’s a feeling among politicians and large corporations that journalists are there to support their craft,” says Spencer. “We’re not paid to act as propaganda machines, but when we don’t, we get this attitude: ‘I’m right, you’re wrong, and to hell with what you have to say.'”

Tremonti’s certainly no stranger to this type of criticism. From the start of her 22-year career at the CBC, she aspired to cover controversial issues because she thought ignoring them would be wrong. Now, like other high-profile journalists who refuse to shy away from tough topics, she’s under perpetual scrutiny from critics with their own agendas – people who are not looking for fair coverage, but news that fits their ideology. Still, it doesn’t faze her. “Getting blamed unfairly has always been part of the business,” she reasons. “Sometimes the criticism is as narrow as it accuses me of being, but I’m not a victim. It goes with the territory.”

o o o

It’s about 5:45 a.m. when Tremonti arrives on CBC’s third floor each morning. As she struts around the corner and past a blue sign that still reads “This Morning,” she looks like a walking coat-hanger – an extra-large coffee in one hand, a bottle of water in the other and an overflowing, leather bag draped over her shoulder. She wears beige slacks with a fitted brown turtleneck and matching, waist-length dress-coat as she stomps heavily toward her office in ultra-high stilettos. Her posture is erect, her head raised, and her frozen blue-green eyes focused.

Born and raised in Windsor, Ontario, in the house where her parents still live, Tremonti was a curious kid who loved school so much she’d spend her summers reading indoors. Her father Tullio was a carpenter who emigrated from Italy, and her mother Eleanor was a schoolteacher. Both encouraged Tremonti and her older brother, Robert, to ask questions. Now 46, Tremonti says she’s a “glorified gossip” because of that advice. She hadn’t lived anywhere else until she received her BA in communications from the University of Windsor and moved to New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, at age 21 for her first on-air radio position. Five years later, in 1983, Tremonti made the jump from radio to television when she became a local reporter for the CBC in Edmonton. But her goal was to go national. In 1987, she became a Parliament Hill reporter for CBC’s The National. But she wanted to travel. So she moved to Berlin in 1991 for her first posting as a foreign correspondent for the same program. Then in 2000, David Studer, executive producer of the fifth estate, invited her to join the show as a host. That may have seemed like an unusual move, but unlike some broadcast journalists, Tremonti has always chosen her own career path. Besides, she was ready to come home to Canada after nine years away.

After just two seasons, she happily returned to her radio roots when she became host of Radio One’s The Current in November 2002. For the self-proclaimed nighthawk, the move meant living like a monk to keep up with her demanding new days, but she missed radio. Before accepting the job, she insisted she’d only host four days a week, because sometimes she needs to be out of the studio to get another perspective. So The Current features guest hosts on Fridays.

CBC Radio created The Current as part of a revamping of the three-hour time slot made famous by the late Peter Gzowski. In the spring of 1997, Morningside had nearly 1.3 million listeners daily, but a year later, after Gzowski retired and the show became This Morning, numbers dropped to 1.18 million. Though not a disastrous slip, the network also wanted to improve the ratings of local morning shows between 8 and 9 a.m. since audiences have stopped listening by then because they are commuting or are already at work. The solution was to start The Current at 8:30. And by replacing This Morning with two shows, Tremonti could cover both national and international news, leaving the lighter Sounds Like Canada to focus entirely on Canada. Jennifer McGuire, now executive director of programming at CBC Radio, created the concept of The Current in July 2002 when she was head of network current affairs at Radio One. Wanting a sassy, edgy, independent show because the dying This Morning wasn’t receiving much critical acclaim, McGuire composed a list of about 20 names of possible hosts and Tremonti was near the top. “I courted her until she couldn’t say no,” laughs McGuire. Today, Tremonti tests positively in CBC’s audience reports, and The Current has nearly 1.5 million listeners daily.

o o o

When she arrives at her office, where the door is always open, Tremonti sits down at a desk cluttered with loose papers, marked-up books and a computer drowning in Post-its. She flips the TV to CBC or CNN or BBC, mutes the volume, and fixes her radio to Metro Morning, CBC’s local morning show in Toronto. The bulletin board hanging behind her is jammed with pictures: her old garden in Jerusalem, friends from Berlin and the “TV tarts on tour” – that’s what Tremonti, Wendy Mesley and Halina St. James, who met at The National in the mid-’80s, call themselves. When AMT, as they call her, worked in Berlin, London and Jerusalem, Mesley (now host of CBC’s Marketplace) and St. James (now executive producer at Discovery) always visited. A diamond-shaped piece of Afghan art that Tremonti “really loves” hangs next to the pics and across from a tall shelf filled with books. “Whenever she’s interviewing someone, her first reaction is ‘I want to read everything he’s ever written,'” laughs Purdon.

With stilettos crossed up on her desk and a hard copy of the show’s question list in her hands, Tremonti picks up a thick red pen and mulls over the notes like a school teacher. She’s changing words, removing, adding and always writing the names of the people she’s interviewing at the top of each page – it’s easy to get confused when talking to six or seven people in an hour-and-a-half. As she finishes writing the bills – or story intros – it’s almost time to tape. Here at The Current, Tremonti writes the least she ever has and she misses it. As a foreign correspondent, she wrote almost all her own stories; on the fifth estate, she wrote hour-long documentary scripts. She loved the fifth estate and says she left too soon. But there, too, controversy was by her side.

In August 2002, Arthur Weinreb, associate editor of Media Report, a watchdog for biases in the news, took on Tremonti. The previous April, Tremonti hosted an episode of the fifth estate chronicling the path of Direct Action, better known as The Squamish Five: a group of Canadian left-wing, urban guerrillas who believed mainstream activism wasn’t working and went on a bombing spree to force radical change in the early ’80s. Weinreb accused Tremonti of glorifying terrorism by giving ex-con Ann Hanson a platform to espouse her ideas. He compared The Squamish Five’s actions to those of Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh, “whom the CBC never fawned over.”

Such criticism inflames Tremonti. She slouches over her desk reading a printout of the article. “I interviewed Hanson. Did he interview McVeigh?” she responds, her tone like a whip that would crack him in half. “When I do a story like that, I want to make you think and I got him to think. So, I did my job.” Indeed, during her two years at the fifth estate, Tremonti won a Gracie Allen Award from the American Women in Radio and Television and was nominated for a Gemini for best writing in an information program.

Such awards don’t impress her critics, however. In 2003, the Post – one of the11 major English-speaking newspapers in Canada owned by CanWest Global Communications, which competes with CBC on the television side – created CBC Watch, a forum for Canadians to express their views and keep the public broadcaster “accountable.” The eyes of CBC Watch bugged out after a 37-second copy story on The Current a few months after the Kissinger fiasco. Tremonti reported that Paul Wolfowitz, the U.S. deputy defence secretary, said the reason for the U.S. War on Iraq was that “the country swims on a sea of oil.” The next day, the Post accused her of misrepresenting the facts: “Mr. Wolfowitz was not describing America’s reason for launching a war,” it argued, “but rather explaining why its range of non-military options had been limited.” That same morning, The Current ran a correction nearly four times as long as the original item. “We did take that out of context,” admits Purdon. “So we corrected ourselves.” CBC Watch never mentioned the correction.

Of course, Tremonti’s not the only target of such bullying. Last July, The Washington Post berated ABC News reporter Jeffrey Kofman for a report he filed about the plummeting morale of U.S. soldiers in Iraq. Critics deemed Kofman’s piece as inaccurate and personally motivated because he’s gay – and Canadian. And no one at the CBC has taken more flak for his alleged anti-Israel reporting than Neil Macdonald, who served five years as the network’s Middle Eastern correspondent before moving to the Washington bureau last year. His coverage prompted a written complaint from Leonard Asper, the president and chief executive officer of CanWest Global, a demonstration against CBC from a group called Canadians Against Anti-Semitism, and several complaints from the Canada-Israel Committee, which promotes the relationship between Canada and Israel. As Western’s Spencer points out, the people taking the shots usually have their own agendas. Unfortunately, the more their views are publicized, the more trust in journalists diminishes. According to Bruce Sanford, author of a 2001 book called Don’t Shoot the Messenger: How Our Growing Hatred of the Media Threatens Free Speech for All of Us, this is the result of increased sensationalism in the news. “A canyon of disbelief and distrust has developed between the public and the news media,” he writes. But sensationalism in reporting doesn’t explain why Tremonti is a prime target of such shooting.

o o o

Back at The Current, it’s 7:37 a.m. and CBC’s regional news has just finished. It’s time to tape The Current. The show goes live to the east coast and then the tape airs at 8:37 across the rest of the country. Tremonti sits in the studio – her shoulders back, head up, eyes focused and hands in constant motion so if you couldn’t hear her voice, her hands could tell the story.

If you’re anywhere near her, you can feel her intensity – it’s intimidating. It could be the way she cuts you off to make her point or her tendency to bark down the phone if you’re wasting her time, or it could be when she snaps, “Not now,” if she doesn’t want to talk to you. But maybe it’s her face: her eyebrows that curve inward and might look evil if they were a darker colour than the strawberry red that matches her hair. Her lips also curve down – in seriousness, not sadness. She’s forever tucking her soft, shoulder-length hair behind her ears – it halfway covers three deep lines along her forehead. Her hair softens the rest of her. Apart from it, every feature is angular – strong jaw, razor eyes, protruding nose – they look like triangles drawn with a pencil and ruler. But none of this really explains why she’s intimidating – that comes from her entire being. You only need to meet her once, just for a moment, and you’ll feel it. Though Wendy Mesley insists her friend just expects a lot, rather than being overly tough, Tremonti’s determination drives her to tackle difficult issues.

That toughness took her to Bosnia to cover the war in 1992. She spent her nights alone in a tiny room with twin beds in Sarajevo’s Holiday Inn, where the walls were cluttered with bullet holes and other marks. She couldn’t turn on the light because a sniper might spot it and shoot. She lay awake her first night, eyes darting around the room, like a child afraid of monsters under her bed – only the monsters were bullets and bombs (and they were real). She leaned a mattress against the window to muffle the bangs and blasts. Something could come through that mattress and kill me, she thought. She jumped up and fastened her flak jacket over her long T-shirt and tights. She grabbed a sleeping bag and pillow and rushed out into the dark and empty hallway. She lay down on the floor. But now there was a 10-storey atrium made of glass about three feet away. What if something came flying through that glass? With that, she picked herself up and made camp in the tiny hotel bathroom. She snuggled into the sleeping bag with her feet by the sink and her head next to the toilet. But if something hits that wall and the sink comes flying at me? leaving the sleeping bag on the floor, Tremonti grabbed her pillow and went back to bed. There’s no use in panicking, she rationalized. There’s nothing I can do. She was fast asleep an hour later. And having come to terms with the danger, she never had trouble sleeping again.

