On Friday, November 11, 2005, in the lobby of The Globe and Mail building on Front Street in downtown Toronto, I leaf through the day’s edition and come across the headline: “Sony BMG shoots itself in the foot while firing against music pirates.” I sigh, because I already know the story: hidden security software has caused problems on some compact disc buyers’ computers. Eight days earlier, the paper’s website posted a more complete report not only explaining the glitch, but also outlining the record company’s planned response. Globeandmail.com isn’t even where I first heard about the mess. Back on October 31, I read about buried software on CDs on the personal blog of Mark Russinovich, the man who actually discovered the problem.

This little story illustrates the central quandary facing newspapers today. By the time a story is reported, written, edited and printed, the information (true, false or a bit of both) has been on the Internet for hours, sometimes days. So why buy a paper? While newspaper circulations decline steadily each year, Nielsen/ NetRatings reports that the number of visitors to newspaper websites grew eleven per cent in 2005. The Calgary Sun, to name one, has a weekday circulation of 65,648, but gets 240,000 unique web visitors each week. Unsurprisingly, younger readers in particular prefer to receive their information digitally and unfiltered. According to the Pew Internet and American Life Project, eighty-four per cent of U.S. blogging teenagers and seventy-two per cent of their non-blogging peers go online to get their “news or info about current events.”

Advertisers have followed the shifting audience. Online classified advertising grew eighty per cent in North America in the twelve months ending last September – in the U.S. alone, spending on all online advertising increased twenty-six per cent to $5.8 billion in the first half of 2005.

National papers like the Globe, less dependent on classifieds, are somewhat insulated, but none of them can afford to ignore the generational trend. Newspaper executives are shifting their focus from their main newsrooms to a previously ignored pocket of the office – the one the online team calls home.

And so they should, but exactly what the online team does – and what it means for the future of journalism – is still something of a mystery. On that November day in the lobby, the Globe’s answer seemed to be: “Let’s scoop our own paper online.” I get more specific and more complicated answers as the winter – and thirty-ninth federal general election campaign – unfolds.

I pass the sea of cubicles that is the Globe’s main newsroom as Kenny Yum, online managing editor, guides me up a side stairwell and past the editorial departments. The online department consists of about twenty workstations tucked along the building’s eastern wall. Soon, five people gather at an oval table overlooked by a blow-up of the first home page of Globeandmail.com, stamped June 19, 2000, 6:09 A.M. EDT. An out-of-place analog clock on the wall marks the time: 4:15 P.M. Thunk… thunk, it says as the minute hand moves. It is January 9, and tonight the federal party leaders compete in a televised English debate for the second time.

Angus Frame, online editor, is at the table, along with his crew: reporter Allison Dunfield, evening news editor Jack Bell and Sunday editor Diana Pereira. Yum outlines the plan for the night. Gloria Galloway, a writer, is in Montreal. Her story, about each party’s likely debate strategy and key policy platforms, is ready for posting at 8 P.M. Pereira will tweak the story as the debate proceeds, while moderating the site audience’s comments. Blogger Dan Cook is set to summarize minutes of the debate from Montreal. Bell will watch the wires and the Globe’s queues for debate visuals and the night’s other news. Yum is standing by to record audio feeds of the debate and post transcripts. Meanwhile, in their offices, three editorial board members from the Globe’s print edition have arranged to discuss the debate in live-chat mode.

Yum finishes his twenty-minute briefing, and there are no major questions. As the clock thunks to 8 P.M. and beyond, the plan glides into execution. Cook’s blog and Galloway’s story go up as the debate – and the editorial board’s discussion – begins. Thunk. 8:31 P.M.: Galloway updates her story for the first time. Thunk. 8:38 P.M.: the story gets a new lead and headline, “Martin wants to remove the notwithstanding clause.” Thunk. 8:53 P.M.: Bell, watching the newswires, announces that Wayne Gretzky’s grandmother has died. Pereira says, “God, he just lost his mother.” Her fingers never leave the keyboard. A bit later she laughs, reading aloud a reader’s comment: “I don’t like Stephen Harper’s grin.”

Yum says, “Well, he does have a bad grin. Whether it’s a good comment….”

Pereira laughs again. “I’ll put it up anyway.”

Thunk. Thunk. Thunk.

10:01 P.M.: Yum posts his audio feed, which is quickly joined by an interactive report card and a column by the paper’s parliamentary correspondent Jane Taber. Cook’s blog receives its final update, and the debate page closes. It’s 10:04 P.M. – four minutes after the event ends.

“For us,” says Yum, “by 10:30, it’s pretty much over. But for them,” he says, gesturing down and away, “they’re still slogging away at it.” And indeed, as I head home at 11 P.M., the main newsroom is quietly abuzz with reporters and copy editors, bashing at computers and punching phones.

The Internet’s appeal extends beyond speed. With the multimedia potential of broadband (used by more than half of Canadian Internet users), audio and visual can marry graphics and text. “You can give people the immediacy of radio with the depth of newspapers,” says Larry Johnsrude, online editor for the Edmonton Journal. At big, rich papers such as the Globe, online specialists cover news events live with audio feed while their notebook-wielding colleagues hit the phones for quotes. Sometimes print-focused journalists find themselves going online with a story that may not remain exclusive long enough for a print scoop. Last June, Globeandmail.com announced – twelve hours before press time – that the National Hockey League and the NHL Players’ Association had found a way to end the lockout. Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief, later wrote that, “We are on our way to becoming a continuous operation, with the newspaper still at the core, but the Web is very much a part of the mix and growing more fundamental to the mission with each passing day.”

That said, today’s consumers don’t just want their news faster; they want to be part of the news operation itself. As Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, said in an April 2005 speech, today’s readers “don’t want to rely on a god-like figure from above to tell them what’s important, and they certainly don’t want news presented as gospel.” Penney Kome, editor of Canadian online magazine Straight Goods, agrees. “News used to be a lecture, and is now turning into a conversation between the news outlet and its audience.”

That amounts to a radical redefinition of news but so far, few journalists are buying it. The Toronto Star is testing the model stealthily by funding – but not linking to – a city news and culture blog called Paved.ca. Some columnists, such as the National Post’s Andrew Coyne, run blogs to supplement their print offerings, a trend that’s also been growing at smaller papers such as The Record in Kitchener-Waterloo and the Guelph Mercury. The Globe allows readers to comment on stories and participate in online polls, customize charts and tables and read staff blogs. But as for amateur civilians actually supplying news, that raises huge questions. “We see, all the time, people at a news event who aren’t journalists,” says Bob Cox, editor of The Winnipeg Free Press. “This is a great thing sometimes because information that wasn’t public can be made public readily. This is a bad thing because there are no standards. Nobody’s judging whether it’s factual, whether it’s credible, whether it’s real. The biggest danger is people posting anonymously on the Web. That’s no better than graffiti sprayed under a bridge by my house.”

The Globeandmail.com often scoops its own paper online

While suspicion of citizen journalism remains the norm among what bloggers call the “mainstream media” – or MSM – citizen journalists are fast becoming an important news source. Quebecor, Inc., for example, recently announced a media experiment in which citizens will supply content from cameras and other digital technologies. Such contributions have already proven especially valuable for gathering foreign news and reporting on national disasters, terrorist attcks and other crises. Richard Sambrook, head of BBC global news, told an October conference that “the avalanche of high-quality video, photos and emailed news material from citizens following the July 7 bombings in London marked a turning point” and the BBC was evolving “from being a broadcaster to a facilitator of news.” He also said, “We don’t own the news anymore.”

Is that loss of control good news? In a Toronto seminar last November, Bob Woodward, of Watergate fame, discussed the impact of changing audience expectations on the way news is produced. “Impatience, speed tend to dominate everything,” he said. “I always find that you do better work if you spend weeks, months, even years on something. There’s not a tendency in the media to do that now… we are continually rushing for the incremental advance [but] we have to get to the bottom of things.”

Of course, journalists get stuff wrong too. At its best, the essence of journalism lies not only in getting facts fast, but checking those facts and seeking broader perspectives. Chris Carter, senior editor of electronic news and information at the Star, says there’s no substitute for the professional approach. While citizen journalists are capable of conducting a proper interview or delivering a balanced report, the traditional editorial process ensures that it actually happens. “There will always be a place,” he says, “for professional journalism to provide that fourth-estate function.”

“Are you coming to watch the elections?” Three times today, I’ve turned down friends’ invitations to huddle around network TV for the results. Now it’s 9 P.M. and I’m at my computer. I’ve got multiple browser windows open, tuned to newspapers across the land and to CBC.ca, along with the alternative Rabble and Straight Goods sites, which I think might defy the 10 P.M. EST embargo on results. (Nope.) I try to access Coyne’s Post blog, but the page won’t load. No worries – I expect to have my hands full.

10 P.M.: Click. The Post, Ottawa Citizen and The Vancouver Sun sites are much the same as when I left them this morning: largely, reprints of the morning paper, with additional wire feeds supplied by CanWest’s Winnipeg online centre. It’s as if nothing has happened in Atlantic Canada, where first results were released half an hour ago.

Click. The Star and CBC have special election sections online, anchored on a Canadian Press tool for viewing riding-by-riding results. The little squares on the chart are already changing colour – mostly Grit-red and Bloc-turquoise in the eastern half of the country – and updating faster than even the Elections Canada site. Wow, I can mouse over individual ridings for updated results. The entire election is right here in my hands. It just takes a click.

Click. Switching over to the Globe, I’m offered an interactive map of Canada with no fewer than seven ways to view results, including nationally, by province, “Ridings to Watch” and “Close Races.” Plus, I can compare this information with results from the previous election. Most important, I can select specific results on a “My Ridings” page. Though I live in Toronto, Ottawa is my home, and I want to see how the two cities voted as a whole. This should be easy – I’ll just add those various ridings to my list.

Click. Um, this will take a while. There’s no easy way to identify Toronto or Ottawa ridings. Maybe Google can find me an electoral map somewhere…

Click. Um. Click. Um. Click. Um.

At 10:30 P.M., I notice the Globe’s riding numbers are sitting still – dead still – last updated a full thirteen minutes ago. My hard-built personal tracking list is useless.

At 10:40 P.M., I open another window. Nothing new at the Citizen or at the Post. No one’s chatting at the alternative forums – of course, they’re busy watching the election! The Star has an updated feature story, but nothing about Ottawa.

10:50 P.M.: Back to the Globe. Still no riding updates since 10:17 P.M.

Better try the TV.

“The flash application we developed to serve the results choked,” the Globe’s Frame explained a few days later. Apparently, too many users bombarded the site with simultaneous requests. “We were hit by a perfect storm of heavy traffic, complicated results feeds and flash technology that slowed us down dramatically from 10 P.M. to 11 P.M.”

Well, at least they tried. The audience may be demanding fresh news, but until now most papers in Canada have been content to reprint the daily paper online, along with raw wire-service feeds.

But this is – and must be – an interim state. “We need to have ongoing updates,” says Shane Holladay, online manager of the Edmonton Sun. “How we do that is something conglomerates are struggling with.” Eventually, Holladay says, “The online version and print version will evolve into a hybrid where one complements the other. The most likely outcome is that people will turn to the website to find out what’s happening in the city or around the world, and then turn to the paper for more in-depth writing and analysis.”

“As a journalist, it’s a reality,” says Yum. “Online came of age quite a while ago. It’s a medium, the delivery mechanism can change, but it’s still news.”

I awake early the morning after the election, walk to the corner newsstand and plunk down my loonie for the Globe. I head back home, pour myself some tea and sit down to read. The results are posted clearly across the top of the front page, followed by twenty-six information-heavy pages. They’ve got the scoop on every region and every major city in the country, with key information in boxes and sidebars on every page. A full-colour election map spreads across two pages, along with a table that compares the results with the 2004 election.

There’s even a wonderfully tabulated chart of riding-by-riding results that covers two full pages.

The entire election, right here in my hands. It just took a night.

In late October 1998, the Kosovo conflict was more than halfway through its tragic course. One day, while cruising the Drenica hills area, I heard about a young boy who had been shot dead. It’s possible that he had ventured too close to Serbian positions without realizing the danger. I wondered who could have shot him and if they knew that he was just a boy who couldn’t have been a fighter. Perhaps they simply saw a shadow moving in the trees and fired at it.

A crowd had gathered outside the boy’s home. There were men around who I believe were from the political wing of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), a faction that had grown to become a thousands-strong militia in less than a year.

The KLA, composed primarily of ethnic Albanians, was battling Slobodan Milosevic’s ruling Serbs and they knew what a public relations coup the boy’s death could be for them, as it would generate international sympathy. The KLA was a real underground – many of the men were farmers and villagers who couldn’t afford to be identified. But the media usually side with the underdog and the KLA knew they couldn’t win without the help of the outside world. In this way, the relationship between the international press and the Kosovo Albanians was symbiotic. I guess that’s how they convinced the family to allow us into the home.

I was one of four or five journalists who saw the boy laid out on a simple blanket, flecks of dried blood on his face. Family members were sitting on the floor around him. His name was Shemsi Elhoni. He was eleven.

The light was just as you see it in the photograph – there wasn’t a lot of darkroom work done on the image and I certainly didn’t use a flash. When I saw the contact sheets, this was the most powerful frame. If the mother appears to be smiling, it’s because she did so between wails of grief. She was in a state of shock and fainted several times.

On a hill a few hundred metres from the home, a couple of men were digging a grave for the boy. They were silhouettes against the sky, small shapes on the top of the hill. As shots suddenly ripped through the air, those shapes dropped to the ground. A few of us ran toward them, soon breathless in the thin mountain air, only to discover just how accustomed they had become to the sound of gunshots. One of the men was just lying there, holding his hat on his head as if waiting for a storm to pass.

As the family and neighbours prepared to carry the boy’s body up the hill, his mother seized the hand of one journalist, a British writer named Emma, and insisted that she walk with her in the procession. This made it impossible to take “objective” photographs, as a journalist was in the middle of the image. But Emma’s presence seemed to soothe the distraught mother.

A year and a half earlier, I had covered the journey of 80,000 Hutu refugees fleeing the fighting in their native Rwanda into the jungles of Zaire. I saw so many of these people die during the trek that something was altered in me. I learned that when you work in a conflict zone, it’s your responsibility to document what happens without letting your emotions interfere. Keeping that responsibility in mind makes the horrible manageable.

Why we pursue the subject of human suffering is complex. Some reasons may be altruistic and some are no doubt selfish. I’m not convinced by those photojournalists who have simple explanations such as, “It’s more interesting than city hall,” though admittedly it is. Many claim they’re working to raise awareness, but I’m suspicious when they say it’s their way of helping. When you really want to help, you join an aid agency, and I’ve known only a few journalists who have. I respect those people for doing it, even if it was to get away from the grind of a big news organization.

Maybe part of the reason we travel to foreign countries to cover events is so we don’t have to care too much. The victims are not family, friends or even compatriots. We can just walk away when we’re done, having had the privilege of seeing it all without having to feel the pain.

What we do may sound like “war tourism,” but anyone in a battle zone must accept the responsibility of producing something from it – something that tries to make some sense of what is going on and contributes to our understanding of how and why conflicts continue to happen.

In August 2000, I was sent to Burnt Church, New Brunswick to cover the daily showdowns on Miramichi Bay between Mi’kmaq fishers and conservation officers. The federal government had set a deadline for native fishers to remove their lobster traps to make way for commercial fishing – a deadline ignored by members of the Burnt Church reserve, who felt that their treaty rights had been violated. The Warrior Society, an aboriginal paramilitary group that was deeply involved in the Oka standoff in Ontario, set up barricades blocking access along the connecting highway between the Acadian Peninsula and the rest of New Brunswick. The standoff also led some non-native fishers, as well as some reserve residents, to fire bullets at each other’s vessels and equipment. I had been working with the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) for only six months and here I was, reporting on one of the most chaotic and violent clashes I’ve ever witnessed in my career.

