I am the son of an Irishman, but I won’t visit my father’s homeland until a man who knows many tough men is safely in his grave.

Did I get your attention?

You know that there’s a story here and I can tell you most of it. Everything, really, except some names, especially the name of the man who knows many tough men and also the precise layouts of high courts in several jurisdictions. That man knows many Irish lawyers. I know only one Irish lawyer—actually, only one lawyer at all—and he gives me sage counsel only when he’s stark naked.

Are you still with me?

Okay, some background. Please accept that everything that follows here is true.

I am a sportswriter of small distinction. I’ve had a lifelong ambition to see my byline in a well-respected Irish newspaper, a story complete with the odd dollop of high Hibernian prose, flashing words like “codswallop” and “cnawvshawling.” I dreamed I might somehow channel my sportswriting hero, Eamon Dunphy, who wrote this of Liam Brady, a national hero:

“He is often looked on as a great player. He is nothing of the kind. His performance on Wednesday was a disgrace, a monument to conceit adorned with vanity and self-indulgence, rendered all the more objectionable by the swagger of his gait.”

Reading this brings to mind my naked lawyer, but I digress.

So I set about finding an idea to pitch the sports editor of the well-respected Irish newspaper. I came up with a winner: a son of the Auld Sod was being inducted into the International Boxing Hall of Fame. In my pitch I detailed how it would be bittersweet—the Irish boxer being honored, sound of mind and body, was going into the hall with a couple of American fighters who were clearly broken physically and neurologically. One had even successfully sued a wild-haired promoter for millions for shortchanging him and sending him into the ring brain-damaged. The irony: upon the Irish fighter’s retirement, he loudly lobbied on the cause of safety, health care and insurance for fighters.

I received an email from the sports editor. The story was a go for the paper’s monthly sports supplement. The fee wasn’t much. Still, my dream was about to come true. I set about my research.

Over the phone I interviewed the Irish fighter and the two American champions—one even had a friend “translate” for him because the game had left him unable to speak clearly. Stuff to break your heart.

To provide some background, I consulted an expert commentator, an old-time boxing scribe based in New York, a loudmouth who cultivated an image straight out of the B movies of the 1940s, right down to the cheap fedora. Mid-cigar chomp, the scribe described watching the Irish fighter wilt during a championship fight held in 110-degree heat in Las Vegas. The oh-what-might-have-been seemed to be the stuff that would set off Guinness-drenched reminiscences.

I fired off a draft of my story, two months before deadline out of consideration for the photo department.

There followed a deafening silence for a few weeks. No emails back. No phone calls. No cheque. Nothing.

Then one day, an anguished call. The sports editor. I thought he was going to ask me questions about the piece before sending it to press. Instead, he told me that the piece had already run and that the former manager of the Irish champ was suing the well-respected Irish paper for libel in both Dublin and Belfast. He told me to gather up my notes for questions from editors on high and company lawyers.

Libel? This small piece of nostalgia and hagiography? Well, none of my overwrought prose, just an offhand observation by the American scribe. He suggested, tongue-in-cheek, that the Irish champ would have held onto the championship in Las Vegas if his manager “had been looking after him” and held out in negotiations for “the corner in the shade.”

I thought this was, well, a load of codswallop until I googled the former manager. Hundreds of hits came up. A few had to do with boxing. Most had to do with a string of successful libel cases, including one for millions against his former boxing champion and the publishers of the champ’s autobiography. I looked for the champ’s autobiography on bookdealers’ websites: only a few copies existed at about $500 per; thousands had been pulled off the market and pulped as part of an out-of-court settlement. The former manager knew many tough men, most of them lawyers.

The well-respected paper’s editors and lawyers called me several times over the next few days, asking me for details. They told me that the suits filed by the plaintiff named only the paper, not me. They invited me to come to Belfast and Dublin to be deposed, to stay on if it went to trial, all expenses covered, naturally. A chance to catch up with relatives.

I gave this considerable thought until one day when I made my routine trip to the Y and encountered the only lawyer I know. An Irishman no less, one who works internationally for business concerns in Toronto. I was in the showers when he walked in straight from the steam bath, pink as a salmon. He casually asked about recent events in my life and I recounted the whole imbroglio of the well-respected Irish paper, the boxing champ and the litigious former manager.

His advice, offered freely, was to the point: “You don’t want to be involved,” he told me. “Do not pick up the phone. Do not respond to emails. Break off all contact. And you certainly don’t want to go there. Just because you haven’t been named to the suit means nothing. The sums of money are immense.”

Gulp.

He then asked questions that were asked only once by the well-respected paper’s editor.

“Did they ever pay you?” he said. “Did you ever sign anything?”

No and no.

“All to the good,” he said.

On the advice of the naked lawyer, I have not picked up a phone in two years. I would not open an email from the well-respected paper for fear that poisonous gas would billow from my laptop. I have never mentioned the litigious manager’s name, nor any other details of said case. Only after I read the litigious manager’s obituary will I be able to bring myself to open a brochure from the Irish Tourism Board.

It’s early November and Richard Stursberg is sitting at CBC’s Toronto headquarters in his nicely appointed seventh-floor office, with its leather armchairs, gleaming wooden table, red Persian rug and big flat-screen TV. Dressed today in an olive blazer, green striped shirt and black pants—a much more conservative choice than the lime-green suit he has worn to work on occasion—Stursberg tells me what he wants CBC to do: put the “public” back into public broadcasting.

Why?

Because, he explains, the public provides much of CBC’s financing, so the programming should appeal to as many people as possible: “I measure our success as to whether our shows are being watched.” In particular, he’s talking about Canadian shows that attract large numbers. And, he adds, “We’re going to make some money. Get more audiences, get more money.”

Stursberg, who spent many years in private broadcasting as president and CEO of the Canadian Cable Television Association (1995 to 1999), president and CEO of Star Choice Communications and Cancom (1999 to 2001) as well as a stint as head of Telefilm Canada (2001 to 2004), is eerily sure of himself, fierce even.

Our discussion moves on to the 2005 lockout of 5,500 employees, which lasted two months and provoked untold amounts of acrimony and animosity toward Stursberg and Robert Rabinovitch, then CBC president and his boss.

What would Stursberg say to employees still angry about the lockout?

“Get over it,” he says quietly, then, almost shouting, “Get over it! One of two things was going to happen: either they were going to strike at a time of their own choosing and cause real serious damage to the Corporation, or we were going to lock them out in a way that caused less damage. So everyone should be happy to have less damage rather than more.”

I ask Stursberg about criticism that CBC TV is becoming more commercial.

“Well, I completely disagree with that view,” he replies. “No one inside will agree with that view, ’cause if they were here and they agree with that view, then why would they be here?”

What do you mean?

“Well, I mean, normally you’d want to work in places where you agree with the philosophy of the place, so all I’m saying is—Kirstine [Layfield, CBC programming director]—her view would be the same as my view. Robert [Rabinovitch]’s view on this would be the same as mine. The person who runs factual entertainment here, Julie Bristow, her view would be the same. Everybody’s view is the same. You know, otherwise we would find ourselves in circumstances where we’d all be running off in different directions, instead of the recipe for success.”

I tell Stursberg that this isn’t what others have said, particularly people from the news division.

He leans forward in his chair, a little smile on his face: “Give me their names.” His tone is light, but the look in his eyes is not.

“I can’t give you their names.”

“Aw… ”

I shake my head.

Stursberg relents, admitting he knows not everyone agrees with him. That’s inevitable when an organization is in the middle of changing its strategy, he explains: “People have been used to doing a certain thing for a long time.”

Maybe they’re not used to doing something else, I suggest later.

“Maybe,” he pauses. “Or maybe they like failure.”

And that was my introduction to the polarizing force that is Richard Stursberg, a figure I had heard plenty about in the weeks before and after that interview. What came up over and over again were charges that Stursberg—who in November became head of all of CBC’s English services after almost four years of leading just English TV—didn’t understand public broadcasting; that he had no programming experience; that he’s more interested in ratings than quality programs; that he’s turning the network into a second-rate commercial broadcaster; that his strong, “arrogant” personality fails to foster an environment where discussion can take place; that his focus is on entertainment, not news; that his goal of reinventing local news is a mistake; that steep cuts to news programs were coming; and that he wanted to divert millions from Newsworld’s budget into general network coffers.

So much heat. But what was the truth?

Beginning in September, I talked to dozens of CBCers, past and present, during almost 100 interviews. Some requested anonymity, afraid to speak on the record for fear they’d lose their jobs. Even several Corp heavyweights chose to keep quiet. Trina McQueen said her position on CBC’s board of directors, along with her “lack of ability to tread a fine diplomatic line,” prevented a discussion. Peter Mansbridge emailed that he had not yet formed a full opinion about developments at the network. Documentarian Terence McKenna wrote that it would be “unwise” for him to speak frankly on this topic. Veteran producer Kelly Crichton literally backed away from me when I asked for an interview. “No, no, no,” she laughed.

But from those who did speak, one name kept popping up: Tony Burman, the former editor-in-chief. For those in news and current affairs, his departure in July 2007 signaled ominous times ahead. The 35-year CBC veteran was a respected leader and a voice of journalistic integrity in the higher echelons of a senior management team that was increasingly viewed as not caring enough about it. Even before the announcement, there was a growing suspicion, skepticism and, at times, outright anger at what management was doing—and might do—to a division that has done much to define what public broadcasting means in Canada. Of particular concern was the current state and future of TV news at the Corp. What was Stursberg’s plan?

Over seven months, I put together a fuller picture of the dynamics prompting not all, but many of the accusations leveled against Stursburg. My intention was to arrange a follow-up interview with him in early March so he’d have the opportunity to respond further to the charges and also to answer some questions that had arisen after our November interview. Though I contacted his office more than a month before the Review’s deadline, following up with numerous emails and phone calls, Stursberg’s assistant said he was unavailable to talk for even 15 minutes. He was busy. He was out of town. He was prepping for a CBC board meeting. But after a last-ditch effort, just before the Review went to press, Stursberg did get back to us.

CHARGE
That Stursberg is starving TV news in his quest to beef up entertainment

During our November interview, Stursberg happily trumpets the fact that CBC has “more new shows this year and more hours of drama and comedy than we’ve ever had.”

I ask if he thinks CBC should focus more on getting back into entertainment.

“Yeah,” he replies with a smile, “I think [TV] is an entertainment medium.”

We move on to rumours of coming budget cuts. Entertain-ment costs a lot of money, I suggest, but then so does news.

“Yes,” he drawls.

Who will get the brunt of the cutbacks?

“There’s no cutting,” he says. “I’m growing. Keep growing, you make more money; you make more money, you have more money to spend. It’s very nice.”

But David Studer, executive producer of the fifth estate, says there was some cutting. He says during the 2006–2007 season he didn’t receive some funds he’d anticipated, which is why the show ran more reruns than usual. This season, in the middle of the fiscal year, the fifth’s budget suffered another slash mid-season; Studer won’t deny a figure of 20 per cent of the production budget. “It’s all we had left,” he sighs. He also confirms cuts have been made across the board at The National, Marketplace and CBC News: Sunday.

Studer can’t say for sure why his show faced two cuts, or what the money went towards, but he knows the consequences: even more reruns.

Mark Starowicz, whose documentary department also saw cuts this year, says there will be more reruns across the network, including in sports and drama, for the next couple of years. But news will be hurt more because dramas are funded, in part, with money from the Canadian Television Fund, and news isn’t. “Right now there is a serious budget deficit in the network,” Starowicz adds, explaining there’s been a buildup of inventory, which often happens with a crop of new shows. These include CBC’s latest slate of programs: jPod, MVP: The Secret Lives of Hockey Wives, Sophie, The Border, Heartland and The Week the Women Went. The network announced it was cancelling the first two on March 7 due to poor ratings; the last one was a hit, debuting with 1.2 million viewers.

Although he supports CBC’s investment in drama and entertainment, the fortunes of Starowicz’s documentary department can be tied to the success of the Corp’s other programming. Hockey, of course, is the biggest factor when it comes to lost ad revenue. The hardest hit happens when the Toronto Maple Leafs fail to make the playoffs. About 40 per cent of the Corp’s ad revenue and 48 per cent of its prime-time viewers come from sports, especially hockey—and despite going four decades without winning the Stanley Cup, the Leafs remain the most watched team in English Canada. This spring, the team started golfing early for the third year in a row.

But documentaries also suffer when entertainment fails to do well. “If Little Mosque on the Prairie doesn’t hover between 700,000 and a million [viewers], it means such a significant loss of money that it actually threatens us,” Starowicz explains. “You can see it: if we don’t have that income, there is no Afghanistan documentary”—a reference to a two-hour March special that involved sending three crews to Afghanistan over a period of two months.

CHARGE
That Stursberg wanted to divert millions from Newsworld into general network coffers

Throughout my research I kept hearing of an elliptical warning Burman gave friends at his September going-away party: “Follow the money.”

The relationship between Newsworld and CBC main operations can be confusing. Parliamentary funding accounts for almost half of CBC English Television’s budget, which for 2006–2007 was $634 million. Advertising revenue and other sources cover the rest. Taxpayers contribute $33 per capita annually for CBC English TV. Of that, only about nine dollars goes to news. After New Zealand and the United States, Canada’s is the lowest publicly funded broadcaster among 18 major Western countries. Funding for CBC hasn’t increased in over 30 years, save for salary increases. And the Corp is still dealing with the effects of budget cuts totaling $415 million made in the 1990s by both the Conservatives and, in particular, the Liberals.

Furthermore, the CRTC regulates all broadcasting and telecommunications activities in Canada. On June 1, 1999, Burman, then head of Newsworld, and a senior management team made a presentation to the CRTC, proposing a wholesale subscriber fee increase from 55 cents per month to 63 cents in the anglophone markets.

The Commission approved the request, acknowledging how the 63 cents and, in particular, the eight new cents would be used by Newsworld to expand live programming, create a network of video journalists, develop more joint projects with Réseau de l’information (RDI), and provide increased support for independent journalists.

Philip Savage, who worked at CBC from 1989 to 2005 in a variety of positions, including senior manager of policy and planning for CBC English television, radio and new media, says Newsworld can provide money to the main network but only if it is for projects that benefit the all-news channel.

Savage, now an assistant professor of communication studies at McMaster University, gives me an example of an allowable project: if CBC opened a news bureau, management could ask Newsworld to pay a portion of that cost if it would also be taking advantage of the bureau.

But what if it used the money for entertainment?

Savage says that decision would go against the spirit of the subscription fee and there’d likely be consequences. “I suspect,” he explains, “if for some reason it happened, then the next time the CBC was reviewed by the CRTC… ”He goes on to explain the consequences. “If the CBC said, ‘We need more money because of inflation—we need 75 cents instead of 63 cents,’ then the CRTC would say to that, ‘Hold on, if 10 per cent of every dollar goes to the CBC for entertainment, we can’t do that.’ Newsworld would look stupid,” concludes Savage. “The CRTC would look stupid. Paying for drama… it would be a risky procedure and people at the CBC would know that. The CRTC would say, ‘No way.’”

