At a smoke-filled bar in the Gulf city-state of Dubai, the Filipino cover band rocks out to Guns N’ Roses as Canadian sailors on leave from patrolling the Gulf of Oman decorate their table with empty long-necked Budweisers. One of the more gregarious sailors is describing the lessons he’s learned since arriving in the Middle East. “They tell you this region is full of chaos, full of violence,” he says. “Then you get here and it’s nothing like what they say.” We are sitting near the speakers and he has to shout over the band. “The people here are even more beautiful than the landscape.” He surmises on the discrepancy between portrayal and reality. “It’s the Americanization of the media. Fox News. In Canada we like to think we welcome all perspectives, but our media is becoming Americanized too.”

While sailors stationed in the Middle East may not be the best judges of the media – they are “end users,” like most people who partake of the news – it’s safe to say that the current emphasis on dramatic divides, war-on-terror rhetoric and “shock and awe” coverage leaves much to be desired. Yet journalists today struggle within the constraints of a 24/7 system that has, in many cases, already outlined “the story” for them, often leaving little recourse but to furnish an update or source a few quotes. For this reason, long-form journalism – narrative nonfiction, literary journalism, New Journalism, whatever term you prefer – offers a powerful counterpoint.

I like the term immersion journalism, which describes the kind of up-close, experiential work that has captivated me throughout my career. This work has required me to spend many months – even years – in the places I’ve covered, to learn the local languages to varying degrees of proficiency, and to conclude that the answers to the rifts segmenting our world are not to be found in press conferences or by quoting mediatrained officials alone. They are, as often as not, found among ordinary people who are living “the news” yet rarely have a voice in it.

There is no substitute for immersive experience, nor for taking the time to explore and understand the underlying issues. Our current media environment, with its insistence on merciless deadlines and its addiction to what sociologists call a media frame (which can be defined as preconceived notions of a story), mitigates against the best that journalism can offer. For all great journalism must grapple with reality as it is, and attempt to convey that.

As an independent journalist, I have had the luxury – it is a luxury – of avoiding some of the pitfalls faced by many foreign correspondents. The first is the five-star hotel, where the only customers are well-heeled professionals and other journalists – all essentially insulated from the realities they seek to cover. The second is “parachute journalism” (a cousin to “hotel journalism”), which has correspondents fly in to sort out a story in a few days, a couple of weeks at best, thus compelling them to rely less on direct knowledge than on what they’ve read in the newspapers back home by someone in the very same predicament.

During the six months I spent in Iran covering, among other things, the Iranian view of the nuclear issue and the election of a new president, I spent only three days in a hotel worthy of the name. Iranians are sin-gularly hospitable, and rarely did a day pass that I was not invited to one home or another, and usually encouraged to stay for extended periods. Whether sitting on the floor of a peasant’s stone hut drinking dugh (a sour yogurt drink), or enjoying a glass of tea in the goat-hair tent of a nomad, or drinking ouzo (mixed with dugh of course) with Kurdish fighters, the peshmerga, around a campfire in the trenches of a battlefield from the Iran-Iraq war, or sitting at the dining tables of Tehran’s elites, I was exposed to the contradictions, the panoply of opinions that make up modern Iran. Peeling back the layers, I found my preconceived notions challenged at every juncture. I suffered in the heat beneath the obligatory headscarf; shared water pipes with strangers; hitchhiked through mountain passes on the back of smugglers’ trucks; was arrested on the border with Iraq; and translated heavy-metal lyrics for university students who took me along to their classes. I could not have written a simplistic report if I’d wanted to.

The task of narrative journalism is to act as a camera lens, to capture snapshots of reality and sort out the meaning on the road to a rough sort of truth. As the late Polish literary journalist, Ryszard Kapuscinski, who chronicled Africa for 40 years, said of his writing, “I managed to stop for a fraction of a second this eternally fleeting life and show the image to others.” And through these images, these frozen moments, a view may emerge of places, of peoples, who are far more complex than we have been led to believe, far less easy to categorize, driven by hopes, fears and desires akin to our own. There may be, embedded in these images, hints at how we might resolve the grave conflicts threatening our world.

The other day, at a cafe in Dubai where I often go to write, the table next to me was occupied by two young women in conservative black abayas talking animatedly to a young man with a shaved head and a pierced eyebrow. And because I’m a practiced eavesdropper, I knew that the young women were locals from this tiny kingdom in the heart of the region’s war zones – 1,000 kilometres from Iraq, a mere 150 from Iran – and that the young man was an American Jew. And because such scenes don’t make the evening news, I will tell you what they were saying.

Among other things they discussed sex, celebrities, and whether they would marry someone “really hot” (they were university-aged after all). They discussed the foreign influence in the region: he thought Dubai was mimicking the United States at a time when the U.S. is losing traction globally; they just liked meeting people from other countries, since the Emirate is home to more than 180 nationalities. He explained why ultra-Orthodox Jews grow long forelocks. They explained the differences between Shi’a and Sunni Islam.

In lightly accented English, one of the women said, “If only everyone would sit and talk like this, people would understand one other.”

Until then, there is journalism.

The first story I wrote for a national magazine got a successful man fired. He was an accidental casualty, because the sad irony is that this story was titled “How to Stay Hired.” Written for Report on Business magazine, it explored the roles of communication and office culture in determining how long a new executive lasts in his job. The man I torpedoed was the new marketing director for the Canadian branch of a multinational corporation, and he was just a little too forthcoming about the difficulty he was having in getting his department turned in the direction he wanted. He was the perfect illustration of the problem I was uncovering, and I knew as I was sitting in his office, recording the gold spilling from his mouth, that his bosses were going to be ticked. I just had no idea to what extent. The day the magazine landed on their desks, they called him out of a conference and told him he was through. I learned this because after getting fired, the first thing he did was call me. “You’ve killed me,” he shouted, almost weeping. “You’ve killed me!”

And my reaction to this news as a young magazine editor and freelance writer was to be, quietly and a little nervously, thrilled. The sense of power and responsibility was intoxicating; I suddenly knew how dogs felt when they got their first taste of blood. The trouble I brought to this man and his family I managed to rationalize away-he was a marketing director, he should have known better-and for the next 10 years or so I looked for opportunities to duplicate the high of notching my first journalistic victim. I became on some level the magazine version of a “gotcha” journalist, scanning subjects for the rope with which they might hang themselves. It was an approach that generated a lot of angry letters from the people I wrote about (I kept a list of the hateful adjectives they used), but it served me well, particularly writing for a business magazine that wasn’t afraid to be critical. And it lasted roughly until the day I became a novelist.

Did I start pouring myself into fiction because I’d lost my journalistic taste for blood? Or did I lose that appetite because writing fiction had introduced me to something sweeter and more satisfying? It’s hard to know the precise order of all the causes and effects. A couple of the stories I wrote during my transition seemed in some ways gentler, and perhaps richer, than anything I’d done before. I do know that my attitude toward magazine work changed most dramatically after I wrote my first published novel, Norman Bray in the Performance of His Life. The main character of that book is a bullying out-of-work narcissist and, had I been writing a magazine feature, he would have been the perfect object of a gleeful skewering. But cynicism doesn’t work in fiction; a novelist cannot pull readers into his story unless he has empathy for his subject, and the success of Norman Bray-and for me the joy of writing it-lay in getting to know and love that character better than he knew and loved himself. In this, it helped that Norman was based on my father, but now I have a model against which I will be able to gauge all my future work. I know what being truly empathetic as a writer feels like. The story I’m probably most notorious for, a profile of Leah McLaren for Toronto Life magazine, marks the last flare-up of my old way of doing things. I wrote it immediately after finishing Norman Bray, and I went into it laden with all my usual hard, cynical tools. But halfway through my research for that piece, I sensed that something was different. I could tell the story was evolving into something that my subject would find painful, and though in the past that realization would merely have spurred me on, this time, for the first time, I felt conflicted. It’s easy to say now, and I’m sure small consolation for Ms. McLaren, but I had a number of sleepless nights trying to sort out the arguments in my head. In the end I went ahead with the piece, and it was criticized by some as mean-spirited. Russell Smith, in a column, decried its lack of compassion. He was thinking like a fiction writer, and I get it now.

I still do magazine work, of course, but these days I know that it is possible to get at the truth in a piece of journalism without leaving bodies in my wake. The goal of any interview is still to get the subject to open up, to expose himself in a way that he never intended, but now when it happens I reach for a magnifying glass, not the nearest sharp object. And I bring the same approach to my fiction. It’s still astonishing to me when reviews of my novels cite compassion as one of their central traits.

I am clearly not the writer I was.

Thomas showed up late but didn’t need a formal announcement to know why the Breakfast Television studio was filled with crying colleagues. He received a package: inside was severance information with a letter that read, “As of today, your services are no longer required….” Thomas surrendered his security card and was denied access back into the newsroom. He was told his personal belongings would be shipped to him. For three years he had been the face of CityTV sports, but as of July 12,2006 he was an intruder, with security guards watching his every move.

Less than an hour later, chum Ltd., the Toronto-based media company that owns CityTV, issued a joint press release with CTVglobemedia (parent company of CTVand The Globe and Mail), announcing a $1.7 billion offer for chum. Thirty-two minutes later, chumissued a second press release announcing the layoff of 191 full-time and 90 part-time employees to make way for what chum called a “new approach to local information programming.” Or, simply, the cancellation of six o’clock newscasts at CityTV stations in Edmonton, Calgary, Vancouver and Winnipeg.

In Edmonton, 47 CityTV employees lost their jobs. In Calgary, the number was about 35. Both newsrooms were gutted, but there were survivors. Edmonton’s 6 p.m. news anchor Paul Mennier became the station’s “local content manager,” a role better known as “news director” at any other station. Without a newscast to direct, he turned to Your City, a local magazine-format light news show. Mennier, along with former City Edmonton news director Chris Duncan (now local content manager at City Calgary) and Al Thorgeirson, regional vice president of chum Television Alberta/Manitoba, had tossed around ideas for a show like it over the past year. With the majority of newsroom staff gone, a traditional newscast was impossible. Attempting to make the most of what they had – and to ensure the CityTV brand lives up to its promise of fiercely local programming – the network quietly launched versions of Your City in Edmonton and Calgary on October 2, 2006, two and a half months after black Wednesday.

Your City’s news value is dubious, but the show’s launch marks the beginning of another makeover for Canadian broadcast journalism – this one affecting news programming. As media industries continue their game of survival of the fittest, the country’s television companies are consolidating further and critics are fretting over what this could mean for journalism in the public interest. They look to the Canadian Radio-Television and Telecommunications Commission (crtc) to make a move, because, while chumand CTVglobemedia have signed on the dotted line, the crtc, along with the Competition Bureau, have the power to delay or even squelch the deal. While the Competition Bureau gave the takeover the green light in March, the crtc’s decision is still up in the air – but there’s next to no chance the commission will kill the deal. What is certain is that as media giants gobble up the weak, if the news can’t rake in the dollars, it’ll be written off as collateral damage.

It’s 9 a.m. Tuesday morning, three weeks after Your City’s Edmonton debut. The station’s remaining reporters and producers are settling in for another workday; they take off jackets, turn on computers and discuss the weather. Assignment editor Randy McDonald comes around to each desk, distributes four pages of potential story ideas for the day and calls a meeting to order. Everyone gathers in a circle, some sitting on rolling office chairs, others on brightly coloured exercise balls. “It helps my posture,” reporter Sudha Krishnan says. With his thinning grey hair and quiet, serious demeanour, McDonald is like a high school teacher presiding over a class of boisterous youngsters – and compared to McDonald, that’s what the rest of the CityTV staff are. Few appear much older than 30.

“So: Rolston. I think we’re going to have to make an editorial decision,” McDonald says of the story that made the cover of that day’s Edmonton Journal. “I don’t think it’s worth hanging in there for a lot more sentencing arguments today.” The four youths charged in the beating death of Shane Rolston will continue to face sentencing hearings today but the story, while appearing early in both Global and CTV’s newscasts, doesn’t make it on Your City.

Hard news is no longer what this CityTV is about. Simply giving viewers the facts is not the idea. Instead, reporters go deep into certain angles, which means an entire show can be devoted to just one or two topics. Your City also adopts a lighter, more upbeat tone, reflected by the show’s tilted, bubble-lettered logo, anchored at two corners with spinning silver stars. Car crashes, fires – it’s not likely you’ll hear about them here. It sounds like the news on Prozac.

“We’re not going to react to the hard news of the day, necessarily,” Mennier says. “Unless we decide, ‘Yeah, that one really stands out because it has a real impact on the community.'”

When television first became popular in the 1950s, Edmontonians received only one Canadian signal on their black and white TV sets: local broadcaster Dr. G. R. A. “Dick” Rice’s cfrn-tv. The station hit airwaves for the first time on October 25, 1954 as an affiliate of CBC. It remained Edmonton’s only television news broadcaster until CBC launched a new local station in 1961. Just before disaffiliating with CBC, cfrn joined forces with eight newly licensed stations in major markets coast to coast to form a cooperative, the Independent Television Organization. Based out of Winnipeg, ITO made it easier for its member stations to share sales efforts, buy foreign programming and produce Canadian content. Eventually, as technology improved and microwave systems became more viable, ITO stations developed into a full-fledged network called the Canadian Television Network, now known as CTV. No major private competitor entered the field again until 12 years later when Dr. Charles Allard launched Independent Television (CITV), commonly referred to as ITV, in 1974. ITV would change hands twice, eventually becoming Global Edmonton in 2000.

In the early 1990s, Manitoba’s Craig Media Inc., then based in Brandon, decided to expand its television properties west to Alberta and British Columbia. However, it faced tough competition, and fought for CRTC licensing approval against networks such as Rogers Communications Corp., chum, CanWest Global Communications Corp. and Baton Broadcasting (now CTV) for a period of four years. Craig lost Vancouver, but in 1997 moved into Edmonton

and Calgary with the Alberta Channel, known as A-Channel. Craig moved its headquarters to Calgary. The stations took to the streets and became highly visible in each city. Adopting a laid-back style similar to the one CityTV in Toronto had made famous, A-Channel chose videographers in Hummers over stiff anchors behind formal news desks – and quickly established itself as a downtown presence with a grassroots approach to reporting.

Just as A-Channel was finding its footing, the station underwent a series of crippling changes. During a labour strike in Edmonton from September 2003 to February 2004, ratings plunged. New hopes were ignited when chum purchased Craig at the end of 2004. Employees were heartened by the better wages and benefits that came with being a part of the chum family. In August 2005, the station was renamed CityTV and the future looked bright. Former sports anchor Thomas remembers that the bosses at chum seemed to like what was happening in Edmonton and encouraged the station to keep up the good work. Which is why many felt betrayed when, less than a year later, the cuts suddenly came. “If they said they were happy with what we were doing in the first place, why would they try to change it eight months later?” he asked. “To me, that obviously was a lie.”

Back when Your City was still in development, the question of what the show would and wouldn’t cover came up in the newsroom. On Wednesday, September 13, the day of the Dawson College shooting in Montreal, Mennier said to his staff, “Hey folks, there’s no right or wrong answers here,” and then asked: “If we were on the air tonight, would we even cover the Dawson College story?”

The response was almost unanimous. “Yeah, it’s huge, it’s massive. We’ve got to.”

“Well, wait a second now,” Mennier said. “I was in my office today watching Newsworld and Newsnet and it was constant coverage. Our competitors would have covered it at six o’clock. What else could we possibly add to that story?”

And that’s why, at 6:30 p.m., Mennier wants to give viewers what he calls an alternative. Your City is anchored by longer stories – often taking a different angle on the days events – and franchise features: fun, quirky segments unique to the show. Every Tuesday, viewers can tune in for Celebrity Chefs, in which wellknown locals (city councillors, comedians) share a favourite recipe direct from their own homes. Every Thursday, Million Dollar Homes gives viewers a tour of one of the city’s hot properties.

Mennier hesitates to describe Your City as a newsmagazine show – but admits it fits the label. “We don’t have a format, we have a philosophy,” he says. “The show on any given day could be a complete half-hour documentary. On other days, it could look more like a traditional news offering where you’ve got seven or eight stories. It’s really about us setting the agenda.”

There is a disjuncture between what happens out west and what happens at corporate headquarters, which, for chum, is in Toronto. The complaint that the needs of Alberta and B.C. are not adequately understood in Ontario is common in many industries. No one at chum’s head office can comment on Your City, says its communications staff, because it’s “specifically a prairie initiative.” The merger, too, is off-limits at both companies. Nothing can be said, they say, because it’s still pending crtc approval. CTVglobemedia submitted the application to the regulatory board on December 18 last year but a public hearing on the deal will not even begin until April 30th. The review process can take up to a year. Meanwhile, both CTVglobemedia and chum maintain the stations will remain independent.

In a note to staff following the takeover, CTVglobemedia president and CEO Ivan Fecan wrote, “We intend to maintain and strengthen the flavour and energy of chum’s brands. We will also keep the news divisions completely separate to ensure diverse voices and the journalistic competition that serves the public interest. Both news organizations will continue to do what they do best.”

CTVglobemedia plans to divest chum’s set of A-Channel stations in small, suburban markets, but in major cities such as Toronto, Edmonton and Calgary, it will own both CityTV and CTV. It’s an unprecedented degree of consolidation. The industry is changing, says McDonald at City Edmonton, which is why his station must change with it. “All the independents have been bought out and that’s kind of a sad thing,” the veteran journalist says. “When the crtc approves the takeover they can’t have two competing news stations in one market, so who’s going to go? Probably us, so that’s why we’re trying to develop an alternative program.” The official word is that nothing has changed, but Your City is an indirect result of the CTVglobemedia-chum marriage. The same could be said of last summer’s layoffs and newscast cancellations – obvious casualties in any takeover. But in a directors’ circular sent prior to the acquisition of the company, chum investors were told that the cuts to local news were part of restructuring plans that had been in the works since September 2005, months before the decision to sell.