I spent more than two weeks following this conflict, logging countless hours of overtime as I tried to keep up with a story that changed by the hour. By the end, I was exhausted by the stress, but I also felt a great sense of accomplishment. I was finally covering the kind of news story I had always wanted to cover.

I have always been compelled to tell stories that are important to Aboriginal Peoples – after all, it’s who I am. As a Mi’kmaq born and raised on the Indian Brook First Nation in Nova Scotia, I’ve often wondered why things are the way they are on Canada’s reserves. I grew up surrounded by poverty, addiction and dysfunction, never knowing my people’s history in the Atlantic Region. It wasn’t taught in any high school history class, and I wanted to know why these social situations existed and what could be done to change them.

This was the basic question I wanted to answer when I entered journalism eighteen years ago. It was important for me to explore a part of Canadian culture that had traditionally been poorly covered by mainstream media. Despite my background, it was difficult to put this desire into action.

While interning at CBC Radio in Halifax in 1990, I pitched stories I thought were important to aboriginal people. Many were dismissed as “too internal,” lacking appeal to a wider audience in Nova Scotia. Things got better at The Halifax Chronicle Herald. Pitches were well-received upon my arrival in May 1994 and some of my articles even made the front page. After a while, though, the encouragement to write about aboriginal issues faded, as did my optimism. I heard, often second-hand, that some colleagues questioned my objectivity and fairness when writing about aboriginal issues.

The most hurtful experience happened six months before I left in 1998. One day, my supervisor discussed his concerns with me pitching aboriginal story ideas. He told me my insistence on covering these issues would only hurt my career because the news desk would never take me seriously. By extension, I’d also never be considered for promotion to more prestigious beats. What I found most disturbing about his comments was what he didn’t say – he never asked about my career goals and how those goals fit with the newspaper. It was readily apparent my aspirations didn’t mesh with the newspaper’s plans, so I left.

A year later, APTN went on-air for the first time. When the network advertised for an Atlantic video journalist – a role I’d been waiting for since graduating from journalism school in 1994, I applied for and got the job.

The atmosphere at APTN National News is no different than any other newsroom. The same journalistic ethics and standards apply as we aim to provide viewers with fair and balanced coverage. The difference is that the entire news staff is aboriginal and the primary goal is to cover issues and events important to Aboriginal Peoples. I report on these issues in the Atlantic region without being questioned about bias or objectivity. Through my work, I’ve learned about the history of my people and the treaties my ancestors signed with the British in the 1700s by covering the Mi’kmaq logging rights trial in Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, as well as by travelling to Innu communities in Labrador to cover the gas-sniffing epidemic among their youth. I would never have been given the chance to cover these stories if I had continued to work in the mainstream media.

My career choices may have limited how far I can go in this profession, but what I do now is far more fulfilling. I’ve developed a beat that goes beyond the headlines to look into why things work the way they do in aboriginal communities. I report on these issues with authority and knowledge.

Even media executives are starting to realize the importance of covering communities and having a diverse workforce in newsrooms. Canadian cities themselves are diverse entities and media outlets need to attract readers, listeners and viewers from a variety of communities.

For me, diversity in the newsroom means more than just hiring people of colour to cover mainstream issues. It means providing coverage of matters that are important to these communities, rather than dismissing such stories as being “too internal.” This kind of coverage needs to occur more frequently and consistently. Only then will diversity be meaningful in mainstream newsrooms.

On the May 8, 1966 episode of This Hour Has Seven Days, Robert Fulford interviewed Marshall McLuhan, who spoke about the recent North American penchant for all things safety. “They want safety air, safety cigarettes, safety cars and safety programming,” the media guru said. But no one could accuse the three million-plus Canadians (about one in six of the total population at the time) watching the episode from their living rooms of wanting “safety programming.” Seven Days was the most radical news magazine CBC had ever produced, and one of the most popular television shows in Canadian history. Everyone watched it – taxi drivers, waitresses, garbage men and business and political leaders. If on a Monday in 1966 you hadn’t seen last night’s episode, says Fulford, you didn’t want to be seen in public that morning or, for that matter, the rest of the week. The show was a fixture in all the major dailies, and not just in the television columns – editorials and letters often cited the program, and interviews with figures like then-Opposition leader John Diefenbaker were newsworthy enough to appear near the front pages. Sometimes those pages told of the government’s frustrations with the program – it was a recurring subject at Monday morning parliamentary question periods in Ottawa.

Laurier LaPierre (left) and Patrick Watson on the set of This Hour Has Seven Days

The audience watching McLuhan on CBC at 10 P.M. that Sunday night was almost as large as the previous evening’s Hockey Night in Canada. Canadians tuned into the program for their usual fix of emotionally charged investigations and interviews. What they got instead was a goodbye, of sorts, from hosts Patrick Watson and Laurier LaPierre. “It has been a year to remember for us and we hope it has been for you, too. Good night,” Watson said. “See you in seventeen weeks,” signed off LaPierre, adding, “well, maybe. Au revoir.” Seven Days didn’t return in seventeen weeks. Summer 2006 will mark the fortieth anniversary of the death – or suicide – of the program. The most innovative, most sensational and most watched current affairs program in CBC history was gone. A flurry of public demonstrations, thousands of letters and angry phone calls, a strike threat from the Toronto Producers’ Association and even a parliamentary inquiry couldn’t make it return.

There will never be another Seven Days – the program’s spirited two-year existence was the combination of talent, tension and a turbulent decade of rapid change. The 1960s were still the relatively early days of television. The public broadcaster was one of a very few channels, and any program had a shot at captivating the whole country. CBC audiences and budgets were bigger, interviewers wore their horn-rimmed glasses and chewed their pipes and cigarettes on camera, and a new crop of anti-establishment journalists were no longer interested in reporting respectful stories about the monarchy. Pioneering investigative journalistic techniques that we now take for granted, Seven Days shook the public broadcaster to the point where it was changed forever. The sins committed in pursuit of its dissident mandate freed the airwaves of CBC’s polite, stuffy attitude, and contributed to a new form of journalism. But, looking back at the show today, from our world of sensational Fox News specials and teary Barbara Walters interviews, it’s easier to understand why CBC management was so pissed off.

For the March 20, 1966 episode of Seven Days, interviewer Roy Faibish deliberately set out to bring tears to the eyes of Doris Truscott, mother of Steven Truscott. Faibish had only a limited amount of film with which to do this, and wasted no time. “Is it hard not to cry when you visit him?” he asked. “What moments are the most difficult? Birthdays? Christmas?” The resulting two minutes and six seconds of film caused someone else besides Doris Truscott to choke up. Host LaPierre, live on camera in front of millions of viewers, had just seen the segment for the first time. He shifted in his suit and tie as he read the conclusion in a hoarse voice, stopping to rub his eyes before he could finish pronouncing the phrase, “Steven Truscott was sentenced to hang by the neck until dead.” Faibish’s sensationalistic interview and LaPierre’s show of emotion were common Seven Days fare. They were also two in a long string of questionable journalistic decisions that made management nervous.

In 1964, executive producers Watson and Douglas Leiterman banded together to lead a team of cocky young broadcasters in bringing something different to CBC’s old public affairs department. Their idea was to produce an opinionated program that would be emotionally engaging as well as being informative, a show that would grab the widest audience possible with issues they cared about. It was something both men had experimented with earlier in their careers while working together on the CBC public affairs show, Close Up. Intent on leaving audiences transfixed, Watson and Leiterman would watch the eyes of whomever happened to be in the room during Seven Days editing sessions. “If we found a section of an interview or documentary that people could take their eyes off, we said, ‘Cut that,'” Watson says. Leiterman regularly stopped CBC cleaning ladies on the Seven Days set after Sunday night broadcasts to solicit opinions. Leiterman says, “They were pretty impatient with the heavy political stuff.”

After setting out their mandate, Watson and Leiterman began instilling the new program with theatrics never before aired on CBC. Their opposing personalities complemented each other – so much so that when the show irked management, the twosome became a force executives wanted to separate. The laid-back Watson had a penchant for social change and a fascination with how images onscreen could affect the senses. The private, reserved Leiterman was so passionate about investigative journalism that he was famous for commissioning sensational stories first and worrying about ethics later. According to colleagues, Leiterman’s desire to uncover plots fuelled many segments that sought out business and government corruption.

The two hired an assortment of young journalists, based less on credentials than pure instinct for talent: a 21-year-old civil rights activist joined as a researcher upon his release from a Mississippi prison, while a mathematics graduate fired from The Hamilton Spectator became head of research. Pierre Trudeau, Moses Znaimer and Fulford contributed on a freelance basis, and LaPierre was such an unpredictable host he had trouble keeping his opinion to himself during interviews.

The personalities of the Seven Days team, coupled with Watson and Leiterman’s techniques, gave the program a smartass attitude. Interviews went for the emotional and were edited down rather than conducted live, infuriating many subjects who felt they were unfairly portrayed. After the show’s first episode on October 4, 1964, justice minister Guy Favreau complained that his seventeen-minute interview had been cut by more than half. Seven Days film editor Ron Carlyle admits today that interviews were also often slightly reordered in the editing suite.

Segments scrutinized a revolutionary contraceptive device called “the Pill,” American anti-war activists, interracial adoption and Bond-girl Ursula Andress’s racy Playboy photos. Miles of film were shot for items – about ten hours for each story – from which Leiterman would choose the most interesting six minutes. Politicians were grilled on the “Hot Seat,” one of Watson’s ideas. The unfortunate subject would sit on a raised chair and be bombarded by two interviewers, glaring lights and a cameraman with a penchant for getting close-ups of nervous sweat glistening on a brow. During the 1965 election, prime minister Lester B. Pearson declined to appear despite a live on-air challenge; the next week, the camera focused on the empty seat where he would have been.

“Document,” a monthly, hour-long feature on the program, saw Watson and Leiterman air some of the most provocative documentaries ever made, such as Canadian filmmaker Beryl Fox’s Mills of the Gods. The film criticized the American presence in Vietnam with shots of a laughing fighter pilot and burning villages. Satirical sketches poked fun at the prime minister, the Pope and pro-Vietnam American senators at a time when following a serious piece with satire was considered a CBC sin.

Rules were broken not only through the show’s innovation, but also behind the scenes. When the Penny Baker camera was invented, improving the way sound and video were recorded, Seven Days became the first CBC program to use it – its portability helped cameramen film crowds and protests. Program staff were accused of stealing footage from CBC’s news department, and the blacklisted Ross McLean was hired to produce items anonymously.

Most controversial were the items that regularly made it to air – and onto the agendas of CBC’s political masters. An interview with American Nazi leader George Lincoln Rockwell caused Diefenbaker to criticize CBC in the House of Commons. Management called a story about silicone-injected topless dancer Carol Doda “sleazy.” Yet Leiterman believed this was a superior way of exposing Rockwell’s racist rantings and demonstrating the emptiness of Doda’s life – by simply showing viewers.

One of Seven Days’s most notorious stunts was arranging a surprise meeting between Ku Klux Klan members and a black activist on October 25, 1965

Stories did, however, sway towards the sensational. During one interview with two Ku Klux Klan members, Leiterman and producer Robert Hoyt deliberately set out to stage a dramatic altercation in the studio, bringing in a black activist without warning any of the participants in advance. When the Klan members were able to keep their composure, Hoyt achieved the desired theatrical effect by trying to get the parties to shake hands. The Klan members refused. Viewers loved the item, but management called it gimmicky and lacking in integrity, demanding the technique be avoided in the future. Critics accused the program of rarely presenting both sides of a story, and though Seven Days staff believed their muckraking was valuable to viewers, at least one member has since revised his thinking. Story editor Brian Nolan went on to screen old Seven Days episodes with his broadcast students at Carleton University to give them a sense of the program’s outlandish techniques. “It wasn’t good journalism, it was terrific television,” he says today. “And the closest to journalism it came would be tabloid journalism.”

Even more questionable were the ways some stories were obtained. In management’s view, it amounted to “yellow journalism” and often involved illegal, unethical behavior. Leiterman believed what appeared on the screen mattered more than how the material was gathered, and let loose his staff on unsuspecting subjects. A reporter called the general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers to track down the baseball player ex-husband of prostitute and alleged East German spy Gerda Munsinger, saying it was an urgent police matter. Reporters secretly taped Quebec justice minister Claude Wagner, and did the same to Diefenbaker as he watched the results of the 1966 election, yelling and swearing at the TV. (It never aired, not only because of poor sound quality – Leiterman deemed it inappropriate.) Cameramen tried to hide bulky cameras behind the curtains at the Royal York Hotel’s restaurant to secretly capture a meeting, and were caught by the waiters. Infamously, political journalist Larry Zolf knocked on former defence minister Pierre Sévigny’s door unannounced, camera in tow, to inquire about his affair with Munsinger. Sévigny hit Zolf with a cane.

While working on a story about Fred Fawcett, a cattle farmer in the Penetanguishene Hospital for the Criminally Insane (imprisoned for firing a pistol at a tax assessor’s car tire during a dispute), Seven Days had been refused permission to enter and interview the patient. Working with Fawcett’s sister Rita – who, feeling her brother had been wrongfully committed, had contacted the show – Seven Days came up with a plan. Carrying a camera and a tape recorder concealed in a picnic basket with checkered cloths on top, three Seven Days crew members entered the hospital with Rita Fawcett, who described them as “friends.” One dressed as a lawyer in a pinstriped suit; another wore a lumberjack jacket and talked with a rural accent. Once inside, they assembled the cameras, shot an interview with Fawcett, who had rehearsed the answers beforehand, and put the cameras away, all in the five-odd minutes it took for the guard to return.

There was never any question that Seven Days would smuggle in a camera. The original plan had involved hiding the camera in interviewer Warner Troyer’s pant leg (Troyer was an amputee). Leiterman later neglected to tell his supervisors that permission had never been granted for the interview, and when this was discovered, CBC news and public affairs director Bill Hogg irritably lectured Leiterman about respectable journalism. Fawcett was later freed, largely because he had appeared to be quite sane on Seven Days.

The Fawcett interview was one of the program’s proudest moments in its quest to uncover corruption but critics still called its tactics sensational. Dick Nielsen, who produced CBC’s The Public Eye in 1965, was influenced by Seven Days enough to imitate it, but held back when it came to using dramatic devices. Controversial material was already being produced across the entire CBC public affairs department at the time, Nielsen says, but no program ever went as far as Seven Days. “We did a similar sort of thing but with less panache, less style and perhaps more integrity, because in some cases that sort of thing can get very out of line.”

It’s no wonder CBC executives thought Seven Days was way out of line. In their mid-fifties, the top two men symbolized the type of grey establishment figures that became foils for rebellion in the ’60s. President J. Alphonse Ouimet came from a strict Quebec upbringing and was “prissy about women and swearing.” Vice-president Captain W.E.S. Briggs – nicknamed “the old man” – was a former Second World War naval captain. Briggs decorated his CBC office like a ship, and was famous for his radio reports of the Queen’s visits. He fumed at the mention of gays on Seven Days because, he said, gay issues were irrelevant to Canadians – after all, there weren’t any homosexuals in Saskatchewan. The two, along with the vice-president and general manager of English network broadcasting, H.G. Walker, came from the golden age of radio and knew little about television programming.