In late October, at our first interview, I ask Burman to elaborate on his “follow the money” comment. He explains that months earlier Stursberg told him he had the right to take $12 to $20 million out of Newsworld’s budget and spend it in any way that he saw fit.

It was, says Burman, a tense conversation.

“I said, ‘You can’t do that, that’s contrary to our commitment to the CRTC!’”

Stursberg’s response, according to Burman, was: “Fuck the CRTC.”

“You can’t fuck the CRTC as long as I’m still around.”

The relationship between CBC and Newsworld is confusing, and it is possible that Burman, despite his many years of CBC experience, doesn’t completely understand it either. That’s certainly Stursberg’s view. When he got back to us just before press time, Stursberg said, “This sounds like a Tony Burman fantasy to me. Burman’s view of what the CRTC requirements are with respect to Newsworld is wrong … The requirement of the CRTC is simply that there be no cross-subsidies from the main channel to Newsworld.”

Also, the CRTC expects CBC, its French language count-erpart and Newsworld to share resources—and the all-news network would be expected to repay CBC for the use of its resources.

Twelve to $20 million is a significant chunk of Newsworld’s expenses. If that kind of cut were ever made, the channel would not be able to afford documentaries, Burman says, and bureaus would shut down. If Stursberg does not take Newsworld’s money, Burman will be a happy camper. If it does happen, he says he would be open to testifying in front of the CRTC at CBC’s next license hearing: “Given the kind of experience that I’ve had with [the senior management] crowd before, I don’t think it’s time to fall asleep.”

CHARGE
That in the Stursberg era, the quality of The National has continued to diminish, a process that began long before his arrival

Don Young, a former journalist at As It Happens, The Journal and The National, has known the CBC VP for a long time and is no fan of him. He says Stursberg “does not like journal-ists” and is well known in the private sector as a critic of CBC and the way it is run. Even 25 years ago, Stursberg argued at dinner parties that CBC should be more efficient: “He was always going on about ‘Why do we need a radio guy and a TV guy covering the same report?’ Well, there are different skills for radio and TV, and just because you’re a good TV reporter you may not be the best radio reporter.”

Young, the executive producer of documentaries and features for the CTV-Rogers 2010 and 2012 Olympics, believes The National is the weakest it’s been in 20 years. One segment he remembers featured Joe Schlesinger in an elephant park in North Carolina after an elephant had killed its trainer. It could have been a sweet five or six minutes, he says, but it felt endless. “It’s filler.”

Another critic is Christopher Waddell, a former National senior producer who now teaches at Carleton University’s journalism school and writes for CBC News Online. He maintains that because of changes in news funding in the last five or six years, The National is no longer a flagship program, it’s “the tail at the end of the dog” and does not have enough resources to do what it should be doing, or even the independence to decide its own agenda.

So reporters seldom have enough time to report in depth, he explains, adding there is a growing lack of depth and experience in the corps of reporters. Journalists used to graduate from local TV newsrooms to The National, where only the most accomplished would make the grade. Waddell contends that audiences aren’t making connections with the new personalities they see, as they used to with Barbara Frum, Patrick Brown or Dan Bjarnason.

Another factor that will hinder development of the next generation of top National journalists is the coming death of the “farm system,” which produced CBCers such as Wendy Mesley, Brian McKenna and Burman. In the aftermath of the 2005 lockout, CBC can now hire contract employees up to a number equal to 9.5 per cent of the permanent workforce. An employee might get a contract for a few months, maybe a year, with no guarantee of renewal. Though the contract status was not meant for reporters, says Karen Wirsig, communications coordinator of the Canadian Media Guild, CBC is now hiring all kinds of core employees, including reporters, on contract. It may be cheaper for the network, but it has led to decreased loyalty and morale—and young journalists are looking elsewhere. Short contract positions, according to Mark Bulgutch, senior executive producer of CBC TV News programming, mean the network is in effect grooming young journalists for other broadcasters.

Vince Carlin, CBC’s ombudsman, understands the negative side of the “lifetime employment” previously attainable at the network: it requires better management to deal with people who can’t be fired, and most managers aren’t good at it. But he disagrees with shrinking the permanent core of journalists, pointing out that to be able to report without fear of falling out of favour with management, they must feel protected. Through the farm system, says Peter Herrndorf, a former English network vice-president and a current board member, “CBC allowed us to learn and make mistakes, and almost burn the place down.”

Still, as Waddell and many others point out, there remains much to praise—Terry Milewski’s Air India reporting, for example. Another positive, says Studer: the “At Issue” panel, which is “marvellous” and reminds him of Peter Gzowski’s Morningside on CBC Radio, which featured a lively panel of three respected former politicians—Eric Kierans, Dalton Camp and Stephen Lewis. Studer also praises Mansbridge’s interview with Karlheinz Schreiber, which broke new ground in the story, and adds that Adrienne Arsenault, Keith Boag and Paul Hunter provide layered, insightful reporting.

Stursberg’s view is that the quality of The National has not diminished. The charge, he says, is “potently untrue.”

Brian Stewart, currently The National’s senior correspondent and host of CBC News: Our World, says the network will likely never recapture the status it had abroad in the 1980s in terms of international coverage. There is much more competition now, so CBC must fight harder for access and interviews. In a lengthy email interview, Stewart wrote that “international coverage is brutally expensive and stagnant CBC budgets don’t allow for a lot of growth.” Yet, Stewart believes the network has some continuing strengths and the general quality of journalism remains the same: overseas reporters are still good, and it’s now possible to do more substantial analysis pieces without leaving Canada by using overseas interviews and better editing facilities. As well, graphics are incomparably better now, he says, as is the Corp’s ability to quickly put high-quality production values into an item.

Stewart doubts he would be able to report from Ethiopia today the way he did in the 1980s, partly due to budget and time restraints. Though print reporters might still have great flexibility, television reporters do not. In the past, Stewart was able to spend much more time with a variety of people. Now downloading research from the Internet has replaced much of that fieldwork, leading to less variety in sources and coverage. He points out that CBC has mounted major news operations during major crises, such as the Iraq invasion, the 2004 tsunami and, currently, Afghanistan. “But we had more freedom to roam in the past and were also not tied down by the constant need to meet satellite feeds and also phone in reports.”

For Stewart, more financial resources and more bodies is only part of the solution: “I also believe we need more introspection about our business, more time to study, to regroup, and more moments to reflect on where we’re likely going. It’s been a long time since I’ve sat around having a ‘blue sky’ session with anyone about future coverage. Everyone’s too damn busy, and attention spans grow shorter … we have to be aware just how frazzled we are and how in need of the quiet moments of reflection. To grow stronger we need to become more ‘sure’ of who we are, and that always needs some serious contemplation.”

That kind of contemplation time was available in the early 1970s, says Herrndorf. Even though weekly newsmagazines had fallen out of favour with Canadians, CBC created the fifth estate, which is still popular.

“Good programming decisions are made, somewhat tautologically, by good programmers, people who have good instincts that are counterintuitive to the general herd,” adds Carlin, the former chief news editor of CBC Television. “They are almost never made by survey.”

CHARGE
That Stursberg wants more news-lite

John Doyle, The Globe and Mail’s TV critic, says CBC is trying to become more commercial. The Corp, he explains, used to be a reliable source for good coverage of Canadian culture. On Newsworld, for example, Nancy Wilson had discussions with the arts and entertainment producer in the studio about the latest Canadian book or film, sometimes interviewing the artists. Now, CBC covers less of the high arts. He believes Newsworld’s The Scene with Jelena Adzec looks almost identical to CTV’s eTalk and Global’s ET Canada, from her Mary Hart–like pose to the “itsy bitsy parts of information” that it broadcasts.

If CBC is taking on the challenge of being more like the commercial broadcasters, then “its challenge is to make sure it’s not dumb,” says Doyle. “You can be slick, sleek, you can be populist, you can be entertaining, but you don’t be dumb, because the CBC audience is not dumb.” He argues some of the network’s arts and entertainment coverage is dumb. He’s noticed a change in the entertainment programming as well, particularly an emphasis on “light pop” and what CBC calls factual entertainment. Shows such as No Opportunity Wasted, Test the Nation and Triple Sensation can be marketed easily, he says, recalling the marketing campaign for No Opportunity Wasted, which saw people rappelling down the side of CBC headquarters. “Instead of saying, ‘Is this show part of what the CBC should be doing as an alternative to commercial broadcasting?’” says Doyle, “the primary concern is: ‘Oh, this is a show where we can do this kind of marketing, we can run an ad, we can reduce it all to a buzzword and get people interested.’ Television sometimes works like that. As to whether the CBC has to, I think is an entirely different question.”

John Cruickshank, the new publisher of CBC News—a position created following Burman’s departure—has a different view. He agrees that CBC does too little arts and entertainment coverage, but contends what it does do is too focused on the high arts. Cruickshank, formerly editor of The Vancouver Sun and chief operating officer of Chicago-based Sun-Times Media Group, goes on to explain he wouldn’t want to lose the focus on high arts, but would like to supplement it with more entertainment.

Would CBC do a book review, not for just two minutes, but bring in the author and have a real discussion?

“Those things are all possible, and there may be times we may pursue the longer form,” replies Cruickshank. “Usually what people are saying when they say ‘serious’ or ‘mandate’ is things should be really, really long. As it turns out, television isn’t a form that is really conducive to really, really long … The complaints I hear about the shortness of items, I think, are kind of goofy, especially on Newsworld.” Cruickshank points out that a 24-hour news channel is “supposed to be short stuff. It’s supposed to be breaking news. It’s supposed to be exciting stuff. People don’t come to it for something long.”

Documentary filmmaker Jon Kalina, who worked on shows such as The Journal, Midday, and Daybreak and continues to do documentaries for the CBC and other networks, says he has the “distinct impression that the CBC is interested in less serious topics.” He believes it has to do with its perception of what the audience wants. “It’s easier to air lighter, more popular [shows] because CBC thinks that people like those things,” he says. “If people like Paris Hilton, let’s give them Paris Hilton.”

In November, CBC aired Doc Zone’s Paris Hilton Inc. But the audience, admits Starowicz, didn’t want it. Not only did Paris Hilton Inc. not get the ratings CBC managers hoped it would but, Starowicz remembers “our own contract manager boycotted it.” That said, Starowicz also points out his documentary department is still doing more serious fare, including Nuclear Jihad, Battle for Bagdad and China Rises, which garnered approximately 760,000 viewers against such stiff competition as Desperate Housewives.

The man who directed Battle for Baghdad and Nuclear Jihad, investigative journalist Julian Sher, a 10-year fifth estate veteran, says that although the doc unit is “an island of sanity; a beacon of hope” for excellent journalism. “There’s not enough airtime, not enough priority given to it.” Sher says when he left the fifth in 2000, there was a flourishing current affairs unit that was getting high numbers and attracted young, engaged journalists: “Now a lot of that is a wasteland. Current affairs doesn’t exist as a current affairs department.” Disclosure is gone and so is Undercurrents. What’s more, says Sher, few of the people he worked with at CBC are there anymore. Their work still airs on the network sometimes, but they don’t work for the Corp because “there are no shows to work for.”

CHARGE
That Stursberg has no overall plan for CBC TV news

A huge frustration for staffers in news and current affairs is continuing management vagueness about its plan for them. “When you find out, let us know!” laughed Renée Pellerin, a producer in charge of special projects at Newsworld, in late January. “Now there’s new leadership, so you would expect things to change,” she says. “We had the same leadership under Tony Burman for a long time. No one knows John Cruickshank like we knew Burman. Managers have told me they have respect for him.”

Adds Studer: “It’s the big unknown. Everybody, including the new CBC president [Hubert Lacroix], says, ‘Can’t wait to see more of your plan, Richard!’ I don’t know—I mean, you hear rumours about everything from a detailed change and cabinet shuffles, and then you hear, ‘No, no, no, it’s just about harmonizing newsgathering,’ which is kind of funny because I thought we already had it.”

On February 20, CBC News announced a reorganization that split the news division into two main areas: programming, run by Jennifer McGuire, who will set the tone and mandate of news programming for all media platforms; and newsgathering, under the leadership of Todd Spencer, whose title will be executive director of news content. It’s an encouraging sign—the two are respected professionals with impressive resumés. McGuire is an award-winning journalist who has been with the Corp since 1988, most recently as executive director of CBC Radio.

Before that, she led the creation of The Current, the popular morning radio show hosted by Anna Maria Tremonti. After joining CBC in 1994, Spencer worked his way up from editorial assistant for national news to become a writer and lineup producer, and helped establish Newsworld’s business unit. He left in 1997 to work in Hong Kong, then joined CNN International as executive producer for the Asia bureau in 1999. He returned to CBC in 2004 as executive director of production and resources.

While there were no immediate clues about what these changes meant, there was uncertainty and anger. The day after the announcement, Stursberg and Cruickshank walked into the main Toronto newsroom around 3 p.m. Stursberg gave a two-minute speech to more than 50 employees. He argued that the restructuring would be good for the network and talked about the need for change at CBC TV. “It sounded like he was saying we don’t work hard enough, that television ratings aren’t high enough,” says a producer who was there. Stursberg claimed there was a tense relationship between radio and TV; that radio was perfect, says the producer, and TV had problems. Mansbridge walked right up to Stursberg and refuted all of his assertions. “That’s horseshit,” he said angrily. A fierce discussion followed. It lasted for at least 30 minutes as the journalists defended what they do and argued about CBC TV’s role. They demanded to know if Stursberg would take money from radio, asked why there was so much entertainment programming and even wanted to know how much money he made.

Stursberg, however, had a different view of the event. “Actually, Peter did not refute anything I said. He refuted something Michael Enright said.”

A day after the heated scene, I ask Studer if employees have a clearer sense of CBC’s big plan. He says all he knows is he’s got a new boss, McGuire, who has a good reputation: “Other than that I don’t know much about the future.”

When I interviewed Esther Enkin in mid-January, she was the deputy editor-in-chief and I wanted to know more about Stursberg’s grand plan.

“Well it’s very early days,” she said. “I have very little to tell you, and what I have to tell you, some of it has to do with competitive edge, so I’m not about to tell you detail, but I’m also going to tell you that it’s very early on and I can’t tell you—not only can’t I tell you because I don’t want to tell you, but because it is a work in progress, there’s not a lot of details that I could share with you. So I’m sorry for that, but that’s where it’s at.”

Enkin talked to me again after the restructuring announce-ment. She now had a new title—executive editor of news— and explained how CBC’s big picture is to connect with more Canadians, to be more available 24 hours a day, to be more responsive to the audience, to offer a broader range of storytelling, to make online content a greater priority, to put as many boots on the street as possible. None of this was new—Stursberg and Cruickshank had said as much months before.