While CityTV had grown deep roots in Toronto, the newly acquired stations in Manitoba, Alberta and B.C. – modelled on the successful Toronto formula – could not compete against the generations-old CTV and Global behemoths. Plus, there was a divide in audience: “The concerns of suburbanites are not necessarily reflected all that well in City’s programming,” says the Toronto Star’s business and public affairs writer David Olive. Compared to Toronto, he says, Edmonton and Calgary have much smaller populations, and neither has a thriving downtown culture, which is where City directs itself.

Pressure from competitors strangled City’s newscasts, and ultimately hindered the chum empire. When founder and owner Allan Waters died in December 2005, his two sons Jim and Ron took over. The Waters boys, as they are sometimes called, announced a desire to continue their father’s legacy, with no plans to sell. But by May 2006, the brothers had begun shopping for buyers.

Industry experts say it was an issue of family succession; the brothers no longer wished to run the chum operation if continued success meant only endless efforts to expand. “You reach a certain point where you have to get a lot bigger or sell out. That’s just a maxim of business,” Olive says. “chum was becoming a smaller and less significant player in the media universe in Canada – not because it was shrinking, but because everyone else was getting bigger.” So in any expansion battle, chum would lose. For CTVglobemedia, Olive says, the attraction lay in chum’s array of specialty channels and radio properties (the merger gets CTVglobemedia into the radio business for the first time). Plus, there was the appeal of getting something before its rival, CanWest Global, could.

Back in Edmonton, the Your City story meeting breaks up after half an hour and, by 9:45 a.m., everyone has returned to his or her desk. What would be going in tonight’s episode of Your City is already in the bag, or at least halfway there. Most reporters begin work on new features for upcoming shows. Krishnan is covering the opening of a new casino for Wednesday’s show and spends the morning researching and scheduling interviews.

While Googling, she chats with fellow reporter Stacey Brotzel and producer Josephine Daniele. Krishnan says City’s newsroom works at a different pace than before and, in some ways, it’s nicer. “In terms of getting a story in and meeting the deadline, we don’t have that stress as much now,” Krishnan says. But working with features means multiple stories at the same time. “We’re juggling things a lot, whereas when you’d come in and – say, the casino story was for today – just focusing on that, and you’d just go, go, go, go.”

At noon, reporter Lana Thomson heads out with camera operator Nathan Gross to a Husky gas station down the street. She’s just scored an interview with the station’s convenience store manager, who agreed to talk about the high-tech security system she installed in her store. It’ll be part of Thomson’s package on home security. As the two jump into a CityTV SUV and Gross guns the engine, it’s the first time all day there’s been any feeling of a news rush. They have to tape quickly – Thomson has a doctor’s appointment in an hour.

In the car, Thomson confirms the staff must get used to juggling many tasks. “We’re doing this with fewer people than we ever had,” she says. “It’s hard because we’re all wearing many hats. Those who are still with the company, for the most part, are people who are able to take on a lot and wear many hats.”

Gross jokes that even though management has tried to get him to do some editing on top of camera work, he’s managed to resist so far. As he speeds through the crowded downtown streets, he says he likes the new direction CityTV has taken. “The only difference I’ve noticed is less, for lack of a better term, bullshit,” he says. “Less car accidents….”

“Less knocking on doors of people who’ve lost their pride and joy,” Thomson chimes in.

“Yeah,” Gross says. “Less bad news stuff.”

Ten kilometres west of CityTV is the home of CTV Edmonton, a sprawling blue and white building that sits on an isolated stretch of Stony Plain Road. The station’s newsroom bustles with reporters, directors, editors, producers and anchors. While CityTV has the feel of a lived-in, dishevelled newsroom, the uniform look of CTV gives the impression of a well-oiled machine. There are no runaway exercise balls here. In a hallway by one of CTV’s many production suites, a plaque hangs on the wall, with the heading “Mission Statement.” It reads: “CFRN-TV is people working together committed to great television and profitable results.” The mantra seems to work – CTV’s newscasts are continually No. 1 in ratings in Edmonton. But it would be a surprise if the shows weren’t – the beaming faces of anchors Daryl McIntyre and Carrie Doll and meteorologist Josh Classen grace billboards and bus stops around the city.

The station’s advertising blitz is representative of how parent company CTVglobemedia pervades national media. What started as one lonely telephone provider has become one of Canada’s largest private media companies. The colonization began in 2000, when Bell Canada Enterprises (BCE) chairman and CEO Jean Monty led the purchase of CTV Inc. (which had just bought specialty channel TSN) for $2.3 billion and later merged with the Thomson Corp. for control of the Globe. Later, BCE would shrink its ownership interest in the resulting mega-company (then known as Bell Globemedia) to help fund its growth, which included an alliance with MTV Canada and the purchase of chum.

Reaction to the takeover news has not been favourable. “The public is always better served when there are more independent organizations chasing stories,” says Christopher Waddell, associate director of Carleton University’s School of Journalism and Communication. “You get better coverage – different sources, different angles, different approaches. You look at it differently because your audience may be different.” Waddell doesn’t buy Fecan’s claim that CTVand CityTV will continue competing head-to-head. “Would the management sit back and stand by if chum did something that all of a sudden reduced CTV’s ratings to zero?” Waddell asks. “My guess is that they wouldn’t.”

Even so, experts are certain the deal will be approved. “The CRTC has rubber stamped most of the changes that have occurred over the years because it is confronted by the fact that economic forces are moving inevitably,” says Professor Adam Finn, academic director of the Cultural Industries Research Centre at the University of Alberta’s School of Business. The CRTC wouldn’t resist the merger, only to end up with an economically unviable company. Nor can it force owners to stay in business “So, what are the alternatives?” asks York University communication studies professor Arthur Siegel. “Selling it to CanWest Global? It’s one or the other.”

The CRTC is expected to ask CTVglobemedia to sell off some stations or increase Canadian content in its programming. In its application to the regulator, the company proposed a benefits package worth $103.5 million, 74 per cent of which will go to new television programming initiatives, plus social and industry grants. The remaining 26 per cent will go toward similar radio endeavours. Promises have been made. “Right now, in the short term it will be fine, there won’t be any difference,” says the Star’s media critic Antonia Zerbisias. “The CRTC is going to make [CTVglobemedia] pour tens of millions of dollars into this. It will be six or seven years over the license term and that will be fine. But one day it will run out, and the cuts will come. Then there will be fewer and fewer newscasts, and fewer and fewer journalists. The long-term picture is not good.”

Peter Murdoch, vice-president, media, of the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), says Canada has one of the most highly concentrated media ownership structures in the world. The news programming cancellations at chum, Murdoch says, is an indication of what will happen if consolidation continues. “We’ve had commissions, inquiries, hearings, time after time in this country, warning about the effects of concentration of ownership and that it should stop,” Murdoch says. There are real threats. “With a homogenous ownership, we run the risk that the views of that ownership filter down into the newsroom. That isn’t scaremongering, it’s a good possibility. What we need in a democracy is the to and fro of a whole bunch of ideas, a whole bunch of opinions.”

The CEP represents 150,000 people who work – both directly and indirectly – in media industries. Last August, it filed a complaint with the CRTC that accused chum of violating its TV station licenses by cutting news programs meant to fulfill the network’s local programming requirements. Media critic and former CityTV producer Liss Jeffrey takes the complaint one step further: “I regard this as a form of license trafficking.” She cites news reports that detail how Jim and Ron Waters “put up chum-City for option, essentially,” after which a bidding war for the company ensued. Jeffrey is livid: “You are not to take a public license and start auctioning off these assets, which rely on holding a license that you have to justify holding in front of a regulatory body.”

But experts and industry analysts agree chum is not the big loser in this deal. “CTVglobemedia isn’t going to take CityTV over in order to destroy it,” says Jeffrey. “If they’re out to destroy anybody it’s CanWest.” CityTV, she predicts, will become a complementary property in the CTVglobemedia stable and as such, will retain its identity – not lose it as some have been worried will happen. “CTVglobemedia can use the City properties to leverage what they already have,” she explains. “They don’t want to make it the same. If anything, they want to make it even more distinctive so it looks like there’s more choice and diversity out there.”

It’s now 6 p.m., a half-hour to show time. Your City host Mennier is in his office, staring intently at the four TV sets mounted to the wall facing his desk. Each is tuned to a different station: CTV, Global, CBC and CityTV. While his station airs CityNews International, a world news program packaged and hosted out of CityTV in Toronto, Mennier’s competitors go with their hour-long local news broadcasts.

That Mennier isn’t on the air at this moment, some say, is unwise. “To take away your news at six and run an international show that, frankly, isn’t very good, is a big mistake,” says Neill Fitzpatrick, news director of Global Edmonton. “Plus, they’ve got Gord Martineau on from Toronto,” he says. “I know who he is, but nobody in Edmonton knows who he is. So you put this strange face in front of Edmontonians when they’re used to seeing local news at six – it’s not going to work.”

Lynda Steele, who anchors Global Edmonton’s five and six o’clock newscasts, says it’s been tough for CityTV to build an audience in a city where viewers have watched CTV or Global for generations. She doesn’t think the station’s fortunes will change with Your City. “Their local magazine show doesn’t seem to have a focus,” she says. “It’s just, ‘Now we’re cooking, now we’re doing this’… I wonder what they’re doing.” Neither Global nor CTV sees City as a competitor anymore. “They’re doing some good things, but in terms of competing against daily news? I don’t think so,” says Steve Hogle, news director at CTV Edmonton. Like Steele, Hogle doesn’t seem entirely sure what CityTV is trying to do with its new show. “There’s some things that they’re doing that are day-of news and there’s others that are magazine-format, so they might be sort of feeling their way a little bit too, I’m not sure….” He trails off, frowning.

Only one thing is certain – while Your City’s features may be entertaining, they’re no replacement for a traditional newscast. According to the most recent report from the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement, Your City averaged just 1,000 viewers in Edmonton each night during the fall 2006 quarter. It’s a far cry from the 138,000 viewers CTV’s six o’clock newscast attracts regularly. A sitcom with a primetime rating of 0.1 (what Your City is averaging) would likely be axed in a heartbeat. But Mennier remains optimistic, confident that people want what he has to offer. “While the other guys have the rapists and the murderers and the pedophiles,” says Mennier, “we want to corner the market on the architects, the medical researchers, the artists and the musicians, and give those people 15 minutes of fame. They’re often overlooked in that daily grind of chasing the bad guys.

“Guess what? It’s a big city,” continues Mennier, “a million people. People die in car crashes and there are murders – does that make it news every time it happens? I don’t know.” Mennier is betting it doesn’t. And if he plays his cards right, maybe it will be enough to save his station from getting swallowed up by a giant.

The floor-to-ceiling windows in the editor-in-chief’s office at The Vancouver Sun face northeast, beyond the white sails of the city’s convention centre to the North Shore Mountains. In early spring 2000, then editor-in-chief John Cruickshank stared out the windows while his two to p editors argued. A simmering power struggle between managing editor Patricia Graham and chief features editor David Beers was coming to a boil. The wrangling had started soon after Beers’s arrival at the paper two years earlier, but they’d both climbed a rung on the management ladder before the end of 1999, so now the stakes were higher.

Graham, groomed from within since the mid-1980s, is five-foot-four and rail-thin. She speaks slowly and projects total confidence and an engaging frankness. Her manner is cool, and it’s difficult to imagine her measured voice rising. Beers, originally from San Francisco, stands nearly a foot taller, lean and lanky, with a receding patch of grey leading into a neatly trimmed beard. He is soft-spoken, but quietly fierce with his words and opinions.

Cruickshank felt that as long as he was there to steady the focus, the tension of having “David operating in one channel” and “Patricia in another” would work, despite the “oil and water going on between the two.” But the merging of two distinct talents into one creative force hadn’t occurred. Beers claimed he’d been granted special “powers to effect creative change at the Sun.” Graham thought he’d “misread many things.” And Cruickshank, an intellectual type who came from The Globe and Mail in 1996, was determined to make his mark on the paper. He’d formed a creative trio – himself, Beers and chief designer Jim Emerson (although he says they “frequently engaged Patricia”) – to give the paper “a brighter, more sophisticated look.”

In a 2002 Vancouvermagazine piece, Beers wrote that the “exchange was ugly” in Cruickshank’s office. He and Graham “found themselves sweating and sometimes swearing” during the meeting. And Graham, looking back now, says the encounter was “bizarre. I kept saying, ‘I feel like I’m in a therapy session,’ when we were in there.”

Not long after the tense encounter, Cruickshank made a surprise announcement – he was to become co-editor and vice-president editorial at the Sun-Times in Chicago. When he left, the fragile détente went with him, but the discord had charged the atmosphere and the paper thrived during the turmoil. “Papers are often most vital when there is conflict inside them,” he says now. “When it’s Happy Valley at a newspaper, the paper is never as stimulating.”

Fresh from overhauling the Ottawa Citizen, Cruickshank’s successor Neil Reynolds found himself saddled with two bickering senior editors. His immediate solution was to create the unique position, at least for a newspaper, of essayist, which relieved the pressure by keeping Beers outside the management structure. Eleven months later, Beers was out of a job. “I was fired,” he says. “In fact, I forced them to tick the box on the form that said fired because they were firing me.” Reynolds, now a columnist for the Globe, thought Beers was a brilliant editor, but says he offended senior management with public criticisms of the paper. And Beers’s reaction to dismissal puzzled him. “Newspapers are a pretty turbulent business,” Reynolds says. “I’ve never known anyone in my life to get so upset about one job change.”

In the seven years since that sweaty, expletiveflecked meeting, Graham and Beers have remained at the heart of Vancouver’s news scene, symbols of the clash between corporate and independent media. Graham is a dedicated newswoman and the Sun is not entirely the corporate nightmare some say it is. Beers is an independent-minded editor who gets more attention for his website than its size and age warrant. The two are engaged in a media symbiosis – the little website with the big name spawned in reaction to the big newspaper with little web savvy – where each prods the other to progress. But everyone agrees on one thing: the more the competition can push the corporate Goliath, the better.

Vancouver is a multicultural centre feverishly preparing to host the 2010 winter Olympics. It is a proudly diverse city, with nearly half its population born outside Canada. Yet its media ownership is among the most homogeneous in the world. The Sun falls under the umbrella of CanWest Global Communications Corp., which also owns the National Post; The Province, the only other major metropolitan daily in the city; Victoria’s Times-Colonist, the major daily in the province’s capital; two other dailies on Vancouver Island; 20community weeklies in the province; and co-owns the Vancouver edition of Metro, the free commuter daily. It also owns Global Television, which hosts the most watched evening newscast in the city, and the CH network, which broadcasts in Victoria.

This reduction of news proprietors didn’t develop overnight. The Sun has been around since 1912, when the city’s population was just over 100,000. It sprung up in a market already dominated by the Province, which has been publishing since 1898, and owned by Southam since the 1920s. The two competed head to head until a massive labour strike at the Province in the 1940s gave the Sun the edge in circulation. Don Cromie realized Southam’s financial resources would eventually swamp his family-owned Sun, so in 1957 the two papers formed a new publishing partnership called Pacific Press. Although housed and printed together, they remained under separate ownership. Six years later, Cromie sold to FP Publications, an inconspicuous first step toward Vancouver’s concentrated media ownership. The FP-Southam arrangement lasted until 1980, when strikes and labour problems forced Sun owners to sell to the former Thomson Corp. chain. Thomson turned around less than a year later and sold the Sun to Southam, giving it ownership of both major dailies. Then, throughout the 1990s, Hollinger gradually acquired full ownership of Southam until finally, in 2000CanWest bought most of the Hollinger papers.

The elimination of competition didn’t go unnoticed by the Canadian government. Between 1969 and 1980, the Davey Committee, the Kent Report and the Bryce Commission all found ownership concentration excessive, but their reports were shelved. More recently, “outright market domination in certain Canadian media markets” was addressed in the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications’s Final Report on the Canadian News Media, released June 2006. Representatives from CanWest, as well as an online upstart called The Tyee, founded by Beers, were among the 304 witnesses who testified.

Some journalists have grumbled about the Sun’s corporate bias and lack of diverse local coverage, even as it employs talented journalists, breaks stories and wins awards. Online innovations have made local information easier to come by, but web-based independent journalism is not yet the norm. One notable exception is the Tyee, which has elbowed its way into the public discourse in less than four years. The Sun, despite decidedly higher numbers of unique hits, has not been innovative in this area. It touts contests – win a condominium, find the worst song ever – and concert reviewers who stay for the show’s encore as local online initiatives, which only fuels criticism about the lack of serious coverage in the public interest. The Senate committee, for its part, recommended that media mergers be subject to a new section of the Canadian Competition Act, but the federal government has not acted on the report.

Today, the Sun and the Province share prime waterfront real estate. The dull brown block at 200 Granville Street is sandwiched between the railway station and gaming giant Electronic Arts. Kirk LaPointe, the Sun’s managing editor, insists the Province is a fierce competitor, dismissing the fact that they share a publisher, are in the same building and are owned by the same company. “We have very different approaches to news,” he says, “very different operating standards.” While both have seen declines in circulation in recent years, the Sun remains ahead in paid daily circulation, with a weekday average of 162,835 compared to the Province’s 141,506.