In contrast, Watson and Leiterman, in their mid-thirties, were the oldest of the Seven Days crew. The rest, in their twenties and early thirties, were taking advantage of life in the sixties. Although “square” and “straight-laced” by the decade’s counterculture standards – they wore jackets and ties to work, put in sixty-hour weeks, and had little time to socialize other than for the weekly wrap party – they were close to the crowd that revelled in the political change as much as they enjoyed the new social freedoms. According to story editor Peter Pearson, who was “like, a 26-year-old kid” at the time, the values of the younger generation producing the show were what made senior managers “hate” Seven Days. They sheltered themselves from the rebellion within their stuffy old headquarters, the former Havergal College building on Jarvis Street nicknamed “The Kremlin.” “Yonge Street was one rocking joint, all those bars,” says Pearson. “There was dope all over those places. Two blocks away, the CBC was in mortal dismay at what the hell was going on. It saw itself as a civilizing force, and over there was Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins and Robbie Robertson and all of these great musicians.” Senior personnel sought refuge from the counterculture at headquarters, but, half a block away, the sex, the drugs, the rock ‘n’ roll and the politics moved seamlessly from the streets to the editing suites to the television screens of the nation.

Management had trouble penetrating this separate universe. When Briggs decided he wanted to keep a close eye on Seven Days, he was frustrated to learn he couldn’t find out what stories would be airing in advance of each episode. Leiterman, wanting to keep the show as current as possible, finalized the show’s lineup right before airtime on Sundays, making a slew of scribbled changes that rendered the hosts’ teleprompters almost illegible. Rather than give in, Leiterman’s staff developed an “us-versus-them” camaraderie in response to management’s attempted restraints. They thought they could get away with anything, which added to the anti-establishment spirit of the show, and continued their blatant rule-breaking, hiding cameras and grilling politicians while management tried harder to curb what they saw as rabid sensationalism.

At the start of the second season, the controversial LaPierre was deemed too provocative to interview party leaders on the hot seat during the 1965 election. After a battle, LaPierre remained part of the election coverage, but Leiterman eventually conceded to the removal of the hot seat, switching to a “round table” format. It was a move that he and Watson would always regret having to make. “Some felt that we should have just resigned then, killed the show,” Leiterman says, “that that was too much interference and that we were betraying our own principles.” Rumours of a possible cancellation abounded as the season progressed.

In spring 1966, viewers protest the cancellation of This Hour Has Seven Days

Management didn’t want to kill the program – it wanted a quieter show. On April 6, 1966, with one month left in the program’s second season, Watson (by then the program’s second host) was informed that his contract, along with co-host LaPierre’s, would not be renewed for the following season. This interference from senior management angered Seven Days personnel. It was the executive producer’s job to hire and fire hosts, not the president’s. The programmers hatched a plan to fight back. In mid- April, Seven Days leaked news about the dismissals to the media, and sparked a battle involving the “Save Seven Days” committee, led by a young researcher – an operation run directly across the street from CBC headquarters in the Four Seasons Motel. The committee spent twenty hours a day running up long-distance phone bills, soliciting support for a petition and organizing demonstrations across the country where fans picketed outside CBC offices. Thousands of viewers wrote letters, and newspaper editorials criticized management’s treatment of the program’s hosts. The Toronto Producers’ Association threatened to strike in support.

The season’s final few episodes went to air amidst the chaos. After Ouimet held a hostile press conference attacking the program, Diefenbaker cried for an emergency parliamentary debate. “I do not think there has ever been a matter which in so short a time has brought about so much antagonism in all parts of Canada,” he said. The prime minister arranged for a parliamentary committee to launch its own investigation and began calling in the players as witnesses, while the CBC board of directors did the same. Ouimet appealed for support, listing the “sins” of Seven Days – LaPierre’s tear, in particular – and Seven Days staff argued in their defence. After the show’s final episode in mid-May, the conflict carried on through a separate inquiry commissioned by the prime minister and led by Stuart Keate, a Vancouver publisher. Keate criticized some techniques used on the show, but was more critical of management. The parliamentary committee report, issued in June, also sided with the program.

The tensions were too great to resolve. Leiterman, refusing to sign a pledge to “accept CBC policies, procedures and direction,” was fired. Watson, LaPierre and other core Seven Days players resigned.

Like the program’s existence, its death was an amalgamation of different forces. If management didn’t kill the show outright, maybe, as former CBC manager Eric Koch puts it, the decade’s clash of generations did. Management certainly clamped down on provocative programming in the aftermath of Seven Days’ demise. The newsmagazine Sunday, which took over its vacated time slot, featured discussions on sexual pleasure and an appearance by Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. It provoked older viewers even more than Seven Days, and was cancelled after only one season. And management refused to air Warrendale – a contentious documentary about emotionally disturbed children by Allan King, “Document” contributor for Seven Days and one of the most notorious cinema verit? directors of the sixties – deeming it too emotional and full of foul language.

The government, tired of arguing about the latest Seven Days episode during Monday morning question periods and fearing on-air criticism, may have also had a motive for killing the show. Pearson appointed a new CBC president to succeed Ouimet in 1968. “Whatever you do, George, please make sure I never hear about the CBC again,” Pearson reportedly told George Davidson upon his appointment. And Davidson did keep things quiet for a while. The programs that took over the Seven Days time slot stayed quiet.

Watson believes Seven Days fuelled management’s anxiety about programming in the years that followed. Rival producer Nielsen believes it actually sparked the death of the old “public affairs” spirit at CBC. The department was renamed “current affairs” and merged with news after Knowlton Nash became director of news and public affairs in late 1968. Nash and other news staff had spent two years lobbying for more prominence for their department, wanting to counter the popularity and controversy of Seven Days and avoid duplication. With the separate public affairs department and its freedoms obliterated, Nielsen says, the new current affairs shows became too reliant on being topical and less concerned with viewers’ concerns, which don’t necessarily revolve around the latest issue or study.

The days following its demise may have been grim, but oddly, the influence of Seven Days didn’t wane. In fact, some of its methods became staples in a market that dwarfed Canada’s. Leiterman went to New York and helped create a new program for CBS called 60 Minutes that would employ the Seven Days spirit of entertainment and uncovering corruption. CBS head Bill Leonard had first noticed the program while visiting relatives in Winnipeg, and he believed the show could be copied “responsibly.” The use of satire and gimmicks like the hot seat were dropped, but even so, viewers couldn’t get enough of segments recorded with hidden cameras – used, unlike at Seven Days, only when criminality was involved.

And though CBC current affairs programs suffered in the immediate aftermath, programs like the fifth estate and The Journal went on to be opinionated, investigative and courageous – although fairer and more cautious. Twenty years ago, when a tough Barbara Frum grilled interviewees like British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, she was paying homage. And Eric Malling’s impulsive hug of a Holocaust survivor on camera would never have been aired on fifth without LaPierre’s pioneering tear. Last year, when current fifth host Bob McKeown ambushed an elusive David Frost to confront him about his questionable relationship with his former client – National Hockey League player Mike Danton, who was convicted of trying to hire someone to kill Frost – he borrowed from Seven Days. Just this February, McKeown instinctively squeezed the hand of a man supposedly wrongfully imprisoned in India for murdering his wife.

Seven Days also made the marriage of news and satire more acceptable at CBC. The corporation’s current satirical newsmagazine, This Hour Has 22 Minutes, borrows from Seven Days in more than just name – whether it realizes it or not. The program builds on sketches of Pearson and Diefenbaker from Seven Days, taking political satire to a level unimaginable in the ’60s. The most recent federal election saw Gilles Duceppe, Jack Layton and Stephen Harper willingly interviewed by a 22 Minutes actor playing an awkward teenage boy. And in November 2005, Belinda Stronach participated in an innuendo-filled sketch with “Mrs. Enid,” a prim but foul-mouthed old woman.

Fewer and fewer current staff have heard of Seven Days, but, as with other legends that line CBC museum walls, like Frum and Peter Gzowski, the show’s influence is inescapable. Jim Williamson, executive producer of the recent spin-off, fifth estate Specials, thinks it is embedded in the broadcast company’s DNA. As each new episode of each new current affairs program is born, personnel that know little of Seven Days get a taste of its mandate to inform and entertain.

Sunday, CBC’s current newsmagazine, contains more than a hint of this DNA. Before the program’s February 2002 debut, Leiterman entered CBC’s new headquarters on Front Street. It was his first time offering advice to CBC programmers since Seven Days folded. Stuart Coxe, who led the team that created Sunday, was so struck by old Seven Days episodes he approached the famed producer for guidance. Impressed by Leiterman’s still-innovative story ideas – eerily, one consisted of obtaining illegal materials and building a nuclear bomb, minus the trigger, then filming an attempt at smuggling it into the pre-9/11 World Trade Center to show how vulnerable it was – Coxe invited Leiterman to talk to his staff.

Not all were enchanted by Leiterman’s methods. One told him she liked his old material, but also held Seven Days responsible for a lot of exploitive television. “The Ku Klux Klan segment, that’s like Jerry Springer today,” she said. “I don’t think it was effective at the time, either.”

“I don’t make television for people who read The New York Review of Books,” an unrepentant Leiterman replied. “I make television for people who work all day and come home and want to be entertained as well as informed.”

Sunday would go on to broadcast a live gay marriage, and an interview where a reporter rode around the desert with Osama bin Laden’s brother-in-law, discussing bin Laden’s driving skills. Recently, the fifth estate aired a documentary set in the future – the first of its kind at CBC, according to Williamson – showing what an H5N1 avian influenza pandemic would be like. The factors that combined to give Canadians a cultural phenomenon like Seven Days would be difficult to reproduce, but when current producers Coxe and Williamson talk about engaging viewers and making them care about issues today, they sound exactly like Watson and Leiterman.

Bill Carroll arrives at the offices of CFRB 1010 in downtown Toronto inhaling a pastry and gulping from a bottle of Five Alive. He’s got half an hour to kill before his show begins. It’s the same morning show – one of Toronto’s top-rated – that he’s been hosting for seven years. As usual, Carroll’s been up for nearly two hours. On the treadmill each morning he watches the morning news and reads the newspapers as he runs. By 7 A.M., he and producer Ryan Doyle have already discussed the day’s news over the phone and started to formulate a plan for the day’s broadcast.

Once in his office, Carroll and Doyle resume their chat. Two likely topics today are the Toronto Police Service job action and reports of criminals being allowed day passes to attend Paramount Canada’s Wonderland. Doyle needles Carroll about his sugar intake. Assuming a manic expression, the veteran news reporter and radio host growls, “But it makes me really peppy.” Given how energetic and bombastic Carroll acts during the course of his almost three-and- a-half hour show, it’s obvious he knows the value of a good sugar rush. Shortly before 8:30 A.M., Carroll’s colleague Ted Woloshyn wraps up his show. “That’s us!” says Carroll. He and Doyle gather up their notes and newspaper clippings and scurry down the hall and into the control room to start the October 19, 2005 edition of The Bill Carroll Show.

The atmosphere in the control room is jovial. During the segment about criminals’ day passes to Wonderland, the callers are mostly critical of the practice until a woman named Mary provides a dissenting view. She defends the criminals, saying maybe they never got the chance to go to an amusement park. Laughter echoes through the control room. Matt, the next caller, lambastes Mary’s opinion and calls her a “moron.” But Carroll defends Mary’s right to her point of view. “She’s maybe a little na?ve,” he says, “but she obviously believes the best in people.”

AM radio owes a great deal to talk radio hosts like Carroll. The band faced extinction in the 1970s as music listeners gravitated to better audio reception on the FM dial. By 1980, AM found its salvation in talk, a format that was started half a century earlier by an American disc jockey named John J. Anthony. CFRB, like many stations, was once all music but switched to a news and talk format by the end of the 1980s. It is now the most listened-to talk station in Canada. The station’s programs follow the format of most talk radio shows in Canada. Steve Kowch, operations manager at CFRB, says it’s “mainly talk sprinkled with interviews and guests.” In the U.S., archconservatives like Rush Limbaugh or “shock jocks” such as Howard Stern define the format. But for a variety of reasons, including Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) restrictions on what can or cannot be said on air, a milder variety of talk prevails in Canada. Still, in order to attract advertising dollars, commercial radio stations need to attract listeners. Usually this means talk radio has to retain a sensationalistic element to boost ratings, even at the cost of bona fide news content.

On December 23, 1900, a Canadian engineer and inventor named Reginald Aubrey Fessenden successfully transmitted his own voice over the first radio system from Cobb Island, near Washington, D.C. Within a few decades, radios provided news, music and entertainment to nearly every household in the country. Today, there are ninety to one hundred million analog radio sets in Canada. They’re a ubiquitous presence in people’s daily lives, playing in kitchens, cars and workplaces. Even many MP3 players are equipped to receive AM and FM.

A Statistics Canada survey from fall 2004 revealed that an average of 10.6 per cent of Canadians listen to talk radio, with the largest audience in Newfoundland at 25.4 per cent. The industry considers talk radio to have a more participatory and engaging nature than music stations, which are often played in the background. Unlike most listeners, talk radio’s audience is encouraged to directly participate in programs. In his book On Air: Radio in Saskatchewan, Wayne Schmalz says listeners call in not only to display their knowledge to the rest of the audience but to interact with a public persona or authority figure about the issues at hand.

With their large personalities, hosts must be entertaining in order to keep listeners engaged, increase audience share and attract advertising revenue. The last ambition is less of a concern to non-commercial stations like those of the CBC, which receives federal funding to help pay operating costs, but they too seek the widest possible listener base. Charles Adler, who’s been on North American radio for over thirty years and currently broadcasts his nationally syndicated show, Adler on Line, from commercial talk-radio station CJOB in Winnipeg, puts it succinctly: “We get ratings results four times a year – if we cannot get ratings, we are out of work.”

Critics of the format say the quest for ratings inevitably trumps all other considerations. Schmalz writes that talk radio’s aim “is to please the greatest number of listeners so that advertisers will continue to buy time and parliamentarians will continue to provide public funds for its operations.” Talk radio’s audience is loyal, so it’s a lucrative group for advertisers. Advertisers are willing to pay twice as much to reach talk audiences versus music audiences because the format encourages “foreground” listening. But that leads to a marketing problem – talk radio is commonly perceived to appeal primarily to retirees. Roy Hennessy, chief operating officer of Aboriginal Voices Radio (AVR) 106.5 FM in Toronto, says the biggest problem with attracting advertisers in Canada is the demographic tends to be older; appealing to listeners under thirty has always been a challenge. MOJO Radio, for example, AM 640’s previous incarnation, was created to appeal to a young male demographic, but failed to attract the necessary audience share and was overhauled.

However, Hennessy, who has had a long career in Canadian radio working at many different stations, including CFRB, says finding the balance between journalism and entertainment is “a double-edged sword.” Talk shows have to provide balance and fairness in how they handle the issues but must also evoke a strong level of listener interest and involvement. “You build entertainment value while you work to accomplish a journalistic point of view,” he says. Patrice Mousseau, the host of Women’s Round Table, which airs on AVR every Friday morning at 11 A.M., says talk radio should ideally function as an entertaining conversation. “Hard journalism?” she wonders. “Perhaps not. But it creates an interest in issues, events and people. If listeners have questions or feel comforted or outraged by topics, this can only be a good thing.”

Rex Murphy, host of CBC Radio’s weekly current affairs program Cross Country Checkup, says there is no need to trade journalistic integrity for entertainment. “A really good guest or a really interesting phone call can be very entertaining,” he says, “and because it is less contrived, it can secure an audience even better than obvious shock.” Every Sunday afternoon, Murphy presides over the two-hour call-in show, which has been broadcast on CBC Radio for forty years. It is Canada’s only live, open-line national radio program and has close to 500,000 listeners weekly.

“Our show is very listener-driven,” says Murphy. “Our callers get to say what they want, more or less, rather than have arguments with the host, which is a signature of one type of call-in show.” On December 4, for example, Frank Graves, founder and president of Ekos Research Associates Inc., was Murphy’s guest. He and Murphy set out to determine the number one election issue in the minds of Canadians. Graves said Canadians were more concerned with social issues than politicians’ ethics. The callers not only offered diverse views but also represented a broad national spectrum, with calls coming in from across the country.