Later, she spent three years in Jerusalem covering the Arab-Israeli conflict. While her coverage from the Middle East didn’t upset too many, she faces accusations that she’s anti-Israel at The Current. “Anna Maria Tremonti and the whole mob of unnecessary CBC duplicates are incredibly biased against Israel,” complains Warren Klass, who has written for The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune and others. Klass claims his views about Israel are shaped by the fact that he lost 500 relatives in the Holocaust, but feels that CBC News blames Israel first because the majority of its journalists have no understanding of Middle Eastern history. And Bryan Dobbs, a retired professor of Jewish studies and the owner and operator of the Electronic Emporium for Jewish History, News and Opinion (EEJH), an Internet discussion list and website, argues that CBC’s audience receives Palestinian propaganda.

Though Dobbs – a lifelong friend of the late CanWest owner Izzy Asper – may be easy to dismiss, Tremonti gave him some ammunition when she interviewed Daniel Pipes in January 2003. Pipes is a political commentator and columnist who established Campus Watch, an organization that monitors Middle Eastern studies in North American universities. The interview was rocky. Pipes began by correcting Tremonti’s definition of Campus Watch. “It’s not about Israel,” he snapped. “It critiques the studies of the Middle East in hopes of improving them.” He also complained when Tremonti asked about a list of alleged anti-Israeli professors on the site: “There is no list? You and many others are talking about [Campus Watch] in the abstract without looking at it.” However, Tremonti never claimed his website was about Israel; rather, she introduced Pipes as a defender of the country. Still, she admits she’s not proud of the interview. She could have been more prepared – she could have clicked on campus-watch.org, for example.

But in this case some critics cut her some slack. The Canada-Israel Committee, for example, received many complaints about the Pipes interview but didn’t feel it was worth issuing a report. “Mistakes are going to happen,” says the group’s director of communications Paul Michaels. He listens to The Current two or three times a week, and respects Tremonti for her balanced coverage as The National’s Middle Eastern correspondent six years ago. “So she didn’t look at the website. That doesn’t make her anti-Israel.”

Though bias in the media is not as rabid as its critics imply, it doesn’t follow that journalists are never accountable. In 1998 Tremonti won her second Gemini – the first being her reportage of the Bosnian war – this time for her coverage of the death of Princess Diana from London. But she isn’t entirely proud of her award; something about it still nags at her. The night before Diana’s car crashed Islamic terrorists in Algeria massacred nearly 300 people. “And none of us went there,” she says softly. She bites her lip and looks down, ashamed – a rare look for her. She throws her hands in the air. “We all went to cover British royalty instead.”

It’s nearly 3 p.m. now and Tremonti’s day is almost over. She’s looking at the Post’s editorial about the Kissinger interview drama, but she’s not bothered or concerned by it – she’d only worry if she thought they were right. Tremonti is sure of her role in Canadian radio journalism.

“I’m just the person who tackles controversial issues,” she says. “If I’m viewed as a controversial person because I do, then so be it.”

It is 1965 and the federal election campaign is nearing an end. Don McGillivray is on a train heading toward Toronto along with other press gallery journalists and prime ministerial candidate John Diefenbaker. A lively discussion about journalism rages in McGillivray’s roomette. Diefenbaker has been saying things in speeches that are untrue and some reporters have started correcting him in their stories. Others, including McGillivray, think this is wrong – a journalist’s job is simply to report what is said. McGillivray and The Globe and Mail’s Anthony Westell argue back and forth until the train approaches Union Station. Westell trudges back to his roomette to pack up, leaving McGillivray silently fuming. As the reporters file off the train and onto a bus heading to the airport, nobody realizes McGillivray is not there. He is so busy mulling over the preceding debate that he hasn’t noticed the train stopping, his colleagues getting off and the train moving into one of the giant rail yards outside Toronto. When McGillivray realizes his situation, he exits the train the only way he can – out the window.

Known as an unusual but lovable character by colleagues, McGillivray was a person of conviction. His feelings for the practice and ethics of journalism ran deeper than anyone realized. The veteran reporter’s argument stemmed from the old world of journalism where reporting did not involve interpreting – a position that had largely been discredited after McCarthyism. This was what was so intriguing about him. He had a passion for the craft that went well beyond the newsroom, and was a pioneer in his approach to economic and political writing, creating a clear, concise style that spoke to people across generations. He cared about the ethics of journalism yet did not seem to have a problem with reporting what was said without questioning its validity. (And even though he simply reported Diefenbaker’s words, he later questioned Brian Mulroney’s.)

McGillivray, affectionately known as Mr. McGoo, believed in the importance of journalism, but never puffed it up as something other than a trade. Although he was from an older generation of journalists, he always related well with younger colleagues. And while he came from an era of hard-drinking, hard-living reporters, he was a teetotaller who preferred collecting books. In short, McGillivray, who died in Victoria, B.C., in June of 2003, was as complex as he was colourful.

Born in 1927, McGillivray grew up in Archive, about 14 kilometers southwest of Moose Jaw. Like many during the Depression, his family was on relief. The tough times made McGillivray skeptical of power, something that came through in his writing. He maintained that the public interest required reporters to be observant of politicians’ actions and his western conservatism compelled him to demand a really good reason when governments made changes. In order to pay for his education – he studied economics and was editor of the University of Saskatchewan’s student newspaper, The Sheaf – McGillivray worked in Moose Jaw at Thatcher’s hardware store, where he met his future wife Julietta Kepner, who he affectionately referred to as Jetty.

In 1951, straight out of university, McGillivray began his career at the Regina Leader-Post. He quickly established himself as a competent and diligent reporter, but he soon faced ethical challenges. Around Christmas, his colleagues at city hall suddenly became increasingly excited. “Well, today we’re going to get the graft,” they explained. And sure enough, the city clerk came around with envelopes holding $50 bills as a reward for positive coverage. A few years later, when McGillivray worked at the provincial legislature in Regina, the graft was $200. McGillivray took the money because he was a young reporter and thought he was doing the right thing, but later used the experience as a cautionary tale for his students.

His ethics were also tested at The Winnipeg Tribune, where he moved in 1955. Home to a talented but hard-drinking group of reporters, it was an odd environment for the abstaining prairie Baptist with thick-rimmed, square glasses, conservative white shirt and dark ties. Although McGillivray rarely dropped by the Winnipeg Press Club, he still managed to impress the members. “His new colleagues at the Tribune expected to spend weeks breaking him in,” remembers Lindsay Crysler, a co-worker and close friend, “and were astounded when in the first days he wrote as many stories as they did, and didn’t have to ask for help.”

Packed into the small press room, sitting shoulder to shoulder, the legislative reporters wrote stories on typewriters using carbon copies. The reporting staff of The Winnipeg Free Press – the Tribune’s main rival – was headed by Ted Byfield, a Christian and a fierce competitor. Other reporters always had to be careful with the copies and even the carbons because Byfield was always working nearby. McGillivray enjoyed the battles, but preferred to rely on more traditional research for his stories.

He faced a different ethical challenge when he moved to the Ottawa bureau of Southam News in 1962. The press gallery dinner – which started in the afternoon and often lasted until morning – was an annual Old-Boys’ booze-up for politicians and journalists. By tradition it was completely off the record, and though McGillivray disagreed with the policy, he never broke the embargo. Instead, he interviewed his drunken colleagues as they stumbled out. It caused a major uproar and soon the dinner went on the record. “Don was a solid supporter of the notion that we were here to report on the public lives of public people,” says Patrick Nagle, who worked with McGillivray at the Tribune and Southam News, “so he was always there in the front of any kind of challenge to authority.”

Despite his ethical approach, there were contradictions. McGillivray joined the Centre for Investigative Journalism (CIJ) a few years after it started in 1978. A leader of the move to change the CIJ to the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), he was among those who argued the emphasis on investigative journalism made others reluctant to join and that all journalism was investigative in some way. With a new name starting in 1990, the group’s membership ballooned. And in 1993, CAJ board member Brian Brennan surveyed members to see if they were in favour of a code of ethics for the association. But McGillivray always spoke passionately against the idea. For him, journalists should be free and unregulated, not restricted by any code. In a CAJ Bulletin from 1990 under the headline, “The Impossibility of a Media Ethics Code,” McGillivray wrote that journalism was not a profession, like law or medicine, and therefore shouldn’t be regulated like one.

Despite this, McGillivray valued journalism because it gave him a venue to express his views. He had various stints as an editor: in 1970 McGillivray became the associate editor of The Edmonton Journal before moving on in 1972 to be the editor of the Financial Times of Canada in Montreal. Then in 1975 McGillivray returned to Ottawa as Southam’s national economics editor. What he loved best, though, was reporting. His work won him three National Business Writing Awards in 1977, 1979 and 1984.

When McGillivray became the national political and economic columnist for Southam in 1985, he had a corner office crammed full of dictionaries, as well as records of financial statements and budgets. If anybody in the newsroom wanted to know the details of, say, the 1980 budget, McGillivray had it in his office or at home or, more than likely, in his head. Just outside his office door sat a filing cabinet with a bulletin board above it where he stuck Polaroids he snapped of his colleagues. On top of the filing cabinet was McGillivray’s snack bar where he set out doughnuts, cookies and jelly beans for the staff. “I think he was personally responsible for 10 pounds on each and every one of us,” remembers former Southam editor and general manager Jim Travers.

McGillivray came from an era when journalists didn’t serve big business or corporate masters, they served the reader. And, especially in the 1950s, editors and reporters at Southam newspapers had a great deal of freedom. While the newsroom rules increased over the years, McGillivray still enjoyed engaging his readers in subjects of national debate, especially politics. He refused to take the posturing of public figures seriously, and didn’t trust Mulroney at all. McGillivray was against the Free Trade Agreement, believing it camouflaged the government’s real interests. He relentlessly derided the Mulroney campaign, which he called “10 Big Lies of 1988” and regularly accused Mulroney of incompetence. Reflecting on what he called the “Persian Gulf crisis,” McGillivray wrote: “The Prime Minister probably didn’t know what he was talking about.” In 1993, he wrote “The Prime Minister is, in fact, living in an economic dream world as he makes his whining exit from public office.” The Mulroney camp made public complaints and accusations of bad faith. Mulroney’s staff stopped handing out transcriptions of press conferences because McGillivray kept finding inconsistencies. While he seemed to have a bias against Mulroney, Travers and Nagle says it was more his general skepticism towards governments and politicians. This was a big change from the journalist who insisted on quoting politicians verbatim back in 1965. Even before his reporting practices changed McGillivray was always cynical of authority. One cold winter day in early 1960, the McGillivray family was walking down Sparks Street in Ottawa heading towards the Orange Blossom restaurant for lunch, the Parliament Buildings looming beside them. McGillivray’s son Neil asked him, “Dad, are you for the government or against the government?” McGillvray replied, “Well, I guess most of the time I’m against the government.”