Trying to keep it that way is the Sun’s current editor-in-chief, Graham, who grew up in west Toronto and graduated from Osgoode Hall Law School in 1974. She didn’t care much for practicing law and landed a summer reporting job at the Globe by impressing then editor Dic Doyle with her only writing samples – short stories she’d never shown a soul. After a year at the paper, she moved on, eventually landing on Quadra Island, one of the Gulf Islands nestled between mainland B.C. and Vancouver Island. In the community known for its sport fishing and arts-and-crafts lifestyle, she took another journalism summer gig, this time writing for Campbell River’s Courier-Upper Islander (now the Courier-Islander). Leaving island life behind in 1986, she moved through the ranks at the Province – copy editor, editorial writer, weekly columnist, editorial page editor. After five years in Vancouver, she jumped to the senior editor slot at the Sun, a position for which she didn’t feel ready. Snatching the editorial page position at first opportunity, she honed her skills on the opinion pages. By 1997, Cruickshank wanted her “maturity of judgment” in the newsroom and convinced her to become senior editor in charge of news. “I promised her that if she plunged in and did a good job,” says Cruickshank, now publisher of the Sun-Times and chief operating officer of the Sun-Times News Group, “she’d have an opportunity to take on a paper someday.”

That day came in 2003, when Graham took the helm at age 54. Unlike her previous Sun editors, she’d spent virtually all of her journalistic life not only in B.C., but also under the Pacific Press banner (now Pacific Newspaper Group). “The paper really needed someone connected to the community and staff,” Graham says. “One of my big things was to make the paper more local – exclusive local content, breaking news, that sort of thing,” she says. “Along with that, more long-form or in-depth journalism.” WestCoast News replaced Lower Mainland as the local section and The Daily Special was added, a double-spread feature surrounded by a rim of short news hits from around the region. The weekly entertainment section, Queue – deemed too event-driven and musicfocused – gave way to WestCoast Life in an attempt to diversify into “things that regular people like to do” – although in the last year items have included spa treatments, doggie daycares and home-bar basics. Longer features labelled Weekend Extra now appear on the front pages of every section in the Saturday paper. Chief news editor Randy Shore became the paper’s first growth and development reporter, a position devoted to suburban Lower Mainland communities. Graham struck a committee that wrote the paper’s first ethics policy. She understood the desperate need for diversity, and created a diversity reporter position, yet the Sun remains a virtually all-white newsroom.
Sun editor-in-chief Patricia Graham looks out over the city her paper dominates
photography by Dina Goldstein

Beers, 49, grew up in Silicon Valley, where his father worked in the aerospace industry. His writing career began at age 23, when his girlfriend’s uncle, a Catholic priest, hooked him up with some Dominican priests in Guatemala. He visited places barred to outsiders because of a guerilla revolt, and wrote a story about a village in which he was stranded. “I went down there with not a lot of Spanish,” he says, adding he got out feeling “just lucky to be alive.” He made the trip on his own dime and then sold the piece to Pacific News Service, a local wire. The story made the front page of the Sunday edition of The Examiner in San Francisco. Beers then edited at PNS and later at Image, the Examiner’s Sunday magazine, which led in 1988 to a senior editor position at Mother Jones. He left after two years, planning to accept a John S. Knight Fellowship – he’d been shortlisted – from Stanford. Instead, his wife, Deirdre M. Kelly, accepted a teaching position at the University of British Columbia in 1991, and he moved to Vancouver.

By the time Beers interviewed Cruickshank for a Q&A in Vancouvermagazine in 1996, he had decided the city was “underserved or illserved by its corporate media.” His opening question to the Sun’s recently-installed editor-in-chief was, “Why have Vancouver’s newspapers been so lousy for so long?” Cruickshank was surprisingly frank, admitting “the city [had] outrun the newspaper for some time.” A couple of years later, Cruickshank offered Beers a contract position to edit an extended environmental series. Rather than be “a carping, self-marginalizing critic,” Beers thought, “I can work inside this media in an honest, good-faith way to improve it and change it.”

Beers’s “Fate of the Strait” environmental series won a 1998 National Newspaper Award, and to this day it’s Cruickshank’s proudest achievement at the Sun. Beers then joined full time and spearheaded the creation of Mix, an arts and entertainment section. Cruickshank wanted “to engage the intellectual community of Vancouver,” so the magazine intentionally became a detour from standard Sun fare. With sans-serif type, short headlines and wide single columns, Beers tried to suggest the excitement then buzzing about the nascent Internet. “Whatever the Sun was doing,” Beers says, “Mix was going to do the opposite.” Despite success, things changed after Beers joined the Sun management team in 1999 as chief features editor. For one thing, Graham, who had been promoted to managing editor about the same time, and Beers didn’t see eye to eye. Graham says Beers had “peculiar notions about corporations” and “thought people were being Machiavellian when there was nothing there.” At the time of Cruickshank’s resignation, Graham describes the team as “dysfunctional.” Beers, in his diary-like rendering in Vancouvermagazine, recalled Cruickshank’s exit as the end “of any chance of me spearheading constructive change at the Sun.”

After Beers’s unceremonious exit, Cruickshank took him on briefly as a content consultant to help create a new section like Mix for the Sun-Times. Beers later taught journalism at UBC and wrote freelance – including work for Salon.com, a project some old San Francisco friends had started. New media intrigued him, but he was wary that the Internet was both unproven and costly; he’d heard, for example, that Salon’s start-up cost had been around $70 million over seven years. His impulse to create a local independent media outlet on the web was met enthusiastically in certain quarters. Paul Hovan, publisher of nowdefunct alternative weekly Terminal City, came on board as publisher (he now acts only as a consultant). The B.C. Federation of Labour also threw in money, along with partners Beers has not named publicly, to create enough of a startup pool – $190,000 – to launch the Tyee in November 2003.

The word tyee comes from the Chinook Wawa (or Jargon) language used in the Pacific Northwest in the 19th century. It means chief, leader or boss. Tyee also refers to a large, feisty king or Chinook salmon. Beers curses the name occasionally for its odd pronunciation (tahy-ee), which hampers promotion, but the name stuck and “feisty fish” analogies abound. Beers knew that allowing his writers creative freedom was one draw his outlet had for potential contributors. “I didn’t want to take an idealistic impulse and exploit it by saying if you really want to do it, you’ll do it for free.” From the start, his contributors have been paid – but not much. Beers sees his website as “bodysurfing the Internet wave.” While the Tyee swims to catch the next wave, the Sun stands on the shore, dipping its toe in the water.

In the Sun newsroom, the afterglow from last night’s party fades. At the annual Jack Webster Awards for journalism excellence in B.C., held under the white sails at the Convention and Exhibition Centre, the Suntook home three top honours. In addition, columnist Vaughn Palmer was handed the Bruce Hutchison Lifetime Achievement Award, recognition for his expertise on B.C. politics and for being an uncompromising government critic. Palmer hasn’t been the only one singled out – in October 2006, longtime Sunreporter Kim Bolan won the PEN Canada/Paul Kidd Courage Prize for her ongoing coverage of the Air India affair. Since 1996, the Sunhas won 15National Newspaper Awards, compared with two for the Times-Colonist and none for the Province.

But any more praise will have to wait until next year. Of more immediate concern is this afternoon’s front-page meeting. Graham and a dozen others make the trek to the dull-grey boardroom, where the only colour is the day’s papers – Post, Globe, Sun, Province, 24 Hours and Metro – tacked to a corkboard and the dropdown screen to project images from a laptop. It’s time to figure out the top stories for tomorrow. In the hopper, among others, are Canada’s biggest house for sale in Abbotsford, the Conservative government’s announcement that income trusts will be taxed after all, an exclusive email Sun columnist Ian Mulgrew’s got about some problems with the attorney general and a study released about dogs that won’t perform Lassie-style rescues. City editor Paul Bucci wonders aloud what the income trust news means for those who own them. “What does it mean for our company, for that matter?” he asks no one in particular. “Write-offs,” someone mutters. The meeting breaks for a couple of hours to let stories progress and to put A1 together.

It’s not only former Sun employees who worry about what will happen at the paper. The broader Vancouver journalistic community does too. Deborah Campbell, former president of the Vancouver chapter of the Canadian Association of Journalists and member of local literary journalism collective the FCC, notes the lack of dedicated environmental, aboriginal and labour reporters at both the Sun and the Province. She wonders what the Sun provides that she can’t get on the web or a wire service, and worries that “when one owner is the gatekeeper on information, you have a prospect for abuse, where some information is highlighted and other information is not.”

Charles Campbell (no relation), who worked with Beers as entertainment editor at the Sun and later sat on its editorial board for two years, believes the daily’s CanWest owners exercise a “troubling” influence on the paper. Mulgrew claimed at the 2005 Senate hearings that he has “an incredible amount of freedom, to range widely and write freely” in his column. Campbell disagrees. “It’s easier to criticize the Israeli government in the Jerusalem Post than it is in a CanWest paper,” he says. “It’s an office joke that you just don’t go there.” Now a contributing editor at the Tyee, Campbell says he still reads the Sun regularly. Like most, he admires many of the journalists, but calls it “a soul-destroying work environment.” Gordon Hamilton, who has worked at the daily for more than two decades, admits, “It’s a controversial place to work – always has been.”

Others have been more pointed. Ian Gill, a former Sun reporter, described the paper he’d left as “a cross between a scrappy, low-rent USA Today and the colour comics,” saying it had “no edge, no creative tension.” But that was 20 years ago, long before Cruickshank arrived to turn everything upside down. And now the woman he mentored, Graham, stares at the front-page mock-up on the screen. Her long strand of pearls mingles with the reading glasses hanging around her neck, her chin resting on the chair back in front of her. She tosses in her opinion, but the meeting is a free-for-all. Bolan is MIA but might have a great story. Mulgrew’s piece is coming together. Norman Spector rants about Belinda Stronach on the radio – will people be interested? The aerial shot of the gigantic house is still up in the air. Will it be income trusts or the dogs that won’t rescue? What about art for the dogs? They need a dog icon for people under 50. “Benji,” Graham throws in. “He’s, like, 20 years old,” comes a reply. “Why don’t we just go with Old Yeller?” LaPointe quips. Graham laughs as the meeting adjourns.

Less than 10 blocks away, through the double glass doors of the Sun Tower building at the corner of Pender and Abbott streets, the Tyee’s office is nestled on the first floor. The 17-storey building is known for its grand tower and faux-copper roofing, as well as its media legacy. The tower was originally built for the Vancouver World daily in the early 20th century, and later bought by the Sun. To reach his editorial team, Beers need only exit his adjacent office and take a few steps to the table. The others swivel in their chairs inside the small office, which was once occupied by employees of the Sun.

Beers stands in front of a whiteboard that covers an entire wall. He’s holding a fluorescent pink Post-it note in one hand, glancing over his shoulder at managing editor Vanessa Richmond and newly-appointed senior editor Richard Warnica. They all agree and Beers puts the Post-it back up on the board. Another editorial decision made. The Post-its represent stories and their line-up placement in the weeks and months ahead. The only problem with this is having too many stories and not enough days of the week for all the yellow, pink and blue Postits. In addition to paying its staff of eight, the Tyee has enough funding to publish four new stories each weekday, which creates a backlog. Beers sits casually at his cluttered desk in the adjoining office he shares with business director Michelle Hoar. The WestCoast News section of the Sun lays folded in half next to him; Daryl Duke, who founded the once independent television station ckvu in the 1970s, is eulogized on the front page. Ask Beers about San Francisco, ask him about Mother Jones, ask him about his work on Mix, and he’s unhurried, comfortable and confident. But ask him about his public criticisms of the Sun and he’ll sigh. He fired a recent shot in a 2006 volume of Canadian Journal of Education, where he referred to CanWest’s consolidation of “the conservative, pro-business, pro-Israel editorial perspective of their new media empire.” Half-heartedly, he’ll go into the standard argument that concentrated media ownership isn’t healthy for democracy, but no further. Instead, he’ll look bored. He’ll become more irritated with every question. A 2003 Vancouvermagazine piece about the Tyee noted that Beers had become “the daily’s own personal scourge, decrying what he sees as the gradual hollowing-out of local journalism.” It’s a reputation he still holds, albeit grudgingly. “I want to talk about the Tyee and you want me to criticize the Sun,” he says, bothered by the direction of the conversation. He won’t take the bait. “I just don’t want to do it anymore. I’m done with that.”

While his animus for the Sun has been replaced by enthusiasm for the Tyee, the vehemence of his criticism remains fixed in the minds of readers. He’s been pegged an unofficial mouthpiece of an anti-Sun movement by some, and it upsets him. “The Tyee is actually a conscious attempt,” he says, “to not become a whiny curmudgeon constantly critical of my last employer.” Banishing the ghost of the Sun from the offices of the Tyee is a start, but it’ll take more time for Tyee to replace Sun as the word most associated with Beers. It doesn’t help that when you search the Tyee for “Vancouver Sun,” there’s no shortage of pieces specifically critical of the paper. A couple of these stories Graham admits came from tips leaked out of her newsroom – such as an internal staff memo from Pacific Newspaper Group president Dennis Skulsky that ended up in the Tyee’s Mediacheck column.

“My sense of David at the time,” Graham says, “was that everything about the Sun was wrong.” She says he was a “solid” editor and “lovely” writer, but that after leaving he became obsessed with criticizing the paper. “It’s not about the content – that’s healthy. But his axe to grind was more ‘I was supposed to do this and I couldn’t.’ And ‘I was fired.’ And ‘Patricia did this.’ That’s personal shit. Drop it. Leave it alone.”

As if responding to Graham’s friendly advice, Beers now distances himself from his critiques. He is not blind to all the good work being published at the Sun. “They seem to be filing all kinds of Freedom of Information requests, they do some digging, they break lots of stories,” he says. “But there’s room to round out the public conversation and the reporting.” He leans back. Now he’s in the editor’s chair, open to criticism of his new venture.

There’s been some. The B.C. Federation of Labour has been a Tyee financial contributor from the outset – providing 27 per cent of start-up costs and now about 12 per cent of operating costs – raising the issue of prounion bias. Beers sucks air at the question. “Everyone knows all about that,” he says, referring to early concerns that the B.C. Feds were using the Tyee as a union mouthpiece. “If it reads like a union rag, come to my house, take me out back and put a bullet in my head,” was his response. He says the other original investors still insist on anonymity, but he’ll discuss his new source of funding. Earlier this year, Eric Peterson, president and benefactor of the Quadra Island-based Tula Foundation announced he would put financial support behind the Tyee and Geist, the Vancouver-based ideas and culture magazine.

With its small team, the Tyee produces a collection of news and views, from lifestyle writing and reviews to media criticism and columns. But Beers is more ambitious than that, saying, “We’re here to change what we saw as a faulty dynamic in the media.” To do that, the Tyee runs investigative stories and extended series – including four-parters on welfare in B.C., the outsourcing of B.C.’s jobs and B.C.’s oil and gas boom. Reporter Chris Tenove was an early contributor to the site, and earned a Jack Webster Award nomination for his community reporting. The best example of the Tyee as springboard is Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon’s 100-Mile Diet series. The 14 stories that originated with the Tyee in June 2005 popularized the concept of eating only what is produced within 100 miles, and led to a Random House book deal.

In 2005, the Tyee announced two charitable funds aimed at promoting citizen-funded investigative and solutions-oriented journalism. The fundraising goal was $15,000 (which a charitable foundation called Endswell agreed to match), but it pulled in more than $21,000, mainly in $100 and $200 chunks for an unexpected total of $36,000. The money was channelled through an outside foundation, and Beers set up an independent panel of judges to evaluate proposals and choose four winners of $5,000 fellowships. The remaining money is held in reserve to help ensure the continuation of the program. The first result, online since August 2006, was Chris Wood’s in-depth series on the effects of global warming in B.C. Other topics covered include mining issues, public transit and First Nations and non-Native reconciliation, all with a B.C. focus.

Initiatives like these increase awareness, yet the Tyee’s growing readership numbers remain modest. The site sees more than 150,000 unique visitors per month; in contrast, the Sun’s saw 529,000 in November 2006. Charles Campbell believes the numbers don’t tell the real story, which is that big corporate institutions don’t look to the Internet for innovation. “Existing media,” he says, “had these placeholders on the Internet, but they were built to protect their own market. What’s lagged in all of this is local, local, local.”

Localizing is part of the plan to bring control of the Sun’s website – currently managed from CanWest Interactive in Toronto – back to the newsroom. LaPointe, who spearheads the reorganization effort, notes the importance of the canada.com network and is cautious about using an overly local approach. “There is a real hazard in the sense of your own local look and feel,” he says. “The way the network has been built up has created a pretty good source of revenue.” While aware of criticisms of the classified-driven, cookie-cutter designed network platform that uses contests to draw visitors, he points out, “Everyone who crows about its look and feel would be delighted to have its traffic and its revenue.” Graham is certainly aware of the Sun’s online limitations. “The digital revolution is well upon us and we’re falling behind,” she told staff. “We have a long way to go to catch up.”

Since their clash seven years ago, Graham and Beers both have pushed for better local news coverage. Beers, who once referred to Graham as a “cagey corporate participant,” no longer has time for criticizing the Sun or continuing the battle he helped foster. Graham, who says Beers “became an expert on the Sun after a very short period of time there,” pushes her paper to catch up to the online world. As the Sun struggles to define local perspective on the web, the Tyee has B.C. written all over it. As Graham worked her way to the top, Beers started over from scratch. Cruickshank may have been right, ultimately, that conflict promotes a motivating environment – his theory explains Vancouver’s current news scene fairly well.