Preparation for Cross Country Checkup varies from week to week. Rex Murphy’s two producers, Charles Shanks and Kate Swoger, spend the preceding week choosing and refining a topic, preparing background information and selecting guests to facilitate the discussion. Murphy keeps up with all major issues himself, then gets ready for any given show topic over the weekend.

Because of the onerous costs involved in producing talk programming, as opposed to all-music formats, few commercial stations are able to employ their own news gathering sources. Some local talk radio stations have reporters for local issues, although for provincial and national stories they rely on other sources. AM 640 in Toronto airs its investigative series on local issues four or five times a year. In October 2005, “The Power and People at City Hall” delved into the inner workings of the city’s political hub. CFRB and CJAD 800 AM in Montreal have newsrooms facilitating coverage of local and some national issues. In fact, CFRB has one of the largest radio newsrooms of any commercial station in the country. And, of course, a national news gathering team supports talk-oriented programs on CBC Radio One.

No matter how rich in resources they are, the best talk radio hosts still have to prepare rigorously for shows. Mike Stafford, host of AM 640’s The Stafford Show and a self-professed “info junkie,” reads all the Toronto dailies, watches the television news and scans the online news sites for The Toronto Star and CNN. Besides being well-versed on a wide range of topics on any given day, Stafford is also a versatile interviewer. During his October 4, 2005 broadcast, he interviewed Toronto Police Association president Dave Wilson about the impending police job action, Liberal MP Dr. Carolyn Bennett about the rise in Canada’s child abuse rate, Dr. Alan Hudak about rising child obesity rates in Ontario and former Toronto city councillor Pam Coburn about her alleged affair with a co-worker. He also found time to grill Toronto Argonauts coach Michael “Pinball” Clemens about his possible mayoral ambitions and talked movies with Reel to Real host and author Richard Crouse.

Stafford’s show airs weekdays 4 to 7 P.M. A balding man wearing dark-rimmed glasses, he sits behind one of the station’s broadcast microphones, tapping his pen to Van Halen’s song “Ain’t Talkin’ ’bout Love.” Taking huge gulps from his cup of diet cola, he looks over his show’s schedule. His style is more aggressive than anything heard on CBC but he still says talk radio is definitely “nicer” here than in the U.S. The call-in segment about childhood obesity on his October 4, 2005 show illustrates his point. He prefaces one of the local calls by announcing that the caller’s son hasn’t been out of the house in ten years because he’s been playing video games. By the time the caller gets to air, however, he apologizes to her, gruffly saying, “I’m just kidding!” She takes his joke in stride and voices her comments.

According to Michael Harrison, the editor of Talkers, an American magazine about the format, Canadian talk radio is less sensational and more journalistic than its U.S. counterpart. Its shows also cater principally to local rather than national audiences. Carroll explains the contrast differently. “In the U.S.,” he says, “it’s not far outside the box. They stick with safe political topics, rally behind the flag. Here the topics are more spread out. You get water cooler type conversation, lifestyle and family issues.”

The style of hosts range from the usually calm, measured tones of Mousseau and Murphy, to the more overbearing yet still informed approach preferred by Stafford and Carroll. All avoid the extreme tactics of American-style shock jocks John Collison and Jeff Fillion, who both learned the hard way that Canadian talk radio is different. Shock radio contravenes the CRTC Radio Regulations and Broadcast Act, which prohibits on-air abusive comment. For example, stations may not air “any abusive comment that, when taken in context, tends to or is likely to expose an individual or a group or class of individuals to hatred or contempt on the basis of race, national or ethnic origin, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, age or mental or physical disability.”

Radio stations must adhere to this code or risk losing their broadcasting licences. Collison, a former talk radio host on Winnipeg’s Talk 1290, has described his on-air persona as “Howard Stern-esque.” He was dismissed because many believed he was promoting hatred against gays and lesbians in one of his on-air rants. Referring to a lesbian Winnipeg School Board member, he declared, “You’ve got diesel dykes running the school board.” His contract was terminated because of numerous complaints and Collison admitted it was this comment that probably sealed his fate. Fillion’s on-air rants, meanwhile, lasted over a seven-year period at Quebec City’s CHOI-FM. On air, he made contentious remarks about business rivals, local politicians, gays, feminists, visible minorities and Montreal media and showbiz stars. In July 2004, after receiving a large number of complaints, the CRTC chose not to renew CHOI’s licence because of Fillion’s antics. CHOI contested the revocation, and the case has gone all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada. The station is allowed to broadcast until the final decision, expected later this year, is handed down. Fillion resigned in March 2005 over disagreements with management about his on-air conduct and the lawsuits it prompted.

While talk radio has the option of being hurtful and cruel, it can also be an unlikely humanitarian force. In Canada, the fact that the format focuses on the local has been a good thing in times of crisis. Emergencies reinforce radio’s ability to provide a sense of community and security in frightening situations when all the other information sources are down. One such predicament was the northeastern blackout in August 2003, which suddenly left fifty million people without electricity and occurred shortly after Stafford went on air at 4 P.M. Purely by chance, AM 640’s transmitter in Grimsby, Ontario survived the outage. That, coupled with the station’s generators, meant that for thirty minutes it was the only station able to broadcast in Toronto. Stafford realized the extent of the power failure when the news wires subsequently came in. “From that moment on, we basically went commercial-free, just taking calls.” He says the blackout was one of the greatest things that could happen for radio in Toronto: “It hammered home its immediacy.”

An earlier crisis, the ice storm that affected Ontario and Quebec in January 1998, demonstrated radio’s potential importance. Talk radio host Ric Peterson recalls that his station, CJAD 800 AM in Montreal, encountered difficulties during the storm because their transmission towers were knocked out by heavy ice. Peterson described how the station’s management realized the need for talk radio during the crisis and transferred AM news talk programming over to its Top 40 FM station, CJFM: “We were able to get the information out to our listeners.”

Calamities don’t happen often, but just the same, talk radio hosts can still show their mettle as both journalists and entertainers on an everyday basis. On December 9, 2005, The Bill Carroll Show featured a call-in discussion about Michel Thibideau, a man who sued Air Canada after being refused French service during his flight. Many of the callers were critical of Thibideau, who subsequently won $500,000 in the lawsuit, but Carroll defended Thibideau in his usual spirited manner, showing an understanding of Canadian law. He said he doubted the affront was worth $500,000 and that an apology should have sufficed. However, he bluntly told his audience that Thibideau did have a right to service in both our country’s official languages. “You may not like it,” Carroll said to one of his many angry callers, “but it’s the law.”

If Carroll had wanted to be solely entertaining or sensationalistic, he would have gone along with the mood of the callers and raged against Thibideau. But he didn’t resort to these tactics. Canadian talk radio may not offer hard journalism, but it does initiate informed on-air debate and discussion of daily news. Hosts like Carroll are mouthy provocateurs but they tend to act responsibly and with journalistic integrity while working off that sugar rush.

Highway 60’s single lanes span 254 kilometres from Huntsville to Renfrew in Eastern Ontario, through Algonquin Park, past the blink-and-you-miss-them hamlets of Whitney and Madawaska and the Murray Brothers Lumber Company, one of the largest employers in the region. The highway cuts through evergreen forests and spruce bogs, continuing southeast past my parents’ inn, until it reaches Barry’s Bay, a village of 1,200 situated on the north end of Lake Kamaniskeg, where I grew up. On the countertops of local shops and gas stations sits the tabloid, Barry’s Bay This Week, once a member of Metroland’s publishing dynasty and now a link in Osprey Media’s chain of newspapers. In a neat pile next to This Week is its competition, The Eganville Leader, an independent broadsheet that has served Renfrew County for more than a hundred years.

“You’re not publishing this any time soon, are you?” asks Doug Gloin, looking at me sideways from behind glasses held together by trolling wire. “I don’t want to tip the Leader.” Gloin, the fifty-year-old editor of This Week, has been using his off-hours to research the lives and deaths of twenty-three local men killed in the First and Second World Wars. Bored with the usual veterans’ tales that fill Remembrance Day editions of community weeklies, Gloin wants to try something fresh, something the Leader has never done.

In 2000, Gloin bought a cottage on Lake Kamaniskeg and began to think about making a permanent move to Barry’s Bay. As an editor of The Toronto Star’s GTA section, he split his time between Toronto and the Bay for six years. Then, in January 2005, he took a severance package and moved up north for good. When Lou Clancy, vice-president of editorial at Osprey and a former managing editor at the Star, heard Gloin was moving to Barry’s Bay, he encouraged his old colleague to apply for the vacant editor position at This Week. “I thought he would become an almost iconic editor because he loves that area very much,” says Clancy. “He’s very hard-working, and community editors need to be very hard-working.” Gloin was taking a time out from work when I first met him at a friend’s house last summer, three months after he started the job. Everything was going smoothly, he said, except that readers weren’t writing any letters. During his first two months as editor, the paper received only seven letters.

Creating a special Remembrance Day issue of This Week isn’t just an attempt to outshine the Leader; it’s another way Gloin is hoping to win back readers lost during the years Metroland owned the paper, and boost its circulation of 2,200 to 3,200 by the end of this year. The Leader, published in Eganville, a town fifty-eight kilometres southeast of Barry’s Bay, has a circulation of almost 5,800, one-third of which is in This Week’s coverage area. In this battle for Barry’s Bay readers, Gloin is taking on a local institution that grew roots in the region long before Barry’s Bay had its own paper. He also has to overcome a feeling of desperation at This Week, brought on by the high turnover and low budgets common to corporately owned papers. “Have you noticed?” asks Gloin. “There’s a chain around my ankle.” The Leader’s owners spend more money and take more chances. The only weapon Gloin has is the quality of his content.

There are three churches, three coffee shops, two grocery stores, two video stores, one pharmacy and no traffic lights in Barry’s Bay. A flashing red light was erected several years ago, much to the astonishment of residents, at the intersection of Highway 60 and Bay Street. Follow Bay Street south of the highway and you’ll find the old This Week office, where the paper operated for many years as an independent.

Long before This Week was part of Osprey, there were several attempts to start a local Barry’s Bay paper. The first, made by Arthur Ritza in 1959, was called the Barry’s Bay Review. Six years later, Ritza suspended publication “for a period of time unknown at present. ” The Review never returned. In 1971, John Zylstra and Ines Bain started a new paper, This Week in the Madawaska Valley. In the mid-1980s, Zylstra left Barry’s Bay without reason or warning. In 1986, when it became obvious he wasn’t returning, Bain sold the paper to Phil and Helen Conway, two local schoolteachers. “We thought running a paper wouldn’t be all that hard,” says Phil Conway. They were wrong. It was hard.

The couple owned and operated the paper, which they renamed Barry’s Bay This Week, for eleven years. It was usually around fifty-six pages, rarely under forty and sometimes over one hundred. “Many times we didn’t have enough advertising to warrant the stories,” says Helen, who was the editor. But they ran them anyway, filling the paper with as much community news as they could.

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Last September, after less than a year on the job, Kim Pittaway resigned as editor-in-chief of Chatelaine, citing editorial interference from publisher Kerry Mitchell. Although there was no particular dispute that prompted her resignation, Pittaway says she had growing concerns over advertising issues. “I inevitably ended up negotiating into programs and approaches that I was not entirely comfortable with,” she says. Within weeks of Pittaway’s departure, Janice Paskey was fired as editor of Calgary’s Avenue magazine and editorial control was again a major issue. “I lost, totally, my editorial authority to a sales director,” says Paskey, adding that the magazine’s sales director was allowed to approve story lineups, pull stories, edit copy and dictate content so as not to offend advertisers.

Pittaway’s and Paskey’s common fate symbolizes the renewed assault on the separation of editorial and advertising in the magazine industry. “Church and state,” as it’s known, has always been a concern because of the implied threat to the credibility of editorial content. But over the past year, the line has become even more blurred. Advertisers, knowing magazines remain an effective way to reach consumers, have increased their efforts to influence editorial content by playing publications against one another and making greater demands. Those who used to be satisfied with good placement and advertorials now want their brands to be associated with the magazines and want mentions in editorial copy. Revenue-hungry magazine publishers, meanwhile, oblige this growing incursion in two ways. One is to draw editors closer to the business side by making editors and publishers one and the same. Another is to restructure the magazine masthead’s traditional order so that advertising sales managers have more power. As church and state become entwined, the risk grows that magazines will lose credibility with readers by compromising the integrity of editorial content. Many in the industry worry that publishers may be pocketing the short-term gain of higher ad revenues in exchange for the long-term pain of reduced subscription renewals and smaller newsstand sales.

From May to October last year, Maclean’s, Rogers Communications Inc.’s flagship newsmagazine, published special features written by Peter C. Newman called “New Canadian Establishment.” The series was sponsored by General Motors of Canada’s Cadillac division, with the car’s logo appearing on the editorial feature. The arrangement raised more than a few eyebrows. “Brought to you by Cadillac means Maclean’s couldn’t bring it to you,” says Bill Shields, editor of Masthead, the periodical industry’s journal of record. And last July, Rogers’s top women’s title, Chatelaine, ran an eight-page bonus home decor section sponsored by Home Depot. The sponsor’s logo appeared alongside the magazine’s. The editorial content was produced by the magazine’s editorial team, while the advertising content was produced by the marketing team at Rogers. Editorial lineups were shared with Home Depot so the ads could be tailored to match editorial content. Both magazines breached Canadian Society of Magazine Editors (CSME) guidelines, which state: “An advertiser’s name or logo may not be used on any editorial pages to suggest advertising sponsorship of those pages, nor shall any editorial page be labelled as ‘sponsored’ or ‘brought to you’ by an advertiser.”

“Few advertisers will now say, ‘Sure, I’ll buy six pages in the magazine,'” says Canadian Business (CB) magazine publisher Deborah Rosser. “They’re asking, of all media, ‘How can I work with you?’ because we have the relationship with the customer they want to reach.” This approach has raised the stakes for publishers. Advertisers who used to divide their allotment of pages among several magazines will now give all their pages to the single magazine willing to provide the most integration. Though she won’t mention any names, Pittaway says that advertisers would approach Chatelaine with these kinds of proposals – and let the editors know they were competing against other Canadian women’s magazines.

What advertisers want is intimacy with editorial, and editorial teams are ever more receptive to negotiation, says Cathy Quinton, a media manager at ad agency Vickers and Benson. “Advertisers are always asking, ‘How can I have my product woven into the editorial or at least look that way?'” By doing that, Quinton says, they figure they’re building integrity for their brands.

These pressures have clearly changed the working environment at magazines. Traditionally, the editor has been responsible for content, while publishers have taken care of the business side – including negotiating the ad deals. Today, though, editors are immersed more than ever in the business side. Where in the past editors might have simply been introduced to advertisers or visited ad agencies, now they come to the negotiating table. This puts them in a position to be more involved in what happens in terms of advertising, but some fear it erodes the ability of editors to take an ethical stand. In addition, editors and their teams are being asked to use their expertise to help advertisers develop and shape their messages. “The time and resources that go into coming up with ideas for advertisers are time and resources taken away from coming up with ideas for readers,” says Pittaway, who has worked with companies such as Kraft Foods on its ad campaigns.

The chains of command at some magazines increasingly reflect the new culture. Rogers, for example, recently realigned its management structure so that sales directors report directly to the vice-president of sales instead of to their publishers. This means each publisher’s direct control is now concentrated on editorial, while jurisdiction over advertising has changed.