He questioned their politics, but McGillivray also seemed to hold politicians in awe. At the end of the 1965 federal election campaign, McGillivray’s family met him at the Ottawa train station. He was fond of Diefenbaker and proudly smiled as his children shook the hand of the former prime minister. Later on, Diefenbaker sent him a note saying: “I think you’re the best writer in Ottawa.” McGillivray had it framed and put it on his wall in his office.

In 1980, he began writing a biweekly political column in addition to the five-days-a-week economic column he started in 1975. He continued to write both until he retired from Southam in 1992. And from 1980 until five years past his official retirement, he wrote a column called “Lingo” that delved into the intricacies of the English language. His economics pieces were always tightly and clearly written and educational. In “How govt. gets, spends its cash,” McGillivray discussed the budget with a clarity that even people without an economics background could understand. “Where does the federal government get its money?” he wrote. “More than 50 cents out of every revenue dollar comes from the personal income tax. Ten cents comes from the tax on company profits. Twenty-five cents comes from excise and sales taxes, levied on commodities…The only other important part is the nine cents in the dollar from investments… Nine plus 25 plus 10 plus 50 is 94 cents. The other six cents comes… from various minor sources.” This was the style of writing that impressed his readers and colleagues. “He made his reputation, justifiably, on his knowledge of how the Canadian economic system worked,” says Nagle, “and he took political and economic journalism to a new level by providing that kind of reporting and commentary to a much larger group of people because his column appeared in every Southam newspaper.”

McGillivray took pride in his writing, but never sounded self-important. “A vast amount of the material available to an economic columnist is flim-flam put out to advance the interests, not of ordinary people, but of some organization or other,” he wrote in 1984. “A columnist has the choice of retailing the flim-flam or trying to expose it. I’ve tried to expose it, not always successfully.”

As a teacher though, McGillivray was an unqualified success. In 1980, he went to work at Montreal’s Concordia University as a professor of economic and business writing. Understanding that students learn better when fed, he served coffee and doughnuts. McGillivray rarely ate sweets himself and instead lived by his own words of wisdom: “Man cannot live by bread alone. He needs a bit of cottage cheese, ketchup and HP sauce too.” He also refused to eat any kind of poultry because he’d eaten too much chicken as a child. In 1982, McGillivray started teaching a fourth-year business reporting course at Carleton University and always came to class with food. But fellow professor Peter Johansen would not be outdone: “We were always upping each other so that by the end of the term we were practically bringing whole meals to class – cold cuts, breads, mustard and all the rest of it.

With no driver’s licence, McGillivray rode Voyageur back and forth between Ottawa and Montreal to teach once a week at each university and write columns for Southam. Students frequently chose his classes because he had a reputation for making economics enjoyable. He gave them a hypothetical amount of money to invest in the stock market, which meant researching companies and reading the stock pages. Throughout the year, the students bought and sold shares as they pleased, but had to pay a “brokerage fee” for every trade. At the end of the year, they wrote about their experience. The moral of the exercise: the only person guaranteed to make a buck was the broker, who got paid regardless of what happened to the stock.

Along with teaching, McGillivray nurtured aspiring journalists. In the summer of 1986, Carolyn Adolph landed a summer job at Southam News, an office full of seasoned political reporters – mostly male. They’d never had a student intern before and Adolph turned out wooden stories because she was never able to write a word that was good enough for her inner editor. Eventually, McGillivray came into her office. “Carolyn,” he pleaded, “you have to take the editor in your mind and wring her neck! Shut her up! Just stop her from criticizing you all the time!”

Oh, my God, I can’t believe he knows what’s going on, thought Adolph. He had just understood what was happening by reading her writing – and he solved her problem.

For all his generosity, McGillivray was also, in many ways, a modest man. The Bank of McGillivray, as he was called, occasionally bailed out the CAJ when it was in financial trouble. Over the years he donated about $5,000, though no one knew until then-executive director John Stevens let it slip at a board meeting. But McGillivray’s fondness for collecting was anything but subtle. By the time he went to Southam’s Washington bureau in 1966, he had already collected about 1,000 books that had to be shipped along with him. After receiving a bill from the movers when McGillvray relocated to London a year later, Charles Lynch, then the head of Southam in Ottawa, sent him a letter saying, “If you buy any books in London, for every book you buy you have to throw one away.” So McGillivray started collecting miniature books, including the four-inch high Encyclopedia Britannica. He read and remembered everything he collected. Sitting at home one night, Murray McGillivray answered a call from his father, who asked: “Can you go to the bookshelf beside the window in the dining room, go to the third shelf from the top, four books in, and get the book with the red cover on it. Can you read me from page 36, the second paragraph down?”

After McGillivray’s wife Jetty died from liver and colon cancer in 1979, he sold the house in Montreal and bought one in Ottawa during the late 1980s. His new home became renowned for its eclectic interior decorating, consisting of items from garage sales, second-hand stores and pieces from previous family homes. Collecting was a passion he picked up from his father, who would spend his Saturdays wandering around thrift shops in Moose Jaw. McGillivray collected anything that caught his eye – the quirkier the better. Mountains of personal effects filled every corner of his house and a stream of political posters plastered the wall leading up the staircase. Leading off the kitchen was McGillivray’s office, with 15 abridged Oxford dictionaries arranged from shortest to tallest. Copies of the Encyclopedia Britannica and Roget’s Thesaurus abounded, and he owned 20 volumes of the unabridged Oxford English Dictionary, second edition. A U.S.-Canada border marker rested in the living room fireplace and a collection of hard, plastic, miniature dinosaurs sat on the coffee table. Books such as Folk Songs, Cowboy Songs, and The Rock ‘n’ Roll Years sat on the ledges of the untuned piano. Shelves crammed with books flooded the house: in the hallways, under the stairs, above the stairs, in the dining room. In 1997, McGillivray donated 15,000 dictionaries, indices, bibliographies, yearbooks, biographies, royal commission reports, parliamentary and media commentary, novels, and caricatures to the University of Northern British Columbia.

His house also featured a Pope room, with a plaster bust of the Pope alongside Bibles and other ceramic religious statues. The Mountie room housed a life-sized dummy wearing a red Mountie uniform, hat and boots that stood at the end of the bed. Coasters, books and paper fans all laden with the classic Canadian symbol of an officer atop his horse vied for shelf space with ceramic and stuffed Mounties. His passion for collecting this paraphernalia was in part to mock Canadian attitudes toward their own pretentious culture. “Don had certain favourite antipathies in this country, starting with Canadian movies,” said Tim Creery, close friend and fellow Southam reporter, in the eulogy he gave at McGillivray’s funeral. “At the movies, Don wanted popcorn, escapism and larger-than-life entertainment; never mind these dreary tales of self-pitying Canucks. He could scarcely abide the CBC, couldn’t abide cultural protectionism at all and had a low opinion of the Canadian literati.”

Whatever his rationale, McGillivray amassed an impressive collection and his son Murray has kept it ever since his father sold the house to move to Victoria and live with his daughter Peigi Ann. That was in 1997, after he retired from teaching because of failing vision and several falls on the icy streets of Ottawa. What was initially diagnosed as Parkinson’s disease later turned out to be Progressive Supra-nuclear Palsy, a similar affliction. As his illness got worse, it robbed him of the ability to read. But as McGillivray wrote in a memoir of his wife Jetty: “I realized that the things I treasure about the people I love – and love still, even though apart – are tucked away in my head, not in boxes in the closet.” So all his books were stored mentally along with his career memories.

Back in his Southam days, the bureau decided to hold weekly half-hour story meetings. McGillivray’s response was to take his annual vacation a half an hour at a time every day. It was his way of letting the bureau know he was his own man, and it had the added benefit of meaning he didn’t have to listen to Charles Lynch and Allan Fotheringham argue. It started off as a joke but soon became serious – until his bosses stepped in. Even then, McGillivray never took any vacations. He thought it was a waste of time when he could be doing what he loved: reporting and writing stories. “To him,” says his son Neil, “nature was a blank space between islands of human activity.” Later, as a professor of business and economics reporting, McGillivray gave a lesson titled “The Joys of Journalism.” The joys included: “You get to know stuff before other people know the stuff” and “You get to tell other people about stuff.” It was McGillivray’s way of showing that journalism was something you do because you love it. Which he did.

Last June, people working at Transcontinental Media were given disconcerting news. They learned that their jobs were no longer secure and that a new editor and publishers were on the way. Upper management at the Toronto-based company, they found out, had been busy making a series of senior staff changes at Canadian Living and Homemakers magazines.

Meanwhile, Canadian Living publisher Debbie Gibson, Homemakers publisher Carol Shea and Homemakers editor Dianne Rinehart were told that their positions had been eliminated.

Strangely, it turns out both stories were true. A new editor for Homemakers and new publishers for Homemakers and Canadian Living were on the way – in the form of one person, Charlotte Empey. The Canadian Living editor was appointed editor of Homemakers as well as group publisher. Effectively, she took on four jobs.

Since 1966, Homemakers’ staff, content, distribution and look have evolved. But in the run-up to last June, there was a major overhaul and relaunch in April 2003. The little pocket-sized magazine on the cashier’s rack became “super digest”-sized. And what was once a book that successfully combined international social issues with recipes and service articles, now focuses on food, fashion, health, beauty and d?cor. Stories about the plight of women in Afghanistan and girls struggling in war-torn countries – the real heart of Homemakers – get lost between stories on finding therapists and displaying photos.

Social issues weren’t the only things to disappear from the magazine; the line between church and state also vanished. Accepting the roles of publisher and editor at two magazines, Empey potentially changed the way consumer magazines are run. The elimination of the healthy friction between editor and publisher has caused a stir. Bill Shields, editor of Masthead, calls Empey’s role a “new business model” where one person dictates from the top down. He claims that Transcontinental, relatively new to magazine publishing and known for its strict bottom line, is cutting costs and trying to generate as much profit as possible to appease its shareholders. Empey doesn’t agree. “There was a sense that we could do business differently and by doing business differently, we could create strong and independent brands that will share some things, such as staff,” she says. While she acknowledges it’s a unique way to run two magazines and does lend itself to certain efficiencies, Empey says her new role is not to save money. Backed by what she calls one of the best management teams in Canada, Empey is thrilled about her jobs. “I’m really blessed to be in a place where I get to do so much strategic thinking,” she says. “I get to think, which is the really exciting thing.”