In April 2005, for example, the Tyee added a blog, Election Central, to cover provincial and federal elections from a B.C. perspective. A week into the campaign, the site broke a story about municipalities in B.C. donating tax money to the Liberal Party. The story, dubbed “Donate-Gate,” ran on a Monday. Through the working week, major outlets including the Province, CBC and the Sun jumped on it. By Friday, in his influential column, Vaughn Palmer called for an auditor general’s investigation into the donations.

This is perfect, says Beers, because all the various outlets played their roles in digging up a story. “It’s doubtful that a corporation that itself donates $30,000 to the Liberals is going to send its reporters after a donation scandal story, looking for one,” he says, admitting journalists from both the Sun and the Province added important elements to the story.

“You’ve got this tiny launching pad,” Beers says of his creation, “yet things can go anywhere. The Tyee is not David with his middle finger raised to Goliath all day.”

To you, I’m fluff. I kill time in doctors’ waiting rooms. I’m the magazine your grandmother subscribes to. No one can remember a time when I wasn’t here. You probably don’t know anything about me, but people trust me. Every month I show up in nearly a million mailboxes. I’m read by eight and a half million Canadians. I’m our country’s most profitable magazine. I’m Reader’s Digest Canada.

Back in my heyday, my bylines belonged to journalism hotshots, presidents and Nobel Prize winners. I broke stories on AIDS before most other magazines dared to publish them. Through war, poverty and plagues, I told people that the world is not only a pretty good place, but can be made better, that life is what you make it, that laughter is the best medicine.

I’ve had access to celebrities, to politicians, to the Dalai Lama, to Donald Trump. Advertising giants have been seduced by my impressive consumer database, the biggest in the world. I’ve worked with the FBI, RCMP and Interpol for crime stories – my World’s Most Wanted feature even helped catch a murderer.

For nearly 60 years I’ve been unchallenged as the most-read, most-trusted name in Canada. But the pace of the world has quickened and being with-it got harder. Writing evolved and humour darkened, while I’ve stayed pretty much the same. More than half my readers are younger than 50, yet my sewing-circle reputation precedes me.

Lately I’ve felt the years creep up on me. I’ve treated myself to a few minor nips and tucks – I finally got that unsightly index-on-cover removed – but I must admit I’m no longer the fresh young publication I once was. In the industry nowadays, my name surfaces only when Print Measurement Bureau statistics come out, because I’m always No. 1. That’s still true, even though I’ve lost 20 per cent of my readership over the past decade.

I have to admit, my journalists’ words are rarely read by other journalists. I seem to have developed a bad reputation with the literati. I’m criticized for deflating the articles I reprint, stripping them of colour and style, theory and philosophy. CBC once defined “brain-dead” as “someone who enjoys Reader’s Digest.” Marshall McLuhan called me a “straightjacket” for independent thought, while both Ronald Reagan and Homer Simpson once called me their favourite magazine. “It’s like admitting you like Dan Brown,” says Peter Carter, editor of Today’s Trucking. “You just don’t want people to know.”

You may think you know me, but think again. The time has come to stamp out the stereotypes that keep me on the bottom shelf with the crossword puzzles. A lot has happened while you weren’t looking, such as the arrival of our hero, editor-in-chief Peter Stockland, in 2004. When he was editor-in-chief of The Gazette in Montreal, Peter gave the paper’s reputation a breath of life. For years they boasted that they sold “The English language. Daily” to Montrealers, but Peter decided the motto had outlived its usefulness and alienated the city’s Allophones. He updated the philosophy with a new slogan: “The Gazette is Montreal.” The broadsheet started to look vibrant again, so our hero looked for a new challenge. That’s when he heard my cry for help.

Peter gave it to me straight. “The Digest has itself to blame for its reputation,” he said. “It’s not a magazine that wants to rock the boat.” But rock the boat he has, and in the three years since our saviour stepped in, I’ve started to get noticed again. Peter’s plan to develop longer, more culturally engaging features, to bring long-form journalism back to the brand made famous by shortening articles, might work. I let a reprint of a Walrus magazine article run 21 RD pages at nearly 5,000 words because it was simply “too good to cut.” I published an exclusive with the Prime Minister after he had turned his back on members of the Parliamentary Press Gallery. I started exploring less-safe topics such as genocide in Darfur, Internet pedophilia and medicinal marijuana. Peter even has been trying to convince Canada’s top magazine writers to work for me.

Yet somehow I can’t shake the fear that I will never be recognized as a writer’s magazine. Just look at my name – I am the “reader’s” digest. My product is information, not ideas. I prefer fact over flair, practicality before personality. I tend to flatten copy with my relentless optimism, curtailing literary devices – bells and whistles, all of them. I look for the anecdote or the relatable character. “We’ve got to have faces and laughter and tears,” Peter says. “Heroes are a staple of Digest stories.”

When I tackle issues, I tend to play it safe by sticking to the unlikely-hero-overcomes-obstacles formula, such as last October’s feature – “The Greater Goal: Out of Sierra Leone’s civil war comes a unique soccer league that fosters hope.” I sell a better way of life. I see things in black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. I mass-produce hope. An article from 2005 says it all: “Gettin’ Better All the Time: Is the world really going to hell in a handbasket? Actually, no.”

But my latest problem has no easy solution. Our hero sums up the growing crisis only too well: “Readers started at a particular point in their lives and have been loyal for many, many, many, many years,” Peter says. “We have to be concerned that the group coming after them isn’t going to start. When that happens, it’s the end.”

Dewitt “Wally” Wallace, a college dropout who didn’t much like to read, dreamed up the original RD, my American older brother, during the First World War. He conceived it as a pocket-sized publication – the bane of today’s art directors. The Little Aristocrat, which was the working name of the magazine before the first issue, promised to condense articles “of lasting interest” from the most important books and magazines. These days Peter calls me a “content aggregation company,” but back then my role was to amass information editors thought people should know, for those who didn’t have the interest, education or attention span to find it elsewhere. Inspired by Henry Ford – the “dreamer and worker” appeared in the first issue in 1922 – Americans eagerly devoured Wally’s neat and tidy approach to life. Henry made cars anyone could drive and Wally made literature anyone could read. The reader would learn a little about a lot – how M&M’s are made, what it feels like to be shot, the numerous uses of sand. I made money during the Depression when people were willing to shell out for a bit of hope. When a paper shortage caused by the Second World War made magazines a highbrow luxury, my subscription list actually grew. Some claim Wally found “the journalistic philosopher’s stone,” a way to hold the interest of a diverse, faithful and enormous readership. I’m a household name, known worldwide for my sunny-side-up outlook and water cooler tidbits. “When we’re talking influence, there is no competitor,” the book The Condensed World of the Reader’s Digest said of my family. “[It] makes all the others look like a rose petal being dropped down a canyon, waiting for an echo.”

The 1940s were a busy time for Pop. The RD empire Wally and his wife Lila had built over the previous 20 years in Pleasantville, N.Y. had become hugely profitable. My big brother had outgrown his pony shed, so Wally and Lila moved him to Chappaqua, N.Y. Yet even today – 68 years after the big move – the flagship has kept the more optimistic mailing address.

When Wally built the next office – a mansion – Lila requested a bell tower flanked by great, winged horses. She loved the myth that a stamp from Pegasus’s hoof inspires men to write. Wally’s gaze shifted to the rapidly expanding Canadian market, hungering to get a piece of those virgin advertising dollars while respecting our country’s local content quotas. Wally discovered he could save a lot of time and money if he wasn’t physically involved in the production of his new baby.

I was born in 1948, before television and rock ‘n’ roll hit the scene. I’m a baby boomer and only a small part of a giant empire that pumps out books, magazines, gifts, music and videos. Like the rest of my family, I take after my big brother – I’m identical in size, politics and philosophy (work hard and you can achieve anything). I look just like my 50 foreign siblings and together we deliver hope in 21 languages. We sit politely on shelves, quietly trumpeting our determined viewpoint to 100 million minds across 61 countries.

During my first few decades, I thrived on hand-me-down content. Called adaptations, a writer takes the original article along with strict, specific instructions to update it, keeping a similar tone, voice and theme. In other words, telling the same story with Canadian sources counted as Canadian content. I was a loophole. Adaptations are still common RD practice, although lately I haven’t been borrowing as much from the communal editorial pool. But some stories – like the U.S. edition’s high- profile Condoleezza Rice interview, or the unpublished Steve Irwin article (written four years before he died) from RD Australia, which appeared in my December issue last year – have been too good to pass up.

The RD team makes these decisions in an office building in downtown Montreal – my home. You probably think I seem out of place in this trendy, liberal city. I live here – commanding nearly four floors of slick black highrise – because my Québécois sister, Sélection du Reader’s Digest, was born here in 1947. Sélection and I bunk with the newest member of the Digest family, Our Canada. Three years old and already breaking readership records, she consists almost entirely of reader-submitted (and highly edited) photos and articles. Peter is her editor-in-chief too. We all share art, research and PR departments.

And now I have a new owner. Ripplewood Holdings, a private equity firm, bought my good name for $1.6 billion last November. It’s too early for Peter to make any predictions about how it will affect me, but any future changes will “depend on who’s left wearing the big hat.” Now that we’re private we don’t have to answer to shareholders, which means, more than ever, I can afford to take risks.

After 25 years of being a “diehard newspaper man,” Peter Stockland left the broadsheet world for a magazine typically associated with blue-haired bridge players. “I’ve worked places where people got into fistfights in the newsroom,” he says. “At the Digest, there isn’t any of that.” One writer describes him as an “old-school news editor,” a guy’s guy who thinks and speaks in anecdotes. His politics are famously right-leaning: his appointment as editorial page editor propelled the Calgary Herald’s swing in that direction. His columns have upset gays and praised America. One even set off a long feud with French-Canadians. He wrote that their culture was a “hoax,” a position that haunted him right to his post at the Gazette and pressured his family to think about relocating for a while.

As controversy from his mudslinging columnist days fades, so does Stockland’s interest in the “red-team/blue-team” politics he was enmeshed in. “The Digest is not one of those yelling, yammering voices that shouts all kinds of provocative things to get your blood boiling,” he says. “I’ve grown tired of that stuff.” The careful observer can still catch slices of a muzzled press-club humour – using dirty humour (an excellent magazine piece defined as “one where you’re sitting with your pants at your ankles until you’re finished”) or quoting a raunchy old Steely Dan lyric (“Show biz kids making movies of themselves”), allowing the rest of the song’s chorus (“You know they don’t give a fuck about anyone else”) to hang in the air. He says there’s “a kind of expected, hard-bitten cynicism” in newspapers, something he can’t get away with at RD. He is no dictator and there is no hierarchy. The editor-in-chief’s door stays propped open and “straight talker” is how employees describe him. “He’ll be pretty sure what direction a story should take,” editor-at-large Bonnie Munday says, “but he’s open to you not agreeing.”

Stockland has learned to speak softly, but he’s still adjusting to RD’s infamously long lead times. The December issue enters fact-checking in the summer, and some stories can take a year to turn over. “I’m impatient,” he confesses. “There’s a sense of urgency, of ‘nowness’ in newspapers that doesn’t work in magazines.” But he’s happy to leave behind the ephemera of daily journalism to create something more lasting. “It was a chance to help shape a magazine in the course of reinventing itself,” he says, rhyming off the three R’s of rejuvenation: Reshape, Renew, Relaunch. “We’re trying to produce a product that appeals to younger generations, but not because we want to be hip – the last thing we want to be is the guy with the bad suit, comb-over and sports car.”

Slides flicker across Stockland’s face as he charges through his sales pitch. He’s wearing a suit, he’s friendly and he dazzles his audience with his PowerPoint presentation, clicking through a surprisingly edgy collection of RD stories. It’s autumn 2005, and at the Toronto stop of his cross-country recruitment tour, eight prominent writers and editors have gathered in a boardroom.

Click: Margaret Wente’s article, “Seven Things You Can’t Say in Canada,” which included her skepticism of scientist David Suzuki, blue-bin bashing and a particularly strong loathing for Margaret Atwood.

Click: “What Canadians Want,” which investigated the benefits of private healthcare.

Click: “The bottom line.”

Click: “The opportunity to write for the most-read magazine in Canada.”

Click: “The choice is yours.”

The last slide soothes any lingering doubts in the writers’ minds: when pay starts at around a buck seventy-five a word – and can double and then some – it’s hard to say no. Stockland goes around the table asking, “Do you read the magazine?”

“No, not very often.”

“Why?” he asks, just as he will in Vancouver, in Calgary, in Halifax. “What do we need to do to make it the kind of magazine that you as an intelligent, articulate person working in this craft would want not only to write for, but to read?”

Writers are blinded by the simplistic formula and don’t see the tough, well-researched story underneath. “We call them ‘heart pieces,'” production editor and head of research Richard Swain explains. “They’re the stories that really grab you.” The average reader doesn’t care who wrote what as long as the information is useful or interesting to him. Where else could Tom Hawthorn publish a story about a defunct roller-coaster? What other magazine would send David Hayes to the U.S. to explore the intricacies of professional dog dancing? Stockland calls these stories the “little gems” that can be published in what has almost become the last general interest magazine in Canada.

But there’s a price attached to the eclecticism – writers sign away their worldwide reprint, periodical and adaptation rights in exchange for access to the world’s nooks and crannies. For that privilege, they often remain faceless, their words read across the planet with no one caring to look at the byline. The magazine does enjoy an odd sort of prestige, though. Cynthia Brouse, a “fairly sporadic writer for big mags,” echoes other writers when she says, “It wasn’t until I was published in RD that my family read my work.”

Before Stockland arrived, RD had been dismissed by the industry it dominated. Then, in June 2006, it printed the story that had been sealed off from Ottawa reporters. The feud between the Parliamentary Press Gallery and the Prime Minister’s Office had turned into a pseudo-strike. Chris Guly, an Ottawa writer, approached the PMO with a few magazine names, all of which were turned down. The PMO offered a compromise: “We’d consider Reader’s Digest.” Stockland, who has known the PM since Stephen Harper was a young man in the former Reform Party of Canada, jumped at the opportunity to do the interview with Guly. “It was quite a coup,” Guly admits. For once, everyone was talking about RD.

Criticism was mixed with envy. Some scoffed at the interviewers’ softball questions, and any that did have substance the PM easily swerved around. “We didn’t hold back in the questions we asked,” Guly says. “Peter called him ‘Steve,'” he adds, explaining that the PM “was quite forthcoming, more than we expected.” The 15-minute timeslot grew to 35 minutes.

The PMO’s decision to use RD was a “nobrainer,” Guly says, designed to reach as many people as possible. “We’re trustworthy,” Stockland adds. “We wouldn’t come at them with an axe.”

Like the Jimmy Buffet quote once published in RD – “It takes no more time to see the good side of life than to see the bad” – the magazine brought its glass-half-full approach to the story, combining a magazine-style look at the PM as a “real guy” with a just-the-facts examination of his policies. Instead of what or why, it was interested in how – how Harper runs the office, how he sees the position, how his control-freak nature is more like Bill Clinton than George W. Bush. The cover boasted, “RDAsks, Stephen Harper Answers,” yet the display copy blew kisses, “Man With a Plan: The Prime Minister is fearless, committed – and having the time of his life.” The PMO, pleased with the result, kept a stack of the August issue around for Harper to autograph. Guly saw copies while in a hospital waiting room. Stockland saw a copy turned around at a grocery store checkout, hiding Harper’s face on the cover. Now this is more like it, Stockland thought. “We’re not the biggest little magazine in the country,” he brags. “We’re the biggest, period.”

The biggest, but shrinking. The editor-inchief’s task is to bring new readers into the fold. To do this, Stockland decided to make the magazine more relevant to Canadians. Aside from the magazine’s logo sprouting a maple leaf, he increased production of original work. Upon his arrival, other publications took credit for as much as 60 per cent of RD’s feature content, but now at least 70 per cent of every issue is Canadian. In fact, numerous homegrown articles are now being “repurposed” for foreign editions – especially Australian and Asian ones. Stockland says this is “because we’re printing original, well-written pieces.” Robert Goyette, editor-in-chief of Sélection, says it’s because other issues want distinctly Canadian content, joking “it’s because we’re not American.” All this new activity originates from the ninth floor of a skyscraper in downtown Montreal.

The inner hive of RD’s offices confuses outsiders. The building has a strange octagonal shape, so offices are slightly misshapen. Tables are covered with copies of RD or bowls of caramels – just like at grandma’s. Weekly assignment meetings take place in a glass boardroom, where the team rates story ideas. The editors get a lot of pitches, but not a lot of writers get RD. “You have to write the articlelite version,” says writer Susan McClelland about pitches. Munday tells potential writers to show her they can write a RD-style lede. She wants an outline of the narrative arc, to know about any “access to special documents,” and the tone and themes of the proposed story. “If they’re passionate enough,” she says, “they’ll do that.”

The team grades queries using its own bureaucratic ranking system. One in 10will be workable, and even then the writer is often asked to do more research, expand the idea and then repitch. The editorial team also reads more than 100 publications for possible reprints. Swain says he grades the published stories – P for possible, U for usable, X or NU for not usable – which then go up the editorial ladder. Those marked “P” must be approved by Stockland.

“It’s a pretty hard formula to crack,” writer and editor Carter says. “It’s not exactly a walk in the park.” He’s one of many who have tried, and failed, to get their stories in. “When I write for the Digest,” says freelance writer Chris Wood, “I’m more concerned to be clear and concise, and not to waste any time. There’s not as much spatial latitude for writing as in other publications.”