Also troubling to the industry is the tendency to combine the editing and publishing roles. Currently, Ken Whyte fills both positions at Maclean’s, as did Lise Ravary at the French edition of Châtelaine. Ravary describes her role as “brand champion” rather than merely a souped-up ad director. She claims there is no potential for conflict of interest. “I know where the line is,” she says. “I made the decision and I’m not fighting with anyone about it.” At the end of November, Ravary was promoted to VP editorial director of women’s titles and new magazine brands for Rogers, but she remains Châtelaine’s editor-in-chief.

Some think a closer relationship between editorial and advertising has its advantages. Rosser, who serves as publisher of Profit and MoneySense in addition to CB, says the editorial and advertising departments at her magazines get together to present each side’s ideas when planning upcoming issues. It allows the advertising department to understand the choices the editorial department makes and to package these ideas to sell to advertisers. “What we sell to the advertisers,” she says, “is the readership.” Jacqueline Howe, a group publisher at Transcontinental Inc., emphasizes how important it is for editors to be aware of the business side of their magazines. “If editors understand the financial aspects of the magazine, you’re going to have a much stronger product.”

Certainly advertisers understand there is a more fluid dynamic to the relationship. While many of them now gravitate toward interactive media and the Internet, magazines remain alluring and important vehicles. With the advent of TiVo and other personal video recording technology, viewers no longer have to sit through the commercials during their favourite television shows. At the same time, a growing segment of television audiences, labelled “light TV viewers,” watch little television and are very selective about what they watch. These same consumers, however, tend to be heavy magazine readers, which makes magazines still popular and appealing for companies looking to sell their brands.

But if consumers – a.k.a. readers – are the targets, no one is certain how they’ll react to the new closeness between advertising and editorial content. Some fear publishers are toying with a longstanding relationship that, once damaged, will be hard to repair. “Most successful magazines have a readership that has a strong element of trust in the content,” says magazine consultant D.B. Scott. “Integrity is all a magazine has. As soon as you do anything that breaks that trust, you’re basically screwed because readers are not stupid.”

Magazines Canada, the professional magazine industry association, is concerned enough with examples such as the Maclean’s and Chatelaine violations that it has organized the Ad-Edit Task Force to review the guidelines and suggest improvements and possible enforcement mechanisms to CSME. “We want the task force to find some way to encourage compliance,” says Patrick Walsh, chair of the task force and editor of Outdoor Canada, “which is a nice way to say give it some teeth.”

Still, it will be hard to turn back an onslaught that is international in scope, particularly when one of North America’s most venerable journalism institutions is leading the way when it comes to blurring the line between advertising and editorial. Late last August, The New Yorker published an entire issue sponsored solely by discount retailer Target Corp. The ads featured illustrations that resembled the magazine’s well-known artistic style. While they were emblazoned with Target’s red and white concentric circle logo, none of the ads carried the store’s name. The American Society of Magazine Editors (ASME) stipulates in its guidelines that any magazine issue sponsored by a single advertiser must print an explanatory letter from the publisher. Failure to comply with ASME guidelines can result in magazines being barred from the National Magazine Awards. Despite the fact that the New Yorker didn’t publish the required note, ASME has stated that the magazine won’t face any penalties from its organization.

Tension between advertising and editorial is a chronic condition in the Canadian magazine industry. Given their dependency on advertising revenue for survival, magazines have always made concessions. Advertiser requests for special placement in the layout – for which they’ve traditionally paid a premium rate – have long been commonplace. Certain advertisers have included provisos in contracts to ensure that their ads not be placed next to stories dealing with “issues” or featuring competitors. Some editors also give the advertising department a heads-up if a controversial story is coming, so advertisers can pull their ads from that particular issue. While she was editor of Homemakers, Dianne Rinehart says she would let the advertising department know if she was going to run a story on cancer, for example, so they could decide whether or not they wanted to solicit cigarette ads.

In recent years, tension has most often centred on advertorials – advertising insert material designed to look as much as possible like the editorial that surrounds it. Editors agree that the font, design and layout of advertorials shouldn’t resemble those of the magazine and should be clearly labelled as such. However, this isn’t always the case. Rona Maynard, former editor of Chatelaine, struggled for years to get the Dairy Bureau of Canada to put the word “Advertisement” on its advertorials. The Dairy Bureau, which made a practice of adapting its inserts to match a range of women’s magazines, eventually conceded to running a small logo on its Chatelaine inserts.

Beginning in 1997, Matinée Cigarettes placed advertiser-produced general interest articles in the now-defunct Elm Street magazine. The pieces were designed to look like the magazine’s editorial pages. The experience was “painful,” recalls then-editor Stevie Cameron. She says she received a significant number of negative responses from readers, most of whom, strangely, were not so much opposed to the advertorial content as to the fact that it was a cigarette company that sponsored it.

Advertisers have also teamed up with editorial teams to produce sponsored content. While he was editor at National Post Business magazine, since renamed Financial Post Business magazine, Tony Keller oversaw two editorial features that were sponsored: Canada’s Outstanding CEO of the Year awards, funded by Caldwell Partners International, and the Canadian Technology Fast 50 Awards, funded by Deloitte & Touche LLP. The companies conducted the research and nomination processes to determine who would receive the awards. They then turned the names over to the editorial team at the magazine, which produced the editorial package. According to Keller, the companies were not regular advertisers in the magazine, they generally didn’t receive ad pages in exchange and their logos did not appear on the feature. Conducting the research for the magazine allowed the sponsors to demonstrate their companies’ services to potential customers, that is, the readers.

Under Maynard, Chatelaine used to run an editorial package presenting the top one hundred women entrepreneurs in the country. Royal Bank of Canada agreed to sponsor the feature, but wanted its logo to appear on the article. Maynard refused. In the end, RBC ran an advertorial showcasing twelve of its successful female clients. This ran in the middle of Chatelaine’s feature.

The first major signal that this arm’s length relationship might be breaking down came in 1997 when Saturday Night printed an excerpt from Mordecai Richler’s novel, Barney’s Version. The words “Presented by Absolut Vodka,” were printed on both the contents page and the first page of the excerpt. Most tellingly, the final page played on Absolut’s signature ad. The copy was printed around the shape of the company’s vodka bottle and “Absolut Mordecai,” a twist on its slogan, ran beneath it.

While sponsored editorials that go this far remain relatively rare, they represent an advertiser’s dream come true. That’s because examples like Absolut Mordecai – as well as the more recent inserts in Maclean’s and Chatelaine – allow advertisers to insert themselves into the trusting relationship that exists between reader and magazine. “Hand in hand with that trust is the ability of the reader to relax about it,” says Scott, “and to say this magazine would never do something that would take advantage of my trust.” In other words, once advertisers have penetrated the relationship, readers will be more open to their messages.

Increasingly, on television news or on radio, with the exception of public stations, most programs are “brought to you by” or “sponsored by.” It seems as though everyone who depends on advertising to survive, in both journalistic media and arts industries, is selling out. “There is a new interest in more branded content,” says Mary Maddever, executive editor of Media in Canada and Strategy, both marketing magazines. Within marketing and advertising circles, she says, there is more of an effort to communicate the advertiser’s message to readers using the medium of content.

In the end, if readers do get more bang for their buck, as many on the marketing side claim, it’s difficult to weigh whether or not they really care who pays for the content. While the trend of sponsorship troubles editors, those on the business end of the magazine industry see it differently. For publisher Jacqueline Howe, advertising-driven content means added value for the reader. “It’s over and above what the reader would get in the normal editorial project,” she says. And, in categories such as fashion and beauty magazines, readers already look at the ads with interest, according to Maddever. She says “hybrid content” has the advantage of providing even more information to the reader. Tailored ad content also helps to build the brands of both the advertiser and the magazine, argues Rogers publisher Rosser. She says it lets readers know that the advertiser – and, by extension, the magazine – understands them. The magazine, even in the ads it features, provides readers with the information they want and need: “It lets the advertiser leverage the relationship the brand…” – the brand being the magazine – “…has with the reader in a way that’s meaningful for the reader.”

And what about the readers? The evidence so far suggests they don’t realize how much editorial and advertising are intertwined. Starcom USA, an agency that helps advertisers reach consumers, released a study last October finding that sixty-five per cent of readers believe advertisers pay for editorial mentions. And when Pittaway participated in an online forum with readers in the summer before she left, she said that many of the questions she fielded were related to advertising. The readers of Châtelaine have asked Ravary point-blank if advertisers pay for editorial mentions. Her response: “It never has been in forty-five years and it won’t be under my watch!” Yet at Outdoor Canada, Walsh receives letters from readers referring to articles as ads and vice versa. “Readers don’t always get it,” he says of the difference between editorial and advertising. “More than most editors would like to believe, readers think we’re selling editorial mentions on a regular basis.”

Faced with this confusion, many in the industry wonder what to do. Walsh says even though communicating with readers is priority number one, the industry previously has done a poor job of letting advertisers know about the organization’s standards of editorial integrity. In the U.S., ASME released a revised set of guidelines in October 2005, which addressed some of the concerns regarding the advertising-editorial relationship. The Magazines Canada task force continues to evaluate the CSME guidelines and compliance measures and plans to look at the need to educate the advertising community as well as the readers about editorial integrity.

Advertisers aren’t waiting for the results. They’re more concerned with pushing harder to get their messages out. And that continuing pressure poses a true conundrum for publishers: do they accept the additional ad revenues now even if the corrosion of the editorial product suggests that readers will be alienated in the long run? Many in the industry say blurring the line between advertising and editorial puts the relationship of trust in danger. The length to which a magazine is willing to risk this trust depends on the type of relationship it wants to cultivate. As Pittaway says, “What it comes down to is if you want to have a marriage forever with your reader or if you’re just dating.”

Just minutes after the latest issue arrives in cardboard boxes, a boisterous Weekly Scoop office falls to a dead silence. It’s just been delivered from its Quebecor-owned printer in Aurora, and the editors and staff writers eagerly devour the result of their week’s work. At the recently established downtown Toronto headquarters on Peter Street, this is typical Wednesday behaviour. Associate copy editor Ryan Porter sits at his computer and reads with his feet kicked up onto an adjacent desk, perusing his handiwork. Nearby, four women – all Scoop editors and writers – gather in an impromptu circle to sit and flip through the magazine before it hits newsstands the following Monday. One writer says, “This is a good issue,” to no one in particular. Another quips, “I love Johnny Depp,” pausing at a two-page spread of the actor.

Because Weekly Scoop is sold exclusively at checkout, where impulse buying is most likely to happen, the cover of each issue is all-important. Former Weekly Scoop publisher Kathryn Swan has high hopes for the issue that has just arrived because it features a large cover photo of Ashlee Simpson. The shot captures the marginally talented American pop star – once caught lip-synching live but now forgiven by fans – mid-cackle. She visited Toronto recently to co-host MuchMusic’s “MuchOnDemand” program to promote her sophomore CD, I Am Me. Inside the magazine, the Scoop has an exclusive interview with the 21-year-old singer, as well as stills from a fiasco that aired on eTalk Daily, CTV’s entertainment vehicle that show an intoxicated Simpson climbing onto a McDonald’s counter. She refuses to be photographed with a fan, insisting in a drunken drawl: “No, I will not take a picture with you. You wouldn’t kiss my foot, so fuck you!”

When it comes to magazines, the top five titles in the United States every week are routinely in the celebrity category: People, Us Weekly, Star, National Enquirer and In Touch rotate in and out of the top spot. The Enquirer alone has a circulation of around three million copies a week, making it the best-selling tabloid in the U.S. Celebrity journalism is now picking up speed in Canada. There are numerous broadcast outlets, including a Canadian version of Entertainment Tonight that launched last September and eTalk Daily, hosted by former prime minister Brian Mulroney’s son, Ben, as well as numerous exclamatory outlets including Star!Daily, Inside Entertainment and Sun TV’s Inside Jam! The print world is catching on to the fact that celebrity news generates a lot of revenue, while still being cheap to produce. In addition to the launch of Weekly Scoop, Rogers Publishing has plans to start a Canadian edition of British celebrity weekly HELLO! this August.

While the Scoop’s content falls under the heading of soft journalism, the potential for profit is anything but. Celebrity journalism is the fastest growing magazine category in North America. That’s worrisome, because the media’s growing reliance on – and the public’s growing preference for – celebrity rather than hard news is precisely the kind of situation Knowlton Nash alerted readers to in his book Trivia Pursuit: How Showbiz Values Are Corrupting the News. In 1998, the former anchor of CBC’s The National wrote of journalism, “It’s a business in trouble because of its current obsession with immediacy, with the pursuit of trivia, with entertainment and gossip.”

Eight years after writing Trivia Pursuit, the former news head must be watching and reading helplessly as celebrity stories now regularly appear front and centre on television and in print. While it might be another trend that fades away, the thirst for celebrity news is currently unquenchable. But media outlets are happy to try to slake it, increasing profit margins by producing inexpensive content that ignores hard news.

In 2005, Ipsos Reid conducted a poll that seemed to echo Nash’s fears. The company found that forty-two per cent of Canadians think entertainment is over-reported in the news, leaving little room for reportage of more substantive issues. But then, news consumers seem to be telling publishers and broadcast executives there is no such thing as too much gossip. Celebrities have become the idolized heroes of a generation of readers infatuated with the rich and famous and their scandals. Entertainment coverage gives credence to the gossip and rumours, while downplaying the traditional dangers of this kind of reporting – unsubstantiated sources, stories of little importance, and the reduced distance between journalists and celebrities. Access, in some cases by any means necessary, is what really counts in the world of celebrity coverage.

The abundance of American magazines flooding the Canadian market is what inspired the concept for Weekly Scoop over a year ago. The magazine was born on July 13, 2004 when Judy Sims, director of new ventures and innovations for Toronto Star Newspapers, Ltd., “identified a void in the marketplace.” She came up with the model and presented Weekly Scoop to Torstar executives the next day. After exactly a year of work with focus groups made up of women aged 18 to 49, the distribution and sales plans were refined to reflect this target audience. Former Scoop publisher Swan confirms the magazine was launched as part of a strategy to expand Torstar Corp.’s media holdings.

Weekly Scoop hit newsstands on October 3, 2005. Torstar, which also publishes countless Harlequin romance novels, bragged about mounting the largest Canadian newsstand launch ever. The company did not do things halfway. It secured 14,000 newsstand pockets at checkout counters in major Canadian retailers such as Loblaws, Wal-Mart and Shoppers Drug Mart and debuted its new product at a promotional price of $1.99. It spent more than $1 million in promotional advertising, going up against American giants of tabloid journalism like Us Weekly and Star magazine. After seven issues, Weekly Scoop – Canada’s first and only English-language celebrity magazine – started to sell out at some newsstands. It’s too early to determine concrete sales figures but circulation manager Mike Marcos reports that of 110,000 issues that go to print each week, roughly 25,000 are sold.

The widespread obsession with celebrity culture may seem relatively new, but Weekly Scoop editor-in-chief Vivian Vassos argues that the celebrity journalism phenomenon has been with us for decades. She says it began with the public’s early mania over film stars like Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The paparazzi thrived on their on-again, off-again romance. Two dozen of them once burst into a restaurant, trampling waiters in the skirmish to get shots of Taylor secretly dining with shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis. She hid under the table while Onassis splashed champagne on the photographers. Burton inevitably learned of his wife’s deception; their second marriage ended a year later.

While Taylor and Burton are obvious touchstones, celebrity infatuation has always been with us. Progenitors of today’s celebrity- centric tabloids can be traced as far back as the seventeenth century with the birth of what were then called “ballads” and “newsbooks.” The ballads recounted sensational stories about murders, omens and unusual births in verse, while the newspaper covered stories with pithy, colloquial prose. This medium evolved into the “penny press,” which emerged in 1833 with the Sun in New York. For one cent, the working class public could buy a smaller, cheaper version of the newspaper, offering human-interest stories written in plain but vivid language. While the six-cent subscription newspapers routinely relied on documents and court records in stories, the penny papers pioneered reporting methods journalists employ today – the interviewing, observation and description required for appealing, human-interest narratives – albeit put to the service of sensational stories.