In her office, the 53-year-old sits comfortably in an armchair. She has trinkets on her television and her grandson’s painting on the wall. A dog-eared copy of Rolling Stone with Keith Richards on the cover rests on her coffee table. His pictures also grace her bulletin board. In this industry, Empey is known as a hard-working woman who can multitask like no other. In 25-plus years, she’s played many roles at magazines and worked in communications, advertising and education. Even critics who question the wisdom of wearing so many hats have only nice things to say – and no one is surprised.

Empey’s first task was to differentiate Homemakers and Canadian Living from each other. Even though both share a crossover readership, she knew women came to each for different reasons. Traditionally, Canadian Living has been about the woman and her family. “That has always been the focus of Canadian Living and we do it better than anybody in this country, as far as I’m concerned,” she says. Homemakers, on the other hand, has historically been about the relationship the reader has with herself.

Second, Empey continued with what the Homemakers’ relaunch set out to do – please readers. In 2003, the magazine’s Print Measurement Bureau (PMB) numbers fell to 1.98 million readers from 2.27 million in 2001. The relaunch freshened the look and shifted the editorial toward what readers wanted. Transcontinental performed its own research and found that women wanted more food, fashion, beauty, d?cor and wellness articles, a contrast from the issue stories favoured by past editors Sally Armstrong (1988-1999) and Jane Gale Hughes (1974-1986). Even though Empey must please her bosses, she acknowledges the importance of social issues.

Back in the 1970s, Hughes’ Homemakers had a national focus. Armstrong travelled around the world, covering stories of suffering, war, triumph and empowerment. “Homemakers has always had a more global reach and elastic borders,” she says. These borders are starting to flex once again, but slowly. In the November 2003 issue, the magazine ran a story on African women working to overcome male-dominance through education and small-business ventures. Twenty years ago, this story would have made the cover, but now the magazine makes beefsteak and mushroom pie the star, and hides the plight of these women in the middle of the book.

Not only were the magazine’s PMB numbers slipping, but Homemakers’ Leading National Advertisers (LNA) stats pre-relaunch were also dismal. Its run-of-press ad pages were down 32.9 per cent compared to the same period in spring 2002. Empey claims LNA was not a leading factor in the magazine’s relaunch. But Sunni Boot, president and CEO of media management company ZenithOptimedia and someone who has worked with Homemakers since it started, claims the magazine had to address the advertising stats. “The LNA is critical because it’s a tool that allows the magazine to monitor how it is performing versus its competitors,” Boot says. “I don’t see how Homemakers could manage its business without it.” She sees Homemakers’ relaunch as a success so far. “It is certainly holding its own. It re-formatted in April and since then has increased subscriptions by 35 per cent and has increased its readership, circulation and advertising.” Since the relaunch, Homemakers has picked up 12 new advertisers.

However, the question remains: is the new editorial formula working? “It’s been an absolute success,” says Empey. The reader response has been positive and subscriptions are up; meanwhile, advertisers are happy and Homemakers was over its revenue projections for the December/January and February issues. But the success of the relaunch won’t show up in the numbers until PMB 2005.

To remain a competitive player in the magazine industry, Homemakers had to “keep up with the Joneses.” In March of 1999, Homemakers’ neighbour on the newsstand, Chatelaine, relaunched. Publisher Donna Clark, editor Rona Maynard and the marketing team made the decision because the magazine was missing its target audience of women aged 25 to 49. What was once the No. 1 women’s magazine in Canada was on the decline. Penetration of its prime market went from 31.6 per cent per issue in 1988 to a mere 17.7 per cent in 1999. The average age of the Chatelaine reader was 50 years old.

The magazine had to improve its product and cater to its readers. First, the magazine had to find out who the readers were (via focus groups) and how to reposition itself within its original target audience. Second, it had to improve its product by having a more contemporary look and more savvy covers. In their research, Clark and Maynard realized it was critical to provide more relaxation and humour for the readers; the days when women needed to be told that they were confident and strong are long gone. The Chatelaine reader was overworked and in need of being entertained, not bombarded with social issues that already filled mainstream news.

Chatelaine addressed this shift in content by providing more useful service articles in the areas of food, fashion, beauty, health and d?cor. It soon regained its No. 1 status. In 2002, newsstand sales were up 89 per cent from 1999, and the magazine had attracted 3.2 million English readers. Clark maintains Chatelaine has doubled its profits. But this took time. “Our newsstand sales didn’t start to show a pattern of improvement for 15 months,” says Maynard.

With the new Homemakers now approaching the 15-month mark, it appears the revamp has been a success: revenue and subscriptions are both up. But with Homemakers’ recent shift away from social issues to focus on food, fashion, health and beauty, will it be able to retain its socially conscious readership? The debate is not new – the dumbing down of content in women’s magazines versus the evolution of content to suit the needs of its readership is an old battle.

The controversy concerns the accusation that women’s magazines are withdrawing from their social responsibility. Mary McIver, former managing editor at Homemakers from 1989 to 2000, has noticed the shift to softer content. She mainly attributes this change to Transcontinental putting pressure on then-editor Rinehart to move content away from international stories and hard-hitting domestic issues and toward a more personal-growth focus. McIver admits that calling it a dumbing down is a sweeping statement, but she does think Homemakers lacks coverage of social issues. A magazine that once featured influential women such as comedian Sandra Shamas or women in the military on its cover, now features beef roulade. “Women can do the lipstick and lasagna thing, but we are also concerned about raising women’s consciousness with issues worldwide and on the home front,” says McIver. She feels alienated from most women’s magazines. “I don’t want to hone my life to perfection,” she says matter-of-factly. “Life is too interesting to set the perfect dinner table or to try to attract a man.”

On the flip side, Empey has spent her career working at magazines where lipstick and lasagna were part of the editorial mix. “If anything is interesting to women, it is valuable,” she says. “You can read any number of women’s magazines and get different layers of information. But, at the same time, reading magazines is not like going to night school. This is entertainment and it needs to engage women emotionally,” says Empey. She considers Homemakers to be like a conversation with a girlfriend and challenges critics, especially women, to think about what they and their girlfriends discuss. “Do you talk about the plight of women in Bosnia?” asks Empey. “My best guess is no, you don’t. You complain about your partner, or your lack of a partner. You celebrate your kids, you complain about your kids, and how you want to lose 10 pounds before you go on vacation.”

Former editor Armstrong agrees. “The dumbing down comment is as old as I am – which is pretty old!” she jokes on the phone from her home office. She is a day away from heading to Afghanistan to write consciousness-raising stories for Chatelaine and Maclean’s, just like she did for Homemakers. “It’s absurd to suggest that a woman who wants to know what’s new in fashion or a quick family dinner is not interested in meaty stories,” she says. In the past three decades, the former editor thinks women have come a long way and achieved success in all areas of their lives. But she also thinks women need to learn how to relax and magazines need to acknowledge this by not taking themselves so seriously.

She’ll get no argument from Chatelaine’s Maynard. “Women don’t need a magazine to remind them that they are smart, informed and engaged in the world. They are confronted everyday with clear evidence that this is the case,” she says. “They are change-makers – they see it in their own over-crowded daytimers, they see it in the media.”

To say that there is a withdrawal from social responsibility in the women’s magazine sector isn’t quite incorrect. But it is certain that readers are asking for useful content they can apply to their lives. As Chatelaine publisher Clark says, women want to be rewarded and stress-free. Being a successful magazine is about knowing what readers want and catering to that.

Empey walks so quickly through the offices of Homemakers and Canadian Living it’s difficult to keep up with her as she goes from a meeting to a food-testing and back to another meeting. Her dual roles keep her busy – so busy she doesn’t have time to stop and listen to criticisms from her peers. It will be interesting to see how she fares with her new four-jobs-in-one position at Transcontinental, now that the line between editor and publisher has blurred.

Slowly, social-issue stories are emerging and creeping into the pages of Homemakers and Empey assures us that there will be many more to come. The magazine promises to continue to feature old-time favourites such as lipstick and lasagna, but Empey sees absolutely no harm in that. Rather, she is excited by the fact that she gets to share “yummy” things with her readers, whether it is a bumblebee birthday cake or a story about women supporting other women around the world.

The bus platform at Toronto’s Lawrence subway station is uncharacteristically quiet for a Friday evening. There are few commuters, no buses and little noise. It doesn’t even feel like rush hour until Jan Wong arrives. Wearing a green hooded coat and bright royal blue backpack, Wong could just as easily be coming from school as from a conference on human rights in China. She is disarmingly youthful, energetic and talkative. In fact, Wong’s barely settled on a concrete bench when she chirps up and offers directions to a stranger. Then she notices the young woman sitting on the bench beside her. “I didn’t even see you there,” Wong says cheerfully, turning toward her. The woman, frizzy-haired and plaid-skirted, looks up from a game of computer solitaire on her laptop and nods.

“I recognized your voice when you were talking,” the woman says to Wong. She giggles but doesn’t say more. Wong giggles too, and half-jokingly offers to give the woman directions. But when Bus 124 pulls up, the chitchat ends. Suddenly Wong is all business. “Tell them to call me,” she pleads, springing up from her seat. “Tell them they should talk.”

She touches her companion’s arm before walking away. “Tell them the story’s dying.”

By “them,” Wong means the parents of nine-year-old Cecilia Zhang, a Toronto girl who was kidnapped from her North York bedroom. Her baffling disappearance has dominated the news for days, particularly in The Globe and Mail’s three-month-old Toronto section. Toronto editor Simon Beck has two of his big guns on the Zhang case: while columnist Christie Blatchford works the police angle, Wong covers the Chinese community.

This encounter with the woman at the bus stop should prove useful – for once, Wong’s byline might get more play than Blatchford’s. As a Zhang family friend, the anonymous laptop woman has been able to provide Wong with material – like how Cecilia was named after a Simon and Garfunkel song – that has set her stories apart. But before Wong scored this too-good-to-be-true source she had to rely on the shrewd reporting tactics that have shaped her career as an investigative journalist. For her third article, seven days after Cecilia’s disappearance, Wong talked her way into a North York neighborhood home so she could peek out a window that overlooked the Zhang family’s back yard. This, she explains, was the only way to come up with the following two sentences: “The kidnappers appear to have jimmied open a kitchen window more than two metres above the ground, facing the back yard. Cecilia’s bedroom was above the kitchen window, and also faced the back yard.”

Most Globe readers probably skimmed over those 34 words. But that wouldn’t matter to Wong, who’s never content with secondhand accounts or truths that can’t be confirmed with her own eyes. She just has to get as close to her stories as possible and she’ll do whatever it takes to get there. “Jan comes from that old school of journalism,” says Maryam Sanati, Wong’s editor at Report on Business Magazine. “She’s one tough cookie.”