RD prints four or five times as many articles as most other magazines. In addition to a sponsor editor, each writer’s copy passes through many hands on its way to fact-checking. From first draft to final copy, up to eight editors – each with detailed ideas about tone, structure and voice – tinker with articles. Critics say the groupthink wipes copy clean of colour, style and any other fingerprints that might identify an author; but then, the writers are paid well for enduring the three-draft requirement and rigorous fact-checking. “Instead of relying on one or two people’s knowledge,” Swain says, “we bring more experience to the table.” To maintain consistency, every word goes through this internal assembly line, dubbed “Murderer’s Row” by grieving writers. The cut-first, finesse-later process is thoroughly entrenched, having been perfected over many years. Copy will be sacrificed to accommodate the cute anecdote, ironic cartoon or inspiring quote that runs at the end of each story. Robert Collins – whose memoir, Who He?, examined his 15 years as an RD editor – compares the mandatory cuts to a shrunken head: “interesting for strangers but not much fun for the owner.”

Writers’ work faces another intense test when running the RD’s fact-checking gauntlet. This can be excruciating for those who, after sweating, stressing and straining over the surgery performed on their sentences in editing, have to watch them die in post-op. The research department demands up to five months to meticulously pore over details of a story – on average, they check more than 12,000 facts per issue, about one for every three words. Writers complain the nitpicking is overkill and changes copy too easily. Life’s Like That at RD – as one American editor cracked, “Well, the Bible was written by a committee.”

The anal-retentive attention to detail is part of what makes the magazine the most-trusted media brand in the world, its guardians claim. In keeping with this “unfailing dedication to accuracy,” errors have even been found in reprinted stories. One regular contributor, Ann Mullens, wrote an anecdote where she had been blown out into Georgian Bay and spent four hours hanging onto a buoy, singing until she was rescued. The RD fact-checker said: “nice opening, but who can vouch for your story?” She had to find the man who had saved her 25 years earlier. “As a writer, you never slip at RD,” Mullens says, “and I find it makes me strive to be better and better.”

Even the reader-submitted anecdotes are fact-checked for accuracy. One too many rejected “Life’s Like That” jokes elicited this lament from one online reviewer: “I guess I will have to climb a mountain, get trapped in an avalanche and chew my arm off to get in RD.”

The challenge,” our hero Peter says, “is to blend in material that reaches out to people who maybe don’t feel we’re for them, while at the same time safeguarding our base.”

Last spring, Hawthorn’s “Boys in High Places: haven’t seen Trailer Park Boys? Where the #&*% have you been?!” created a stir with my readers. They wrote of their surprise, their gratitude, their anger that I would “sink so low.” I don’t swear that often, it’s true, but these stories are my favourite type of gamble – virtually risk-free.

I reprinted a 6,500-word feature from the New York Times Magazine last year, originally titled, “What Will Become of Africa’s aids Orphans?” The story was so unlike me, so dark. It followed author Melissa Fay Greene to impoverished shelters where children go to die. Greene concluded with her adoption of Helen, a healthy 5-year-old girl. When I told the story – which I renamed “A Home for Helen” – I didn’t change the writer’s words per se, but I did cut out about 85 per cent of the 6,500-word story. Where Greene’s piece started low and hit the reader with statistic after statistic of despair, my version starts and ends on an up-note, only briefly lingering on the hopeless. I don’t avoid the issue; I rearrange it. I tell it through Helen who, thanks to Greene, has a bright future.

For every problem, I have a solution. I sprinkle every story with a sugary coating of the good-in-us-all to make the scary stuff easier to digest. Publishing a controversial article is much safer when you bubble-wrap it with stories like “Toronto’s Very Odd Elephant,” which, although published this past January, could have been lifted directly from my 1966 cover, “The Lobster: Oddball of the Ocean.”

Every issue strives for a balance of story selection, which is why I’m the most-read magazine in nearly every demographic, not just your grandmother’s. I’m No. 1 among professionals, young families and high income households. I reach more university-educated readers than any other. I have 852,000 teenage readers.

I eliminate the need for niche magazines – I’m an all-in-one gardening, women’s, hobby, cooking, decorating, health, parenting, finance and advice magazine, as well as chicken soup for the soul. Even after my facelift, at my core I’m the same old RD. “We’re never really new and improved,” says my publisher Larry Thomas. “It’s not a revolution, it’s an evolution.”

Peter’s challenge is to make me better, and he’s finding the writers to do just that. Once they’ve mastered my formulaic narratives, even my group edit won’t be able to digest their words beyond recognition. Peggy Wente, Bill Richardson, Scott Feschuk and Rick Mercer all have managed. I tolerate their literary devices. Their humour and opinion are hardly tainted by my enthusiasm for the bright side of life.

I always get picked on, it’s true, but I guess I’m an easy target. If you’re interested in a magazine of ideas, are you going to give a second thought to a mini-mag that’s the size of a toy?

But I know our hero is set to change all that. He’s succeeding, isn’t he? I do hope it’s not too late.

One September evening during my last year of high school, I went up to my room with a pack of stickies in one hand and Maclean’s Guide to Canadian Universities 2002 in the other. Like thousands of other 16-year-olds, I needed advice on my educational future. No one knew more about Canadian universities, it seemed, than Maclean’s.

Before long, I had attached stickies to the profiles of every school offering a journalism program. The Guide provided me with minimum entering grades, male-female ratios, hot hangouts and the most popular profs. I learned that Ryerson had a central location, a well-priced café and its own outdoor skating rink called Lake Devo. I also learned that it ranked 19th out of 21 primarily undergraduate universities nationwide.

Whatever.

Stats sell, as every editor knows. Poll results make great headlines. Charts and graphs package numbers in a grabby way. And then there are rankings, which present data in a simple, seductive package that’s uniquely appealing – and problematic. Rankings seem to offer a terrific service: Everyone wants to go to the best university – or the best hospital – and no one wants to try the worst. Thus, Canadian Family ranks the “coolest cities for families,” Chart the best Canadian songs and albums, Report on Business the CEOs of the year, Canadian Business our richest citizens and best boards, Score Golf the top 100 golf courses and Reader’s Digest the world’s most courteous cities.

But few – if any – publications in Canada have tried to rank anything using as much data as the Maclean’s annual university issue. Or invested more editorial resources and more careful planning in a rankings project. Or won so much success in attracting top-level collaborators – until now. In 2006, 26 of Canada’s 47 universities pulled out of the Maclean’s rankings and quit supplying it with crucial data. The magazine isn’t giving up on its brilliantly popular franchise, but the case raises the question: If this much care and effort can’t produce rankings so authoritative that they command universal respect, is there something wrong with the rankings idea itself?

Leaning back in his office chair, University of Toronto president David Naylor allows his eyes to wander. They take in a black shoulder bag bursting with paperwork, a U of T coffee mug on a U of T coaster and, outside the window, students crossing King’s College Circle on their way to Tuesday’s 10 a.m. class. He answers questions only after moments of silence and then speaks in the composed tones of a scholar. I’ve asked him to remember what spurred him into action against Maclean’s.

“One of the ‘a-ha’ moments,” he says finally, “was when Ann Dowsett Johnston called to advise that U of T and McGill were tied for No. 1.”

The call from the editor who was then in charge of Maclean’s universities project came shortly after Naylor’s installation as president in October 2005. As dean of medicine, he says, he had paid no attention to the magazine’s “superficial look at the institutions and indicators.” He just laughs when I ask if he consulted Maclean’s during his daughter’s hunt for a university.

But as U of T’s leader, he came upon a file filled with complaints from various experts and university administrators about Maclean’s methodology. Naylor quickly concurred with his predecessors: Canada’s universities were much too different to be compared with one another in a blunt ranking, and why continue using staff time to assemble the required 22 pages of data every summer for an exercise that many considered “oversimplified and arbitrary?” The magazine’s annual ranking, Naylor concluded, was “meaningless.” If so, it wasn’t for want of trying.

The 1991 inaugural issue of Maclean’s university rankings was the brainchild of two editors, each with a son close to graduating high school, who couldn’t find enough information on the average entering grades, student-faculty ratios or scholarships and bursaries at Canadian universities. Why not follow another weekly newsmagazine, U.S. News andWorld Report, with its hugely popular and then eight-year-old college issue? The resulting special issue of Maclean’s sold out across Canada within three days; it took weeks to arrange a second printing.

From the start, universities complained that Maclean’s data was hollow and its methodology flawed. Even the principal of McGill, whose school was ranked No. 1, called the technique “blunt.” Maclean’s was ready to listen, and for the next six months, two editors travelled across Canada to consult post-secondary education experts and groups. The heads of 44 universities agreed to answer a questionnaire weighing 15 different factors that could be used to assess a university.

The next year saw a new approach. There were now four distinct sets of data: numbers relating to the schools’ reputation, financial resources, the quality of the student body and of the faculty. (The list has since expanded to include indicators such as class size and library holdings.) And, instead of ranking the 46 schools in a single top-to-bottom list, Maclean’s ranked (as it has ever since) three separate categories: primarily undergraduate, comprehensive (for those offering a wider range of both undergraduate and graduate programs), and medical/doctoral universities.

Mel Elfin, founding editor of the U.S. News and World Report rankings, phoned Dowsett Johnston to congratulate her on the changes she’d spearheaded. But he also offered a warning. “Don’t publish your rankings every year,” he said. “Canada’s too small. There aren’t enough universities, and they’re all public. Nothing will ever change.” But instead of pulling back, Maclean’s expanded its universities project, even launching an annual book-form universities guide – including the rankings and much more – in 1996. (Dowsett Johnston left the magazine in December 2006 and is now vice-principal of development, alumni and university relations at McGill. She didn’t respond to interview requests.)

All those customers can’t be wrong. “Rankings probably get a lot of flak within the industry because they’re considered easy journalism, and flashy without having any real merit,” says Canadian Business editor Joe Chidley. “But some rankings provide a lot of information quickly. It’s a quick comparative of often complex issues – like universities, for instance.”

I see Chidley’s point the second I click the public accountability link on the University of Western Ontario’s website. After Western pulled out of the rankings, the school published data online similar to what it would have given Maclean’s. One document, a PDF file on average entering grades, retention rates and the like, is 55 pages long. Another, the 2006-07 operating budget, runs 80 pages and is flooded with complicated jargon, long sentences, graphs and figures that few 16-year-olds are likely to digest.

By contrast, a well-edited package of data can provide an easily-read public service for consumers – and satisfy mere human curiosity at the same time. In August 2006, Canadian Business Online staff scoured radio airtime and album and ticket sales to rank Canada’s five most powerful musicians. Céline Dion came in first. That same month, the magazine ranked our top actors, looking at four factors weighted equally: estimated earnings, press clippings, Google hit lists and TV mentions. The gold went to Jim Carrey.

Meatier rankings call for more research. To compile the September 2006ranking of Canada’s 40 best cities for business, CB writers studied unemployment and crime rates, average property taxes and electricity costs, travel costs and operating costs of doing business, including payroll and benefits data for 350 corporate office personnel in each city, including the winner, Quebec City.

Collecting solid data on universities may be even tougher than CB’s task. When Tony Keller was the editor of National Post Business (since rechristened Financial Post Business) he oversaw the FP500 ranking of Canada’s leading companies. He encountered little controversy over those rankings, which were based simply on revenue, as were Profit’s rankings of Canada’s top women entrepreneurs and fastest-growing companies. MoneySense ranks the Top 200 Canadian stocks by studying share price, net sales and market capitalization, among other numbers accessed from public databases. All that data is publicly available, and generally unquestioned.

But now, Keller is managing editor of special projects at Maclean’s and runs the biggest rankings game in town. One of his main complaints is a lack of verified data. “When you’re dealing with government or business, journalists are summarizing annual reports and quarterly reports that would add up to thousands and thousands of pages of documents,” Keller told me. “With higher education, Maclean’s is eking out a couple of numbers and those are all the numbers we can get. That’s all that exists in the public space.”

Nancy Reid has a 17-page resume and the personality that goes along with it. The former president of the Statistical Society of Canada, Reid is a tenured professor of statistics at the University of Toronto. Despite her unimpeachable credentials, I was nervous when approaching her to help me understand the statistical issues in compiling rankings – after all, her president had been a major player in the exodus from Maclean’s. But then again, her own school consistently sat atop the rankings and she doesn’t seem the type to tailor her views to anyone. Her answers were so quietly methodical that my tape recorder laboured to pick up the words.

When you combine measures for “a lot of different things that aren’t really comparable,” she says, the result is an overly-simplistic final number. “You can say a school is No. 1 and that doesn’t really mean the university is right for the student.” What most concerns her is its “instability.” Schools are ranked overall according to their scores in individual categories concerning more than 20 different areas of university life. That means a single small change in data for one category has the potential to significantly alter a university’s place in the overall ranking.

Reid forgets herself for a moment. She studies my copy of Maclean’s, which rests on her office coffee table, opened to the schools’ national reputational ranking and topped by the University of Alberta. “You hear a lot of good things about Alberta now,” Reid muses, flipping the page to the overall ranking for medical/doctoral schools. Alberta finished sixth. “Hmmm,” she says absently, her eyes on the page. “You’d think Alberta would have surpassed Western by now.” She catches herself, meets my eyes, and chuckles. “I guess that’s another worry, if you do what I just did – ‘Oh, gee, Alberta’s six and Western’s five, it should be the other way.’ If those rankings could change on the turn of a dime, like I said before, then it’s silly… silly to think like that.”

When Ann Dowsett Johnston told Naylor that U of T was tied at No. 1 in the medical doctoral category, Naylor asked her for the numerical scores behind the ranking, which Maclean’s doesn’t make public. She told him there was only a miniscule difference between U of T and McGill; in fact, they’d practically been tied for the past 14 years.

That, Naylor says, is what got him going. He says his first thought was: “If you were creating a ranking system based on history and reputation, you might glom it together in such a fashion as to more or less put a couple of the older institutions, both around 180 years old and well-reputed, in something of a dead heat. And if you didn’t do that, you might find that you didn’t get much cooperation from those institutions that could potentially swing others out of alignment with your magazine.”

As a renowned clinical epidemiologist, part of Naylor’s old job was to evaluate performance in hospitals. So Naylor pored over Maclean’s rankings with the eye of a scientist who’d been there and done that, but not that way. “I was really taken aback,” he says. “This system would fail the vast majority of tests that we would ever put on any system of institutional performance assessment. And yet here we were, as an institution, rubbing it in our hair as if it were highly meaningful.”

Naylor began talking with other presidents and says he found many who wanted out of “this prisoner’s dilemma in which we were all trapped.” Some schools had already toyed with the idea of dropping out of Maclean’s. Two had, but briefly: Carleton in 1994 and the University of Manitoba that same year and the next. They’d rejoined after accusations of sour grapes, but a united front would be different.

It’s not clear who actually spearheaded the boycott. The presidents of the universities of Calgary, Alberta and Lethbridge first considered dropping out in February 2006 after meeting with Maclean’s editors to discuss methodology. But it was last summer when those three, plus Naylor and seven others, agreed to write an open letter to Keller. Drafts went back and forth until August 14 – two weeks before the deadline to send data to Maclean’s – when they dropped the bomb. Copycats followed swiftly and within a month, the number of boycotters rose to 26 out of 47.

Among the top three schools in each of the three categories, U of T and Queen’s were the only opt-outs. Those remaining hardly waxed enthusiastic. A spokesperson for St. Francis Xavier refused to discuss the methodology with me. Gail Dinter-Gottlieb, president of Acadia University in Nova Scotia (third in the undergraduate category since 2002) told me straightforwardly that the rankings provided “publicity that we could never afford to pay for.” Acadia relies on its rank to attract the half of its student body that hail from central and western Canada and internationally.

Dinter-Gottlieb likens the situation to the mutually-assured-destruction premise of the Cold War. “Everyone is somewhat unhappy with the survey,” she says, “but nobody up until now has been so completely unhappy that they’d pull out.”

When news of the boycotts broke, Keller moved quickly to defuse rumours of the rankings’ demise. “The universities are my subjects, not my partners,” he told the Toronto Star. “We’re absolutely going to continue to publish our rankings. Look at all the publicity this has generated – this is fun!”

Keller says he did about 300 interviews during that time, all the while leading the team cobbling the ranking issue together. Three days after the open letter, Keller sent a letter to all 47 universities informing them that Maclean’s would continue the project, with three changes. First, each university’s actual score would be published, to cast light on the small differences between schools. Second, Maclean’s would launch a special issue focusing on graduate schools, professional schools and research, to counter complaints of excessive focus on undergraduate education.

Those changes will take effect this fall, but the third innovation was immediate: an online tool that produces customized tables with universities’ scores on five chosen indicators. Three days earlier, The Globe and Mail, in partnership with the Educational Policy Institute (EPI), had posted a similar tool on the Globe’s website. This personalized approach “is the future of ranking, absolutely,” says EPI’s Massimo Savino.

The advent of customized rankings will go some way toward addressing critics who find fault with the wide variety of variables that Maclean’s measures – up to 24 in all. In fact, Naylor, for one, sees that variety as a plus. “They do try to look at a broad range of institutional performance elements – that’s a strength,” he says. But it’s a strength that carries baggage. As the 11 presidents wrote in their open letter, there’s danger in aggregating data from large, varied institutions. A hospital ranked No. 1 in obstetrics and No. 10 in cancer care would be averaged and ranked No. 5 overall, they wrote. “For a patient seeking care in one of these areas, such a measure would be useless at best and misleading at worst.”