After Joseph Pulitzer bought the New York World in 1883 and William Randolph Hearst acquired the New York Journal thirteen years later, this kind of “yellow journalism” became the weapon each paper used to try and conquer the other in an all-out circulation war. The competition became so fierce that in 1924, Hearst launched the American Daily Mirror with this mandate: “Ninety per cent entertainment, ten per cent information – and the information without boring you.” When actor Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, the tabloids were heavily criticized for overlooking the death of Harvard educator Charles W. Eliot, who had died just two days earlier. But if Valentino was less important than Eliot, he was certainly more glamorous to the mostly working-class tabloid readership, attracting more than 100,000 mourners to his funeral.

By the 1950s, gossip columns and tabloids were thriving. When Taylor broke up singer Eddie Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds, the public could not get enough of the starlet’s homewrecking. The gossip not only increased Taylor’s celebrity, it made many stars realize what a little scandalous publicity can do to propel a career. Today, the powerful torque of Internet sites devoted to celebrity gossip has pushed this obsession into overdrive.

Jonathan Burgess, associate professor with the department of classics at the University of Toronto, speculates that celebrity journalism increasingly replaces more traditional stories. “Perhaps since we have lost myths, traditional tales, shared cultural narratives going back generations, you could say that celebrities fill a gap.” Burgess argues that the media’s constant coverage of the rich and famous has elevated these figures to the near-mythical status in the public eye. “Celebrities are often trendy and ephemeral but due to mass media they are known everywhere. To that extent they are shared cultural material, like myth.”

One morning in early December, ET Canada assistant director Gillian Parker sits in a dim control room in one of the editing suites. She’s watching one of twenty-eight monitors built into the adjacent wall. Directly above is a brightly lit clock. It’s nearing 11 A.M. when host Cheryl Hickey, after a wardrobe check, is ready for her stand-up on what looks like a glowing, elevated runway surrounded by bright poinsettias. In a sparkly teal top and black gaucho pants, she poses carefully with her hands folded in front of her, bobby pins and hairspray keeping her blonde hair perfectly still. In the control room, clasping a yellow stopwatch, Parker watches Hickey on the monitor. She counts her down, “Five, four, three, two….” Hickey’s voice blasts over the control room speakers with unanticipated intensity, “Hello everybody, I’m Cheryl Hickey.” Her emphasis and intonation make her sound like Mary Hart’s twin.

Global TV’s Entertainment Tonight Canada (ET Canada for short) – a new domestic partner of the 25-year-old American program, ET- and Star!Daily have joined established entertainment shows like eTalk Daily, Inside Entertainment and Sun TV’s Inside Jam! Newcomer ET Canada has a distinct, immediate advantage: access to twenty-five years of exclusive archival footage from its American counterpart. Launched last September, ET Canada airs every evening one half-hour before its syndicated big sister. Each show’s introduction is peppered with teasers from American hosts Hart or Mark Steines. The idea is to pull Canadian viewers into watching back-to-back episodes. The half-hour Canadian version features the bubbly Hickey hosting against the signature ET backdrop and theme song.

Hickey had recently been a guest on CBC radio’s Sounds Like Canada, defending ET’s journalistic content. She said to host Shelagh Rogers, “I think what we do is journalism. We tell stories just like journalists do, but in a different way.” When the allure of celebrity culture came up, Hickey mentioned the escapism generally tied to entertainment journalism. “We live in a stressful climate and people just want to sit back and relax.”

In between takes, as Bob Marley’s “Jamming” wafts out of the speakers, Hickey announces she was one of the answers in the Star crossword that appeared in the previous Saturday’s edition. Her stylist mumbles to herself, “It must be some kind of milestone,” about Hickey’s newfound minor celebrity status.

After sneaking into the control room to lick organic peanut butter from a plastic knife, Hickey prepares for the next reading. She’s struggling to pronounce Stavros Niarchos, Paris Hilton’s boyfriend. She tries saying his last name with an accent, then drops it altogether and settles for Stavros. The segment is about Mary Kate Olsen’s interview with W magazine, after the famous twin’s much-publicized bout with anorexia and recent break-up with Niarchos. Hickey finishes in a falsetto, “But she still misses her ex – Stavros.” As her stylist reapplies her blush off-camera, Hickey mockingly adds, “Even though he cheated on her and went to Paris [Hilton].” She jokes in a syrupy voice, “She has a Buddha doll now.” Off-camera, celebrity journalists often resort to sarcasm, if only as a defence mechanism against the inane behaviour of their subjects.

In the control room, five directors piece the show together, rewinding a screeching tape of reporter Roz Weston’s interview with Bryan Adams. Weston is standing to Adams’s right in a black shirt, with his arms folded. “We’re hanging in Quebec City with one of the coolest guys in rock ‘n’ roll – Bryan Adams!” Adams interrupts in his soft-spoken voice, “Thank you,” before Weston continues, “Kicking off his tour tonight.”

They both continue to smile at the camera before being signalled that it’s stopped rolling. Adams elbows Weston in the ribs and laughs: “Kicking off his big Canadian tour. C’mon, give ’em some action, man – it’s entertainment!” Weston begins to tape a second time, careful to emphasize the word Canadian. Adams throws him a high-five and says, “Dude that was perfect, you just need some encouragement.” As Weston begins to tape another take Adams jokingly warns, “One last chance – burn this off.” Weston continues to stare intently at the camera without looking at Adams, saying, “I’ll burn it off,” through a clenched grin. In the control room, a few directors begin to chuckle and snort.

Several hours later, having returned from Quebec City, Weston walks into the small control room. Zusko gives him a friendly handshake and asks, “Was Bryan Adams pissing you off a little bit?” Weston responds with a nod, “Yeah, a little bit,” before they joke back and forth about the superstar being “a douche” for the condescending treatment. Weston was irritated but managed to shake Adams’s hand and say, “Thanks, that was fun” after filming his last stand-up with the singer. One of the unwritten clauses in the celebrity reporter’s job description is grinning and bearing the celebrity – however annoying – in return for access and cooperation.

Weston’s lip curls slightly as he realizes I’m a reporter and I’ve overheard the kvetching. After we shake hands, graphics designer Allen Savoie says, “He’s bigger than Ben Mulroney!” poking fun at eTalk’s rival host. Zusko scolds, “Shhh… you’re gonna get us in trouble.” Savoie backtracks a little, adding, “I meant physically bigger.”

The rivalry between the two shows is no secret. The next morning, at eTalk Daily’s Toronto offices, I’m wrapping up an interview with executive producer Jordan Schwartz. He calls after me as I walk out of his office, coat in hand. He’s just received a message on his BlackBerry. Every morning, Canadian content times are tallied and sent to Schwartz. Each night, CTV monitors eTalk and ET Canada at 7 P.M. EST and, using a stopwatch, compares the number of minutes allocated to Canadian stories by each show. As he scrolls down the BlackBerry’s screen, Schwartz says, “If we’re all supposed to be doing Canadian and putting Canadian stars first and others aren’t – it’s important to know that others aren’t.” eTalk’s December 7 show, according to this tally, aired fifteen minutes and thirty-three seconds of Canadian content during the twenty-one minute broadcast (not including commercials), while ET Canada docked only 4:35 CanCon. Although eTalk wins in the Broadcast Measurement Bureau (BBM) ratings with more viewers overall, ET Canada’s senior executive producer Zev Shalev argues that, while technically true, ET wins viewers where it counts ? he claims they pull in the big city audiences across the country.

ET Canada offers celebrity content with a Canadian twist, but then Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) content requirements make it impossible for the program not to include homegrown subject matter. In March 1995, the CRTC announced in a news release that it was introducing a flexible policy with “an emphasis on promoting Canadian entertainment programming.” It introduced the policy before renewing licences for private, English-language stations in British Columbia, Ontario and Quebec. At the time, the CRTC found that Canadian entertainment programming (including drama, music and variety) was significantly under-represented. “As an example, only twenty-five per cent of all English-language entertainment programming scheduled in the evening is Canadian,” former CRTC chairman Keith Spicer noted at the time. The CRTC issued an ultimatum. “Licensees of most private English-language television stations earning over $10 million in annual advertising revenues and network payments may now choose between two options: continue with a condition of licence on Canadian programming expenditures; or adhere to a condition of licence requiring the licensee to broadcast a specific number of hours per week of Canadian entertainment programming between 6:00 P.M. and midnight.”

Since the policy, entertainment programming in Canada has escalated sharply – and not necessarily for the good. In a recent broadcast of ET Canada, this distinct content comprised an “exclusive” visit to TV personality Lynda Reeves’s home. While ET reporter Weston admired the flat-screen TV, it became clear the “exclusive” was actually a plug for her interior design series, the Global-aired House & Home. Many of the so-called exclusives that run on both eTalk and ET Canada are little more than self-promotion for their respective networks. In fact, Schwartz, who is also vice-president of daytime programming for CTV, is proud of this and suggests the idea of plugging network programs originated at eTalk.

There is the problem of corporate self-promotion being passed off as Canadian content and then there is Canadian over-kill. The Scoop’s entertainment and celebrity editor Nelson Branco points to the many stars within Quebec as evidence that hero worship can be incubated here too. “We’re trying to create a Canadian star system,” he says, pausing to add emphasis, “…slowly.” Comparing celebrity journalism to soap operas, he says the war in Iraq has given entertainment journalism a major boost. “We look to entertainment to escape the depressing hard news,” he says, a realization that has propelled the lucrative celebrity journalism business in Canada.

The Scoop editors say its office receives a steady parade of positive letters from readers who can’t get enough coverage of Canadian content. One wrote, typically, “Finally, a Canadian gossip magazine to call our own.” The editors maintain the position that their weekly tattle sheet is a legitimate magazine that covers beauty and fashion trends as well as celebrity gossip. And, they say, despite the preponderance of American television, pop and film stars crowding the Scoop’s pages, they’re creating and growing an English Canadian star system. Once-neglected Canadian stars now understand that by developing long-term relationships with entertainment journalists, they can boost their careers and magazine sales, much like their American counterparts.

The Scoop’s launch issue set the overall tone. It identified itself with a banner reading “Canada’s hottest international celebrity magazine,” although it’s Canada’s only English-language celebrity magazine. The issue doesn’t promote Canadian stars. Instead, capitalizing on what has come to be known as the “Brangelina” story, it features American stars on location in a Canadian province. On the cover, Angelina Jolie is framed with the headline: “Brad and Angelina: Wedding Bells in Alberta?” Vassos points out that it’s Scoop’s mandate to take a Canadian approach to international celebrity and entertainment. “Canadians have a unique sense of humour,” she says. “They don’t take celebrity culture too seriously.”

The day after Ashlee Simpson’s profane outburst at McDonald’s, Scoop assistant features editor Michelle Bilodeau interviewed the pop star in her hotel room. “Now that I know she was drinking the night before,” Bilodeau says of the encounter, “I wasn’t surprised.” Still, the reporter worries that Simpson’s representatives at Universal Music Canada might be unhappy. “I still have a feeling that the label will call me and ask me what’s up,” she says. Scoop packaged the interview segment with exclusive footage of the spicy McDonald’s incident, courtesy of eTalk. The magazine and the show share information and stories, including a column. A fan had followed Simpson into McDonald’s with a camcorder and then sold the tape to eTalk. “We had to report it,” says Bilodeau. “We had to play it up to get readers interested.”

A publicist from Universal had been present for Bilodeau’s entire twenty-minute interview in Simpson’s room at the Four Seasons Hotel in Toronto, but they didn’t discuss the incident because the amateur tape that caught Simpson inebriated and swearing hadn’t yet been leaked. Bilodeau needn’t have worried – Simpson’s handlers didn’t say boo after the story ran – but her experience in the entertainment industry has made her keenly aware of the quid pro quo relationship between journalists and celebrities. With Simpson, she set a warm, soft tone for the interview by praising the singer for achieving back-to-back number-one singles. From that moment on, apart from not wanting to talk about her sister, singer/actor Jessica, Simpson was fairly candid.

Senior producer Darren Soloman believeseTalk received the now-infamous tape because of its reputation for fairness and reliable sources. When I characterize the freelance work as the “drunken Ashlee Simpson tape,” Soloman gets defensive. “We didn’t say she was drunk,” he retorts. “It doesn’t matter if you say it,” I reply, “she’s clearly intoxicated on tape.” “But it does matter,” Soloman answers back. Soloman seems worried that eTalk will be seen as too salacious and says Simpson was treated with respect. When I mention that they aired the tape despite the possibility of a backlash from the singer’s record company, Soloman changes his tune. He leans back in his swivel chair, seizing the opportunity to champion eTalk for not pulling punches. Nodding seriously, he says, “Right, we report what we know is true.” eTalk publicist Emily Young Lee, who has been sitting in on our interview, realizes Soloman has perhaps betrayed a little too much emotion, and tries to do a bit of damage control. She describes the story as “strong journalism,” forming a fist with her right hand to hammer her point home into her outstretched palm.

Back at Scoop ‘s weekly post-mortem session, an hour of reading the Simpson issue has passed before Branco announces the good news: Us Weekly will also be featuring Simpson on its cover next week. He should recognize good news when he sees it – the one-time fab magazine writer turned down a senior editing position at In Touch magazine in New York, opting instead to periodically write for them so he could stay in Toronto to join the Scoop team. For him, matching the cover story of a major American celebrity magazine is proof positive that the Scoop’s editorial instincts are spot-on. The fledgling weekly is officially fit to compete against the American monoliths.

As for the prevailing allure of American megastars, editor-in-chief Vassos says celebrity culture reveals a lot about our own lives. The Scoop team can ponder these issues amidst the gallery of large photos of celebrities – ones that have appeared in the magazine – that adorn the office walls. There is the “wall of fame (or shame),” featuring Lindsay Lohan looking gaunt, Russell Crowe being led away in handcuffs, and Cameron Diaz vainly trying to hide her bare, mascara- less face from paparazzi. Tacked to Vassos’s own office wall is a photograph of Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt strolling along a beach – their romance being the hottest celebrity story of the year. Attached to it is a yellow Post-it note that reads, “True Love!” punctuated by a small heart drawn with a black Sharpie pen.

Which side you choose in the Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt split, Vassos suggests, says an awful lot about what kind of person you are. She asks, “Why are we on Team Angelina?” Or, alternately, “Why are we on Team Jennifer?” Exactly what it says about the reader may vary, but what it says about journalism is clear-cut. When our reality is framed as one simple binary question – “Are you an Angelina sympathizer or are you a Jennifer sympathizer?” – there is no room for the news.

Sharon Burnside tilts her head upward and squints, as if the story she is about to tell is written not in her own memory but on her office ceiling. It happened in February 2005, a few weeks before she was set to start her new job as public editor of The Toronto Star. At a conference in Vancouver, Burnside found herself lunching beside Renaud Gilbert, ombudsman for CBC French-language services. Knowing Gilbert was a veteran in the role and an established voice of accountability, she decided to ask him for advice. According to Burnside, Gilbert gazed out the window for several seconds before uttering a phrase straight out of The X-Files: “Trust no one.”
Especially not, Gilbert might have added, fellow journalists. Certainly, most Canadians have their doubts. Leger Marketing studies in both 2005 and 2006 indicated that only forty-nine per cent of Canadians believe journalists are trustworthy. The 2004 Report Card on Canadian News Media, conducted by the Canadian Media Research Consortium (CMRC), found that almost one in three Canadians felt the news they were getting was often inaccurate. And fifty-four per cent of those surveyed believed news outlets regularly tried to cover up mistakes.