Wong’s toughness is legendary. And while it may not win her friends, it does mean she’s bestowed with a grudging respect from industry colleagues. If there’s one thing journalists agree on, it’s that Jan Wong knows how to go out and get a story. Call her pushy, fearless, tenacious, persistent; any way you look at it, she’s a reporter on a mission. This demon reporting has led Wong to break some original stories, such as her discovery that Terry Popowich, a senior vice-president of the Toronto Stock Exchange, lied about graduating from the London School of Economics. (Popowich was immediately fired). But her toughness also courts controversy. Some colleagues saw Wong’s post-9/11 attempt to expose lax airport security by bringing a box cutter onto an Air Canada flight as little more than sensationalism. Readers questioned why Wong risked putting others in danger for her work.

But what makes Wong controversial is also what makes her one of the country’s most talked-about reporters. She rarely censors her thoughts, and spills them onto the printed page with savage honesty – as anyone who’s lunched with her would know. Former “Lunch with Jan Wong” subject Pamela Wallin once compared Wong to Hannibal Lecter. CBC’s Michael Enright went even further: “A request for lunch with Jan Wong is like hearing from Revenue Canada – it’s a phone call you don’t want to get.”

Wong’s tough approach has seen her through plenty of successful career roles. With three books, a stack of newspaper credits and two distinct claims to fame, first as a foreign correspondent and later as a columnist, Wong’s journalism has thrived by constant “self-reinventions” – a term coined by Edward Greenspon, her boss at the Globe. Take a glance at Wong’s résumé and you’ll see it’s true of her life, not just her work. Nestled among her brag-worthy credits at The New York Times, the Globe and The Wall Street Journal is “peasant, rural China” – her occupation from 1975-76. “Pneumatic driller and lathe operator” is listed for the year 1972.

But it’s a nagging pressure, this self-reinvention. Since the death of Wong’s column in 2002, she has struggled to find a new niche at the Globe. Wong’s most promising stint – as an ROB Magazine writer – was sacrificed for the Toronto section, where editors appreciate her name, if not her talents. Sandwiched between other big-name writers, she doesn’t fare well. Like a handy crutch, her tough journalism persists, propping up a few stories – like Cecilia Zhang. But so far, it’s not enough. Journalist Robert Fulford, like many in the business, talks about Wong in the past tense. Still, like everyone else, Fulford knows you can never count her out. “What Jan Wong lacks at the moment is a role,” he says. “That’s it.”

On a quiet Tuesday in early September, Wong is anxious to get to her meeting. Preferring to work from home, she hasn’t been to the office since the Globe launched its Toronto section. At noon, Wong will meet many of her editors and colleagues for the first time. None of this matters, of course. She has already predicted the meeting will be a waste of time, conducted simply because the Globe is a meeting-oriented institution and editors have nothing better to do than hear themselves talk. But, she explains, rifling through mail and blue sticky notes at her desk, she is anxious to get there because there will be sandwiches – “Reporters will go far for a free sandwich,” she quips.

Wong is usually – and remarkably – void of personal vanity or self-consciousness. (“What would really embarrass me?” she once asked in an article for Toronto Life. “It’s hard to say when you have no threshold of embarrassment.”) She also has a penchant for thinking aloud. “I’m checking my email – is that rude? Am I rude?” Wong asks, whipping around in her chair. “Let’s keep talking, I’m just reading something.”

Before long, Wong walks briskly through a maze of cubicles to a drab boardroom at the back of the building. The room is empty, save for Tony Reinhart, the Globe’s newly hired Toronto columnist – and the promised sandwiches. As more people trickle in and sit down at the boardroom table, Wong unpackages the food and distributes napkins. “Do I have to wash my hands because of SARS?” she jokes. Then, as unfamiliar faces drift in, she asks loudly, “Who’s that? I don’t know any of these people.”

Once the room is full, Wong suggests they go around the table introducing themselves. But as Saturday Toronto editor Dianne de Fenoyl explains her role in the weekend section, Wong quickly interjects: “You have egg on your face,” she announces. De Fenoyl blushes while everyone else chuckles. “That’s just like Jan,” someone at the other end of the table says.

It was at another table – the family table – that Wong most likely came by her legendary frankness. By the time Wong was born in 1952, the Wong and (on her mother’s side) Chong families had two generations of Canadian experience behind them. Both families were survivors. Wong’s grandparents had paid the head tax imposed on Chinese immigrants to Canada, while her parents and had lived through the 1923 Chinese Exclusion Act and become pioneers in the Chinese-Canadian community. At family get-togethers, where everyone battled to be heard, Wong learned the skill of speaking up.

Her childhood was comfortable, if sheltered, growing up in Montreal with sister Gigi and brothers, Earl and Ernest. Their father, Bill Wong, was a businessman and successful restauranteur who urged his eldest daughter to adopt the “Confucian work ethic” at an early age. So Wong brought home good-girl grades and searched for a role model. Her mother, Eva Wong, suggested then-journalist Adrienne Clarkson. Wong picked Lois Lane.

That was before China’s Cultural Revolution. By 1972, Wong had replaced Lois Lane with a new ideal: Beijing Jan. That summer a 19-year-old Wong moved to China to study the language, find her roots and become her ideal: a woman who could renounce capitalism, abandon Western society and live the life of a Chinese peasant while propagating Mao Zedong’s vision. She was one of only two Westerners enrolled at Beijing University at the height of Mao’s Cultural Revolution.

The next six years were Wong’s most formative. As a revolutionary, she studied Maoism at school, worked as a lathe operator at Beijing Number One Machine Tool Factory and lived off her own sustenance at Big Joy Farm in rural China. “Bright Precious” Wong (as she was known in Chinese) also watched as Mao’s government perpetuated a two-tiered class system and clamped down on civil liberties. Wong herself reported two fellow workers to the authorities for their “counter-revolutionary” plot to leave China for the West. Then, at some point in all of this, Wong changed her mind about Mao.

In her 1996 memoir, Red China Blues, Wong recounts her Maoist phase as “radical chic,” naïve and idealistic. “I thought I was a hard-nosed revolutionary,” she writes, “but I was really a Montreal Maoist.” A passing fad, perhaps, but one with lasting consequences. Experiencing Mao’s China firsthand pulled the tunic from Wong’s eyes. Rather than becoming disillusioned with power, she learned to be more skeptical. She refused to be pushed around. And in doing so, Beijing Jan acquired the skills that would lead to her no-bullshit journalism.

In 1980, after working as a news assistant for Fox Butterfield, The New York Times’ China correspondent, Wong returned to the West to complete her Masters in journalism at Columbia University. Fresh out of journalism school, she became the marine reporter at The Montreal Gazette, where her editor, Joseph Gelmon, nicknamed her “Skipper.” Given a beat no one wanted in a puffy, lightweight section, Wong opted instead to write investigative pieces about the shipping industry. When a less hard-hitting competing publication appeared, advertisers backed out and the paper killed the marine section. Other novice journalists might have been scared for their jobs or reputations. Wong simply thought: good for me.

It was an attitude she would take with her back to China. In 1988, after eight years working as a journalist back home, Wong returned to Beijing as the Globe’s China correspondent. But this was a very different Beijing Jan. For six years, Wong’s hard eye reported a country in turmoil. After Mao’s death in 1976, the government was losing its grip on political dissidents and in 1989, tensions erupted in a bloody massacre at Tiananmen Square. Camping out on a hotel balcony overlooking the Square, Wong watched and took notes as the body count mounted.

Her furious, methodological documentation of the Tiananmen massacre earned Wong a reputation back home. “[Tiananmen] was one of her real high points,” recalls John Fraser, Wong’s predecessor as Beijing bureau chief. “That’s when I realized she was a superb journalist.” Others agreed, and in 1994, Wong returned to Canada as the Globe’s darling. She brought with her a strengthened conviction for real reporting in Canada’s landscape of polite, sycophantic and politically correct journalism. She knew people might get hurt by her tough words, but she also knew that, back home in Canada, freedom of speech was hers to exercise. “I know that people get upset [at what I write],” Wong explains. “But I’m not afraid. We have so little to fear as journalists in the West. So I’m going to have a reputation. Big deal. I’m not going to have my house firebombed. That’s real fear.”

o o o

Back in Toronto, Wong wasn’t exactly safe. After publishing a best-selling memoir, she prepared herself for the possibility that, like many foreign correspondents before her, she could disappear into obscurity. But Wong didn’t disappear, she reinvented herself – again. And as Jan Wong the columnist, she became more famous still.

“Lunch with Jan Wong” wasn’t Wong’s idea, but it was certainly her creation. It began when Wong’s editor Cathrin Bradbury asked her to write a profile of author Margaret Atwood that made readers feel as if they were sitting at the lunchtime interview. It took off when Wong’s behind-the-scenes portrayal of the meeting revealed everything from Atwood’s surprising shortcomings (she couldn’t spell macaroni) to her appalling diva behaviour (after choosing the restaurant, Atwood complained about the table and refused to eat). From there, Wong had to figure out how to follow her own act. So, she perfected the art of the inappropriate questions – like the length of KISS frontman Gene Simmons’ penis or whether Canadian beauty queen Danielle House was menstruating the day she posed nude for Playboy. And only Wong, with her unassuming little-Asian-girl bit, could always get those answers. The column became a must-read.

Wong’s “Lunch with” style was typically light, if condemnatory. Her take on Canadian author Evelyn Lau: “Now, I left my comfortable Montreal home at nineteen to voluntarily haul pig manure in China during the Cultural Revolution. But I have trouble understanding why someone so smart would drop out of school and run away from home at fourteen and end up as a junkie-whore.”

Critics like journalist Allan Fotheringham called her unsympathetic, unhappy even. Yet readers generally welcomed Wong’s hard eye – as long as her gaze was focused on public figures. It was when she veered from the relative safety of celebrity profiles to write about everyday people that Wong was more often accused of being indiscriminately judgmental. Her column on Toronto beggar Nancy Lynn Hallam was particularly controversial. Her description of Hallam partly read: “She was fat – 277 pounds on a five-foot-two inch frame. And she always begged from a government-supplied $4,000 Ultramatic wheelchair-scooter, less a necessity than an accessory… [She] was wearing blue eye shadow, pink stretch pants, a teal-blue sweatshirt, and a soiled white hockey sweater.”