The only way to compile wide-ranging numbers into a single ranking is to give each factor its own value when crunching the data. This process is called weighting, and it’s one of the most controversial aspects of the Maclean’s method. A school’s reputation among respondents to a poll of educators and opinion-makers is worth 16 per cent of the final grade, compared with 11 per cent for the average entering grade of the student. In the 2006 edition, Alberta placed first in the reputation survey, but sixth overall in the medical doctoral category because it finished mostly in the middle of the pack for 23 other indicators. Guelph, however, finished eighth in the reputation survey but first in its category, after lurking close to the top for most other indicators, including class size, faculty credentials and finances. “That’s where it becomes totally subjective,” says Jamie Mackay, vice-president of policy and analysis at the Council of Ontario Universities. “If you adjust the weights, you might well get a different ranking.”

Last year, for instance, Queen’s finished second in its category in Maclean’s, but 176th in the United Kingdom’s Times Higher Education Supplement ranking of the world’s best 200 institutions – well behind other, larger Canadian schools. That’s because the smaller Kingston school has the high entrance grades, reputation and financial base that Maclean’s emphasizes, but a comparatively low research output. It didn’t even make Newsweek’s ranking of the top 100 global universities.

Reid, on the other hand, doesn’t quarrel with the weighting system. “If Maclean’s is going to do this exercise,” the statistician told me, “they have to make some kind of decision. It looks fine to me. As long as they treat everyone equally and give breakdowns of the percentages, they’re doing the best they can.”

Some subjectivity is always going to be part of any rankings project, except one based on a single variable. Keller doesn’t deny that. But he dismisses as “specious” the presidents’ claim that while they object to the ranking exercise, they do want to be assessed and measured in a meaningful way. “No one else in society gets to say that,” he told me. The federal government, for instance, doesn’t say, “We don’t like the way the Globe covered our last budget, so we won’t be releasing a budget. It’s not because we’re opposed to releasing budgets, it’s just we don’t like what journalists do with the budget figures when we release them.”

Still, Keller felt he couldn’t produce a ranking that lacked data from 55 per cent of the subjects. In mid-September, Maclean’s filed requests for student data under provincial Freedom of Information laws. The results were patchy: New Brunswick’s universities aren’t covered by the province’s FOI law and other schools exercised their rights to delay release of data, forcing Maclean’s to use year-old numbers for about half of the boycotting schools.

University of Lethbridge president Bill Cade thinks this solution exposed rankings’ underbelly. “If it’s really a rigorous ranking exercise,” he told me, “then how can you lump together last year’s data for some schools and this year’s data for other schools?” Keller’s response to complaints is unapologetic: He made the most of the data he could get. “My job is to serve the reader,” he says. “It’s not to negotiate with universities.”

I was a few months into my first year at university when Maclean’s 2003 ranking issue hit newsstands. I flipped through it while waiting at Toronto’s Union Station. I had no reason to quarrel with my school’s scores and rank, but I had wanted to study journalism at a university in Canada’s biggest city, so my choice was made for me when I won admission. I had no regrets about my choice, but, reading the rankings issue endured as one of my annual rituals: I’d knowingly smile at Ryerson’s placing and drink up the gossip about the schools I could have gone to instead.

By then, the Maclean’s ranking had similarly established itself as an annual ritual on the newsstand. It is the magazine’s best-selling issue most years, moving between 30,000 and 35,000 single copies. It is, no question, the biggest and most accepted attempt to take the measure of post-secondary education in Canada, but not the only one. CB began reporting on MBA schools in 1992. It was forced to stop ranking the schools in 2002 when six of them boycotted the magazine. Today, to produce its MBA guide, CB writers travel across the country, visit each school and write individual profiles. The guide also contains statistics on tuition fees, enrollment and diversity of student body and faculty, among other numbers.

For Canadian Lawyer’s annual report on law schools, recent graduates grade their alma mater on such quality measures as curriculum, faculty, testing standards and facilities. Their answers are translated into points and, ultimately, letter grades.

The Globe takes a similar approach to its annual University Report Card. It surveys current university students on their experience and presents the results in the form of a letter grade. Categories include quality of teaching and career preparation, variety of courses, most satisfied students, residences and fitness and sports facilities. The Report Card ranked schools for the first two years, switching to letter grades in 2004 after universities complained. “We also thought that, looking at our own data, there sometimes wasn’t really much of a difference between, say, No. 1 and No. 12,” says Simon Beck, the paper’s special reports manager. The project was packaged as a 60-page glossy magazine for the first time in 2006.

The Globe’s report is based entirely on students’ scores in response to questions about library quality, interaction with faculty, food services and 19 pages of other queries. Selected students enrolled on StudentAwards.com, a financial aid website, can fill out the survey. Respondents totaled 32,700 in 2006, including at least 10 per cent of most of the schools’ student population. That’s a lot of data, but statistician Reid is worried by the sample’s lack of randomness. Students enrolled on a financial aid website don’t comprise a good cross-section. “If you sample them randomly,” Reid says, “you can get pretty good accuracy with a sample of this size. It’s not a sample-size issue, it’s a sample-quality issue.”

Random selection. Sample size. Data-set validity. Weighting. Aggregation. I’ve learned a lot about numbers and how to compare them since I set out on this exploration of what lies behind my annual rankings fix. Perhaps above all, I’ve learned I can trust comparisons of hard data more than easily manipulated grab bags of dollar figures, inventory numbers, opinion polls and other information. “The more you stray from ranking facts to ranking impressions and opinions, the more controversy you’re likely going to get about the rankings you’ve done,” says Chris Waddell, Carty Chair in business and financial journalism at Carleton. “It’s not somebody’s opinion how much profit Nortel made last year – you can find it in a document and it’s a dollars-and-cents figure. Whether you had a good university experience is not a quantifiable figure.”

And yet, I know who I am. I’ll probably go on peering at rankings and the accompanying tidbits long after I’ve graduated from whatever becomes my last school. And I’m not alone. “We’re not going to drive out rankings,” says George Kuh, founding director of the National Survey of Student Engagement. “It’s human nature. They’re fun reads and they’re easy to grasp.”

“It’s funny,” agrees Canadian Lawyer managing editor Kirsten McMahon, who has slaved over law school rankings for six years. “Rankings, they’re interesting, they’re fun, but whatever it may be – it could be a survey about anything – I’m going to take it with a grain of salt and do my own research.”

In its premiere issue almost four years ago, The Walrus magazine introduced a front section called Field Notes. Its purpose: to offer Canadian readers a peek into indigenous cultures abroad. In scientific circles, the term refers to the notes taken by scientists during or after their observations of the phenomena they are studying. These types of field notes are a description of events, interviews, beliefs and personal reactions to what the scientist sees around her. With this as a guiding premise, the Ryerson Review of Journalism decided to observe up close the comings and goings, the rituals and rivalries and the hunt for sustenance of what is in Canada, a strange publishing animal. What follows is the result of six months of close observation and investigation into this lumbering beast that, like its namesake, has been teetering on the edge of extinction for much of its life.

SIGHTING
Walrus editor Ken Alexander and the magazine’s new publisher Shelley Ambrose
LOCATION
Downtown Toronto, the inaugural “Wild and Wonderful Walrus Party”
DAY AND TIME
November 22, 2006, 7 p.m. to midnight

The din of conversation seldom lets up. At the centre of the crowded lobby of Toronto’s Isabel Bader Theatre is the wild (to some) and wonderful (to others) Ken Alexander, boss walrus. Unlike in the Arctic ice floes, where the dominant walrus displays the longest tusks – up to one metre – Alexander proves he is the boss by a human display of power: He and his herd, particularly the family foundation, have thus far been the prime source of funds for The Walrus. Charming and bright, wearing a pewter suit, he is, tonight, a striking contrast to the Alexander found in his offices. There, he is overworked, under-slept, eccentric and the object of much gossip, some of it bitter. Here, he is smooth and collected, the noble champion of Canada’s only mainstream, national magazine of long-form journalism devoted to ideas, culture and current affairs. He plays the part perfectly.

Glass of white wine in hand, Alexander’s voice booms as he speaks to an interchanging circle of people. Two lines manoeuvre slowly around him: one flows toward the huddle of velvet, lace and pressed shirts at the free wine table; the other moves away from it, leaving behind a trail of empty glasses and stained tablecloths. This is the first stage of the night’s three-part fundraiser. Later, inside the theatre, the 450 supporters, who each paid either $125 (subscribers to the magazine) or $150 (nonsubscribers) to be there, will see part two conclude with a public discussion on optimism by designer Bruce Mau and Alexander. Given the Walrus’s tumultuous past, it’s a word Alexander does well to know.

After an hour of mingling and an hour and a half of intellectual entertainment, the Wild and Wonderful Walrus Party moves around the corner to stage three: “fine food and dancing” at the Gardiner Museum, home to a collection of ceramics as fragile as the egos of many writers after encountering the wild Alexander. At the Gardiner, servers dressed like swanky hotdog vendors navigate the throng, handing out gourmet fries and onion rings in oily paper cones. It’s like a souped-up greasy spoon. No one is dancing. Alexander exchanges his glass of wine for a pint. Next to him is Shelley Ambrose, the magazine’s newly hired publisher and executive director of The Walrus Foundation, to which the modest $30,000 raised at this event will go. There are whispers throughout the magazine industry that she, if successful in her new dual role, could soon grow tusks long enough to vie for dominance.

Right now the two are friendly and animated as they speak to members of another ever-shifting circle that includes, at times, Walrus-ites such as Nora Underwood and Daniel Baird and freelancers such as Marci McDonald, who wrote the cover story for the magazine’s first issue, an award-winning 12,000-word investigative piece on the business dealings of then prime minister Paul Martin.

This is the first significant fundraising event the foundation has held since it won charitable status from the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) after a three-year struggle. At the time, the November 2005 success prompted much celebration. Finally, everybody hoped, the magazine could move forward and begin its long-desired appeal for funds from foundations and other interested parties. But what came instead was a year-long fundraising standstill, one that prompted many to criticize the foundation for wasting a year.

On this night, though, nobody wants to breach the camaraderie to dwell on the animosity that has plagued the Walrus and Alexander. This fundraiser, planned long before Ambrose signed on, is all about signalling to staff, contributors, supporters, potential supporters, suppliers and numerous others that it’s time to forget the past and move on to the next stage in the evolution of the Walrus.

But the story of how the magazine survived until now is just as compelling – perhaps more so – as the tale of where it’s going. The three years leading to this party were an incredible journey that would have felled a less determined species. But that struggle for survival, as remarkable as it is, also raises questions about the revolving door of staffers, freelancers and board members, the constant search for cash and the quest for charitable status that began before the first issue came out. The questions include: Why did so many people leave the Walrus? How exactly was the beast funded for three years without charitable status? How hard is it, really, to work for the Walrus? How, after being rejected more than once, did the Walrus finally win charitable status? What concessions did it make to satisfy the CRA – and are they nothing but a sham? Central to it all is the man who has been castigated so frequently: the Wild and Wonderful Ken Alexander.

To read the rest of this story, please see our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
It can be purchased online here.

It’s another warm, sunny day in late October 2006 and Alanna Mitchell is working in a tiny window-walled office that overlooks her porch in Toronto’s east end. She’s finishing an article for The Walrus, to be published in the winter, about the furious pace of climate change. A framed copy of the mock front page her colleagues gave her when she left The Globe and Mail hangs at the entryway, the headline like a benediction: “Think Globally, Act Globally – The Alanna Mitchell Story.” The strategic communications associate for the International Institute for Sustainable Development (IISD) is doing just that.

Mitchell loves working from home, but it took some adjustment. In 1990, as a new social trends reporter for the Globe, she covered science stories and eventually became the paper’s earth sciences reporter. Until two years ago, she split her time between her home office – neatly filled with science books, papers, childen’s art and work-related memorabilia – and her desk in the Globe newsroom. The routine worked for more than a decade and she reaped recognition. In 2000, Mitchell won the Reuters-iucn Global Media Award for excellence in environmental journalism for “A Special Report From the Vanishing Forests of Madagascar.” Her prize was a fellowship at the University of Oxford. A book deal – resulting in 2004’s Dancing at the Dead Sea: Tracking the World’s Environmental Hotspots – followed.

Despite the acclaim, the equilibrium at the Globe shifted for Mitchell. In July 2002, Edward Greenspon became editor-in-chief. He told staff he believed in beat reporting and he wanted to bring more in-depth coverage and investigative journalism to the paper. However, according to Mitchell, her new boss wasn’t convinced the science of climate change deserved regular coverage and by summer 2004, she says Greenspon had taken her aside and questioned the need for her to be on the earth sciences beat at all. “He told me that he thought I couldn’t write objectively on the subject anymore.” She remembers feeling that “he thought I’d been bought.” Mitchell left in December 2004. (Greenspon’s office did not reply to interview requests for this story.)

Almost three years later, editorial leaders at the Globe are singing from a different hymn book. In his January 27, 2007 editorial letter, Greenspon acknowledged that the paper had not “fully devoted [itself] into plumbing the depths of the science of global warming, the emerging policies or the economic implications.” He promised that the paper’s “year of going green officially starts today.” And if the masthead’s symbolically emerald background didn’t prove the paper’s devotion, the dramatic photo spread of melting ice caps, monster wildfires, January golfers, ruined fruit crops, snowless skiruns, starving polar bears and Vancouver’s devastated Stanley Park certainly did. “Welcome to the new climate,” read the headline.

Canadian print media hasn’t exactly led the green chorus. In the past two years, best-selling books, award-winning films and celebrityowned Priuses have spotlighted the seriousness of climate change. An Ipsos-Reid poll conducted in October 2006 found that 63 per cent of Canadians were “desperately concerned” that, without major changes, the end is near. CTVglobemedia commissioned its own poll, confirming that 86 per cent of Canadians are serious about environmental action and support higher fuel efficiency standards.

Newspaper executives weren’t the only ones surprised by the public’s newfound concern. In a 2006 Decima Research poll, the environment surpassed health care as the issue voters were most concerned about. And with that, the Conservative government had some re-prioritizing to do. The amount of ridicule heaped on its proposed Clean Air Act in fall 2006 came as a surprise. After Stéphane Dion, draped in lime green, made the environment a key component of his campaign and won the Liberal leadership in December, the government appointed a new environment minister to develop another platform. One month later, a poll showed 11 per cent of respondents were prepared to vote for the Green Party, suggesting it could even win seats in the next federal election.

For the Globe, the era of questioning climate change is over. It has become the new orthodoxy – some critics call it the new religion – and the looming crisis has meant a surge in environmental journalism. During the past six months, the Canadian public has found itself awash in information. Whether this new-found attention is sustainable, or merely another trend based on reader surveys, is debatable. When global warming is no longer polling hot, the media might cool their coverage, just like they did last time.

Climate change didn’t become the hot topic in the Canadian news industry overnight – but almost. Edmonton Journal environment reporter Hanneke Brooymans wonders whether former U.S. vice-president, environmental advocate and Academy Award-winning documentarian Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth was the impetus. The Toronto Star’s national science reporter Peter Calamai speculates that a trickle-down effect occurred when “scientific gobbledygook” started being translated into digestible bits. Martin Mittelstaedt, the Globe’s current environment reporter, rattles off an accumulation of events that together may have built momentum: “Winters without much winter, extreme heat, extreme storms, the Tory attack on climate change policies, the defeat of the Republicans at the U.S. mid-term elections, people repudiating George W. Bush, repudiating a lot of the policies he stood for, more overwhelming science – add those things together and you get a change in people’s views.”

Before the conversion, Mitchell was one of a handful of journalists to cover the science of climate change – but not the first nudged off the beat. Michael Keating wrote some of the first environmental stories in Canada starting in 1966 and later as a reporter for the Globe from 1979 to 1988. Back then, chemical use was the big issue, thanks in part to Rachel Carson’s now canonical Silent Spring, published in 1962. Also an award-winning journalist, Keating was eventually forced out. “They said I was getting stale, to do something else,” he says. “So I jumped ship.” He worked as a freelance writer, a consultant for Environment Canada and a professor at the University of Western Ontario’s Graduate School of Journalism. In the balmy late fall of 2006, Keating recalled a prediction that scientists at Environment Canada made in 1986: “Southern Ontario would have weather like Ohio or Kentucky within about 20 years. We’d have much greater variation in weather, more extremes, more warming in the Arctic,” he says they told him. “It’s all panned out, right on schedule.”

When the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization formed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988, the news didn’t cause much of a ripple. Keating admits coverage was difficult then because of the lack of narrative drive. “It falls back on the head of the journalist for not being able to make it a human interest story,” he says. “We might have sold it better to the editors.” The IPCC – a group of hundreds of scientists and policy-makers from around the world – released its first Assessment Report in 1990. The massive document, drawn from mounds of scientific study, concluded that climate change was irrefutably happening.

At the time, plenty of environmental stories ran in newspapers about the dangers of PCBs, the greenhouse effect, acid rain and tree dieback in Canadian forests. The stories may have been an intense wake-up call, but explanations didn’t always look for human causes (“Dinosaur dung provides clue to ancient greenhouse effect” – Kitchener-Waterloo Record, October 23, 1991). Still, environmental coverage was on the upswing to the point that, just after the IPCC released its first report, the Ryerson Review of Journalism’s Maria Smith wondered if we weren’t in an “age of environmental enlightenment.” She wrote in 1990, “But maybe this time concern for the environment will override worries about the bank balance.”