Stursberg is enthusiastic about local news and wants to reinvent it. To do that, CBC will focus on three pillars. First: editorial priorities will be specific to local markets. Second: there will be a multi-platform offering, running on TV, radio, Internet and mobile simultaneously—and increasing cross-promotion. The third pillar is based on citizen journalism. “How we find out the news and report it will be a joint undertaking between us and the people who used to be called the audience,” Stursberg says.

But there must be something more to his plan than local news, which, he explains, is an “important part of total news … Two-thirds of revenue sits in local news.” So I asked Cruickshank. “Richard has been working here for a couple of years developing a plan for CBC News he’s sold to the former president and sold to the board, and I’ve signed up for the plan,” he says. “I think it’s a very good one, a very strong one, and that is to ensure that all of the folks working in news, on new media, radio and television, are communicating fully amongst themselves, that we’re using all of the news we have in the most efficient way possible.”

But how will this efficiency be implemented?

“There’s a very large number of reporters across the country in radio and television,” explains Cruickshank. “It certainly is a matter of maximizing the work that these folks do—and to some extent, rationalizing the work that they do—making certain that we’re not duplicating efforts, that national reporters aren’t doing the same stories as local reporters; that when television reporters can file for radio they do, when radio reporters can take a VJ with them and file for television that they do—that allows us to extend the reach that we have across the country.”

Starowicz told me he suspects there are only five reporters for all of Toronto, I tell Cruickshank, wondering how much more work five reporters can handle.

“That’s an accounting issue more than anything else,” he says. “The issue is: are we harnessing the activities of all of those folks effectively for the Toronto broadcast, or the Vancouver broadcast, or the Calgary broadcast? And the answer today is no, we’re not, so we’ve got to rethink that in a way that we can use all those people doing that work more effectively.” He says just because employees might not be assigned to a local broadcast doesn’t mean they can’t file for newscasts across Canada.

It’s still not clear how the plan will be carried out. “It’s a work in progress,” says Enkin. “Step one was John coming, step one and a half was him enunciating where he wanted to go. Now, step two, he’s put his team together.”

As for Stursberg’s response to the charge he has no overall plan for news, when he replied to us just before press time, he said:“This is also rubbish…We are now moving to the next stage by overhauling our entire newsgathering and programming operations.

Running any major part of CBC is among the most difficult of jobs—and with millions of owners, accusations of bias, budgets constraints, labour disputes, no real political support, technological advances, changing audience tastes and more, Stursberg can only accomplish so much.

To get a better idea of the challenges he faces, I talk to Phyllis Platt, a former CBC director of network programming and executive director of arts and entertainment, now an independent producer, to add the perspective of someone who has seen the view from the top.

If CBC English TV had been non-commercial, she says, it would have made everybody’s life a lot easier. “Sales drives certain agendas—it doesn’t control agendas, but it pushes agendas,” she says, and there are a whole lot of agendas to satisfy, including those of governments, which “tend not to be friends of the CBC.”

Platt believes Stursberg’s dilemma is that for a public broadcaster to survive in this environment, it must attract a significant number of viewers, because, “sooner or later, whatever government of the day is looking around for money to move someplace else, or is in trouble economically, will likely turn its gaze to the CBC and decide, ‘Well, there aren’t enough people supporting it, so now we can get rid of it.’”

She believes Stursberg’s agenda is to build popular support for CBC to a level where its future is more secure. How to do that, Platt concludes, is always tricky.

Bob Cox likes to run long distances. The last time he ran a marathon, the 2006 Manitoba Marathon, he came in 52nd out of 731, eighth highest in his age division (he was 45 at the time). Lately he’s running just for the exercise, but also to let his mind wander. He tries to leave by six in the morning, but sticking to a routine isn’t easy right now. As publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, he has a lot of responsibilities. When he does manage to get out for a run, he does a few stretches and heads off toward Assiniboine Park.

Cox has never liked standing still for very long. His first big job was as a court reporter for the Free Press in 1984, but after three years he jumped to The Canadian Press and worked at bureaus in Regina, Ottawa and Edmonton. He was restless and wanted to see the country, so it was perfect, but after 10 years he took off again, becoming city editor at the Edmonton Journal. He crossed the nation once more in 2000, heading east to The Globe and Mail. As both national editor and night editor there from 2000 to 2005, he was exposed to the Internet beast.

By 2005, he’d seen a good chunk of Canada when he applied for the job of editor-in-chief at the Free Press. Murdoch Davis, his old publisher from the Journal who had since moved into the same role at the Free Press, eventually called wondering if Cox might like to come back to the paper. For the restless wanderer, it was a fresh horizon.

And there was a lot on the horizon. Since his return, Cox has advocated radical change—especially on the website. In two years the Free Press has gone from charging for web content to allowing readers full and free access, doubling the hits and rapidly expanding web traffic. Reporters now move original content to the web and that’s changed the way they do stories. They put up video and audio clips routinely. They update frequently. They regularly interact with the community. It’s a big change. Cox, who has been publisher since November 2007, calls the Free Press a “news organization” on the web rather than a newspaper, and admits he doesn’t know where all these new initiatives will take the paper.

It’s one thing for Cox to advocate rapid change, and quite another to adapt to the reality of the Internet. Recording and filing video consumes too much time, reporters hate undercutting their own stories by posting short web exclusives, and online editions were slow to generate significant advertising revenue. Meanwhile, community interaction is a laudable goal, but sometimes, when audience participation consists of comments such as, “Fuk the MSM anarchy rulz,” journalists have to wonder what’s happening. Cox pushes on, hoping he’s getting somewhere.

The challenge all major dailies face is that they’re huge, costly information providers with declining circulation numbers and advertising revenues. Cox’s manager of online research and development, John Sullivan, who was also his former online editor, understands the dilemma. “If the web’s going to be breaking news,” he says, picking up a copy of the Free Press with his left hand, “what does this do?” He drops it, and it makes a loud thud. “No one’s come to grips with it yet.”

He came from the sky. Mike McIntyre, the Free Press’s justice reporter, arrives on an Adventure Air float plane at 9:30 on the morning of August 14. The Pauingassi First Nation reserve, which sits on a peninsula on Fishing Lake, 310 air kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, is accessible by car only in the winter, when the ice is frozen, and even then McIntyre would be taking his chances. His job is to write about the death of Adam Keeper, a six-year-old bullied, stripped, forced into the lake and drowned by fellow schoolchildren.

The only problem is, McIntyre somehow has to stay connected to the office from this remote part of Manitoba and make it look good on the website. He’s brought along his Sony digital camera, and Keeper’s parents agreed to let him videotape the funeral for the Free Press. What will eventually appear on the paper’s website looks shaky, handheld, like a home movie. There’s a shot of the victim’s parents. A child runs out of frame. The camera abruptly cuts to the congregation and an Aboriginal singer with an acoustic guitar, playing a song in Anishiinabe, the Pauingassi language. The video pans across grieving families. Then it’s over. No narration.

McIntyre has captured Adam’s funeral on video, but now he has to wait. At 5:30 p.m. he takes out his memory card, puts it in an envelope and gives it to pilot Oliver Owen, who slips it into the pocket of his white shirt and takes off. When he lands in Winnipeg, a Free Press employee picks up the card from the Adventure Air office, and James Turner , who was then the video editor, uploads the clip onto the server. It’ll be online before Winnipeggers fetch their morning paper.

The story could have ended there, but because web surfers linked to it through social bookmarking websites such as Digg.com, over 140,000 people saw the story that day alone, the most daily traffic the Free Press has ever had. The debate held on those websites about what to do with the kids who murdered Adam—counselling, punishment or something else—made for the kind of “YOU’RE WRONG” debates the Internet is known for.

The story on Adam’s funeral is still available for free. For most of 2007, content was free for one week; after that, non-subscribers had to pay. Free Press online coordinator John White rabble-roused to eliminate the firewall. He knew it wasn’t attracting anybody new. Even The New York Times had unlocked its archives and columns, after a futile spell of trying to pry money out of readers for “premium” content. Now the majority of Free Press content, going back to 2001, is available without charge.

Because users are now able to read both old and new stories, they visit the site more often, says White, and more traffic means more advertising. His equation? “Traffic plus new content equals cash.”

Cox likes to run along Wellington Crescent, near his own street in the River Heights North neighbourhood. Wellington sports a lot of stately mansions and three-storey houses. It’s right beside the Assiniboine River that runs through Winnipeg. There’s a lot of green here, both in the trees that provide cool shade, and in the bank accounts of the house owners who pay people to plant those trees.

A lot of these mansions were built around the turn of the 20th century, when Winnipeg experienced an economic boom. With the Canadian Pacific Railway coming through town, the money poured in. It was going to be the “Chicago of the North,” except for one glitch. In 1914, the completion of the Panama Canal—a technological marvel connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—reduced the number of rail trips necessary across the country. Winnipeg has never reached those heights of optimism since.

Four decades before this letdown, in 1872, when Manitoba was just beginning to experience boom times, William Luxton and John Kenny started the Manitoba Free Press (renamed the Winnipeg Free Press in 1931). It was one of the few survivors of “Newspaper Row,” a.k.a. McDermott Avenue, where at least half a dozen papers competed for Manitoba readers.

The Free Press was historically known for being a Liberal paper, although its politics have blurred over the years, especially since the NDP became such a force in Manitoba. It has editorialized for more improvements and funding for Winnipeg’s downtown, which has become decrepit over the past couple of decades—in part because companies, including the Free Press, moved their offices and factories out of the core. There are still a few movers and shakers downtown, though. The Asper family, for example, does business at CanWest Global Place. At 33 storeys it’s the city’s tallest building. In 2001, patriarch Israel Asper negotiated the purchase of the old Southam newspaper chain from Hollinger, Conrad Black’s company, to add to his television properties. Now Asper’s offspring control CanWest Global Communications Corp., a media empire with newspapers in every major city from Victoria to Montreal. Except, that is, in their hometown: they own neither the Free Press nor the Winnipeg Sun.

CanWest was beaten to the punch by Thomson Corp. In 1979, Thomson bought the Free Press. Then in 2001, Ron Stern and Bob Silver formed the FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership. They also bought the Brandon Sun, Winnipeg’s Uptown weekly and other Manitoba community newspapers.

As a CanWest executive, Davis instituted a policy of running uniform editorials in all company newspapers, which angered journalists to no end. Four years later, as Free Press publisher, Davis agreed to distribute the National Post in Winnipeg. While former editors were critical of CanWest (Izzy Asper once claimed the paper was obsessed with it) the two companies now have a good business relationship.

Andy Ritchie, the Globe’s former vice-president of operations, replaced Davis at the Free Press in 2006. But it wasn’t a great fit and Ritchie left a year and a half later over a disagreement with the owners about his top-down management style.

With no CanWest offering around, the Winnipeg Sun is Cox’s lone challenger. When the 90-year-old Winnipeg Tribune folded in 1980, employees took what was left of its staff and started up the Sun. The current incarnation is a typical Sun Media paper: no stories on page 1, page 3 girls, tabloid size. As of early 2008 its circulation sat at 38,924, less than one-third of the Free Press’s 119,936 weekday number (in 1979, a year before the Tribune shut down, it had two-thirds of the Free Press’s circulation). As for the web, the Sun’s site features no local breaking news and little video.

For now, at least, Cox just has to worry about everything else on the Internet.

No one is likely to make the mistake of calling Cox a hip guy. He was always the straight man when he and his colleague, humour columnist Doug Speirs, did their charity comedy act together. A clumsy one too—Speirs recalls that Cox once knocked over a flaming drink, igniting both the bar and his fleece sweater, though he quickly beat out the flames with his hand. He’s basically a quiet guy, balding, with a face like an avuncular insurance salesman. He likes to talk things over before making a decision. He doesn’t seem overly confident—or the go-to guy for making big changes—yet he is.

When Cox took the baton as editor-in-chief in April 2005, his paper’s website was mere “shovelware.” Hired web monkeys loaded the print edition onto the Internet, and that was it. The main innovation back then was something called fpnews.ca, which offered the newspaper’s entire contents in PDF files. But there was a catch—the electronic version was available only to print subscribers. On the main site, the paper charged for its web content. Executives were worried that readers might go straight to the Internet and bypass the broadsheet altogether.

Managers at the Free Press, as well as most other Canadian newspapers, have since calmed down. Now they grow audience numbers through the website rather than flogging their paid subscriber base. For Cox, newspapers need their Internet audience to make up for the decline in circulation. “My number one job is to capture audience,” he says. “If you don’t have them, you don’t have anything.”

Cox hasn’t captured the audience alone. Andy Ritchie, his predecessor, opened up a slew of sister websites, including a massive launch for Whatsonwinnipeg.com, a full-service entertainment website, which he put video on. John White ran a local news website before Cox hired him. Cox learned a lot from his former co-worker, Globe online editor Angus Frame, about how to cope with the new and imminent realities of pushing video, adding bloggers and posting live updates. Sullivan, who felt that online content was being ignored and left out in the cold under Davis, now manages one of the most important parts of the newspaper. Cox fields half a dozen new ideas for Internet content every day. It’s overwhelming, but he’s still looking, still restless. The website continues to change, and the paper along with it. The Free Press has added 6 a.m. staffers and have divided their deputy editors’ duties into online and print.

At 7 a.m., Free Press editor-in-chief Margo Goodhand is at home when the email comes through. Rapper Kanye West needs an Xbox 360. Right now. Well okay, the paper needs an Xbox 360 right now so West can have one in his dressing room later. That’s why marketing director Brodie Milne is emailing. He’s been preparing for the concert right from the get-go and is now helping with the setup of tonight’s show at the MTS Centre. The Free Press is co-sponsoring, and West’s contract rider demands an Xbox 360 be backstage. Milne’s asking everyone, including the editorial boss.

No, Goodhand doesn’t have an Xbox 360, but she’ll ask friends before her board meeting in three hours, and the other editors at the meeting. Turns out no one else has an Xbox 360, either, and none of them knows where to get one. Arts and life editor Boris Hrybinsky and Goodhand segue from the Xbox 360 crisis—Milne eventually snags one from a buddy—to how best to review the concert. West will take the stage at 10 p.m., one hour before the paper’s press run starts. They decide to put the review on the web instead, and drop a throw on page 1 to direct readers to the site.

Pushing people to the site is exactly what editors have to do, according to Sullivan. “The newspaper should not have any breaking news in it,” he says. “Breaking news is fundamentally the purview and territory of the web.” The Globe’s Frame agrees and says, “There are still newspapers that do not put breaking news on their website—that’s old hat.” Three or four paragraph stories, shorter than what will appear in the paper, are fine; the city desk calls them “webbies.”

Around the city desk, while they’re writing stories, reporters grouse about who gets the cool toys. Management gets BlackBerrys, while the people who actually file stories have to wait in line to sign them out. They need BlackBerrys, they say, to send in their webbies and updates directly from the scene. Goodhand says not so fast; the editor-in-chief’s position “is a BlackBerry kind of job now,” too. Reporters also have trouble adjusting to the reality of letting go of their stories. Before webbies, other Winnipeg media read the paper’s exclusives in the next morning’s edition. Now this competitive advantage is all but gone.