The recent spate of high-profile journalistic lies and misdemeanours presumably contributes to this cynical view. The Boston Globe severed ties with Halifax-based freelancer Barbara Stewart after she wrote a story in April 2005 about a Canadian seal hunt that had not yet taken place. In the same month, the Detroit Free Press suspended sports columnist Mitch Albom after he filed a story describing two former players’ attendance at an NCAA basketball game that had yet to be played at the time of his writing, and to which the two stars didn’t show up. (Albom apologized and was later reinstated.) More egregious was the scandal involving USA Today’s Jack Kelley, who, when a 1999 story about ethnic cleansing in a Kosovar village could not be verified, created a witness to corroborate his reports. An investigation into Kelley’s work found a pattern of deception dating back to 1991. Throw in the infamous Jayson Blair scandal of 2003 at The New York Times, and it’s little wonder that a survey released by the Pew Research Center last June showed that only fifty-four per cent of Americans found daily newspapers to be believable. That’s down from eighty-four per cent in 1985.

Canadian journalists don’t have an unblemished track record. The National Post hired sports columnist Scott Taylor after he resigned from The Winnipeg Free Press amid allegations, with which he disagreed, he plagiarized a USA Today article. The paper hired him despite the fact that it had already axed columnist Elizabeth Nickson for failing to attribute quotes and medical reporter Brad Evenson for fabricating them. Prithi Yelaja still writes for the Star, even though then-ombudsman Don Sellar reported that nearly a third of an April 2004 story she filed about a U.S. army deserter was rooted in a Village Voice article.

It’s worth pondering how much those in charge of Canadian news media care about credibility. Thirty-six per cent of respondents to the CMRC survey said news organizations ignored public complaints – which, at least, is lower than the fifty-eight per cent of Americans who said U.S. media turn a blind eye to public protests. But papers in both countries generally have taken steps to minimize mistakes and own up to them when they happen. Some have appointed reader advocates, implemented fact-checking regimes or even enlisted technology to target errant reporters and force them to change their ways. But no matter how hard editors and reporters work to keep their reputations intact, their efforts will be in vain unless readers buy in. The Hamilton Spectator’s managing editor Roger Gillespie chuckles as he recalls an industry meeting he attended in November 2004. At an Associated Press Managing Editors conference, several “embedded readers” were placed in the room. “One of the readers,” says Gillespie, “was a police officer who stood up and said, ‘If I made as many mistakes as you guys do every day, I’d be out of a job.'”

By 2003, reporter Jayson Blair of the Times was posted to the high profile beat of reporting on the war in Iraq from the perspective of military families on the home front. He was given the assignment in spite of the fact that, internally, he had earned a reputation as one of the paper’s most error-prone metro reporters. His faulty work had yielded almost fifty published corrections over four years, and now Blair found himself in the national spotlight. Under the glare, he fell from grace. The paper’s subsequent investigation showed plagiarism or fabrications in a staggering thirty-six separate stories over seven months. Blair lost his job, and the Times found one – rebuilding its reputation.

Among new executive editor Bill Keller’s first big changes was the appointment of Daniel Okrent as the first public editor in the Times’s 152-year history. Assistant managing editor Allan Siegal told PBS Online NewsHour: “The New York Times had a firmly entrenched, almost bitter opposition to the appointment of an ombudsman, and we turned around on that.” Okrent’s eighteen-month contract would see him writing twice monthly columns that criticized the Times on such matters as its delayed apology for Judith Miller’s erroneous reporting about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, its reliance on anonymous sources and its use of “rowback” – articles that attempt to correct previous stories without explicitly acknowledging that errors were made. Okrent’s appointment highlighted a growing trend in the past decade, which has seen more U.S. dailies, like the Los Angeles Times, adding editorial representatives to deal with credibility concerns.

Gina Lubrano, executive secretary of the international Organization of News Ombudsmen (ONO), says the number of American news outlets with such representatives has increased from roughly thirty to forty since she joined the ONO in 1992. Canada, on the other hand, is trending in the other direction. In 1989, there were six ombudsmen at Canadian newspapers, whereas now Burnside is currently the only Canadian newspaper ombudsman who is a member of the ONO (although the Toronto Sun has a reader representative). In broadcast news, CTV and Global leave corrections in the hands of their news directors. Only CBC – with Gilbert and his English-language counterpart, Vince Carlin – employs ombudsmen.

“We had one up until about fifteen years ago,” says Raymond Brassard, managing editor of The Gazette in Montreal. “There were staffing cuts, and that was one of the positions to go.” Currently, department editors address all corrections, and Brassard insists that department heads talk with reporters who have made the mistakes. He also requires that these reporters submit a written explanation of why the error occurred to both him and the department head. “It’s easier to ignore things by sending them off to the ombudsman,” he says. “This way, more people are involved.” Editorial executives across the country echo this view. The ombudsman’s role ran “out of gas,” says Allan Mayer, editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal. “We worry about credibility every day,” says Winnipeg Free Press editor Bob Cox, “but we’re not going to appoint one person to fix it. It has to be a part of the newspaper’s culture.”

Still, the ombudsman’s role goes beyond fielding complaints and correcting errors. “We’re not saviours by any means,” says Burnside’s predecessor at the Star, Don Sellar. “But we can create a dialogue within the paper about ethical issues.” Since Burnside took over the job, she has, like Byron Calame, Okrent’s less entertaining successor at the Times, written columns exploring the use of controversial photographs, fairness in reporting and the intricacies of her own job. Last Boxing Day, Burnside used her column space for a feature entitled “You Be the Editor,” outlining ten of the Star’s ethical dilemmas from 2005 and asking readers how they would have responded. More than 1,200 people took Burnside up on her offer.

Simply having an ombudsman, however, doesn’t necessarily mean that a newspaper is trustworthy. As Star reporter San Grewal points out, ombudsmen are limited in terms of their effect on a publication’s overall credibility. “The whole idea is to make sure things never get into the paper that are inaccurate,” he says. “What an ombud is doing is addressing things after the fact.” Some journalists also have doubts about the loyalties of ombudsmen, pointing out that those who have a prior history with a publication may water down their criticism. Dan Turner, whose October 2005 report on behalf of the Public Policy Forum examined the current state of Canadian journalism, questions whether ombudsmen are fully free to take the gloves off. “Newspapers have tended to appoint people from managerial positions who don’t have much juice left,” he says, adding that he sees little point in having an ombudsman “if you’re not going to be fierce with it.”

Indeed, if readers are looking for public editor Burnside to demonstrate critical ferocity, they’ll be disappointed. When freelancer Carol Watts plagiarized a large portion of an article appearing in Starship, the paper’s children’s page, last September, Burnside wrote a column acknowledging that the plagiarism had taken place and that it was unacceptable. But she gave Watts a chance to apologize. “I’m just asking myself, ‘What were you thinking?'” Watts was quoted as saying. “It’s heartbreaking after sixteen years.” The column makes no mention of disciplinary action against Watts, leaving the impression that a broken heart trumps broken rules. Alison Downie, readership editor at the Sun, has, like Burnside, brought a diplomatic sensibility to her job since editor-in-chief Jim Jennings created the position in June 2005. Jennings says newspapers have lost touch with readers and a representative like Downie can help to rebuild the relationship. “One of the problems is that when you call a newspaper, it’s hard to get an editor on the line,” says Downie. “This way, there’s one person who can deal with that.”

Downie and Jennings both shy away from describing her role as the equivalent of an ombudsman’s. They point to the breadth of her responsibilities, which include fielding reader complaints about circulation and even the paper’s crossword puzzle. Her columns range from debates about the paper’s political coverage to a “dos and don’ts” lesson on how readers can improve the chances of seeing their letters published. She does have the odd bulldog moment. In a January 29 column addressed the Sun’s election-day package under the front page headline “218 Reasons Not to Vote Liberal,” Downie wrote: “I believe the feature should have been more clearly identified as an opinion piece because it was running up front as part of the election news package. It really belonged in the Comment section. A month ago.” Downie has even shown a willingness to get her hands dirty, having once investigated a reader’s accusation that the Sun’s photo editors were using Photoshop software to place women’s private parts in Sunshine Girls’ armpits. “I had to take it seriously because the guy was serious,” she says. While she’s been given complete freedom to critique her own paper, Downie’s previous role as city editor means that her instincts often conflict. “My gut reaction,” she says, “is to defend the newsroom.”

The near-extinction of ombudsmen leaves some papers looking for fresh ways to shore up reader trust. At the Spectator, one method is to use technology to strong-arm reporters into greater accountability. In 2003, managing editor Gillespie formed a newsroom committee to examine the paper’s approach to accuracy. The group found that 985 corrections had been printed over the previous five years, but came up with no explanations for how the mistakes had happened, or might have been prevented. Today, any reporter there who makes three errors in a thirty-day period cannot file a story without attesting that all facts have been checked. Senior reporter Bill Dunphy, who was directly affected by the new system after misspelling some names, remains a strong supporter of the policy. Contrary to the fears of some colleagues, he says, the form has not been used by management to punish its employees – although he wouldn’t have a problem with that. “Accuracy should be part of a reporter’s evaluation,” Dunphy says. Gillespie says published corrections have fallen twenty-five per cent since the system was introduced almost two years ago.

Several U.S. papers have taken up an old standby for policing accuracy: fact-checking. At a few papers, such as the Detroit Free Press and The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, the facts in a random sampling of stories are checked by editors after publication. The Sun follows the Star-Telegram’s approach: phoning or sending questionnaires to sources after publication, asking them if their quotes and the story as a whole are accurate. Jennings hopes the system will be fully operational this spring, with three stories a week being randomly checked. He also says that a phone call following a spring 2005 series on animal abuse produced a whole new angle of investigation. “A guy brought in briefcases full of court documents that indicate what official sources told us was incomplete,” he says. “This person came to us because he knew someone else that we had contacted for the story.” To Jennings, this was enough validation for his new practice. “People know that you care about getting the whole story and getting it right.”

As for Canada’s two national papers, the situation is status quo. Jonathan Kay, managing editor of comment at the Post, writes in an email that his paper’s Letters to the Editor page is sufficient to ensure a transparent dialogue with readers. The Globe and Mail’s deputy editor, Sylvia Stead, says the paper is currently reviewing its corrections policy and that a recent development is the placement of each correction in the section in which the original story ran rather than collecting them on A2. Credibility, she adds, depends more on day-to-day performance than special mechanisms. “Our incidence of plagiarism hasn’t been high,” says managing editor of news Colin MacKenzie, “and positions like the public editor at the Times tend to come about in times of crisis. We’ve examined this issue and it left us feeling pretty good about where we stand, post-Jayson Blair.”

The Vancouver Sun managing editor Kirk LaPointe recalls an experiment from his days as editor of the Spectator near the turn of the millennium. The paper’s editors tried to count the number of decisions they needed to make each day. “We lost track at half a million,” he says. Journalism is an inexact science, errors are the price of its practice, and, LaPointe says, things are no worse today than they’ve ever been. It’s not the number of journalistic gaffes that are killing credibility, he says, but rather the increased scrutiny being heaped on news media. “Mistakes are magnified,” he says.

Journalists make a living by putting society under the magnifying glass, and now it’s our turn to feel the heat and glare of scrutiny. How newspapers react to this inspection may help determine the future of a profession that uses trustworthiness as its primary currency. Efforts to win back reader confidence need to be guided by humility. “The public is smart enough to know that no organization is infallible,” LaPointe says. “You look worse by pretending that you are.”

“He’s taking me to see the beast,” I think, as Scott Anderson leads me through an ill-lit warren of cubicles, through a door and down a bright, narrow hallway. He stops and, twisting a knob, swings another door open. The ceiling jumps eighteen metres above my head. Silent hulking machines, beset with buttons and knobs, loom over me. Steel glistens under the mercury vapour light bulbs like the fangs of a predator. In an hour, the beast will rumble and roar, shaking its cave and hurling paper through gaping slots, under and over metal clamps. In the next twenty-four hours, the presses will devour eighty tonnes of paper and over eighty kilograms of ink. Monstrous arms will load the giant paper rolls onto the presses to be yanked, stamped, sliced and folded into 155,000 copies of the Ottawa Citizen. Waiting delivery trucks, spewing exhaust, will drive the newspapers out to Citizen subscribers and 3,200 boxes and locations across the Ottawa region. Over the course of a day, the Citizen’s three in-house presses will guzzle over $2,800 worth of ink and more than $40,000 worth of newsprint – in a year, enough to circle the earth almost nine times. The costs don’t stop there: electricity lights the massive bulbs and fuels the growling machines; delivery vans burn diesel or gasoline; pressmen earn a yearly salary. The beast and its thousands of cousins worldwide don’t just consume commodities – the price of feeding the presses is devouring the newspaper industry itself. Newsprint costs have soared forty per cent in the past three years.

It gets worse. Across North America, the newspaper industry has suffered declining circulation and plummeting earnings. An article in The New Yorker last October stated that, although the population of the United States had increased by sixty-four per cent between 1960 and 2004, daily newspaper circulation had dropped by 3.7 million. One result: massive job cuts, in the U.S. at least. “This is a scary time to be a newspaper journalist,” writes one industry watcher. “Publishers are taking out their machetes.” In Canada, the cuts may lie just ahead.

The Canadian Newspaper Association’s most recent records show that circulation of daily newspapers in Canada dropped 2.3 per cent between 2004 and 2005 – with an overall drop of 8.5 per cent over the past ten years – though big-city papers do worse than that. The Winnipeg Free Press’s circulation has fallen an average of 2.4 per cent each year over the past four years, while The Gazette in Montreal has dropped 3.9 per cent, and The Vancouver Sun 1.8. “Every editor in the country is thinking about it,” says Bob Cox, editor of the Free Press. He cites threats like the Internet, less time to read newspapers, diminishing reader habits and an aging readership. Cox recently asked an auditorium full of students at the University of Manitoba what their first source of news is. “Two-thirds of the room,” he recalls, “put up their hands when I said ‘Internet?'”

In his 2004 book, The Vanishing Newspaper, veteran American journalist Philip Meyer uses circulation trend lines to look forty years into the future. “Extending that line with a straightedge,” Meyer writes, “shows us running out of readers late in the first quarter of 2043.” But prophecies like these haven’t stopped the journalists at Canadian newspapers from railing against the Grim Reaper.

“People have been talking doomsday since I got in this business,” grumbles Anderson, back in his office. The editor of the Citizen has the rosiest outlook I encounter in forty interviews for this story and at least one hundred articles on the state of newspaper journalism. This is “the golden age of print,” Anderson says – journalists are putting more words on paper than ever before. “And that’s not including the web.” Newsstands are exploding with information on every subject imaginable for every readership group – even “left-handed cross-dressers who only come out on Tuesdays,” he deadpans. But that doesn’t make him complacent. “Newspapers,” he tells me, “need to renew themselves constantly.”

Indeed, I seem to have arrived at a time of renovation. When I ask for Graham Green, the Citizen’s business editor, security can’t figure out his extension number; when Green walks me to his office, it’s full of boxes. Next week, the office will belong to the Citizen’s new associate editor, formerly the online news editor. Green is squatting there until the former business editor (of over ten years) moves across the newsroom to replace the former sports editor, who’s just taken over as managing editor from the new editorial pages editor. And the former editorial pages editor – well, that’s Green. “Everything’s new around here,” he says.