Letters flooded in to the Globe about Wong’s harsh description of an ordinary person – and about her questionable decision to take a homeless woman to a fancy restaurant for its sheer shock value. But Wong makes no apologies for this, or any of her other columns. “When you’re a journalist,” she says, “you have to be very critical and analytical of people – whether they’re rich or poor. I don’t treat anybody with deference.” But as willing interview subjects became harder to find, “Lunch with” was eventually killed.

The column survived just over six years, from 1996 to 2002. Some, like Fotheringham, would say it was six years too long. Even friends, such as Globe colleague John Saunders, felt Wong’s fierce reporting was wasted on the trivial celebrity beat and were glad to see her move on. But moving on would be Wong’s biggest challenge yet. Unlike her news writing, the distinct narrative voice of “Lunch with” made Wong a subject of her own journalism. She was now a persona. As Fulford wrote in his review of the “Lunch with” book, “[it] tells us only a little about each subject, but it amounts to an extensive portrait of Wong.”

That self-inked portrait lingers on. These days, Wong faces two equally unappealing possibilities: that readers can’t remember her name outside of “Lunch with” infamy, or that they can’t remember her name at all.

o o o

It is late November, nearly four months since the birth of the Toronto section, and the days are getting shorter and colder. Cecilia Zhang is no longer on the front pages (Wong won’t revisit the story until the spring). So, with nothing better to do, Wong goes to Rochester, New York, for an inconsequential story about a ferry line that will soon link that humdrum city to Toronto. Her editors aren’t crazy about the piece but she can’t postpone the assignment any longer. She’s tired. She has other things on her mind. And to top it all off, it’s raining.

Walking into Rochester mayor William Johnson Jr.’s office, Wong looks, by her own admission, quite pathetic – “Like a drowned cat.” Perhaps because of this, Wong speculates, her interview with Mayor Johnson goes very well. Her story, “Ferry Bad Place” goes on to impudently outline the reasons Torontonians wouldn’t want to go to Rochester, even quoting the mayor himself about one particular stretch of the city: “I wouldn’t walk there. Don’t go there again.”

With its damning details and acid-dipped humour, the Rochester story is classic Wong. And, like other classic Wong articles, it creates quite a stir. Wong’s editors are pleasantly surprised; the people of Rochester are outraged. The mayor writes into the Globe and refers to Wong as “Rush Limbaugh in drag.” Even The New York Times picks up the story about Rochester’s indignation. But Wong, for her part, seems unperturbed. She is, in fact, bemused. Aside from the hassle of constant interview requests, she thinks the story is no big deal. And comparisons to Limbaugh fail to faze her. As she tells the Times, China’s secret police are capable of much worse threats.

You wouldn’t expect any less from a woman who, in Fraser’s words, “is someone whose errors of judgment are as big as her successes.” The thing about Wong is that her errors and her successes can sometimes be one and the same. “There must be people who roll their eyes and say, ‘There she goes again!'” Wong says of the Rochester story. But, she adds, “I love doing that kind of thing.” Being mischievous, causing a stir – these things come naturally to a journalist who prefers infamy to obscurity and self-reivention to predictability.If Wong’s editors at the Globe would recognize this, they could save her from her current limbo.

Whether to promote good citizenship or just good gossip, every society needs a troublemaker. This is one role, at least, that should always be open to Wong if she wants it. And she does.

Back in mid-October, Jim Williamson was as nervous as an expectant father in a hospital waiting room. Fidgeting in the front row of the John Bassett Theatre in the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Disclosure’s executive producer turned his head to scan the audience every 15 seconds. He griped his clipboard tightly, flipping through pages of notes. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, watching his social experiment unfold.

The three ordinary Canadians onstage debated political issues such as health care and military spending. Hundreds of people – armed with placards, fluorescent armbands and streamers – sat in the surrounding seats. They booed, they hissed, they cajoled. Beads of sweat emerged on the foreheads of the trio as catcalls and obscenities interrupted them. The cameras swerved and pivoted to capture the melee, while carefully hiding the man responsible.

The three candidates weren’t really running for prime minister – but it sure looked that way. Disclosure held a cross-country open call and of the hundreds of applicants, these were the ones who made it to the glaring lights and flying accusations. Each went through a one-week crash course in political rigour: image-making, policy-making, campaigning. And this debate was just one aspect of Disclosure’s three-part season premiere, “The Making of a Political Animal.”

As he broke from generic newsmagazine format and veered into reality television territory, Williamson knew he was taking risks. His job, his reputation and Disclosure itself were hanging in the balance. In its third season, the investigative program tried to secure a younger, more “modern” audience. Newsmagazines on Canadian TV have lost half a million viewers over the past few decades – in the 1970s, CBC’s Marketplace racked up approximately 2.5 million viewers, while CTV’s W-FIVE nabbed 1.5 million. The genre’s highly structured, dry style had become stale and the CBC was counting on the highly regarded Williamson to capture a younger audience and perhaps save a dying breed of journalism. But in early April, CBC cancelled the show due to dismal ratings.

When it debuted in November 2001, Disclosure was designed to be a “dynamic investigative program,” very different in style from the CBC’s reliable workhorse, the fifth estate. The show paid more attention to the hosts and their reporting – it was meant to be modern, dramatic and daring. Co-hosted by Winnipeg anchor Diana Swain and CBC icon Wendy Mesley, the program showed initial promise. The hosts interviewed subjects with refreshing candour and the show cut through public relations bafflegab. For instance, in an episode on how business television shows charge for airtime, Mesley got startlingly candid answers from Garth Turner, CEO of Millennium Media Television. He emerged on screen with Nalini Sharma, vice president of content and development, who was there to answer Mesley’s questions. By the end of the interview, however, the irrepressible Turner was delivering monologues on his business ventures, while Sharma nearly disappeared from the frame.

The mandate of the show also called for a transparent look into the workings of journalism. In the first season, stories included Swain and Mesley driving around in a car and Mesley surfing the Internet from her cubicle. “That type of camerawork gave viewers the excitement of reporting,” says The Globe and Mail’s TV critic, John Doyle. “The first season was all about the journalism, the movement, no pauses – but that quickly became annoying.”

Disclosure’s numbers from the pilot season reflected Doyle’s view. The ratings were a disappointing 467,000, compared to 640,000 for the fifth estate and 800,000 for W-FIVE. Instead of concentrating on journalism, Disclosure focused too much on the personalities of the hosts – Mesley the bulldog aggressor, Swain the restrained professional – and not enough on actual issues. Another problem was that Disclosure had no one executive producer, so the show had no identifiable imprimatur. And it faced strong U.S. programming in its time slot and didn’t stand much of a chance of developing an audience.

In Disclosure’s second season, CBC attempted to fix the problems. It appointed Susan Teskey who, as senior executive producer of the fifth estate, helped that program garner four Geminis over six years. She immediately hired 16 people for Disclosure, and Mesley was replaced by veteran anchor Mark Kelley. In addition to Swain and Kelley, she hired Gillian Findlay as a third host. Findlay was a respected correspondent who covered topics like the Palestinian Intifada and the war in Chechnya. The show took a serious turn, less focused on the journalists themselves and more on the issues, without completely dulling the edge. It was more honed visually, but most importantly Teskey sought dramatic, revelatory storytelling without compromising the journalism.

For instance, “Ka-boom!” took on the issue of body checking in minor league hockey. Kelley investigated a nationally approved report that had calculated injuries in both checking and non-checking leagues and posited that there were fewer injuries in checking leagues. Kelley found that the calculations and therefore the conclusion of the report were inaccurate – in fact, just the opposite was true. As a result, newspapers across the country debated the necessity of body checking, and the Canadian Hockey Association distributed an instructional DVD on checking to all minor league hockey associations and changed the rules to restrict checking to children 11 years old and up. With this episode Disclosure met its goal, producing an installment that challenged beliefs and changed the way people thought. Teskey injected a little humour too – she arranged for Kelley to be checked while delivering one of his dialogues. “That show really struck a chord with the public,” says Kelley. “I was at a Springsteen concert a few months afterwards where people recognized me and patted me on the back.”

Disclosure producers became more enterprising. In an episode entitled “Anchors Away,” they looked at Paul Martin’s family and how his company, Canada Steamship Lines, set up shop in places like Liberia and Barbados – countries commonly used as tax havens. Kelley doggedly pursued Martin throughout the segment, travelling from Halifax to Vanuatu, an island in the South Pacific. He was unable to get the shipping magnate to agree to an interview, so he ambushed him at a parade. As Kelley valiantly posed questions from the sidewalk, Martin smiled and waved from his float, offering no explanation. “Anchors Away” was ambitious, but the one-sided take left viewers with a skeptical view of Martin rather than a well-rounded perspective.

After taking in the grim fact of the second season’s decline in ratings – to an average of 430,000 – Julie Bristow, CBC’s head of current affairs and weekly programming, told Teskey “a new leadership style was required.” Williamson received the call to replace her in May 2003, with only six months to go before the season premiere. Having seen the inner mechanisms of many shows, the brief lead time didn’t faze him – nor did the declining ratings. He’d been involved in many shows that have historically altered the genre – CTV’s Canada AM in the 1980s, CBC’s The Journal and its successor, The National Magazine, where he briefed Barbara Frum for interviews. He also worked at the fifth estate as senior producer and directed two episodes of Canada: A People’s History, the most popular documentary series this country has ever produced. Mark Starowicz, CBC’s executive producer of network programming and creator of A People’s History, said, “I hold Jim in the highest regard – he’s not only a great journalist, he has the TV skills to create a dramatic show.”

Along with Starowicz, another professional mentor for Williamson was Frum. At The Journal, he recalled briefing the late anchor for interviews, working long into the night, scouring obscure files and amassing pages of information. When he presented his material to Frum, she’d put the pile of research on her knees, look up and ask, “Jim, what’s really going on here? What’s interesting about this?” She taught him to avoid getting bogged down in detail and instead focus on the core – on what really grabs the viewer’s attention. Frum’s tutelage, along with the desire to bring stories to life that Williamson’s father instilled in him, was a good combination for the man appointed to steer Disclosure away from the turmoil of its first two seasons. “All I want is to do something new and original,” he said. “TV needs a good shot in the arm.”

Williamson’s eyes peer out from behind a pair of wire-rimmed glasses, and there is a passionate spark when he talks about music, politics and history. There’s something about him that seems almost boyish. He talks quickly and softly about his father, a diplomat who went on trips for weeks at a time. He says he would try to imagine the people and places his father was seeing, and then listen attentively to his tales when he returned. “He was able to analyze life elsewhere and explain it to people back home,” Williamson says. “I absorbed some of it, I must have. My desire is to relay this to the public, to show them sides of issues they otherwise might never see.”