“We might as well put it on the website,” a reporter says.

“I’ll contact the radio station,” another chimes in.

“I’ve already emailed them,” the original reporter says.

Meanwhile, Sullivan prods the newsroom about filing to the web. He bellows: “Feed the beast!”

Sports reporter Ed Tait would like to help, but he’s having a bad video day. Normally he’d tape the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football practice, but it was rained out. Instead he gets the usual boring locker room interviews about the upcoming Canadian Football League game against the Calgary Stampeders. And he records Blue Bombers coach Doug Berry in the Chairman’s Lounge, a small, dimly lit bar with ugly green carpeting. The only other guy shooting the coach’s press conference is from the Calgary Herald.

Tait needs something, anything, to send Turner. No one ever trained him on how to use a video camera; his editors just told him to get out there and shoot. Since then, the managers have hired a video expert from Global TV to teach filming and editing techniques. After a few practice runs, other sports photographers—who’d also been converted to double-duty as videographers—taught him a few tricks with zooms and how to hold the camera. Tait says he “got real artsy-fartsy, like Martin Scorsese.” The bosses seemed to notice Tait’s budding auteur-like sensibilities—and they were ecstatic that he got video on site.

Today Tait hasn’t got much, so he cuts it short. The material’s weak and there’s no time to go through it all anyway. He writes up a script, does the voiceover and sends it to Turner, who is having his own long day. Usually he works from 3 to 11 p.m., but figures he won’t finish editing until 9:30. Then he’ll start videotaping his broadcast, which could take him to one in the morning.

Turner shot yesterday’s video newscast at the back of the newsroom with a handheld camera and lighting apparatus. The background is a wall cover-ed with Free Press front pages from the last few years. An old Underwood Five typewriter sits just out of frame. The audio typically consists of Turner reading punched-up leads. The video usually shows zoom-ins of still photographs. “Maybe the standards are lower on the Internet?” Turner wonders, “I don’t know.”

The look might be more amateur hour than auteur, and Turner admits he “doesn’t know who’s watching it,” but the Free Press keeps loading video onto the site. In fact, it offers more video than any other newspaper in Canada. Photographers go wherever editors think something might happen.

Wayne Glowacki has to shoot a University of Manitoba protest about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s environmental policies, even though he’d rather produce more in-depth, documentary-style fare, similar to what’s available at globeandmail.com or thestar.com. The big papers don’t post new video every day, and some of their material also looks amateurish, but the stories generally have more depth. One Globe video in December 2007 starred feature writer Ian Brown talking about his severely disabled son, Walker. Much of the script was lifted from Brown’s 8,000-word feature published in the Focus section, but it looked like a mini-doc, whereas Free Press videos look like local news.

Glowacki arrives at the protest, but no one’s there. Or maybe they were. The press release had the event happening at 12:30 a.m., but he’d assumed 12:30 p.m. A flag decrying Harper’s environmental apathy is the only evidence that it had happened. Growacki leaves after about 10 minutes. Some days there’s no good video in Winnipeg.

The craving of the beast creates problems for the writers too. Sports reporter Paul Wiecek didn’t want to post his exclusive that the Blue Bombers had signed Juran Bolden, formerly of the National Football League’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, on September 5, but management decided to go ahead. The story went up at 5:30 p.m., but the paper doesn’t monitor its own website feeds 24-7, so no one tracked the followup. At 8:37 p.m., in response, the Blue Bombers made the Bolden acquisition official. The team also announced that it had acquired Ike Charleton, who’d been cut from the NFL’s Detroit Lions. By midnight, sports fans were sending emails wondering why the paper’s online coverage was incomplete. Wiecek read the messages the next morning.

Cox usually finishes his run after half an hour. Long distances can feel endless and runners need to develop a mental toughness to survive. They can’t focus on their feet pounding the pavement, or their lungs feeling pinched or even the goal ahead, because they’re never quite there. The mind has to wander.

By the time Cox gets home, he’s run across Wellington Crescent, through Assiniboine Park, then back along Wellington to his house. Some days when he finishes, the sun has not even risen. He does a few cool-down stretches, slips inside the house and gets ready for work.

The web is always going to have something new, something fresh, something unexpected for newspapers to adapt to. That makes it tricky to plan and react. News chasers such as Cox can’t focus on the goals, or the pain or even the act itself—they simply have to keep running.

They’re trapped by this race, but they weren’t “free” when they were just printing a broadsheet. They were constrained by their medium, but it was safe. Then the experiments came along—opening up the site, statistically analyzing the number of hits, adding video, blogging—and it became freer and scarier. The Free Press’s Internet venture is one large incubator. Cox says, “Let’s see what works.”

Now, the delivery system has changed from a 100-year-old way of doing things. The Free Press has woken up from the dream that the classic model would survive. And the editors are asking fundamental questions: Why is the newspaper structured the way it is? What should newspapers publish when the breaking news is already on the web? For John Sullivan, the answer is clear. Print journalists must provide depth, analysis and debate. “If I already know what happened,” he says, “tell me why I should care. That’s the new territory of the newspaper. That’s all it should be.”

THE NEW

How Bob Cox and The Winnipeg Free Press caught up with the pack in building an on-line presence—and why the finish line is still far from sight
BY WILLIAM STODALKA Photography BY Thomas Fricke

Bob Cox likes to run long distances. The last time he ran a marathon, the 2006 Manitoba Marathon, he came in 52nd out of 731, eighth highest in his age division (he was 45 at the time). Lately he’s running just for the exercise, but also to let his mind wander. He tries to leave by six in the morning, but sticking to a routine isn’t easy right now. As publisher of the Winnipeg Free Press, he has a lot of responsibilities. When he does manage to get out for a run, he does a few stretches and heads off toward Assiniboine Park.

Cox has never liked standing still for very long. His first big job was as a court reporter for the Free Press in 1984, but after three years he jumped to The Canadian Press and worked at bureaus in Regina, Ottawa and Edmonton. He was restless and wanted to see the country, so it was perfect, but after 10 years he took off again, becoming city editor at the Edmonton Journal. He crossed the nation once more in 2000, heading east to The Globe and Mail. As both national editor and night editor there from 2000 to 2005, he was exposed to the Internet beast.

By 2005, he’d seen a good chunk of Canada when he applied for the job of editor-in-chief at the Free Press. Murdoch Davis, his old publisher from the Journal who had since moved into the same role at the Free Press, eventually called wondering if Cox might like to come back to the paper. For the restless wanderer, it was a fresh horizon.

And there was a lot on the horizon. Since his return, Cox has advocated radical change—especially on the website. In two years the Free Press has gone from charging for web content to allowing readers full and free access, doubling the hits and rapidly expanding web traffic. Reporters now move original content to the web and that’s changed the way they do stories. They put up video and audio clips routinely. They update frequently. They regularly interact with the community. It’s a big change. Cox, who has been publisher since November 2007, calls the Free Press a “news organization” on the web rather than a newspaper, and admits he doesn’t know where all these new initiatives will take the paper.

It’s one thing for Cox to advocate rapid change, and quite another to adapt to the reality of the Internet. Recording and filing video consumes too much time, reporters hate undercutting their own stories by posting short web exclusives, and online editions were slow to generate significant advertising revenue. Meanwhile, community interaction is a laudable goal, but sometimes, when audience participation consists of comments such as, “Fuk the MSM anarchy rulz,” journalists have to wonder what’s happening. Cox pushes on, hoping he’s getting somewhere.

The challenge all major dailies face is that they’re huge, costly information providers with declining circulation numbers and advertising revenues. Cox’s manager of online research and development, John Sullivan, who was also his former online editor, understands the dilemma. “If the web’s going to be breaking news,” he says, picking up a copy of the Free Press with his left hand, “what does this do?” He drops it, and it makes a loud thud. “No one’s come to grips with it yet.”

He came from the sky. Mike McIntyre, the Free Press’s justice reporter, arrives on an Adventure Air float plane at 9:30 on the morning of August 14. The Pauingassi First Nation reserve, which sits on a peninsula on Fishing Lake, 310 air kilometres northeast of Winnipeg, is accessible by car only in the winter, when the ice is frozen, and even then McIntyre would be taking his chances. His job is to write about the death of Adam Keeper, a six-year-old bullied, stripped, forced into the lake and drowned by fellow schoolchildren.

The only problem is, McIntyre somehow has to stay connected to the office from this remote part of Manitoba and make it look good on the website. He’s brought along his Sony digital camera, and Keeper’s parents agreed to let him videotape the funeral for the Free Press. What will eventually appear on the paper’s website looks shaky, handheld, like a home movie. There’s a shot of the victim’s parents. A child runs out of frame. The camera abruptly cuts to the congregation and an Aboriginal singer with an acoustic guitar, playing a song in Anishiinabe, the Pauingassi language. The video pans across grieving families. Then it’s over. No narration.

McIntyre has captured Adam’s funeral on video, but now he has to wait. At 5:30 p.m. he takes out his memory card, puts it in an envelope and gives it to pilot Oliver Owen, who slips it into the pocket of his white shirt and takes off. When he lands in Winnipeg, a Free Press employee picks up the card from the Adventure Air office, and James Turner , who was then the video editor, uploads the clip onto the server. It’ll be online before Winnipeggers fetch their morning paper.

The story could have ended there, but because web surfers linked to it through social bookmarking websites such as Digg.com, over 140,000 people saw the story that day alone, the most daily traffic the Free Press has ever had. The debate held on those websites about what to do with the kids who murdered Adam—counselling, punishment or something else—made for the kind of “YOU’RE WRONG” debates the Internet is known for.

The story on Adam’s funeral is still available for free. For most of 2007, content was free for one week; after that, non-subscribers had to pay. Free Press online coordinator John White rabble-roused to eliminate the firewall. He knew it wasn’t attracting anybody new. Even The New York Times had unlocked its archives and columns, after a futile spell of trying to pry money out of readers for “premium” content. Now the majority of Free Press content, going back to 2001, is available without charge.

Because users are now able to read both old and new stories, they visit the site more often, says White, and more traffic means more advertising. His equation? “Traffic plus new content equals cash.”

Cox likes to run along Wellington Crescent, near his own street in the River Heights North neighbourhood. Wellington sports a lot of stately mansions and three-storey houses. It’s right beside the Assiniboine River that runs through Winnipeg. There’s a lot of green here, both in the trees that provide cool shade, and in the bank accounts of the house owners who pay people to plant those trees.

A lot of these mansions were built around the turn of the 20th century, when Winnipeg experienced an economic boom. With the Canadian Pacific Railway coming through town, the money poured in. It was going to be the “Chicago of the North,” except for one glitch. In 1914, the completion of the Panama Canal—a technological marvel connecting the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—reduced the number of rail trips necessary across the country. Winnipeg has never reached those heights of optimism since.

Four decades before this letdown, in 1872, when Manitoba was just beginning to experience boom times, William Luxton and John Kenny started the Manitoba Free Press (renamed the Winnipeg Free Press in 1931). It was one of the few survivors of “Newspaper Row,” a.k.a. McDermott Avenue, where at least half a dozen papers competed for Manitoba readers.

The Free Press was historically known for being a Liberal paper, although its politics have blurred over the years, especially since the NDP became such a force in Manitoba. It has editorialized for more improvements and funding for Winnipeg’s downtown, which has become decrepit over the past couple of decades—in part because companies, including the Free Press, moved their offices and factories out of the core. There are still a few movers and shakers downtown, though. The Asper family, for example, does business at CanWest Global Place. At 33 storeys it’s the city’s tallest building. In 2001, patriarch Israel Asper negotiated the purchase of the old Southam newspaper chain from Hollinger, Conrad Black’s company, to add to his television properties. Now Asper’s offspring control CanWest Global Communications Corp., a media empire with newspapers in every major city from Victoria to Montreal. Except, that is, in their hometown: they own neither the Free Press nor the Winnipeg Sun.

CanWest was beaten to the punch by Thomson Corp. In 1979, Thomson bought the Free Press. Then in 2001, Ron Stern and Bob Silver formed the FP Canadian Newspapers Limited Partnership. They also bought the Brandon Sun, Winnipeg’s Uptown weekly and other Manitoba community newspapers.

As a CanWest executive, Davis instituted a policy of running uniform editorials in all company newspapers, which angered journalists to no end. Four years later, as Free Press publisher, Davis agreed to distribute the National Post in Winnipeg. While former editors were critical of CanWest (Izzy Asper once claimed the paper was obsessed with it) the two companies now have a good business relationship.

Andy Ritchie, the Globe’s former vice-president of operations, replaced Davis at the Free Press in 2006. But it wasn’t a great fit and Ritchie left a year and a half later over a disagreement with the owners about his top-down management style.

With no CanWest offering around, the Winnipeg Sun is Cox’s lone challenger. When the 90-year-old Winnipeg Tribune folded in 1980, employees took what was left of its staff and started up the Sun. The current incarnation is a typical Sun Media paper: no stories on page 1, page 3 girls, tabloid size. As of early 2008 its circulation sat at 38,924, less than one-third of the Free Press’s 119,936 weekday number (in 1979, a year before the Tribune shut down, it had two-thirds of the Free Press’s circulation). As for the web, the Sun’s site features no local breaking news and little video.

For now, at least, Cox just has to worry about everything else on the Internet.

No one is likely to make the mistake of calling Cox a hip guy. He was always the straight man when he and his colleague, humour columnist Doug Speirs, did their charity comedy act together. A clumsy one too—Speirs recalls that Cox once knocked over a flaming drink, igniting both the bar and his fleece sweater, though he quickly beat out the flames with his hand. He’s basically a quiet guy, balding, with a face like an avuncular insurance salesman. He likes to talk things over before making a decision. He doesn’t seem overly confident—or the go-to guy for making big changes—yet he is.

When Cox took the baton as editor-in-chief in April 2005, his paper’s website was mere “shovelware.” Hired web monkeys loaded the print edition onto the Internet, and that was it. The main innovation back then was something called fpnews.ca, which offered the newspaper’s entire contents in PDF files. But there was a catch—the electronic version was available only to print subscribers. On the main site, the paper charged for its web content. Executives were worried that readers might go straight to the Internet and bypass the broadsheet altogether.

Managers at the Free Press, as well as most other Canadian newspapers, have since calmed down. Now they grow audience numbers through the website rather than flogging their paid subscriber base. For Cox, newspapers need their Internet audience to make up for the decline in circulation. “My number one job is to capture audience,” he says. “If you don’t have them, you don’t have anything.”

Cox hasn’t captured the audience alone. Andy Ritchie, his predecessor, opened up a slew of sister websites, including a massive launch for Whatsonwinnipeg.com, a full-service entertainment website, which he put video on. John White ran a local news website before Cox hired him. Cox learned a lot from his former co-worker, Globe online editor Angus Frame, about how to cope with the new and imminent realities of pushing video, adding bloggers and posting live updates. Sullivan, who felt that online content was being ignored and left out in the cold under Davis, now manages one of the most important parts of the newspaper. Cox fields half a dozen new ideas for Internet content every day. It’s overwhelming, but he’s still looking, still restless. The website continues to change, and the paper along with it. The Free Press has added 6 a.m. staffers and have divided their deputy editors’ duties into online and print.