“No, it’s a good thing,” says a passing editorial writer. “It’s been too old for too long.” The 160-year-old broadsheet operates out of a brown-brick cavern in a comfortable Ottawa neighbourhood, seventeen kilometres from Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s residence at 24 Sussex Drive. The Citizen isn’t a national newspaper, but it often looks like one. Rob Warner, the city editor, affectionately calls it, “a schizophrenic newspaper … in the biggest small city in the world.” When the Citizen was born in 1845, fathered by a 29-year-old Irish immigrant named William Harris and called The Packet, its mandate was clear: the four-page journal would compete with the conservative Bytown Gazette, the only newspaper in a muddy lumber town of 4,500. Today’s Citizen serves a booming region of 1.05 million people, including Canada’s fourth-largest city, and is sold across the country. Its readership is educated, affluent and older – average age 48 – and includes the capital’s political, diplomatic and bureaucratic elite.

A heavyweight in political and business reporting, and generally regarded as one of the best newspapers in the country, even the Citizen is bleeding. Circulation has dropped twelve per cent over the past five years, while Ottawa’s population has jumped eight per cent. “There was a time when they used to put the circulation numbers up on the wall in the newsroom,” says Richard Starnes, who has been a reporter and editor at the Citizen for twenty-two years. “I suspect they don’t do that anymore because it’s too depressing.”

But Anderson and his cost-conscious bosses at CanWest Global Communications Inc. aren’t yet ready to cauterize the paper’s wounds with budget cuts. “More for less,” he says, “that’s not a challenge I want to give the people in my newsroom.” On the contrary, since I first arrived at the Citizen on a rainy October morning, the newspaper’s Sunday newsprint magazine, the Citizen Weekly, has been relaunched and editors and reporters have embarked on a number of ambitious projects. And, most remarkably, in October, the Citizen posted five job openings externally, including openings for an assistant news editor, a business writer and a Sunday editor. If newspapers are dying, this one’s still kicking. Even intern Shannon Proudfoot feels a swell of momentum. “It’s clear they’re trying to rejuvenate the newsroom,” says the 26-year-old reporter. “There’s a general feeling of speeding up,” she says, “I mean, that’s the sense I get – maybe it’s just wishful thinking.”

In his opening note for Each Morning Bright, a collection of Citizen articles compiled over 160 years and released in October 2005, Anderson borrows a phrase from Neil Reynolds, his predecessor, in calling newspapers “the literature of the people.” In the years before television, citizens turned to their newspapers for local news, reports from abroad, even weather forecasts. Nearly everyone subscribed, so newspapers had a monopoly over readers – and over advertisers. As business-savvy husbands looked up yesterday’s stock prices, their wives clipped coupons. The kids combed the paper for a part-time job or a cheap used car. And later, for a house. Then they were subscribers, like their parents.

Household penetration for U.S. newspapers peaked at about 130 per cent in 1920, according to Meyer, which means 130 newspapers were sold for every hundred households. Newspapers were raking in profits of twenty to forty per cent; other businesses with a high product-turnover rate, like supermarkets, prosper with profits of one to two per cent.

Even when newspapers started to lose their monopoly to television, owners stayed wealthy because reading newspapers was a habit that many had formed early. But, for the first TV generation, the habit was less entrenched. And for the generations after, less still. In the 1980s, new technology made newspapers cheaper to print by eliminating typesetting and stripping, which compensated for reduced revenue. Population booms masked sagging penetration. It wasn’t until the early 1990s that journalists at the Citizen and other city newspapers even noticed outside competition. “Loyalty was a thing of the past, not just with newspapers,” says Drew Gragg, deputy editor of the Citizen, who has worked for the newspaper for twenty-five years. “It used to be that if you’re a Citizen subscriber, you’re a Citizen subscriber forever. Then, suddenly, readers had to be won over on a regular basis.”

Profits plunged and newspaper owners slashed newsroom resources. Bureaus were closed; page counts dropped. And the readership ebb continued. The industry languished until 1996, when press baron Conrad Black bought a controlling interest in the Southam chain. Famously criticizing the Southam newspapers of an “overwhelming avalanche of soft, left, bland, envious pap, which has poured like sludge through the centre pages,” Black swore that he would refashion the Citizen, the centre jewel in his newsprint crown, into a newspaper “befitting the capital city of a G7 country.”

At Black’s expense, the Citizen underwent a $2-million resuscitation. Ten editorial jobs were posted, an unimaginable extravagance in that era of slashing, and the daily newspaper was pumped with more business pages, opinion pages, and national and international news. The average issue fattened by six editorial pages. Black proclaimed to his employees and competition that he would “end the gradual erosion of circulation that has afflicted the entire industry since the 1970s.” In only four months, the circulation declines of the Citizen and The Gazette in Montreal, also owned by Black, didn’t just halt – they reversed.

In October 1998, Black unleashed the National Post on Canadian readers, igniting a newspaper war crackling with the spirit of yesteryear. Peter Robb, the Citizen’s deputy editorial page editor (formerly the A-section editor) describes the Post of that day as a lightning rod that zapped newspapers across the country into provocateurs that engaged debate and set agendas, instead of limply reacting to the news of the day. By the time Black retreated from the flames, he’d sparked drama and excitement in the industry – but not profits. The Post has lost money since its inception and the circulation of Black’s dailies eventually dropped again. In 2000, Black sold most of his empire to CanWest, including the Citizen and twelve other big-city dailies, and fifty per cent of the Post. In the deal, CanWest also took on Black’s debt.

Last September, the media company announced plans to spin twenty-eight per cent of its newspaper holdings, including the Citizen, into an income trust to pay down the debt. “The day that CanWest assembled its most stable properties into a trust, nurturing and investment went out the window,” commented Steve Maich, Maclean’s senior editor and national business columnist. “They are now assets to be drained of value… and quality is a luxury to be sacrificed on the altar of immediate cash flow.” The January 25 column, called “Bleeding Newspapers Dry,” also prophesied impending job cuts: “CEO Peter Viner… [invoked] the accountant’s favourite euphemism for blood on the floor. ‘We will increase our focus on cost containment,’ he told analysts.”

• • •

The afternoon story meeting at the Citizen starts forty-five minutes late. Anderson looks around the boardroom at his editors, assembled in mismatched chairs around a long narrow table. “Let’s pray for a moment,” he says solemnly. His eyes close as his editors look up from piles of papers, stop talking to one another, swivel on their chairs to face him. “Pray to the front-page gods,” Anderson finishes. His new business editor smiles broadly, a few others chuckle. One by one, the group reviews upcoming stories. Anderson pulls off his glasses to read his BlackBerry as Robb offers up a possible frontpage story. “We need something fun on the calendar,” Anderson interrupts. Robb has a reporter working on the demise of VHS tape.

“How do we shoot the death of VHS?” Anderson asks. The editors lob ideas back and forth. Rip the ribbon out and pile it in front of a camera? Chart the industry’s global value? Anderson doodles on the back of the meeting’s sked: a rectangle enclosing two circles – a crude videocassette. Beneath it, a curved line. He holds up the piece of paper: eyes, a curved mouth – a sad, frowning VHS face. Everyone laughs.

The meeting ends, and the editors return to the Citizen’s dimly lit newsroom to continue sending copy to the ravenous presses, and onward to fight the mostly losing battle for distracted readers’ attention. At the Citizen, Anderson attacked the question of relevance with the newly shuffled editors in his newsroom. “Leonard, I want you to give me voices no one else is hearing,” he told Leonard Stern, the Citizen’s new editorial pages editor. To help him engage a community of readers in debating the issues of the day, Stern has an editorial board of five and an astonishing four pages to fill on weekdays with mostly original content, including an editorials page in the paper’s City section.

Meanwhile, over at the city desk, Rob Warner has overseen no fewer than twenty multi-part series since his appointment in 2001. “Ready or Not,” an eight-part series about emergency preparedness, was reported in part from Washington and New York. “A Revolution in Dying,” an eight-part series on palliative care, encompassed twenty-seven stories from the front lines. Other special reports have probed mental illness, community building, and the stories behind the graves in Ottawa’s Beechwood Cemetery. Warner bristles when I ask him if his projects attract readers to the newspaper. Selling the paper, he says, “isn’t my job. I’m not a marketer, I’m a journalist.” The way to engage readers, he asserts, is to tell stories that affect them and are about them. “A Revolution in Dying,” called out to Warner after his own son died.

The move towards more length and depth in storytelling goes beyond Warner’s special projects. The newly relaunched Sunday newsprint magazine experiments with narrative techniques and has included lengthy pieces about Michael Ignatieff’s political intellectualism, wind technology and a personal reflection on federal daycare. And Ruth Dunley, the Citizen’s associate editor, who previously did a stint as the news editor responsible for convergence, was inspired by a PBS reality television series called Colonial House when she came up with the Citizen’s “Little House in the Village” series. For two weeks, interns Neco Cockburn and Hayley Mick donned linen sack coats or corsets, milked cows, churned butter and slept on straw-filled mattresses in a farmhouse in Upper Canada Village, a reconstructed 1860s village in Morrisburg, an hour outside of Ottawa. “After twelve days without a proper shower, I could barely stand myself,” wrote Mick. “My hair was stiff, my pits reeked.”

On the series’s website, readers could dress digital mannequins in the cotton layers of Cockburn and Mick’s traditional costumes, tour their spartan bedrooms, watch video diaries and read blog entries by the contemporary pioneers, whose only modern convenience was a laptop. Despite the kitsch, the project garnered responses. “The interns became celebrities,” says Dunley, who fielded letters and emails. Readers visited Cockburn and Mick at Upper Canada Village during tourist hours. Local television and radio shows interviewed the interns. One concerned reader wrote, “Are they warm enough at night?”

“Readers felt personally invested in Neco and Hayley,” says Dunley. “We’re identifying institutions that our readers use,” says Anderson, “and trying to form partnerships with those institutions.” Another example is the Citizen’s embrace of the Cappies, a U.S.?based awards program through which local newspapers help high school students become theatre critics by publishing their reviews of high school plays in the paper. “We had the public school board and the Catholic school board in the same room, working on the same project,” boasts Anderson. “The days when newspapers would simply sit back and report on events in their community are long gone.”

In 2001, Northwestern University’s Readership Institute released an impact study called “The Power to Grow Readership,” pinpointing eight strategies for growing readership at daily newspapers, after examining one hundred newspapers across the United States, survey results from 37,000 readers and non-readers, and a content analysis of over 47,500 stories and visuals. The research backed news that focuses on people and is intensely local. Obituaries hit the mark with readers, as did narrative storytelling. But the study’s clarion call goes beyond content to a wholesale shift in newspaper culture: hierarchical, change-resistant traditions are an obstacle to growing readership; newsrooms need to encourage risk-taking, innovation and more collaboration between sections.

No newspaper in Canada has embraced the Readership Institute’s counsel as enthusiastically as The Hamilton Spectator. In October 2003, the paper underwent a major rethink. Among the changes: the six-section newspaper collapsed to four; the business, entertainment and lifestyle sections were killed; the daily stock pages were axed from two or three pages to one. The paper launched a daily broadsheet magazine called Go, experimented with storytelling and ran month-long serials.

“One of my biggest concerns,” says Spec editor Dana Robbins, “is that we will not, as an industry, have the intestinal fortitude to reinvent ourselves at the speed we need to reinvent ourselves.” Targeting his newsroom’s culture, he tells his staff they’re in “the readership business” and urges them to take more risks. “I would much rather be embarrassed occasionally by what I see in our newspaper,” he says, “than bored.” Robbins is hesitant to use circulation and readership as indicators of success – indeed, circulation has dropped by 1.5 per cent each year over the past five years and readership is down this year.

Across Canada, newspapers are trying to cope with the state of the industry. “The biggest challenge we face is relevance,” says Lynn Haddrall, the Kitchener-Waterloo?based editor of The Record and the Guelph Mercury. “That is always an issue for a newspaper at any time, but it’s even more so now when you look at how fast the world is changing around us.”

This year, the Record added a youth editorial board, an offshoot of the paper’s first community editorial board, established in 2000. “Over the six years, we’ve probably added over a hundred different voices that didn’t have access to the paper before,” she tells me. The Record has also held public forums on issues that appear in the paper. In Winnipeg, to give readers of the Free Press better education coverage, editor Cox appointed a second dedicated education reporter. And every Wednesday is “Neighbours” day, on which the newspaper prints four pages devoted to community stories about local people. At the Edmonton Journal, editor Allan Mayer recently ran a story in the Sunday edition on the election campaign of a local politician – drawn in graphic-novel style across four full pages.

The creativity that Spec editor Robbins sees in newspapers right now makes him envious of me. “When I was twenty-two and coming into the newspaper industry,” he explains, “there was a stupor – a sleepiness.” His voice gains momentum as he describes the industry today as dynamic and evolving. “Your career will witness a renaissance,” he says. “It’s a very exciting time for you as a young journalist.”

On the flip side, the Citizen’s Anderson warns: “If we keep doing what we’re doing, we’ll die.”

My last interview at the Citizen takes place in a robin’s egg blue office that sings with colour in contrast to the paper’s mostly brown newsroom and other offices. Lynne Clark, the Citizen’s market development manager, is a statuesque woman, perched atop a pair of black stiletto heels. An hour-long conversation about radio spots and box inserts dissolves into talk about the future of the newspaper. “Eventually,” Clark says, “the hard copy of the newspaper, the presses, will be gone, thank God. The newsprint will be gone. The ink will be gone. The hard costs will be gone.”

Newspapers outside of Canada are already making format changes to reduce printing costs and improve readability. Broadsheet heavyweights like The Wall Street Journal and Britain’s The Times and The Guardian have shrunk their page sizes. The Independent, a London daily, was the first to go tabloid, and circulation shot up eighteen per cent within six months. Not a single English-language city daily in Canada has tried a format change, though the Spec converted its sports section to a tabloid during its revolution. Citizen publisher Jim Orban has been watching the format changes with interest.

In the meantime, many city newspapers in Canada are improving their websites. The Citizen’s website is run by CanWest employees out of offices in Montreal, Toronto and Hamilton as part of the Canada.com network. The network relaunched in late November 2005, transforming itself from a convoluted mess to a sleek portal where you can find national breaking news, an electronic version of the daily newspaper, blogs and Citizen extras like the “Little House in the Village” series.

Other city newspapers are now adding breaking news and blogs to their websites. (For more about the Internet’s effect on the news business, please turn to page 36.)

Will any of this be enough to save the newspaper? “I don’t know,” Anderson says candidly of the changes at the Citizen. “It’s an experiment. I don’t have the answers.” Similarly, when I ask Spec editor Robbins over the phone if his sweeping changes constituted a leap of faith, the line goes silent for a minute. “You know what,” he says eventually, “You’re absolutely right. There is a leap of faith involved in this, faith that we’re doing the right thing.”

Clark says that the biggest changes in the newspaper business probably won’t happen in her career, but that when they do, they’ll solve the logistical woes of the newspaper industry worldwide. Purely electronic newspapers will market themselves as niche products the same way that magazines do, and readers who don’t buy newspapers now will be able to buy chunks of the newspaper that appeal to their interests. Clark almost salivates at the idea. “We could have people who only subscribe to our Sports sections,” Clark predicts. “That would be wonderful. We could have people who only subscribe to our local news section…. It’s going to put newspaper readership through the roof.”

Halfway through our interview, Orban pokes his head through the open door. “I don’t know what your schedule is like,” says the Citizen publisher, “but I wanted to invite you to Christmas dinner.”

Clark’s heels click-clack on the brown tile as we walk down the main hallway towards the front of the building, through a set of double doors and into a sunken room full of tables and chairs. A ruddy, smiling man with a butcher knife carves a turkey. We help ourselves to mashed potatoes and carrots and then, with every seat in the room taken, walk back to her office.

“Who were all those people?” I ask her of the faces I didn’t recognize.

They run the Citizen’s printing press, Clark tells me.

I try to fathom how different the newspapers of the future will look, when these people won’t have jobs. Then I glance at my watch – it’s 3 P.M. – and wonder how they’ll spend the next hour or two, until it’s dinnertime for the beast.