Smith had reason to be optimistic. During the economic boom of the 1980s, editors felt flush and environmental journalism found its place – at least in the margins of the mainstream. But this gradually gave way, especially when the recession of the early 1990s forced editorial budgets to tighten. Then came the Internet frenzy, followed inevitably by the dotcom bust in 2000, the Enron scandal, the freefall of Canadian technology titan Nortel’s stock, Bush vs. Gore and 9/11. It’s no wonder stories about emissions reduction and climate change were scarce.

In 2001, the IPCC released its third Assessment Report (a second came out in 1995). The debate among world scientists focused on what was causing the climate shift. Although the earth does go through natural warming and cooling periods, the panel predicted a spike in global temperatures anywhere from 1.4 to 5.8 degrees. Any change will have enormous impact on the globe – a four-degree shift ended the last Ice Age. The reaction by Canadian news to the report was passing. Most papers posted a story the day of and left it at that. Others – notably the Edmonton Journal, The Vancouver Sun and the Winnipeg Free Press – buried it or didn’t cover it at all. Meanwhile, public debate swirled around the myth potential of global warming, hampered by short attention spans and a lack of familiarity with complex scientific language.

Not anymore. When the IPCC released the findings of its fourth consensus report this February – repeating its previous refrain, with stentorian emphasis – Mittelstaedt said it was “like a five-alarm blaze on the beat.”

T he blaze, which once smoldered deep in A sections, now burns up the front pages, along with charts, graphs and sidebars to break it all down for hungry readers looking for answers. “Science is hard,” Mitchell says. “It’s hard to read, it’s hard to understand and it’s really hard to translate.” Part of the reporter’s job is to sift through mountains of data and jargon, which requires enormous amounts of time and research in order to “democratize the information,” as Mitchell says, and put it into a compelling narrative. This has always been true, but stories once perceived to have been written by advocacy journalists, now focus on searching for solutions to the global warming problem.

At least journalists are no longer expected to play the point-counterpoint game. The days of stories written under the assumption that the reality of climate change is debatable are over. Skeptics were once given equal playing time. “When a child is murdered,” Mitchell says, “we don’t enter into a big social debate about whether it’s appropriate to kill children. We just take it as a given that we don’t want our children to be killed. So we don’t go about interviewing a whole bunch of people who kill children, who want to justify killing children.”

But environmental stories still compete with every other interest. “People crawl over broken glass to get space,” Calamai says. “It’s always a battle to get enough space for articles that go into the complexities.” He also worries that the increase in quantity hasn’t necessarily meant an increase in quality. Some people, he says, “just aren’t checking their numbers against anything but the previous day’s story.”

If the public’s interest is maintained, they’ll be looking for solution-based stories, not just more information. The tendency among many news outlets to shirk conversations about sustainable development business models and in-depth scientific analysis has been noted frequently by frustrated journalists – as well as in media analyses such as The Missing News, a Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives study published in 2000. The authors, while acknowledging the difficulty in reporting on “the byzantine world of research and science,” categorized Canadian coverage of environmental stories as “lacklustre” and guilty of playing up dramatic stories – such as oil spills and radiation leaks – “at the expense of open-ended issues, which are continental and extend over long periods of time.”

A side effect of the climate change conversion is that the science and environmental reporters no longer have exclusive control over their turf. Reporters from other sections are joining the flock. “The Globe has a bunch of interesting environmental reporting, including in the business section, and that’s smart,” Mitchell notes. At the Star, sports reporter Randy Starkman’s story on how climate change affects winter sports (“Melting slopes ‘scary’ sign of climate change,” November 30, 2006) made the front page.

Eventually, if the greening of newspapers continues, stories such as “Fighting for Space at the Mall” – an unquestioning story about the $200,000 Gurkha SUV that makes the Hummer look like a toy, which ran on the front page of the Star’s Wheels section last December – could become a thing of the past. But as long as media outlets publish climate change stories on page one while celebrating trucks the size of tanks in its specialty sections, the new orthodoxy will appear to be a mile wide and only a few inches deep.

While the shift in public opinion became obvious in 2006, not every journalist joined the chorus.

Terence Corcoran’s office at the National Post building in suburban Toronto is lined with books on climate change. Books that support the science, books that refute the science and books that are the science mingle on stuffed and sagging shelves. On his giant L-shaped desk, bright yellow legal-size folders are stacked with their labelled spines facing the centre of the action – Corcoran’s chair. Most of the handwritten labels are slugs for environmental issues – softwood, smog, junk science, tsunami, monsanto. Corcoran leans back in his chair, near a bulletin board covered with signs and stickers such as “Save the World from Greenpeace” and “Proud Member of a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy.”

The Globe’s Margaret Wente and CBC’s Rex Murphy have mocked the rush toward climate change acceptance in the past, and although they both have recently taken a moderated position, Corcoran, editor of The Financial Post and one of its lead columnists, is unrepentant in his disregard for the new orthodoxy. “Junk science” is what he calls the “exaggerated and politicized” data that supports climate change. “I say no to believing in climate change in the same way that, if somebody said, ‘Do you believe in God?’ then I would say, ‘Well, probably no.'”

Corcoran, who in person is courteous and quiet, continues, “I don’t really know and I don’t think anybody else really knows.” Corcoran’s agnosticism – and the conflation of global warming with faith – reached page one of the Saturday Post on February 10. The headline asked readers, “Is environmentalism the new religion?” while the accompanying large illustration showed Gore as a saint holding his good book, An Inconvenient Truth. Belief, skepticism, devotion – the language of faith surrounds climate change, and it’s a phenomenon that annoys Mitchell. “When people say, ‘Do you believe in climate change?’ it’s not like, ‘Do you believe in God?’ It’s not a religion – it’s not even particularly controversial in most parts of the world. This is scientific literature of stuff that’s been observed and printed.”

The Globe’s editor-in-chief agrees. In his public confession, Greenspon assured readers that going green did not mean the paper had “traded in journalist agnosticism for religion… We are in the business of promoting debate, not dogma.” This denial of climate change religiosity didn’t stop either the Globe or the Star from using words and phrases such as “green icon,” “Goracle,” “celeb status,” “climate-crisis hero” and “eco-pilgrims” to report on a February 21 appearance by Gore at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall – suggesting, in other words, that this new secular congregation was heralding its prophet.

Back in March 2006, freelance journalist Chris Wood travelled to Mexico City to cover the Fourth World Water Forum, an international gathering of non-governmental organizations, businesses, citizens and governments. On assignment for the Vancouver-based online news outlet The Tyee, Wood highlighted some major points of the event, including the coming water crisis, Canada’s large reserves of fresh water and the role the country will play in the looming calamity. His reports were illuminating, but the editor’s note at the top of his first article was the real shock: “Of 800 international journalists covering the Fourth World Water Forum underway in Mexico City, Chris Wood is the only Canadian.”

That was the original lead of this Review piece, because the anecdote symbolized the state of environmental journalism six months ago. Well, that was then. In the course of reporting for this story – from September 2006 to February 2007 – environmental coverage has shifted from deep skepticism (atheism) to neutrality (agnosticism) to full-blown belief, with all the zealotry that entails.

But we’ve heard this sermon before. What happens if the flock grows tired of repeated oracular warnings? If the current craze for climate change coverage doesn’t hold, Anthony Downs won’t be surprised. Thirty-five years ago, the Brookings Institution-based scholar published his essay, “Up and Down With Ecology: The Issue-Attention Cycle,” which chronicled public interest in ecological and environmental issues. Downs identified five notable stages of interest: pre-problem, alarmed discovery and euphoric enthusiasm, realization of the cost of significant progress, gradual decline of intense public interest and post-problem. In 1972 he noted that during stage three – when “euphoric enthusiasm” about the environment gave way to real concerns – “There is good reason to believe that the bundle of issues called ‘improving the environment’ will also suffer the gradual loss of public attention characteristic of the later stages of the ‘issue-attention cycle.'”

Science and environmental reporters get a lot of ink these days, and that’s good because they have a lot to work with. The coverage is more forceful than in the “environmental enlightenment” era of the late ’80s and early ’90s – and looks better too. Large-scale catastrophes such as the December 2006 windstorm that ripped Stanley Park to pieces make for excellent visual enhancements. Even less immediate events can now be portrayed vividly: photographs depicting the glacial Alps 45 years ago and today, placed side by side, are splashes of cold water to accompany a story on glacial melting.

But the real test for journalists will be to keep the story going when the weather is benign, when the political winds shift and when the next commissioned poll says public interest in climate change has waned.

I’m in the basement and it’s cold. Above the low hum of the ventilation duct and the steady breathing of two elderly men sharing the room with me, I hear creaky wheels approaching. I’ve been waiting for only a few minutes, but not knowing what to expect and being in unfamiliar territory, makes it seem much longer. The attendant re-emerges from the back room, pushing the cart toward me. “Take as long as you need,” she says, returning my ID and leaving me with Sylvia Fraser’s remains.

She’s far from dead, though. In fact, in the last two decades, the author of 10 books (six of them fiction), Fraser has returned to her roots as a magazine writer. “She’s one of the best journalists in the country,” says Toronto Life senior editor Mark Pupo. But Fraser, 72, is still known most notoriously for her 1987 autobiographical work on sexual abuse, My Father’s House: A Memoir of Incest and Healing.

The word “I” peppers her journalism – notably in her controversial Toronto Life memoir about working with Peter Gzowski and her affectionate profile of long-time friend June Callwood. Her non-fiction books are also laced with her own experiences; even her novels, she says, are “autobiographical in a way I didn’t know when I wrote them.”

But when I meet the real, live Fraser for the first time, at a Second Cup a short walk from her downtown Toronto condo, she says to me: “Unless I have a very good reason to write in the first person, I don’t. It’s often an extremely lazy way of doing a story.” At this, I feel a wave of panicked confusion. This is Sylvia Fraser, after all. Isn’t she a pioneer of personal journalism in Canada? Isn’t that why I’m here?

“Sometimes,” she goes on, “it looked like I was writing personal journalism when I wasn’t. What I mean by that is that I used myself as a device in the story simply to be the straight person. You’d see me in the article and it looked like personal journalism but it wasn’t. It was just the structure.”

Iwheel the cart over to the nearest empty table. I’m in the Mills Library in Hamilton, Ontario, and the cart contains three of the 17 boxes of archives stored under Fraser’s name. They’re filled with old correspondence, cassettes and magazine clippings. Some of the other 14 boxes contain manuscripts and research notes, but those are sealed until her actual death. I lift the first box onto the table.

I’ve officially put myself in this story. I wasn’t sure I would. My own battle with the word “I” dates back to one of my first journalism classes. My professor said the word had no place in a news story, and with such force that I still feel cheap using it, like it’s – I’m – taking the easy way out. Talking to legendary journalists about Fraser hasn’t helped my dilemma much. Callwood, for instance, has a particularly strong opinion about the “I” word: “I hate it. Hate it, hate it, hate it.” Why? ” I don’t think the story should be about how ‘I knocked on the door and Adrienne Clarkson opened the door.’ It’s not important. It’s not about you. A writer saying, ‘I knocked on the door’ – it seems to me lazy writing.” Author, speaker and magazine writer Rona Maynard agrees: “If you’re going to be sharing your views with hundreds of thousands of people, then you’d better be damned interesting. It’s like, I’m a guest at a dinner party and someone is hogging the conversation, when they should have stopped 20minutes ago.”

Dear Mrs. Fraser:

I think you handled the book beautifully, much better than the condensation in most of the United States newspapers. I am pleased indeed. I wonder if you will get the highly emotional reaction both pro and con that has been taking place in the United States. Thank you again for this sensitive treatment and for your enthusiasm.

Betty Friedan [February 2, 1964, responding to a feature in Star Weekly about her book, The Feminine Mystique]

In 1957 – when women were still expected to get married and produce a brood of children – the then Sylvia Meyers graduated from the University of Western Ontario with an honours degree in philosophy. At that time, the jobs available to women were “nurse, teacher, secretary or social worker.” Fraser craved “an adventurous, footloose kind of life” and spent the next 11 years working for Star Weekly, a magazine about sport, lifestyle, fashion and food published by the Toronto Star. She started out writing headlines and editing; when she got up the nerve to try writing, she jumped into full-length features.

Fraser didn’t fit the typical mould of a woman of her times; old friends unfailingly mention her platinum locks and fierce independence. “Female journalists,” she says, “at first used to be pretty strange creatures and the ones that were functioning at any kind of a high level in the field, generally speaking, presented themselves in a kind of a male-ish sort of way – be tough talking, hard drinking and hard smoking. That was, generally speaking, the form that women were expected to take, to pass as real people. And I never did that.”

For one of her Star Weekly stories, Fraser visited Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion. “He was writing the Playboy philosophy, so it seemed to me that was really interesting him more than really doing it. And so there were others in the Playboy staff who were far more active in taking advantage of the bunnies than he was. And now this business of going around with all the bunnies on the arm. It’s just display.”

“She was not doing your basic old-timey Canadian feature writing,” photographer John Reeves remembers. He shot Fraser for the dust jacket of her first novel, Pandora. “She was spending tremendous amounts of time with her subjects and writing a very hot-wired style that I would have connected with, I don’t know, Tom Wolfe and stuff.”

Star Weekly folded in 1968 and Fraser was jobless. She had an idea brewing for a novel, but when she started, she found herself writing an entirely different story. “All this stuff about childhood came bubbling up,” she says. It would be more than a decade before she became conscious of memories of incest, but Pandora, her novel about the life of an eight-year-old girl, was where it began.

Dear Sylvia,

…I see that Berlin Solstice is out on paperback – that’s good! Sylvia don’t ever doubt that novel – it is absolutely first-rate. Canada, alack, was not ready for it, nor was the rest of the world. Its time will come. Cold comfort, but words of wisdom from a reader who knows how to read.

God bless-

M [Margaret Laurence, 1986]

Fraser was in the process of finishing Berlin Solstice, her fifth novel, set in Nazi Germany, when she started remembering awful things from her own childhood. “I could see later,” she tells me, “that I turned it into a metaphor for my own life. The question I was asking in the book was: How could the Nazis have done what they did? And the real question I was asking for myself was: How could my father have done what he did? How could the good Germans have let it happen? Of course: How could my mother have let it happen?” Themes of sexual abuse and violence had already crept into her four preceding novels, but now that Fraser knew what had fueled much of her writing, she was unsure if she should continue to write. In 1984, shortly after Solstice’s publication, she packed her bags and moved to California, to heal.
Dear Sylvia2

Sylvia…

I like the idea of what you are going to do in L.A. In a sense it is depressing to me considering the fact that I consider you to be one of the great Canadian writers that have ever emerged but revitalization – and I forget the term you used – is what is needed….

I think the breakthrough will happen but in the short-term, it is lousy for you, lousy for me – and I think totally unfair. I love you dearly and will continue to do so and as I have said on several occasions, if you run out of money – you can get it easily, quickly and professionally.

Love Jack [McClelland, 1985]

After a year in California, Fraser started writing My Father’s House, and this time, she knew it was personal. She wrote to her editor and friend Jack McClelland: “Even if I were writing a very flawed book it would be useful, because I have the goods. Most attacks on this subject are destined to be depressing and negative, but I am writing what believe to be a powerful, human and positive book. Because I was able to find help, to complete my journey, to describe my quest and to forgive, without minimizing the crime.”

“All of my friends thought I was committing professional and personal suicide,” Fraser says. “It was essentially the first book to indicate that abuse might be a middle-class problem rather than just something on the fringes.” The book later got caught up in a controversy about “false memory syndrome,” which accuses therapists of effectively implanting “memories” of abuse in their patients. Today, Fraser jokes that her obituary will say she had “alleged memories of sexual abuse.”

Fraser has spent most of the last two decades freelance writing, largely for Toronto Life. “It’s a relief after writing books. A story may be difficult but, hey, its only 10 to 12 pages.” Mainly, she writes profiles, crime stories and, dare I say, personal journalism. She is picky about assignments. “There are a lot of journalists who enjoy ‘getting the dirt’ and I don’t, particularly,” she says. “I don’t ignore what I find out in the course of interviewing around a person or interviewing them, but essentially, it’s not a basic motivation of mine.”

The exception could be that controversial piece about her former boss, the late Gzowski, in which she explored his battles with alcohol, depression and a “muddled” sex life. In 2002, the piece won silver at the National Magazine Awards, where she has been honoured 16 times over the years (3 golds, 2 silvers, 11 honourable mentions).

How did the piece go over with Gzowki’s family? “Badly,” she says. She claims she had been asked to write the piece and agreed reluctantly, calling it “a piece of the truth.”

“Everybody was onto this great icon who had died. And I don’t take anything from that – Peter was an icon…. I felt that the Peter I knew, who was troubled, was missing from all the things that were being said.” But, she adds, “I wouldn’t want it to come out wrongly, but I feel I had a little permission to say those things because I put myself out in the same way; I write as deeply, if not infinitely more deeply, about myself.”

Dear Sylvia,

Well, now, I guess I won’t be able to sue you after all. It seems I did say all those things, and you do have all the tapes. It’s decidedly strange – finding oneself laid out in print at such length, and with such perception…. But I must commend you, and thank you, for the tact and affection which pertains throughout….

And I think I can be objective to this extent – it’s beautifully written and very elegantly constructed. Many of the paragraphs really zing, and it all holds together very well….

Take care, and mend well.