At 7 a.m., Free Press editor-in-chief Margo Goodhand is at home when the email comes through. Rapper Kanye West needs an Xbox 360. Right now. Well okay, the paper needs an Xbox 360 right now so West can have one in his dressing room later. That’s why marketing director Brodie Milne is emailing. He’s been preparing for the concert right from the get-go and is now helping with the setup of tonight’s show at the MTS Centre. The Free Press is co-sponsoring, and West’s contract rider demands an Xbox 360 be backstage. Milne’s asking everyone, including the editorial boss.

No, Goodhand doesn’t have an Xbox 360, but she’ll ask friends before her board meeting in three hours, and the other editors at the meeting. Turns out no one else has an Xbox 360, either, and none of them knows where to get one. Arts and life editor Boris Hrybinsky and Goodhand segue from the Xbox 360 crisis—Milne eventually snags one from a buddy—to how best to review the concert. West will take the stage at 10 p.m., one hour before the paper’s press run starts. They decide to put the review on the web instead, and drop a throw on page 1 to direct readers to the site.

Pushing people to the site is exactly what editors have to do, according to Sullivan. “The newspaper should not have any breaking news in it,” he says. “Breaking news is fundamentally the purview and territory of the web.” The Globe’s Frame agrees and says, “There are still newspapers that do not put breaking news on their website—that’s old hat.” Three or four paragraph stories, shorter than what will appear in the paper, are fine; the city desk calls them “webbies.”

Around the city desk, while they’re writing stories, reporters grouse about who gets the cool toys. Management gets BlackBerrys, while the people who actually file stories have to wait in line to sign them out. They need BlackBerrys, they say, to send in their webbies and updates directly from the scene. Goodhand says not so fast; the editor-in-chief’s position “is a BlackBerry kind of job now,” too. Reporters also have trouble adjusting to the reality of letting go of their stories. Before webbies, other Winnipeg media read the paper’s exclusives in the next morning’s edition. Now this competitive advantage is all but gone.

“We might as well put it on the website,” a reporter says.

“I’ll contact the radio station,” another chimes in.

“I’ve already emailed them,” the original reporter says.

Meanwhile, Sullivan prods the newsroom about filing to the web. He bellows: “Feed the beast!”

Sports reporter Ed Tait would like to help, but he’s having a bad video day. Normally he’d tape the Winnipeg Blue Bombers football practice, but it was rained out. Instead he gets the usual boring locker room interviews about the upcoming Canadian Football League game against the Calgary Stampeders. And he records Blue Bombers coach Doug Berry in the Chairman’s Lounge, a small, dimly lit bar with ugly green carpeting. The only other guy shooting the coach’s press conference is from the Calgary Herald.

Tait needs something, anything, to send Turner. No one ever trained him on how to use a video camera; his editors just told him to get out there and shoot. Since then, the managers have hired a video expert from Global TV to teach filming and editing techniques. After a few practice runs, other sports photographers—who’d also been converted to double-duty as videographers—taught him a few tricks with zooms and how to hold the camera. Tait says he “got real artsy-fartsy, like Martin Scorsese.” The bosses seemed to notice Tait’s budding auteur-like sensibilities—and they were ecstatic that he got video on site.

Today Tait hasn’t got much, so he cuts it short. The material’s weak and there’s no time to go through it all anyway. He writes up a script, does the voiceover and sends it to Turner, who is having his own long day. Usually he works from 3 to 11 p.m., but figures he won’t finish editing until 9:30. Then he’ll start videotaping his broadcast, which could take him to one in the morning.

Turner shot yesterday’s video newscast at the back of the newsroom with a handheld camera and lighting apparatus. The background is a wall cover-ed with Free Press front pages from the last few years. An old Underwood Five typewriter sits just out of frame. The audio typically consists of Turner reading punched-up leads. The video usually shows zoom-ins of still photographs. “Maybe the standards are lower on the Internet?” Turner wonders, “I don’t know.”

The look might be more amateur hour than auteur, and Turner admits he “doesn’t know who’s watching it,” but the Free Press keeps loading video onto the site. In fact, it offers more video than any other newspaper in Canada. Photographers go wherever editors think something might happen.

Wayne Glowacki has to shoot a University of Manitoba protest about Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s environmental policies, even though he’d rather produce more in-depth, documentary-style fare, similar to what’s available at globeandmail.com or thestar.com. The big papers don’t post new video every day, and some of their material also looks amateurish, but the stories generally have more depth. One Globe video in December 2007 starred feature writer Ian Brown talking about his severely disabled son, Walker. Much of the script was lifted from Brown’s 8,000-word feature published in the Focus section, but it looked like a mini-doc, whereas Free Press videos look like local news.

Glowacki arrives at the protest, but no one’s there. Or maybe they were. The press release had the event happening at 12:30 a.m., but he’d assumed 12:30 p.m. A flag decrying Harper’s environmental apathy is the only evidence that it had happened. Growacki leaves after about 10 minutes. Some days there’s no good video in Winnipeg.

The craving of the beast creates problems for the writers too. Sports reporter Paul Wiecek didn’t want to post his exclusive that the Blue Bombers had signed Juran Bolden, formerly of the National Football League’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers, on September 5, but management decided to go ahead. The story went up at 5:30 p.m., but the paper doesn’t monitor its own website feeds 24-7, so no one tracked the followup. At 8:37 p.m., in response, the Blue Bombers made the Bolden acquisition official. The team also announced that it had acquired Ike Charleton, who’d been cut from the NFL’s Detroit Lions. By midnight, sports fans were sending emails wondering why the paper’s online coverage was incomplete. Wiecek read the messages the next morning.

Cox usually finishes his run after half an hour. Long distances can feel endless and runners need to develop a mental toughness to survive. They can’t focus on their feet pounding the pavement, or their lungs feeling pinched or even the goal ahead, because they’re never quite there. The mind has to wander.

By the time Cox gets home, he’s run across Wellington Crescent, through Assiniboine Park, then back along Wellington to his house. Some days when he finishes, the sun has not even risen. He does a few cool-down stretches, slips inside the house and gets ready for work.

The web is always going to have something new, something fresh, something unexpected for newspapers to adapt to. That makes it tricky to plan and react. News chasers such as Cox can’t focus on the goals, or the pain or even the act itself—they simply have to keep running.

They’re trapped by this race, but they weren’t “free” when they were just printing a broadsheet. They were constrained by their medium, but it was safe. Then the experiments came along—opening up the site, statistically analyzing the number of hits, adding video, blogging—and it became freer and scarier. The Free Press’s Internet venture is one large incubator. Cox says, “Let’s see what works.”

Now, the delivery system has changed from a 100-year-old way of doing things. The Free Press has woken up from the dream that the classic model would survive. And the editors are asking fundamental questions: Why is the newspaper structured the way it is? What should newspapers publish when the breaking news is already on the web? For John Sullivan, the answer is clear. Print journalists must provide depth, analysis and debate. “If I already know what happened,” he says, “tell me why I should care. That’s the new territory of the newspaper. That’s all it should be.”

On an August night in 2007, Luc Lavoie lounges in the shadows on the back patio behind a Montreal old boys’ club. The then-spokesperson for former prime minister Brian Mulroney cuts an ominous figure in the dark, his face half-illuminated by the glow of the club’s lights. He puffs on a cigarette in one hand and sips from a glass of wine in the other. Across from him sits Harvey Cashore, senior editor for CBC’s investigative program the fifth estate, and The Globe and Mail’s national reporter Greg McArthur. The two met while investigating the sprawling Airbus affair, in which German businessman Karlheinz Schreiber alleges that he gave Mulroney secret commissions stemming from Air Canada’s $1.8-billion purchase of thirty-four A320 Airbus Industrie passenger planes. Cashore is working on his sixth documentary about this story, which has become one of the most complex political scandals in Canadian history.

Cashore and Lavoie don’t get along—the journalist’s probing has irked many people with power, prestige and connections—so the mood alternates between tense and light-hearted. “Where is the money?” he and McArthur ask. “What did Mulroney do with it? Why did he take cash payments from Schreiber?”

“Canadians have a right to know why Mulroney took the money,” Cashore says.

“What makes you think you have a right to anything?”

They continue pushing for answers. But Lavoie, a tempestuous, outspoken charmer, skirts the hard questions, answers the easy ones tongue-in-cheek and rambles off-topic. He takes a drag on his cigarette and locks his eyes on Cashore. Returning the stare, Cashore again asks, “What happened with the money?”

“Ah, Aar-vey,” he drawls nonchalantly, “I wish this was another time, another place, back before the rule of law, and we would settle things in the alley.”

The complicated relationship between Cashore and Lavoie doesn’t bother the reporter, who has endured criticism, lawsuits and personal turmoil to get to the bottom of a story he’d never have guessed would go this deep.

Schreiber’s job was to sweeten international business deals on behalf of German companies—essentially acting as a high-priced middleman. Bavarian manufacturers such as Airbus, MBB and Thyssen Industries employed Schreiber to ensure they landed international contracts. Stationed in Canada, he circulated within the Progressive Conservative Party, befriending some Tories who would later end up in power. He first curried favour with the future prime minister in 1983 after paying to fly delegates into Winnipeg for a convention that would lead to Mulroney’s party leadership. In the following years, Schreiber made fast friends with other high-profile Tories, including Mulroney cabinet minister Elmer MacKay and Newfoundland premier Frank Moores. At the time of the purchase in 1988, German law permitted the use of schmiergelder (grease money) to lubricate bureaucratic cogs. But bribery is illegal in Canada and government contracts—including those involving then–crown corporation Air Canada—forbid the use of kickbacks. Still, Schreiber alleges that he gave Mulroney $300,000 in cash after he left office in 1993. The former prime minister says the cash totaled $225,000 and was for international lobbying, not Airbus.

The fact that Cashore’s stayed on Airbus for 13 years is unusual in a profession always eager to move onto the next story. It’s also a testament to his reputation as one of the finest investigative journalists in the country.

Once commonplace, investigative units dedicated to this costly, time-intensive reporting are now dwindling. But the public’s appetite for deeply researched stories such as Airbus remains and is perhaps even more voracious in these complex times. Any news organization that believes the press is a pillar of democracy ought to agree—but putting this principle into practice isn’t so simple.

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.

Chantal Hébert wasn’t ready the first time she arrived at Parliament Hill as a news writer in the fall of 1977. Her press card said Radio-Canada, but amid all the balding, wrinkled white men, she feared she was too much of a “baby face.” She was 23 at the time. “I felt like I suddenly landed in my parents’ living room,” she remembers. “Everyone looked years older than me.” She handed in her resignation three months later and returned to Toronto to cover current affairs for the French network. But Hébert was back to Ottawa in 1986 unintimidated.

Even still, today she shyly observes the rest of the parliamentary press gallery folks from behind a limestone pillar in the foyer outside the House of Commons Chamber. Camera operators and producers position their equipment as they prepare for the scrums. Everyone seems frantic, but it’s organized chaos—and she’s used to it.

Known for being no-nonsense and professional, Hébert dresses the part. No glamorous weather bunny, she wears black cords with a leather belt, a cotton long-sleeved shirt and practical rubber-soled shoes. Her hair is cut like Han Solo’s in The Empire Strikes Back.

In a few heartbeats, the place is crowded as anxious reporters and antsy columnists hoping to grab a good quote shove microphones and digital tape recorders in the faces of politicians. Hébert stands back, but continues to pay attention to the routine reporting around her.

“I already got what I need,” she says with a smile, her arms crossed. She reserves her questions for private interviews. By her own admission, she’s not a team player and doesn’t pretend to be one, straying from the pack and passing on drinks with the gang after deadlines. “Don’t people have families?” she wonders.

Hébert prefers a more humble approach than the glory-seeking that afflicts some columnists, the ones who are entertainingly opinionated, though not always as thoughtful. That may mean sacrificing a higher public profile, but she says that doesn’t matter to her anyway. Besides, now 33 years into her career—and with her hands full as a national affairs columnist for the Toronto Star, a guest columnist for Le Devoir and a regular panelist on CBC’s The National and Radio-Canada’s Les Coulisses du Pouvoir—Hébert has never enjoyed so much respect in political and media circles. “She is the most influential journalist in the press gallery right now,” says pollster Allan Gregg, who appears with her on the CBC panel. “When she says something, when she writes something—English and French—all her colleagues pay attention.”

Born into a francophone family in Ottawa, raised in Hull and educated at York University’s Glendon College in Toronto, Hébert began reporting from Queen’s Park for Radio-Canada in late 1979. “I didn’t know I wanted to cover politics,” she says. “I just wanted to be a journalist—and I didn’t have any lofty ideas of being a columnist or a foreign correspondent. I just wanted to work in the business and see where it took me.”

After her first brief stint in Ottawa, she continued to work for Radio-Canada from Toronto covering education, francophone affairs and Queen’s Park. Three years after returning to Ottawa, she became the parliamentary reporter for Montreal’s Le Devoir. In 1993, she moved over to La Presse to be bureau chief and later a columnist, but returned to The New England Journal of Medicine with her current guest column in 1999.

Despite Hébert’s rising popularity in Quebec, most of English Canada still had no idea who she was, even after she began appearing on CBC’s Sunday Report in the late 1980s. “She wasn’t really a household name at that point,” Paul Wells of Maclean’s remembers. “And it actually took several years for her to become one.” During the debate over the Meech Lake Accord in 1987, her colleagues finally noticed how well she knew and understood Quebec political culture. Later, Wells worked about 100 feet away from Hébert in Ottawa’s National Press Building and the two had short morning discussions about premiers and politics. The conversations weren’t long, he says, “but by the end she’d say something smarter than I ever could have.”

While covering the 1988 election campaign, Hébert—who’s one of five children and has two of her own—spotted an error in the Liberals’ childcare plan. When David Lockhart, the party’s policy advisor, tried to explain the proposal to reporters, Hébert ended up explaining it to him. “Oh,” replied Lockhart. The incident not only embarrassed the Liberals, it impressed the other members of the press gallery. “This led to one of the biggest debacles the party faced in the election campaign,” says Keith Boag, The National’s chief political correspondent. “She’d done her homework, she knew what the questions were and she was able to bring other reporters along with her.”

One reporter who knew her was Wendy Mesley, then a CBC parliamentary correspondent, who respected her “as being perhaps the best reporter on the Hill.” She adds, “I trust everything that she writes.” Mesley was impressed enough to suggest her for the Sunday Report panel, and Hébert ended up appearing on it occasionally. “You could tell from the get-go that she was good—and that she was going to be really good,” says Peter Mansbridge, who hosted the show. Years later, he made her one of the originals on the “At Issue” panel in 2001 and now calls Hébert the group’s lynchpin.