Williamson wanted to transform any lingering stodginess into intellectual voyeurism – with a touch of irony – on Disclosure. In two of the first three episodes, the show invited viewers to participate, either in terms of voting (“Political Animal”), or “solving” a staged crime from the couch at home. Williamson boldly gambled that he could increase viewership by engaging them personally and hooking them into tuning in next week. It wasn’t the first time he used the formula. As senior producer of The National, he developed numerous political documentaries involving ordinary Canadian citizens. One was entitled “72 Hours to Spend $5 Billion,” which explored how regular Canadians would spend the Liberal budget surplus. He won a Gemini in 1990 for “At the Lodge,” a documentary that pitted three Canadians against each other in a debate about the Meech Lake Accord. “‘Political Animal’ wasn’t modelled on it in any conscious way,” he said. “I wanted to come at things in a non-conventional way and using real people was the most genuine approach.”

“Political Animal” provided compelling insight into the grooming of politicians. It showed how, after focus group analysis, candidates willingly changed their appearance to appease the public. The viewer was privy to seeing Bridget Pastoor, a 63-year-old nurse from Alberta, pace her hotel room, frantically perfecting her speech. Rick Loewen, an unemployed worker from Winnipeg, grew increasingly impatient with the debate audience. Each candidate also underwent a radical clothing, hair and overall image metamorphosis. While it was fascinating to watch the transformation of real people into political contenders, too much time was dedicated to it. At times the episode threatened to slip into Extreme Makeover territory, the reality show that changes plain Janes into runway models.

Williamson’s Disclosure re-formatted investigative journalism to reflect current pop culture trends. The kind of access viewers had to politicians in “Political Animal” would be impossible during a real election, so he provided the next best thing. It was a daring format reminiscent of This Hour Has Seven Days, a newsmagazine that ran on CBC from 1964 to 1966. Disclosure had a large budget and attempted cutting-edge journalism in a three-item format, much like This Hour. The CBC waited three decades after the demise of This Hour before trying again to reach a younger audience with a newsmagazine. Undercurrents debuted in 1995, and most of its content involved technology and media – how advertisers used classic Bob Dylan lyrics to sell cars, for example, or how much cyberslacking (recreational websurfing and chatting) cost companies. Unlike any other CBC show at the time, Undercurrents used informality and MTV-style camerawork to connect with younger audiences. By the time of the dot-com collapsed in 2000, however, both its substance and style had grown stale, and the show was cancelled in 2001.

Three years into its mandate, Disclosure still seemed like a fresh take on Undercurrents. After “Political Animal,” the show settled into using more journalistic technique and less attention-grabbing trickery. For example, in “Dead Silence,” Gillian Findlay focused on the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in Toronto, specifically looking at the role of the World Health Organization (WHO).

The episode had a distinct fifth estate feel – an obvious observation given Williamson’s past – yet offered surprise. Williamson and senior editor Harvey Cashore looked at accusations made by the media against China after the SARS epidemic, how Chinese officials allegedly “covered it up” and “failed” to tell the world about it. Disclosure sent Findlay to find out where the WHO was prior to and during the outbreak, and why more wasn’t done to prevent the spread of the virus. Midway through the segment, the direction completely flipped and took you on an unexpected course. Findlay uncovered startling facts, like how the epidemic festered for two months in rural China before the worldwide outbreak, and how the WHO failed to act. You thought the episode would be about providing more evidence for China’s guilt – the usual media take – yet Findlay’s exposé of the WHO’s mishandling of the illness questioned accepted wisdom.

In another episode, Williamson looked at the issue of forensic testing. The first segment focused on Jim Driskell, whose conviction of murder in 1991 was largely based on three strands of hair found in his van. At the trial, an expert testified that the strands matched the victim’s. Swain looked at various modes of testing, and how our policing systems, are, in some cases, still relying on antiquated methods. Hair comparison testing, for example, is so flawed it has been referred to as “a modern day snake oil.” New tests of the strands have revealed they in fact belonged to three different people. Shortly after the episode aired, Driskell was released on bail after 13 years in prison for a crime he says he didn’t commit. Although Disclosure was not the catalyst for his release, it undoubtedly refreshed the public’s memory and resurrected old information that may have been overlooked.

In the second segment, dozens of people were asked to participate in an experiment designed to test memory. They witnessed a mock shooting and were then asked to single out the culprit – a man they’d seen for less than a minute. When shown photos of all the potential suspects, few could positively identify the perpetrator. Most police forces that Disclosure contacted in Canada still used this method, despite its obvious flaw.

Over the past decade, it has become increasingly difficult to do this kind of investigative journalism well. In the Internet age, any information can get posted, forwarded or sent, which means it is less secure, of variable quality and the sources are questionable. Law and corporate regulation protect sources better than ever – for example, a reporter has to work harder to get the right numbers and the correct people. And if the reporter does find perfect sources, chances are they are adept at answering or dodging questions. “These days, people are highly skilled at not answering,” says Carleton University professor emeritus Dr. Lionel Lumb. “It’s far harder to nail down something.”

Disclosure and Williamson faced many challenges, including the well-established competition: the 29-year-old the fifth estate and the 39-year-old W-FIVE. This past season, the fifth estate had been strong. Its first four episodes focused on compelling issues, like the alleged relationship between Osama bin Laden and the Bushes, and a look at the rising use of anti-depressants. Despite addressing them commendably, the show presented information to a different demographic – an older, more dedicated audience that has watched the show for decades – which left room for Disclosure. This season, W-FIVE included edgier, showier camerawork, indicating that CTV was seeking the elusive younger audience as well. But the CBC had both Disclosure and the fifth estate to appeal to different demographics, while W-FIVE was trying to target all age groups. Plus, critics pointed out its tendency to replicate the U.S.’s 20/20. “W-FIVE has definitely become more sensational,” said television critic Bill Brioux of The Toronto Sun.

The episode on Canadian Michael Bublé, a youthful chart-topping vocalist, clearly demonstrated its broad target audience. In a flimsy attempt to attract both young and old viewers, Bublé was compared not only to Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake, but also to Bobby Darin and Paul Anka. W-FIVE was in for a rude awakening if it wanted to pull in big numbers across such a broad demographic.

In its third season, Disclosure drew an audience of 350,000, down almost 120,000 from its initial year. The CBC cancelled the program only two months after axing current-affairs show counterSpin.

Williamson had wanted to reverse Disclosure’s sliding audience numbers and “change the modus operandi of journalism.” He believed a show like the fifth estate had become more epic. “They have collaborative projects that can only be done on a big scale,” he said. “Disclosure is different because it takes creative chances.”

Neil Docherty, a long-time producer at the fifth estate, believed Williamson’s adherence to mandate was essential. “Disclosure is a serious attempt at a newsmagazine with a more modern feel,” he said. “Undercurrents developed the modern format, but its main problem was its undefined mandate.”

Dr. Lumb said that CBC hasn’t quite figured out how to reach a younger audience, and its cancellation of Undercurrents in 2001 may have been premature. “Disclosure is CBC’s attempt to maintain the aggressive in-your-face style of Undercurrents,” he said. “CBC didn’t want to lose any audience, so they introduced it right away. Too onerous a responsibility was put onto Disclosure, and that’s why it didn’t meet anyone’s expectations. That’s why it didn’t get the numbers they wanted.”

Everyone’s crowded around the boardroom table on a chilly October afternoon for the Ryerson Review of Journalism’s first story meeting. My foot’s tapping impatiently as the student beside me pitches her story; then, it’s my turn.

“Public health reporting,” I suggest. “It’s surrounded us through what some are calling the year of panic: Mad Cow disease, West Nile virus, SARS. Masked people flashed across our televisions at night and lay folded on our doorsteps when we woke. We learned that our hamburgers may be lethal and mosquito bites can be worse than itchy. But what,” I wind up, “did journalists learn about public health reporting? How are these stories covered, what are the reporting and editing pitfalls? And what makes them news in the first place?”

My colleagues stare blankly. A woman at the other end of the table muffles a yawn with her sleeve. “Are you waiting for something else to happen?” someone asks. In the weeks ahead, I’ll get used to this kind of response. A faculty advisor will wrinkle his forehead, peer through his eyebrows, and ask, “What are you going to do to make this current? SARS? Mad Cow? Who’s gonna want to talk about them a year later?” Even my handling editor, who professes enthusiasm, won’t be able to hide his worry: “It’s unfortunate you won’t have any fresh scenes in this,” he’ll allow at our first meeting. But at the boardroom table, my colleagues really try to be positive. “Ah, SARS will come back,” says one with a reassuring flap of the hand. “Maybe we can manufacture something and release it,” suggests our editor from the head of the table, and we all snicker.

Glancing around at a salad of pitying faces, I’m embarrassed. I have the most boring story in the history of the Review.

André Picard knows this feeling. The acclaimed public health reporter for The Globe and Mail has won six awards in that role, including the Canadian Policy Research Award. He says his “pet issues” are not epidemic infections but the rate of heart disease, diabetes and childhood obesity. Of the 706 stories crowned by his byline in the past three years, no fewer than 172 addressed these three issues. Many ran on page A1. “More than 16.5 million Canadians – half the population – are considered at risk of developing diabetes,” he wrote last October, linking the increased risk to an “explosive obesity epidemic.” Mundane trends like these, Picaard says, are the really important public health stories.

Yes, but are they news? That’s a battle to be fought, one day at a time. “Sometimes, editors will say, ‘Haven’t we written about heart disease before?'” Picard says. “And I will say, ‘Yes, but haven’t we written about Paul Martin before?'”

The picture changes, of course, when a mysterious illness has people dropping like flies. That’s news, no doubt about it – until people stop dying. But in the aftermath of last year’s global SARS scare, both journalists and public health experts began questioning the volume and accuracy of the reporting. A rash of symposia broke out around Toronto, in which reporters and public health officials discussed the coverage with academic experts. A study by Margaret MacNeill and Larry Hershfield from the University of Toronto’s Centre for Health Promotion suggested there was poor communication between the press and public health officials. Seth Feldman and Daniel Drache, the director and associate director for the Robarts Centre for Canadian Studies at York University, said the volume of stories had peaked after the World Health Organization slapped a travel advisory on Toronto – with the infection rate well into its final slump. Karen Palmer, a public health reporter at the Toronto Star, was one of only a handful of reporters who showed up repeatedly at the conferences. “What did we do wrong and how can we do better next time?” she asked at each one. Few experts offered clear answers.

At the Canadian Asso ciation of Journalists’ annual conference last spring, a panel addressed the debate. In a small basement room in Toronto’s Hilton hotel, Picard hunched over his laptop as he read his speech. One problem with the SARS coverage, he said, was that the press fed panic by presenting key numbers “in a cumulative fashion” – with each incidence of sickness piled upon all the previous ones. If, instead, the stories had been presented with an epidemic curve – a graph that shows the rise and decline of new cases – readers would have seen “quite clearly, that the outbreak peaked on March 26 – at least one month before news coverage peaked.”