All the best, Charles [Taylor, journalist, responding to a 1983 profile in Toronto Life]

People have been writing non-fiction in the first person since the days of Thucidydes, but the modern my-eyes-have-seen-it era in journalism started with Jimmy Breslin and, later, Norman Mailer. “Then all of a sudden, toward the end of the ’60s, Tom Wolfe began to write in a very exuberant, very personal way, about pop culture usually,” Fraser remembers. “And this became the style. Instead of writing objectively, writers around here all began imitating; they’d go out to have a personal experience. It was all about them.”

Today’s leading journalists still fall into two camps when it comes to first person narrative. Here’s Ted Conover, the author of Whiteout and Newjack, who, when interviewed for one of my textbooks, The New New Journalism, said: “The first person is how I best tell a story. Because my persona is so often that of the ‘witness,’ not using the first person would make me feel like a left-handed person who was forced to use his right hand.” But Jonathan Harr, author of A Civil Action, said in the same book, “I strive to be invisible. I’m an observer, not an actor.” Likewise, Alex Kotlowitz, best known for his book, There Are No Children Here: “For me, the power in writing comes from using the third person. Get out of the way, and tell the story.”

Angie Gardos, who edited Fraser’s unflinching Gzowski piece for Toronto Life and the later, much kinder, profile of Callwood, says: “It’s really about evaluating each idea on its own merit, rather than talking about it as a form as a whole. It’s not like you’re hoodwinking the reader in some way. If you wanted a piece that had an edgier approach to June Callwood and her way of seeing the world, then you wouldn’t have put Sylvia on it. What you wouldn’t get with that is that level of intimacy and understanding.”

If the personal factor is an unstoppable force in journalism, and since Fraser’s own “I” has been all over her writing for longer than I’ve been alive, how can she shrink from the label “personal journalism” to describe her work?

“I’m not out to write about myself,” Fraser says. “A lot of other writers pretend to be writing about other people but they’re really writing about themselves. I don’t have a political agenda. I’ve written about people of every stripe in terms of politics. And I don’t drag in, a lot, my personal life in terms of listening to people and what they have to say. I think I really do listen.”

She may not set out to write about herself but when she does, it makes for some of her best journalism. Fraser quotes Tennyson’s Ulysses and says, “I am a part of all that I’ve met,” but the opposite equally applies. The details of her personal life have helped to form the way she sees – and reports on – the world. And she can’t get more personal than that.

Once, when talking about the horrors of her childhood, the cost and scars of it all, Fraser looked up from her vanilla latte and caught my eye. “I mean,” she said, “I wouldn’t know who I would have been if this hadn’t happened to me. I would hardly like trauma of that sort to happen to anybody, but in a way, to wish it didn’t happen would be like wishing myself dead. Because I would have been an entirely different person.”

Except for his $250,000 grey F430 Ferrari and his equally costly Bentley Arnage, Brian Hunter kept a low profile in Calgary. The 32-year-old millionaire lived otherwise inconspicuously in one of the city’s many sprawling suburbs, waiting for his one-hectare, $3-million house to be built. Hunter traded in natural gas for a Connecticut hedge fund called Amaranth Advisors, where in 2005 Trader Monthly estimated he earned between $75 and $100 million – making him North America’s second wealthiest natural gas trader, behind only American business maverick T. Boone Pickens. In August 2006 alone, he raked in $2 billion for Amaranth. Even his friends in a recreational baseball league didn’t know about his lucrative career until he lost it all a month later.

On September 18, 2006, Amaranth sent a letter to investors saying it expected big losses as natural gas prices began to drop. On the front page of The Wall Street Journal the next day, Ann Davis reported from Calgary about Hunter’s $5 billion loss in natural gas bets. The Journal dedicated more than 2,600 words to the kid born and raised in Calgary, whom Davis had interviewed in July. The Globe and Mail picked up the Journal’s story about Hunter, as well as running one of its own. The story that appeared in the Calgary Herald, the city’s paper of record, was a Reuters business brief on page D5. It didn’t mention Hunter or that the losses were sustained in Calgary.

Two days later, the Globe reported from Calgary with interviews of Hunter’s friends and colleagues. That same day, the Herald mentioned Hunter for the first time in another Reuters article, on page D4; the Toronto Star ran the same copy. Hunter made the front page of the Herald’s Calgary Business section for the first and only time on September 28 – 10 days after the story broke. Margin Calls, a briefs section, announced Hunter had left Amaranth – a development the Globe ran on its website one day earlier. Eventually, the National Post, the Herald’s corporate bigger brother, sent John Greenwood to Calgary to profile Hunter’s demise. The article never ran in the Herald.

For the Herald to get beat, then fumble, one of the biggest business stories of the year is a journalistic embarrassment. But how it happened is part of the bigger challenge the paper faces as it struggles to match the growing influence of the city it covers. Since energy prices started breaking records in 2005, people have flocked to Alberta to cash in on the booming economy. This year, Calgary’s population surpassed one million. It’s estimated that 60 people move to the city per day and 100 immigrants from other countries relocate to Calgary per week. The boom has made the Herald one of two daily English newspapers in Canada whose circulation is actually going up. As of September 2006, its circulation cracked 120,000 on weekdays and 126,000 on Saturdays, a 7.4 per cent increase from 2002, when the Herald’s circulation bottomed out after a debilitating labour strike. The fallout meant the departure of many veteran journalists and forced management to fill the editorial roster with young prospects, leaving it a minor-league paper in a major-league city. Since then, under the leadership of current publisher Malcolm Kirk, the Herald has rebuilt its reputation as the city’s dominant paper. But what the strike took from the Herald – a generation’s worth of veteran reporters and reporting experience-prevents the paper from achieving the prominence Calgary deserves.

The Ship and Anchor Pub is a popular watering hole on the Red Mile – the strip of 17th Avenue that became infamous after the 2004 National Hockey League playoffs, when drunken debauchers in Calgary Flames jerseys made national headlines. Tonight the Ship is throwing a Halloween 1980s retro party. The young men and women who keep the city booming dance to songs by Styx and Talking Heads, written while they were toddlers. Most of Calgary’s young adults are flush with disposable income, so the shots move fast at the Ship. Beside me a suicide bomber and a hot UPS girl talk intimately. A caveman with a gun knocks a man dressed as an inflatable penis into my back.

“A lot of these people could be doing something more meaningful with their lives,” says a man at the bar who’s also being nudged by the six-foot phallus. I ask him for his thoughts on the Herald. Just before we’re toppled by a fight between a Teen Wolf and a Nacho Libre, he yells: “The reason the Herald sucks is because we don’t demand more from it.”

Calgary has always been more literate than anyone gives it credit for. The city grew out of a North West Mounted Police camp set up in 1875. A mere eight years later, the first issue of the Calgary Herald Mining and Ranch Advocate and General Advertiser appeared. With the arrival of the railway, Calgary became an important regional centre and remained the gateway to the Rockies until the discovery of large oil deposits in the province in 1947, making it a gateway to prosperity. Through booms and busts, Calgary has retained its entrepreneurial spirit, a place where anyone could yank up his bootstraps – a popular turn-of-phrase for Calgarians – and become self-made.

The Herald has not always seen eye to eye with the Cowtown it calls home. J. Patrick O’Callaghan, publisher from 1982 to 1989, believed in the old journalistic adage of afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted, which some felt didn’t mesh with Calgary’s entrepreneurial spirit. When O’Callaghan left in 1989, the paper shifted to the right. In 1996, under the direction of new publisher Ken King and new owner Conrad Black, successive attempts to make the Herald a better fit with its city put management on a war footing with its own staff. Bob Bergen, a former reporter, says management’s shift led to senior editors intruding on reporters’ copy, changing their stories after-hours without consultation. As grievances about biased editing mounted, a group of staff began polling interest in unionizing.

In the fall of 1998, 62 per cent of the Herald staff voted to form a union. Once negotiations began, Bergen says the sticking point became the union’s demand for a clause allowing reporters and photographers to remove their names from stories or photos in protest. That October, Black replaced King with Dan Gaynor, who had fought unionization as publisher of The Standard in St. Catharines, Ontario. Refusing to crack, 102 Herald staffers went on strike at 3 p.m. on November 8, 1999. The battle lasted eight months, devastating everyone involved. “It ripped a big hole in friendships and ripped out hearts and hurt a lot of people,” says Don Martin, now the paper’s federal affairs columnist. Globe hockey columnist Eric Duhatschek declined an interview, but said in an email: “That was just such a difficult, challenging eight months walking that damn picket line from seven until 11 at night, five days a week, with two school-age kids and a wife who doesn’t work outside the home that I’m not all that interested in reflecting back on it; and am not sure I could offer a dispassionate analysis anyway. The wounds run pretty deep.”

In June 2000, editor Peter Menzies and Gaynor offered the remaining 93 strikers the choice of either a revamped contract or a buyout package. In the end, only eight strikers could stomach a return to the newsroom. The other 85 took the substantial buyout. For many, the decision to leave led to bigger and better things – a number are working at the Globe, former senior journalist Brian Brennan is a bestselling author, Bergen completed his PhD and is now teaching at the University of Calgary, and two strikers, Terry Inigo-Jones and Robert Driscoll, started the Alberta weekly Business Edge, which has since gone national. In contrast, the paper languished in mediocrity. Bruce Bonham, a current desk staffer, was hired immediately after the strike to work in the chaotic newsroom. Many of the replacement reporters came from community newspapers and, Bonham says, “should not have been at this level yet in their careers.” Bergen is less diplomatic, calculating that by losing 85 employees, many with more than 20 years of experience, the Herald replaced more than 1,000 years of experience with the “dregs of Canadian journalism” during the strike.

The community reached its own verdict: weekly circulation continued to decline, bottoming out in 2002 at 112,258 – a decline of 7.5 per cent.

Malcolm Kirk was 35 years old when he became editor of the Herald in 2003. A graduate of King’s College in Halifax in 1989, he had been climbing the Southam, then Hollinger, then CanWest ranks, working first for the The Gazette in Montreal and then The Province in Vancouver. In August 2006, he was installed as the Herald’s latest publisher. Wearing a blue shirt with tight, white pinstripes and perfectly pleated pants, sipping coffee in his office, he speaks eloquently of his 11 years at the Province. He thumps his cup against the table in rhythm to each position he rhymes off: “As a copy editor,” thud, “assistant sports editor,” thud, “sports editor,” thud, “news editor and managing editor,” double thud.

When he arrived in Calgary to take over the reins as editor, Kirk says he was aware the strike had affected the paper. But he also sensed a need to move on. He changed the Arts section to focus more on celebrities instead of just local arts, added a lifestyle section called Real Life, emphasized local coverage, and introduced Swerve, a Friday culture, entertainment and listings magazine that swept the Western Magazine Awards last July. “We launched just a barrage of new features,” he says, “a ton of stuff.” At the centre of most initiatives was a commitment to local coverage.

The paper suffered tough criticism, at least at first. In 2004, Robert Bragg, a former Herald reporter and columnist (now a journalism professor at Mount Royal College) who left before the strike, called the Herald’s journalism trite and forgettable in an interview with Alberta Views. “It’s an embarrassment for a city this size to have a paper this shallow, this out of touch with what’s going on,” he said. “They don’t put enough resources into it, they’re scrambling.”

But the paper’s turnaround under Kirk tells a different story. To date, weekly circulation has grown 7.4 per cent – a sign of more than just the city’s growth. Bonham says Kirk has created a positive environment in the newsroom. The awards also came. Grant Robertson won the paper’s first editorial National Newspaper Award since the strike for a story investigating the questionable business practices of the Direct Energy company in 2004. The same year, the Herald received an honourable mention from the Michener Award Foundation for public service journalism – its first since 1997. The paper won a NNA in 2005 for exposing voting irregularities in the last municipal election and was runner-up for a joint investigation with the Province that looked at abandoned Indian brides. In 2006 alone, the Herald won a total of 16 national and international newspaper awards – the most the paper has received in 15 years. Lately even Bragg is more upbeat. “You’ve started seeing more and more solid news stories,” he says. “It’s been a solid daily paper with occasional moments of brilliance and occasional lapses into really abysmal mediocrity.”

With its journalistic foundation rebuilt, Kirk now wants to capture the bootstrap spirit of the city and turn the Herald into a groundbreaking Canadian newspaper. When I ask him about what he has planned, his eyes spark with ambition – but his words are more ambiguous. Kirk repeats himself, saying that the Herald wants to lead North American newspaper journalism into the future. “Let’s see what we can do to make this the best newspaper in the city. And not just that, but beyond. Ultimately we’re going to be a multimedia news company. That’s our goal. We’re going to be able to provide you with information the way you want it, when you want it and how you want it.”

One recent change has been the online content. Editorial page editor Doug Firby introduced Q, a blog of sorts that allows readers to interact with the newspaper. Firby has also gently introduced a more sweeping change during his five years: Since he arrived in Calgary from the Standard, editorials have moved from the far right to being grounded in small-c conservative values. The paper has changed its stance on global warming – now accepting it as a reality and not sensationalist science – and in the 2004 provincial election it called for a stronger opposition to then-premier Ralph Klein. The paper does not hesitate to criticize Mayor David Bronconnier and city council on its infrastructure plans. It has vocally opposed the way the city spends taxpayers’ dollars and the state of public transit. It is increasingly proactive in suggesting alternative solutions. The Herald applauds growth, while being wary of its complications. But some observers contend that the paper can be naive. For instance, in an October 5,2006 editorial titled “Party on, folks; It’s OK,” the Herald said that despite falling oil prices, prosperity would continue to grace the province. “So, relax, Albertans. We could be better off than many Canadians for years to come.”

It is words such as these that Brian Brennan, an author of six social history books on Alberta, worries about. He says the paper doesn’t understand how the city was crushed in the ’80s. He says it has lost its institutional memory.

The grey tones in Charles Frank’s hair and his walrus moustache stand out in the Herald newsroom. He is one of precious few Herald employees with more than 20 years experience at the paper. Hired as a business writer in 1978, Frank has held numerous positions and became business editor in 2001. He brags that business stories run on A1 in the Herald more than anywhere else in Canada. The man knows his city and its millionaires: from the brutish cowboys to the quiet hedge fund traders who can lose billions in a matter of days. However, he concedes that since Calgary is removed from the major North American financial centres – New York and Toronto – the paper’s investment coverage isn’t a priority. This is one reason, Frank says, the Herald didn’t get the Brian Hunter story. By the time it broke, he says, there wasn’t much the Herald could do – though its competitors found myriad ways to cover the developments.

Current editor-in-chief Lorne Motley says the Hunter story was a one-off. “Would I have loved to have gotten that story? Sure, but every editor knows you’re going to miss some.” Like the city it covers, Motley, who’s 40, admits that the paper has a young staff compared to other major dailies. Instead of a weakness, he believes the strike was one of the key ingredients to the paper’s current success. “I wouldn’t wish it on anyone,” he says, “but the weird irony is that it has allowed us to come to where we are today.” Namely, to a place filled with aggressive journalism and creativity. In our interview, Kirk says he understands the criticisms, but argues the Herald’s reporters provide complete coverage. And he invites people to give examples of when the paper missed an important angle.

One example Brennan and others cite is the coverage of the downside of the boom: infrastructure dilemmas, labour crunches and homelessness. Though these issues are covered in the paper, Brennan says they aren’t covered with the knowledge of how such decisions can affect the city, or of just how damaging a bust can be. Don Martin sees it as a trade-off: the young staff has given the paper energy, but the lack of local historical knowledge – and the accompanying inability to put events in broader context – is a weakness. “Let’s face it, if your average reporter is 31 years old, he was six when the National Energy Program came down. I was in the process of losing my first house.”

Catherine Ford, a retired Herald columnist, agrees that youthful ambition is great, but it can take a reporter only so far. “The kind of cauldron in which young journalists learn what the city is about, learn who is important, learn what they can do and can’t do in terms of what’s the political culture, what’s management like, who can you tell to fuck off and not get fired. None of that is there.”

All critics agree that CanWest needs to give the Herald the resources to hire some of Canada’s top business journalists, just as the Post did when it launched. Calgary attracts some of the country’s most talented businesspeople, physicians and academics – but not journalists. “The Herald hasn’t managed to attract any people of that calibre,” says Brennan. “I look at the bylines in the Herald and I don’t recognize them.” Since Kirk arrived, the Herald has spent money redesigning the paper, investing in marketing and launching Swerve. Now his plan is to experiment with new ways to deliver his product. But he also claims to focus on recruiting and retaining talented columnists or reporters, despite what has already happened to some of the most promising. “The best and the brightest, if they happen to make a bit of a splash in Calgary, will be scooped up by other papers,” says Brennan. “No doubt about it.”

Brennan argues that this makes the Herald Canadian journalism’s farm team. Young and talented journalists are apt to leave the paper. A recent example is Grant Robertson, who was picked up by the Globe after winning an NNA for the Herald. This flight baffles Bonham. “I was a little bit surprised that a lot of people do seem to use it as a stepping stone,” he says, “because for me it should be a destination paper.”

In late November, two weeks after I asked Charles Frank why the Herald buried the Brian Hunter story, the paper devotes 2,500 words – beginning on page three of the business section – to the fallen trader’s tale. Two and half months after The Wall Street Journal broke the story, the article’s original reporting chronicles Hunter’s demise. But it sheds little new insight on what happened, except to say that the trader’s boss gave the 32-year-old too much power too fast and that Hunter, who declined to be interviewed, was still building his $3-million home and even contemplating heading back to work. Then, on December 31, the Herald named Hunter one of the top 10 Calgary newsmakers of 2006.

Herald hindsight had finally deemed the blown story worthy of its rightful place on the news roster.