Younger members of the press gallery also look up to her. Kady O’Malley, Ottawa correspondent for macleans.ca, reads Hébert faithfully. “No one ever wants to disagree with Chantal,” she says, “because you just assume you’re going to be wrong.”

Though Hébert and one of her two sons (and his girlfriend) live in Montreal’s Côte-des-Neiges neighbourhood, the boys’ father lives in Toronto, where he works in television production. “We have an unconventional relationship,” she says, “but yes, we see each other and we do family things.”

Spending time with her family is far more important to her than carousing with colleagues. Early in her career, more experienced journalists told Hébert she wouldn’t make it as a political reporter if she didn’t put her hours in at the bar or join the press club, but she never gave in to the peer pressure. Wells, though, can recall one time she went out with the rest of them: during the 2004 election campaign. Trays of Alexander Keith’s floated from the bar to tables filled with journalists in the Lower Deck, a popular Halifax pub, and Hébert was preparing to pack it in for the evening. “She was being Chantal, a bit of a stick in the mud,” says Wells. But then the Top 40 music stopped and a band playing Stan Rogers songs took the stage. Hébert plunked herself back down, ordered another round and sang along with the band. She might have still been there when he left, he thinks. “It was a side of her we almost never see. It was a very un-Chantal moment.”

But Wells didn’t know her before age toned down her wilder side: “I wasn’t always 53,” she admitted last fall. When she was younger she attended concerts by groups such as The Who and Led Zeppelin, enjoyed vodka in high school and hitchhiked. “I was dangerous,” she says with a smirk, but won’t go into detail about it. She’s never smoked pot, though. Now, she sticks to blasting Mozart and other classical music in her office while writing her columns.

Hébert’s office in the National Press Building across the street from Parliament has a door, because Star columnists and bureau chiefs get doors. It’s very simple inside: posters of French movies, including La Femme Nikita, cover most of one wall and she’s tacked up a few dog-eared photographs from a kayaking trip with colleague Michel Auger. There’s also a laminated plaque with a picture of Hébert and Serge Chapleau, the cartoonist for La Presse, from when she hosted La face cachée de la une, a news show on Montreal’s Télé-Québec, from 1999 to 2001. A small television on the end of her desk broadcasts the House of Commons proceedings.

She makes it to Ottawa at least a couple of times a week. Mondays are usually her quietest day, but she’s meeting a source at 7:30 tonight and Hébert is ahead of her game: she has time to pick up her snow tires for her Mercedes-Benz. She bought the used car, a step up from her last one, a Subaru, with the money she earned from her first book, French Kiss: Stephen Harper’s Blind Date With Quebec. And yet, she claims not to care much about the status that comes with driving luxury wheels. “I don’t like money very much,” she says, “and I don’t buy stuff.”

To write her autopsy of the 2006 federal election, Hébert took two months off everything and rotated writing shifts between her home and her cottage in the Laurentians. Her ability to break down big political issues and translate them into simple, coherent summaries in her columns is just as clear in French Kiss. Quill & Quire gave it an excellent review. Dan Rowe wrote: “Of all the books that have already been written about the Conservative Party’s 2006 electoral breakthrough, Chantal Hébert’s French Kiss is the most useful to understanding not only Stephen Harper’s victory but the circumstances that helped bring it about.”

Other critics, though, felt it read too much like a really long column or a collection of them in book form. “I expected more, and better,” wrote a disappointed William Johnson in a Sunday Report and Mail review. “The book is disjointed in its organization, leaping about in time and topic, without any apparent organic plan … sweeping declarations are not enough when careful analysis goes lacking. The book is not up to the reputation of its author.”

That reputation was part of the appeal for John Honderich. When he was publisher of the Star, he wanted to pair two unique voices from Ottawa—an idea he got while working in Washington, where newspapers have several columnists—and in 1999, he chose Hébert and James Travers.

More complementary than antagonistic, they offer different perspectives and build on each other. “She writes a good column; I try to,” says Travers. “It’s good healthy competition.” Honderich considers hiring Hébert one of his greatest accomplishments at the paper. “She has an absolutely first-rate mind and she’s far better than the current state of column writing.”

That may sound like little more than home team favour-itism, but when This Magazine graded political columnists on its blog in 2004, Hébert topped the list. She received an A+ and comments worth sticking on her fridge: “She’s easily the best political writer in the country right now, in French and English,” wrote Andrew Potter, now a columnist with Maclean’s. (Andrew Coyne, then at the National Post, received a B+, while the Globe’s John Ibbitson, who’s now in Washington, earned a B for being unsentimental.)

Her high rating aside, Hébert relies more on reporting and background knowledge than opinion, so her columns sometimes read more like news reports. She makes no apologies for her approach and her colleagues back her up. “She’s not dull,” says the Globe’s Christie Blatchford. “I find her stuff to be so informed,” she says. “She says something is true—I believe it.”

Blatchford also respects Hébert for not being one of those columnists who’s so into the politics that nobody outside of Ottawa can understand her. On November 23, 2007, for example, her Star piece began: “Twelve months after Stéphane Dion’s Liberal leadership victory, bewilderment about the result has turned to widespread consternation.”

It’s all high praise from a columnist whose style is such a stark contrast from Hébert’s. Blatchford puts more of her personality into her work, provoking an instant reaction from her readers—they either love her or they hate her. But they all read her. As John Barber, city columnist for the Globe, says, “You have to have an original perspective and a distinct voice.”

But Hébert prefers taking an objective stance and believes columnists need to do more than just outrage their readers. After all, most Canadians with an affection for politics want more than funny hats and loud opinions—they’re looking for insight and thoughtful analysis. “I’ve made enough influential enemies,” she says. “But I don’t think I’m being too safe. I don’t think the notion of journalism has to do with making people angry.” That’s just fine with Alan Christie, national editor at the Star. “People who write shock columns are a little more controversial because they write things that are nasty about individuals,” he says. “We don’t allow that to happen anyway.”

Riling up readers may not be part of the job, but these days, marketing is. A higher profile is good for the columnist and the papers she writes for, and Hébert is not afraid of fame or being recognized. In fact, she invites it by regularly appearing on television in both official languages. Even when she must contend with fellow panelists who disagree with her, she avoids stepping on too many toes. “She would tend to be more sympathetic towards the Quebec nationalist take on things than I would,” notes fellow “At Issue” regular Coyne, but the chemistry between the two only makes it more fun to watch.

Still, her columns are what matter most. They may not be water-cooler conversation outside of the political sphere in English Canada, but influence is better than notoriety anyway. Besides, she has enough fame in Quebec. When Liberal leader Stéphane Dion spoke at a luncheon in Montreal in 2007, many in the crowd were more intrigued by Hébert, who was standing at the back of the room. “Everyone wanted to talk to her, everyone wanted to shake her hand,” remembers CBC parliamentary reporter Susan Bonner. And as Travers says, “Chantal Hébert is not Paris Hilton—whatever fame she has is entirely deserved.”

Last April, at 8:50 p.m. on a quiet night, Jawaad Faizi picked up his ringing cellphone with his right hand while clutching the wheel of his car with his left. It was the voice of Amir Arain, his editor at Mississauga’s Pakistan Post, telling him he had just received an anonymous warning on his office phone. “Keep the Faizis safe; they want to kill him,” the caller told Arain. Shaken, Faizi hung up, and five minutes later rolled his beige 1992 Nissan Sentra into the driveway of Arain’s home. Behind him, another car silently crept up and blocked his exit. Before Faizi had a chance to take off his seatbelt or turn off the engine, he heard a loud slam from behind him and men rushed the car. He couldn’t see how many there were, but one of them appeared near his window, brandishing a cricket bat like a giant hammer and slamming it down on Faizi’s windshield. The shards of broken glass cut his head and arms and sprinkled down onto the grey pavement. Panicking, he crouched down as the bat screamed through the driver’s window, inches away from his head. One attacker reached through, punching Faizi while the other started making quick swipes at him with the bat, cutting his arms as he shielded his face. They yelled, warning him in Punjabi and Urdu to stop writing attacks on Islam and their leader. In a moment of clarity, Faizi reached for his cellphone to dial 911. Seeing the phone’s light, the attackers shouted “chalo, chalo” (“let’s go, let’s go”) and ran back to their car, disappearing into the night.

Police haven’t been able to identify the men behind the attack, but Faizi believes the leader they were referring to was the Muslim scholar, Pakistan-based Muhammad Tahir-ul-Qadri, founder of the Idara Minhaj-ul-Qur’an. Faizi had criticized him in a column that appeared in the Pakistan Post two weeks earlier. It’s a charge Qadri’s local representatives adamantly deny. Faheem Bukhari, the clean-cut director of the Mississauga Muslim Community Centre where many of Qadri’s local followers celebrate their faith, says that members of his centre were in no way connected to the attack and insists he is open to assisting the police in any way.

Whoever the attackers were, they aren’t the first to try to intimidate Canadian-based writers in the Pakistani-Canadian community. Since 2000, several journalists working for community papers in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA) have been pressured to censor their writing and omit comments or entire articles that may be perceived as critical of Islam. Zealots justify intimidation with scriptural verses that tell them it’s their duty to correct other Muslims whose actions or beliefs conflict with traditional Islamic law. But despite these threats, a handful of liberal Muslim journalists continue to report on both religious and secular controversies within their communities, and like Faizi, risk their safety and that of their loved ones for what they see as the truth.

This wasn’t the first time Faizi had faced violence as a result of his reporting—but it was the first time it had happened in Canada. As a reporter in Pakistan, Faizi says he was beaten on several occasions and faced men who threatened to kill his family before his eyes. His journalism career started in Lahore where he wrote for the Daily Jang, one of the country’s largest papers. Several of his older relatives worked there, and after covering the political beat, he was soon promoted to chief reporter at 21 and was sending his father’s friends at the paper out to report stories around Pakistan. Even after the promotion, Faizi earned a reputation for his bold investigative pieces, tackling topics other reporters wouldn’t dare touch for fear of reprisals. He specialized in features exposing the crimes of wealthy and corrupt religious leaders, politicians and criminals. In October 1999, he and two other journalists infiltrated the hidden Punjab jungle base of Riaz Basra, the infamous terrorist leader of Lashkar-e-Jhangvi. Faizi barely escaped with his life when one Basra loyalist recognized his face as he waited in the compound. He was able to publish an exclusive feature for the Daily Pakistan on the terrorist’s home in the next issue. In a country with a military government that openly censors the media through legislation and intimidation, it was not an easy road. He quickly learned to watch his back.

Then in 2001, a man broke into Faizi’s home and held his three-year-old son at gunpoint over another column on Lashkar. Putting himself at risk was one thing, but having his family in the crosshairs was another. Escaping the violence with his wife and two children, Faizi came to Canada in 2002, claiming refugee status. The family soon found a basement apartment in Brampton and survived on welfare until Faizi found work. Arain, who also had worked in Lahore as a reporter and sub-editor for the Daily Express, had recently launched the Post and was looking for staff writers. Mohsin Abbas, a journalist who had been on a police hit list in Pakistan before moving to Canada and who now works for The Hamilton Spectator, knew both men. He introduced them over Tim Hortons coffee, and the two agreed to work together.

Arain launched the Post in 2000 as the Canadian extension of his uncle’s paper in the U.S. Like many of the other 20 or so publications that serve Toronto’s diverse South Asian community, the Post features political, religious and business news from Pakistan and Canada in English and Urdu. Distributed free to grocery stores and restaurants throughout the GTA and across the country, the Post has a print run of 25,000 copies in Canada and reaches many of Toronto’s 61,000 Pakistanis. This large population has developed tight-knit communities in pockets such as Mississauga and Etobicoke. While many liberal Pakistanis get their news from mainstream English media, the Urdu community papers tend to cater to a more conservative segment that holds on to the old language and culture. These are the people who are most influenced by local religious leaders, explains Haideh Moghissi, a professor of sociology at York University and author of several books on Islam. She adds that the few imams who threaten liberal journalists feed ignorance and rely on the lack of education of their followers. “So when they say these Islamic practices of the Qur’an or Hadith would require aggression,” she explains, “given their authority, many believers would see it as the word of God.”

I meet Faizi and Arain on a sunny afternoon in October, during the month-long fast of Ramadan, at the Post’s Mississauga office. Layers of carpet, subfloor and cement separate the reporters in their small office from the salesmen and customers in the Sleep Country and Cashmoney outlets on the ground floor below them. After pouring himself some coffee, Faizi settles into his desk chair. I can’t see any family pictures amidst the stacks of papers and yellow Post-its in front of him, only the image of Qadri, with his grey beard, tight mouth and stern eyes staring from the cover of a book leaning on the wall beside Faizi. That same book sat on the passenger seat of his car during the attack. As we speak, Faizi rubs the hair above his forehead, touching the glass fragment the doctor left under his skin because surgery would cause more harm than good.

Faizi says he continues his work out of respect for his role as a sahafi—the Arabic word for journalist. It roughly translates in English to “God’s duty,” a mantle that many Canadian journalists would reject out of hand. But for Faizi, the connection is obvious. “A journalist,” he says, “has a few duties: he must always teach and tell the truth about people.”

The articles on Qadri weren’t the first over which Arain and Faizi have been threatened—and not all of the threats have been related to the coverage of religious issues. In 2004, the Post ran a story about Pakistanis who were arrested in Canada in possession of heroin valued in the millions of dollars. The following week, Arain received threatening phone calls saying the paper should not print pieces like that. Faizi reasons that some people were angered because the wrongdoings reflected badly on the whole community. Although these and other threats have made them cautious, Faizi and Arain never expected things to get physical here.

And Qadri makes an unlikely villain. He overtly promotes interfaith dialogue, opposes extremist interpretations of Islam and spoke out against Osama bin Laden after September 11. During a visit to Toronto in 2007, Qadri urged followers at a Mississauga mosque to take down a wall dividing the men from the women because he believes eye contact with the imam is necessary to fully grasp his teachings. His local followers didn’t comply, and when the paper ran a story about his proposal, Arain received threatening phone calls demanding he stop.

That was in January 2007. But three months later, Faizi wrote about Qadri again, this time in a column about a lecture the scholar held in Pakistan on the word “Muhammad.” During the speech, Qadri’s followers in the crowd pointed to the sky where the clouds before the moon formed the Arabic name of the Prophet. Faizi, basing his report on a press release from the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an, criticized the event and stated that Qadri claimed to be able to write the name of Muhammad on the moon with his finger. While some believe the event was a miracle, Faizi remained skeptical. His column was clearly marked as opinion under a title that translates as “The Imam of Balds,” referring to a dream he recounted in the column where the devil offered him the chance to be the king of all bald-headed people and introduce a new school of thought to Muslims, with the promise that he would be bestowed with wealth and power equal to that of Qadri. Even laced with humour, Faizi’s point was clear: in his dream, Qadri’s claim to be a great spiritual leader was as credible as Faizi’s claim to be the leader of bald-headed people—and its root was equally corrupt. From past experience, he knew these words would anger some in the community but Faizi maintains that as a journalist, he refuses to live in fear. The column was guaranteed to spark controversy—even in a mainstream newspaper, suggesting any spiritual leader had made a deal with the devil is likely to provoke letters and angry phone calls.