Reporters also failed to question the messages sources gave them, Picard said. “Was it really necessary to quarantine 10,000 people? Did we really need to shut down hospitals? Did we really need to screen visitors going into hospitals in Kenora, 1,750 kilometres north of Toronto? Are 24 deaths really a lot when 6,000 people die of old-fashioned influenza and pneumonia each winter?”

All good questions, for sure, but as for the volume of coverage, just what were reporters supposed to do? Maureen Taylor, a medical and health reporter for CBC’s The National, says a dramatic new story is always going to win the race for air time. “How many nights a week would you watch The National if all I told you was ‘Quit smoking, get up off the couch and eat better’?” she asks. “Those are huge public health issues, but there’s not a lot of news value in those things. When there is, I cover it, but when there isn’t, I’m not going to beat you over the head with it. My job is not to make you healthier. My job is to cover health news. And SARS was news.”

I’m heading home for Christmas when I hear on the radio that a case of Mad Cow has been isolated in Washington State. I must admit even I am tempted to turn the dial: I’m a bit Mad Cowed out. But at least it could help my story stay current. Meanwhile, we’ve begun talking about art for the Review. My colleagues and I agree my story will likely need an illustration, not a photo. We talked for a minute about how to “illustrate complexity.” Maybe a cow in a mask with a mosquito biting it?

Well, no, I think we’ve seen enough masks, thank you. Though few on Toronto streets last spring actually saw anyone sporting this accessory, The Winnipeg Free Press was one of many to brand SARS-related stories with the logo of a man wearing a mask. The picture was from China, but since it sometimes ran on the same page as stories about SARS in Toronto, Helen Fallding, the paper’s science reporter, jokes that on the planes headed for Pearson, “only the Manitobans would be wearing masks.”

But what other pictures were there? Visuals are elusive when the real story is locked away under quarantine. And that’s the beginning of the problem with packaging complicated stories in hard-news spaces. It’s even harder to slap catchy and precise headlines on murky public health stories. Picard remembers one story he wrote, about a study indicating that Aspirin might not help, and could sometimes harm, people with heart conditions if they also had high blood pressure. The Globe’s headline read: “Aspirin may be doing heart patients little good: Study sees limited benefits in many cases.” Picard’s real message was more complicated: the study was a warning against self-medication without medical supervision.

Messages can just as easily be lost or confused in the body of a story when wording is oversimplified or condensed. Helen Branswell, a health reporter for Canadian Press, says she can’t remember when CP began using the term “highly infectious” to describe SARS. But in an interview, microbiology and infectious disease expert Dr. Donald Low told her that once precautions were taken, the new virus’ transmission rate was lower than that of influenza. Branswell then persuaded her editors to quit using the term. “It’s like sailing,” she says. “You think you’re heading somewhere and you think you’re right and then you’re not, so you have to adjust your course.”

Early January: SARS is back! China’s confirmed two new cases – could this mean those elusive “fresh scenes” for my story? But no one’s dead yet and officials believe the outbreak is much milder this time; one patient has already been discharged. But then – Yes! – there’s news from Vietnam: 14 confirmed human cases of something called the avian flu. The virus, apparently spread to humans through infected poultry, has possibly taken 13 lives. Public health is on the front page again.

I’m not the only one waiting around for the angel of viral death. The National’s Taylor, for one, is unapologetic. “I’ve become obsessed with infectious diseases actually,” she says, her eyes wide as she knits words into a meandering exclamation point. “I find them the most interesting stories to cover because they’re so unpredictable – I love smallpox, I liked doing influenza this year – other viruses, you know, I can’t wait – or even the flesh-eating disease, there are still people getting flesh-eating disease in this city – when was the last time you heard about that – and that’s an interesting bacteria….”

Finally, she pauses. “I tell people I miss SARS,” she confesses, “and they go, ‘Well, that’s awful. People died.’ And that’s true,” Taylor concedes. “I don’t mean to make light of that, but what I mean is, it’s fascinating to be a health reporter in Toronto when this is happening right under your nose. This is never going to happen to me again, probably.” She gazes off for a moment, then snaps back to attention. “Avian flu – it would be so cool to be in Vietnam right now, where… what is going on with this bird flu? It’s fascinating.”

Front pages everywhere greet avian flu with fanfare. “This could be way worse than SARS,” reads a Globe headline over a piece by medical reporter Paul Taylor, who muses: “Could this be the start of a global flu pandemic, just like the one that swept the planet after the First World War, killing between 20 million and 40 million people?” Maybe. But maybe this too will pass and reporters will again be criticized for sensational coverage. The biggest problem for public health reporters is a lack of solid information. As they brace themselves for “the next pandemic” that everyone seems sure will strike, sooner or later, with devastating results, the best reporters can do is watch for clues to something that might not even exist. “If this goes the way of 1918 we’ll all know people who die,” says CP’s Branswell about the bird flu. For now she’s watching for a case in Canada, or an indication it can spread from human to human. “Every day I have to make choices,” she says, “and I will continue to make choices as we find out more.”

It’s a paradox: a new illness’ mysteriousness makes it news, but also makes it almost impossible to cover well. Branswell says it’s easy to find fault with SARS coverage after the fact. “The damn thing didn’t even have a name,” she says. “My sense was that everyone was trying to do the best job we could with the little we knew.”

If it’s hard for seasoned health reporters to navigate unknown lands like this, it’s harder for those with no background. Dr. Michel Brazeau, chief executive officer for the Royal College of Physicians and Surgeons of Canada, says reporters not on a health beat tend not to probe stories deeply: “All they want is a 50-second quote.” When the Mad Cow story broke after a case was confirmed in Fairview, Alta., last May, the weekly Fairview Post was suddenly in the middle of a huge national story. But with a staff of one sports reporter and editor Arthur Williams, the Post lacked both the resources and the expertise to analyze the public health impact. “I can’t be at every news conference in Edmonton,” says Williams. Instead, he gathered what detai ls he could from the Internet and concentrated, as always, on issues directly affecting Fairview – the economic impact on area cattle ranchers, a local group trying to develop alternate specialty beef products and markets.

But even science reporters like Winnipeg’s Fallding can be confounded by the elusiveness of hard facts – for which she often blames government officials’ obstructiveness. “In Manitoba we have the best Mad Cow research facilities but scientists were told they couldn’t return our calls,” she recalls, “since information had to go through an official spokesperson.” Denied access to the labs to report first-hand on the Mad Cow investigation, she was left reporting official statements. Before asking a question, she could usually have written down officials’ answers: We’re monitoring the situation.

“There’s an old-fashioned school of thought with some that we don’t need to know,” Fallding says. As part of last year’s anti-West Nile efforts, several rural communities in southwest Manitoba were fogged with malathion. The chemical was controversial for reportedly killing beneficial insects, and some people worried about long-term effects on the water supply. To help evaluate these fears, Fallding requested statistics on the number of Culex mosquitos (the type carrying the virus) in the region. Dr. Joel Kettner, the chief medical officer of health for Manitoba, told her the numbers weren’t yet compiled in a way the press would understand. “They finally gave us the information but it was long after the summer was over and the mosquitos were dead,” says Fallding. (The data did indicate an especially large Culex population.)

Dr. James Young, Ontario’s public safety commissioner, concedes that reporters didn’t always get information promptly during the SARS outbreak. “But we didn’t have enough information either,” he says. “We kept nothing secret.” Reporters’ frustration reflects a feeling that people always have in an emergency: “they want to know everything,” Dr. Young says. “They want to know the result, they want to know when it’s going to be over – as quick as possible. And that’s human nature and that’s correct. Unfortunately at the beginning of an emergency, that’s the answer you don’t have.”

When officials withhold incomplete or preliminary information, it’s because they want to make sure the public gets a consistent and accurate message, says Dr. Young. This conflicts with reporters’ need for fresh answers and new angles. Yet, the relationship between reporters and public health officials is symbiotic. Reporters rely on health officials as the only authoritative sources of facts, and health officials need reporters to get their message out. If the two can’t trust each other, both jobs get a lot harder.

Last summer, Toronto’s public health department launched an education campaign aimed at tamping down public fears of West Nile virus. On bus shelters and garbage bins, a huge mosquito cowered under a bold caption: “Don’t Let Them Spread Fear.” I was not the only reporter to wonder: are they talking about the mosquitoes or the press? So I asked Dianne Chester, the communications coordinator for Toronto Public Health’s West Nile division. “Oh,” she assured me, “it was the mosquitoes.” But moments later she added, “[The press] don’t necessarily get the message correct.”

Toward the end of January, we talk about art for the stories again. It seems mine is one of only three that still doesn’t have any art planned. Big surprise. “Is your story about SARS?” asks our editor. “‘Cause we were talking about having a picture about SARS. But it’s about other things too, right?” I shrink from explaining the theme all over again. “I just don’t want to see a picture of a mask,” I sigh.

By now, even the season of SARS postmortems has finished. Most reporters stopped showing up by the end of October, when York’s Feldman and Drache release d their report on the pattern of SARS coverage. Looking out at a room of empty seats, the two professors, with matching Colonel Sanders beards, greying hair and bobbing moustaches, announced that coverage in three Toronto-based newspapers (the Star, the Globe and the Post) jumped during the World Health Organization’s travel advisory to between 200 and 300 per cent of average levels, with each paper printing up to 25 SARS-related articles a day. A reporter in the front row picked a fight with the researchers, saying he didn’t see the news value of the research. “Give me a lead for tomorrow’s paper for your report,” he said. “That’s what I’m asking. Give me a lead, 25 words.” The two researchers said he could take whatever meaning he wanted from the numbers, but he kept digging: “What’s my lead?” he demanded. “Write my lead for me.”

Finally, someone in the back drawled, “I think that’s your job.” She was missing the point. This was yesterday’s story, the last thing a reporter or editor wants to spend time thinking about. And now, yes, it’s last year’s story. But if it’s true that public health catastrophes loom all around us – and that the next global pandemic is overdue – reporters’ and editors’ fatigue at thinking through the issues heightens the risk of repeating the same mistakes. “We wrote too much about SARS when we knew little,” says Picard, “and we’re not writing enough about SARS now that there are lessons to be learned.” But if public health reporting poses special challenges to both reporters and expert sources, at least it’s on the map now. As Picard says, “After years writing about stuff like infectious disease and prevention, my bosses suddenly think my job is important, not just quirky.”

And my story? Well, it was published in the Review, and look, you made it all the way to the end.