It did. Some callers praised the humour in the piece, but others called Faizi and the Post anti-Islamic and threatened violence if the paper kept printing attacks against Qadri and Islam. The day before he was beaten, Faizi filed a report to the Peel Regional Police 12 Division in Mississauga, stating he was worried about his safety. He says they told him not to worry.

So why did Faizi take on Qadri? His inspiration for the column came from his dream, which, he says, predated Qadri’s lecture and in which the devil told him Qadri had the power to write his name on the moon. After Arain showed him the Minhaj-ul-Qur’an press release, Faizi couldn’t believe the coincidence, and decided he had to publish the column alongside the moon miracle article in the next issue. Some are skeptical about Faizi’s explanation. Dr. Iqbal Nadvi, the imam at Oakville’s Al-Falah Islamic Centre and director of the Islamic Circle of North America, an organization that promotes Islamic tradition and education, says Faizi’s attitude has a more earthly root. “It is totally a sectarian thing,” he says, claiming Faizi is Wahhabi, a member of a reform movement of Sunni Islam that traditionally rivals Qadri’s Sufism. Wahhabism also tends towards extremism and literal interpretations of the Qur’an and Hadith. Even Faizi’s friend, Mohsin Abbas, agrees. “He’s very aggressive in his writing … a good thinker, but he’s got to put his sect on the side when he writes. You don’t use this platform to attack other people.”

It’s a charge that puzzles Faizi, especially coming from a friend. He maintains he is not affiliated with any religious group. Perhaps, he says, Nadvi and Abbas think he is Wahhabi because of his frequent references to scripture in his work. “I always give them examples from the Qur’an—if the Qur’an says this and you claim to be a Muslim, then why are you doing this, or this?” asks Faizi. “When any person thinks or writes like this, it’s very easy to say he’s a Salafi or Wahhabi.”

Tahir Aslam Gora is all too familiar with Faizi’s plight. Growing up in Punjab, he was a journalist, community activist and publisher with a reputation for being an articulate critic from within Islam. Gora has been threatened, offered bribes and imprisoned in Pakistan for speaking and writing his mind. He fled his home and eventually came to Canada where he hoped to find a less hazardous writing environment.

In 2000, Gora took over and relaunched a small Canadian community paper, Watan, saying he hoped to encourage debate and true journalism within a divided community. Like the Post, the weekly was written mostly in Urdu and distributed for free to local grocery stores and restaurants in the GTA, where it was read not only by Pakistanis but by members of the larger South Asian community. According to Gora, after he published several liberal articles, men from a local mosque went to each of the drop-off locations and took every copy of the paper off the stands.

Then, in June of his first year, Gora ran a small ad announcing a conference held by the Ahmadiyya, a persecuted sect constitutionally referred to as non-Muslims by Pakistan’s parliament for its belief that its founder was the second coming of the Messiah. Soon the imam of Jamia Islamia Canada in Mississauga was speaking out against Watan and Gora in his sermon. Gora claims he also received a call from the imam while working at the office, warning him not to print anything about Ahmadis or attacks on Islam again. The imam allegedly also threatened to ask his followers and local businessmen to stop supporting the paper through advertising. The journalist stood his ground.

“No, I don’t consider my writing against Islam, or against Muslims,” he explained. “I’m just furthering the debate. If you would like to write anything, send me a fax and I’ll print it.” In an interview with CBC’s The National last March, the imam denied ever making the call. But Gora remembers every word. One by one, over half of his advertisers backed out. So did some of the grocery stores that carried Watan. Gora says they came to him saying they were being pressured by local businesses and mosques not to help a religious dissenter. He adds that several advertisers were told that if they continued to support his paper, the mosque would start a campaign against their businesses as well.

In late 2000, Watan criticized the Taliban in a story about the destruction of ancient Buddhist statues by the regime. The next day Gora found a message on his office phone. On the tape, which Gora saved, a calm low voice says, “Your newspaper seems to be promoting anti-Islamic sentiment amongst our community, so maybe we should be inviting our Muslim community to ban and throw your newspapers out of their shops. This is a warning to you and your newspaper.” Not long after, he ran an article covering a sex abuse scandal at an Islamic school in Ajax, Ontario, where the principal was charged with assaulting four students (police later dropped the charges). Days later, as Gora was checking his messages at the Watan office, a man’s low voice threatened to blow up Gora and the newspaper. Alarmed, he immediately called the police, who sent a bomb squad to evacuate the building. No explosives were ever found and police were unable to track down the caller.

By February 2003, Gora had closed the doors of Watan. In a span of three years, 70 per cent of his advertisers had dropped out. Bankrupt and with few supporters remaining, he left Toronto and now works for The Hamilton Spectator as a columnist. His column often covers and comments on current Islamic issues. By separating himself from community papers and going mainstream, he feels he has found a haven safe from acts of retribution. “If I will not write, who will write? I feel that dying without telling what you have in your heart is not doing justice to yourself and to this planet,” says Gora. “I want to fight this battle until my death.” While Watan’s demise saddens him, he preferred to shut down the paper rather than yield to intimidation. He shrugs and grins. “I don’t know, I’m a stupid man. I cannot sacrifice news for commerce.”

But others do. Like similar papers catering to other ethnic groups, the Pakistani community papers vary widely in editorial content and quality. Because many of the publications are free, they are particularly reliant on advertisers to stay in print. Publisher Arain is proud of the Post’s hard journalism content that his competitors won’t print, as others opt instead for pro-business profiles and other inoffensive material. It’s a charge that Latafat Siddiqui, the editor of Canadian Asian News, one of Toronto’s two English-language Pakistani community papers, doesn’t duck. He has no qualms about printing articles for his advertisers; his paper runs between 10 and 20 per cent promotional copy, which can include profiles, requested interviews and political campaign messages. “You may call it a PR job,” he laughs. He estimates that the average Urdu paper is filled with around 20 to 25 per cent promotional editorial material. Mohsin Abbas, the journalist who introduced Faizi and Arain, explains that some of these publications are backed by religious sects, just as they are in Pakistan, and many don’t criticize anybody for fear of losing support. It’s easier to simply copy and paste from other Pakistani newspapers.

Is there an organized effort by Muslim leaders to stop liberal journalists from speaking directly to Canada’s Pakistani community in their own language? York University scholar Moghissi says no. Rather, she says, “I don’t think there is an organized effort yet.” She also suggests that historically, Muslims are much harsher towards members of their own community than they are to critics from the outside. Journalists working for Urdu language community papers are especially vulnerable because their publications cater to more conservative Muslims. That’s why Gora was targeted while mainstream publications that ran the same stories were not. But, she says, imams who try to silence the debate are overstepping their authority and those who incite violence should be prosecuted. “They should be punished, there is no question,” she says. “Then they would think twice when inciting violence.”

Many liberal Pakistani reporters have one thing in common: their belief in journalism as a passion rather than a profession. They have fled an oppressive military regime to practise their vocation, removing themselves from immediate danger but placing themselves in the position of having to rebuild their lives and careers in a new country. When the threats continue in a nation they’d believed would offer safer opportunities for their opinions and their reporting, these writers see few options. Gora is happy working in the mainstream media, with some book projects on the side. But even a connection to a major media outlet doesn’t guarantee safety. Abbas, who also writes for the Spectator, has continued to receive threats demanding he reveal key sources and retract his writing. Recently, he has adopted a personal policy of self-censorship after discovering that some of those threatening him know where his family lives back in Pakistan. Out of concern for his relatives, he’s maintaining a low profile and avoiding controversial stories until they can join him in Canada. “It’s not a short battle, it’s a long run,” says Abbas, “and I want to fight this battle until my death.”

And Faizi? Over jazz music and an afternoon coffee at a café in Toronto’s eclectic Kensington Market, he tells me the risks he took in Pakistan were crazy, especially for a man with a wife and children. Still, he clearly enjoys his role as a defender of the truth—as he sees it—and says he’ll never stop writing. He’ll continue his column at the Post, and plans to write about the attack again in a future column. He has book plans as well: one on the recent death of Benazir Bhutto, and another on the religious and militant parties of Pakistan. He wants the books to inform the younger generation of Muslims about the corrupt actions and brainwashing practised by religious parties. “I have a lot of stories,” he says, flashing a grin.

Doris Anderson had an impeccable manicure. The editor of Chatelaine from 1957 to 1977 loved the high-lacquer look. “When you would go into her office,” says Marjorie Harris, who wrote for the magazine in the early 1970s and was later associate editor, “she would get out her polish and start doing her nails. The smell of nail polish still reminds me of her.” For weekly story meetings, writers and editors would grab a quick smoke, then gather in Anderson’s sparsely decorated corner office in the Maclean Hunter building in Toronto, and hear her growl, “I don’t know, gals, what do ya think?”

Anderson died last year from pulmonary fibrosis at age 85, and in January of this year, Masthead ranked Chatelaine the second most influential Canadian magazine of all time. It named Anderson the greatest magazine editor in Canadian history because of her ability to balance business with the interest of the greater good. A committed feminist and a tireless activist, arguing for abortion rights and more women in parliament, Anderson was an uncompromising person who wrote about taboo subjects and rejected the prevailing assumption that the only fulfilling path for a woman was to become a housewife. But she also had a softer side and writers, editors and readers loved her for it.

Though she came from a generation of women who were expected to be voiceless, Anderson refused to stay quiet. And while many young women my age may be oblivious to what an accomplishment that was—and even bristle at the term “feminism”—it is only because of Anderson and others like her that we can graduate from university and be progressive journalists or do whatever else we want, free of female stereotypes or other constraints. We owe her a lot.

Anderson’s early life seems surreal to me. Born Hilda Doris Buck to a single mother in Medicine Hat, Alberta, on November 10, 1921—only a few years after some Canadian women won the right to vote—she was considered illegitimate and placed in a Calgary home for unwanted babies. But Rebecca Buck soon retrieved her daughter, telling everyone she had taken in a child to make some money. The difficult decisions her mother faced had a profound effect on the young Anderson and helped make her into a lifelong advocate for women.

When I was born 22 years ago, my mother, who was the age I am now, was unmarried. I can’t imagine a time when young women travelled to secret locations to have their babies and then gave them away. My mother and father did not get married until last year, though they raised my younger brother and me together. I thought this was normal until I went to a Catholic school. The other children were so astonished that my parents weren’t married I gained new-found pride in my unconventional upbringing.

After a turn as a fiction writer and a stay in Europe, Anderson landed at Chatelaine’s door in 1951. Hired to write advertising promotions, she also had to approach Eaton’s, Simpsons and Dominion to persuade them to design window and floor displays to coincide with upcoming features.

In 1952, Chatelaine editor Lotta Dempsey stepped down and John Clare, who had been managing editor of Maclean’s, took over. Anderson climbed the ladder under Clare, irritating him every time she suggested that not all women were content to be housewives. In 1955, after working as a staff writer, she became associate editor. For one story Anderson interviewed pioneer women who had followed the buffalo trails north from Winnipeg. These women gave Anderson precious old photos, which she hoped would accompany the piece. The magazine’s editors wanted to use an illustration of “a menacing native looming in the foreground” as art for the story. Though she was just at the beginning of her career, Anderson fought back, saying the design was ugly, frightening and off-putting.

Clare, a “gruff, pipe-smoking man,” often took exception to Anderson’s chutzpah and threatened to fire her more than once. Even when he left Chatelaine in May 1957, he showed no signs of supporting her campaign for editorship. “Doris was running the magazine,” says activist and writer Michele Landsberg, one of Anderson’s good friends. Instead, publisher Floyd Chalmers named Gerry Anglin editor. When Anderson threatened to resign, Chalmers told her, “You are going to be married and you will become a hostess and a mother.”

“I have been carrying this magazine for the past year,” she argued.

Despite heavy opposition, Chalmers relented. “They gave her the job,” says Landsberg, “which she should have had, and she immediately started making it a feminist magazine. You can’t understand how revolutionary that was.”

She hired tough writers, including Landsberg, June Callwood, Adrienne Clarkson and Barbara Frum, and assigned them to write stories, such as Callwood’s “The Problem of the Terrible-Tempered Husband,” about a battered woman. She also printed advice from experts that encouraged women to be who they wanted. Circulation grew from 480,000 in the late 1950s to 1.8 million by the late 1960s—by that point, one in every three women in Canada was reading Chatelaine.

Anderson aimed to shatter the pre-feminist stereotypes found in competing women’s magazines, and she wasn’t afraid of the controversy that followed. She wrote about abortion rights in a 1959 editorial. As soon as the issue hit the newsstands, Chatelaine’s phone lines lit up as readers cancelled their subscriptions and called for Anderson to be fired and the magazine to be shut down. “I was appalled,” wrote one reader. “If she suggests the abortion laws be changed [then] why not the murder laws and the laws against mercy killing?” She continued: “There is no such thing as an unwanted child; there are thousands of couples who are longingly waiting for a child to adopt.”

Undaunted by the attacks, Anderson addressed a workplace issue that was close to her heart in a 1960 editorial. “A large Canadian supermarket chain reported that a woman doesn’t stand a chance of being appointed to an executive position, even though women store managers, during the war, did a good job,” she wrote. “What happens then to all those bright girls who lead their classes in school and at university? … Are they always to be toiling away on the lower levels for lower salaries? Is there always to be a kind of iron ceiling above their heads? I’m afraid, until someone proves otherwise, that I am forced to conclude that there is.” As Penney Kome, editor for straightgoods.ca, an independent online newsmagazine, sees it, “Doris played … a crucial role; she was such a pioneer in waking women up to the inequality that accompanied the roles they were expected to play at that time.”

Anderson’s Chatelaine also allowed women to debate the increasingly controversial issues surrounding marriage and motherhood in the early 1960s. Valerie Korinek, a University of Saskatchewan history professor who wrote Roughing It in the Suburbs: Reading Chatelaine Magazine in the Fifties and Sixties, believes the magazine created a special community. “If they were participating in the readers’ page, they got not only a sense of what the editors thought would be of interest or important to Canadian wives and mothers,” she says, “but also what other women were thinking about and how they were responding to the periodical.”

As I researched Anderson’s life, I found a 1973 National Film Board documentary, Women Want, which I thought would help me understand the history of Canadian feminism. In one scene, a woman sat at her office desk and said her husband didn’t oppose her working—she just wasn’t sure he was terribly happy about it. Another admitted, “I like going to the bank and being able to take out money.”

I watched the film from my couch in my bachelorette and couldn’t believe how much has changed over the last 50 years. I realized the independence I take for granted might have infuriated my parents if I’d been born two generations earlier. I was angry about the injustices these women faced, but I also felt ashamed and selfish because I’d never had to work up the courage to fight for my rights.

When Chatelaine received galleys for a new book in 1963, Anderson declined to run an excerpt because it covered ground already well-trodden in the magazine. The book? Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique. “I think she was well ahead of the curve in talking to women about the issues and concerns that really mattered to them,” says Kim Pittaway, Chatelaine’s editor from 2004 to 2005, “rather than focusing only on the issues and concerns that were ‘supposed’ to matter.”

And Landsberg told me: “In the ’60s, when nobody else talked about this, we had articles on how women are the poor and how poverty was a major play on racism written by black women. We had native women; we fought for native women’s rights.”

And yet, Anderson’s editorial vision didn’t fully resonate with me. As a young biracial woman, I was struck by the lack of diversity in her magazine; I began to see how the second wave of feminism was conceived primarily for the benefit of middle-class white women.

Reading a 1959 Chatelaine article, “My Daughter Married a Negro,” helped me better understand the contradictions. I couldn’t believe how intimately the piece described a mother’s relationship with her daughter as she struggled to understand the relationship between her white daughter and a black man. The honesty in the piece was inspiring as the mother came to love her son-in-law and his family, who felt uneasy themselves about the relationship. My admiration for Anderson grew as I realized what courage it must have taken to run such articles at the time.

But in a 2006 journal article from the Canadian Journal of Communication called “No Go to No Logo: Lesbian Lives and Rights in Chatelaine,” Carleton University journalism, media history and gender studies associate professor Barbara M. Freeman pointed out that whenever there was a strong backlash against an article, Anderson assumed she’d gone too far and would drop the subject for a while.

I can’t think of Anderson without thinking of my great-grandmother Alice Glavine, who was born in 1917 in St. John’s, Newfoundland, and died at age 89 in Toronto. She gave birth to nine children and was a housewife all her life. She may have wanted to have it all, but at that time, mother-hood was not a choice—it was the only choice.

Anderson challenged the notion that all women were born housewives. “We’ve been brainwashed about the ease of keeping house with all the ready-mixes, miracle cleaners and general gadgetry,” she wrote in 1964. “Our society tends to assume that all women are born mothers and homemakers, in the same way that all ducks can swim.”

But Anderson was beginning to embrace marriage and motherhood herself. In 1957, she married lawyer David Anderson. Her first son, Peter David, was born in 1958, a year after she became editor of Chatelaine, followed by Stephen Robert in 1961 and Mitchell Richard in 1963. Each time, she worked until her due date, breaking an unwritten rule that pregnant women resigned from their jobs at five months. After each birth, she returned to work, flouting another custom of the times. She took almost no maternity leave. “My mother was an incredibly busy woman,” says Mitchell Anderson. “I mean, my mother loved us a lot, but she was also doing some pretty important stuff.”

Chatelaine’s mix of stories always reflected the lives of modern women—women who, like Anderson, held strong opinions on abortion but also maintained a drawer full of dazzling nail polishes. The magazine was a place to learn about fashion and the latest food trends too. Pieces such as Meals of the Month (“Tired of cooking the same old thing? This month’s suggestions with our readers’ favourites could be your favourites too,”) and “The New Look of Spring ’57” (“The versatile cape is back, suit jackets are shorter, skirts are easier,”) offset the controversial pieces and appeased advertisers and readers expecting a more conventional tone.

By this time, she’d been passed over for the editor’s chair at Maclean’s in 1969. Anderson had wanted more authority, more opportunity and more money, but the job went to a young Peter Gzowski, who had been the managing editor there for the previous seven years. “I believe to this day that I could have put out a fine magazine,” Anderson wrote in her memoir, Rebel Daughter. “I have always regretted never being given the opportunity to prove it.”

Over the years more and more liberal articles appeared and Anderson’s Chatelaine editorials became increasingly vocal. And there was a drastic transformation in her photo in the magazine. In the 1950s, she was a demure, well-coiffed woman in a business suit and pear-shaped diamond necklace. In 1975, she appeared with short hair, shoulders slouched and legs apart, with her hands hanging low, wearing a slightly stern expression.

Anderson stepped down as editor of Chatelaine in 1977 and a year later ran for office in a federal byelection as a Liberal, but lost. She accepted an appointment as chair of the Canadian Advisory Council on the Status of Women in 1979 and then played a crucial role in the development of Section 15 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, barring discrimination based on race, origin, colour, religion, age, disability and sex. When Lloyd Axworthy, then employment minister, cancelled a 1981 conference with the Council to discuss the gender equality clause, Anderson resigned. This act was the catalyst that provoked 1,300 women to gather in Ottawa and march on Parliament Hill. “What is this minister saying? ‘We can’t have our say on the constitution?’” remembers Senator Nancy Ruth, “and women got mad.”

The following year, Anderson became president of the National Action Committee on the Status of Women, a coalition of more than 700 women’s organizations. She served until 1984 and then went on to write a column for the Toronto Star, three novels and TheUnfinished Revolution, a book about women’s movements.

At her 80th birthday party in 2001, which she humbly thought no one would attend, more than 1,000 friends gathered at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel. Soprano Mary Lou Fallis sang “Song for Doris,” which she had written for the event. “We ended up all singing,” remembers journalist Rosemary Speirs, “and at the end of it everybody twirled their napkins in the air.”

Reeling through Chatelaine on microfilm, I read every editorial by Anderson. I spoke to some of her friends and influential Canadian feminists, listening to their stories and fond memories. Each spoke with such clarity and passion; as a younger, less-experienced female journalist, I was intimidated but invigorated by their words.

In February, Iranian-born Maryam Sanati became the editor of Chatelaine. She told CBC that women are at a unique time in history—leading rich lives, but “still responsible for most of the child-rearing and taking care of elderly parents.” Perhaps her willingness to voice her opinion so early in her tenure means Sanati will take advantage of Chatelaine’s large forum to continue Anderson’s fight for equality.

In her final editorial, Anderson bid her readers farewell by writing about advances women made during her tenure. “When I took over as editor … women in politics, medicine, law and business were as rare as whooping cranes. Today all that has changed.” It sure has: while the world is not perfect, young women have many freedoms. And yet, it’s easy to lose sight of what Anderson’s generation faced. I now realize that I owe many of the opportunities I have to her and those who joined her in the fight for women’s rights. But I wonder if she will be properly remembered by those who come after her and if they—we—will carry on the work she began. I hope that we do.

Journalists have long been democracy’s watchdogs. The job of a good reporter, editor or producer is to monitor the powers that be and shine a light on issues and events that deserve scrutiny. Since the launch of the Ryerson Review of Journalism, we’ve followed a simple premise: monitor the watchdogs and shine a light on issues and events in journalism that deserve scrutiny. As we celebrate our silver anniversary, we take a moment to congratulate ourselves, to show how well our graduates are doing, to remind ourselves (blush) of some of our less stellar moments and to let our three primary leaders have their say on our origins, our financial woes and our insistence on high journalistic standards. In the many discussions about what could be an appropriate cover for this issue the consensus was a watchdog—a perfect symbol of what we’ve done well, and what we will continue to do.

Good Christ, what have I got myself into? It was gorgeous August day in 1983, and I’d just got back from kicking around Malibu with a screenwriter pal and blowing my magazine awards dough.

Now it was time to put away childish things and get down to my new job. I’d just been appointed chairman of the School of Journalism at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute, my alma mater, the first Rye grad (class of ’59) to lead the school. So there I was on my first day at the office, surveying my domain. More accurately, I was standing amid the floating dust motes and the peeling walls of a newsroom that seemed about the size of a squash court. In the gloom, I could make out a few clackety typewriters that reminded me of the first-come-first-serve ones in the old Telegram newsroom on Melinda Street. They were of about the same vintage and in the same state of disrepair. Nothing much else to feast the eyes on except a row of grimy paste-up tables along the front of the room. “Good Christ,” as my late friend Robert Markle would say, “what a bring-down joint.”

Thus thrilled, I headed for my office to see what bureaucratic challenges awaited me there. Going through the files, I noted that at the end of the previous semester the faculty had voted to introduce in the fall term a curricular innovation named streaming, which called for all students to specialize in one of three journalistic genres—newspaper, broadcast or magazine—in their final year. All their senior classes would directly relate to the skills required by their specialty and those skills would come together in a hands-on course called Masthead. For newspaper students, then, Masthead was the campus daily, the Ryersonian; for broadcast specialists, on-air newscasts and documentaries; and for magazine majors, a magazine. The trouble was there wasn’t a magazine and there was no money to launch one. Acknowledging this small setback, the faculty had generously decided that the magazine students could have a few pages at the back of the Ryersonian, oh, say, once a month. Then they’d buggered off for their summer-long break, leaving the rest to me. Oh yeah, they’d also canvassed the senior class and turned up 11 doughty students who were willing to take a chance on the magazine stream.

Only there wasn’t one. As with the missing magazine, there was neither time, money, office space, faculty or even course credits to make the new stream possible. Just the same, there was no way that I, a magazine editor to my bones, was going to let those 11 kids take a back seat to the Ryersonian. If nothing else, they’d have their magazine.

First off, I called Jim Ireland, whom I considered then and consider still to be the best editorial art director in Canada. Jim and I were old colleagues and old friends; we’d done The Canadian and Toronto Life together and stayed in touch. I laid out my plight to Jim, who by then had his own design business, and sort of, kind of, wondered if he’d be willing to design and produce a student magazine for whatever little dough I could dig up, probably less the cost of his materials.

“Anything to stop your whining,” Jim said, or words to that effect. “Got a name yet?”

“The Ryerson Review of Journalism.”

It was always going to be a critical review of journalism. For a slew of reasons—not least that Canada had never really had one—I never considered any other kind. I loved the idea of bright, independent students kicking the tires of the established media, the idea that they weren’t going to buy this streamlined baby without looking under the hood, the idea that, for better or worse, they wanted to find out what made it run, and write about it. At the time, God knows, nobody else was. This isn’t to say that I wanted to hand them a forum for smart-assed polemics or common-room punditry. They’d learn nothing from that—and, worse, their efforts would be ignored. No, if they were going to be the least bit respected, they’d have to adhere, with everything they had, to the standards they were promoting, both in the contents and the production values of their magazine. It would have to engage and hold its audience on the basis of good writing, good thinking and good looks, just as any other commercial magazine did. No slack could be cut for student work. Anything that smacked of it—undisciplined prose, circus design, sloppy typography, stupid heads and decks—would doom their magazine as just another classroom exercise. They had to be too credible to be dismissed—and then they had to get better.

We started out in a broom closet in the basement that had once served as a dark room. A dirty sink in the corner still stank of chemicals. We were almost all smokers—little tin ashtrays overflowed on every surface—so it’s a wonder we didn’t choke to death. Still, it was a place to hang our hats and store our files of typewritten manuscripts. Draft after draft of them. For the Review, computers—and the ease of email—were still many years away. Manuscripts got to the typesetter, proofs to paste-up, paste-ups to printer by student express—that is, on bicycles, the TTC or, in emergencies, by cab. We worked evenings and weekends (our orphan course wasn’t timetabled); we met in my office or the halls or anywhere else we could gather (the big board that kept us to our copy and production deadlines was, of necessity, portable); we made do… over and over again.

None of this fazed the intrepid 11. Theirs was an instant camaraderie born of being outsiders, rebels against the ink-stained ethos of the place. “We felt we were pioneering something,” recalls Kit Melamed, one of the driving forces, “and it was a lovely feeling.”

We spread out from two centres: Jim and me. Between us, we put the arm on a lot of professionals we’d given work to over the years. We were shameless. Production assistants worked for a pittance, photographers for expenses, two guest writers for, as one of them put it, “zero.” A colleague from The Canadian, the late Frances MacDonald, agreed to help the kids smooth out their stuff. Since she was one of the best maga-zine copy editors ever, her polished hand enhanced just about every sentence they published.

I dug into every corner of the budget and outside grants, hoping to excavate bits of money. My biggest single score, I think, was from Reader’s Digest, which annually gave the school $500 for student travel. I called the editor-in-chief, Charlie Magill, whom I knew, and asked him if I could use the grant, on a one-time basis, to help start a magazine. He called back a couple of days later with permission.

It went like that. The late Tom Skudra, who’d done award-winning documentary photography for us at Toronto Life, donated two gallery-quality portfolios for the inside front and back covers (black and white ads for those pages didn’t appear until 1985; colour came along in 1987). Our front cover subject drew our front cover. Gratis, of course. One of the 11, Mickey Trigiani, did a revealing piece on the great editorial cartoonist of The Globe and Mail, Ed Franklin, who believed his art form was being destroyed by interference from the Globe’s editorial board. I asked Mickey if there was any chance Franklin might be willing to depict himself and his predicament for us. The result was a wonderful self-portrait of the artist at his drawing board trussed up a straitjacket and leg shackles. As a bonus, he gave us permission to use eight of his best cartoons inside.

Other memories abound. Tommi Lloyd, in her metallic silver jacket, going from grimy job printer to grimier job printer looking for one we could afford. Jim checking out the shop she finally found and discovering sheets of our film on the floor. He asked for van dykes, photo proofs that were the final check of everything in a magazine, and was told they’d never heard of van dykes. But he got them anyway.

Then there was Kit Melamed’s memorable moment. She was possessed of a singular determination and used it to get Joey Slinger to drop a guest column into our tin cup. When it arrived she was thrilled with it and promptly put it into production. Weeks later, she got a small-voiced call from Joey: had she hated the column so much she couldn’t bring herself to tell him? Is that why he hadn’t heard from her? “I’d had no experience,” Kit says now. “It never occurred to me that a writer of his stature would want a response from me.” The next day found her picking her way through the Star’s newsroom, bearing a bouquet of roses for Joey Slinger.

The day the books came everybody was out in front of the journalism building, waiting for the truck to pull up. We grabbed the first couple of boxes, headed inside and tore them open. There it was: 48 pages of classic design on black-and-white newsprint (the only colour was spot red in the cover logo), 10 solid stories, ranging from the biased coverage of the Korean Air Lines tragedy to the internal strife at CBC Radio’s Sunday Morning, plus profiles of the Sun’s Christie Blatchford, the Globe’s Shirley Shazar and Ed Franklin, together with insider reports, book reviews and a Q & A with Seymour Hersh. Compared to the glossy, four-colour award winners to come, it was a modest beginning. But to all of us there that day, it was the most beautiful thing in the world.

Don Obe is the founding editor of the Review. He is now a professor emeritus.

Who’s written books

Chris Turner (1998) has a knack for converting what he wrote for Shift magazine into successful books. An essay on everyone’s favourite family from Springfield became Planet Simpson: How a Cartoon Masterpiece Documented an Era and Defined a Generation. Published in 2004, it was an international bestseller. His second book, The Geography of Hope: A Tour of the World We Need, which came out last year, is rooted in a piece called, “Why Technology is Failing Us.”

Siobhan Roberts (1997) used the same trick with King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry, based on a profile she wrote for Toronto Life. And The Politics of Bones by J. Timothy Hunt (1999) began life as a Saturday Night article on the symbolic funeral of Nigerian environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. Hunt is now writing a book about the recently discovered skull of French literary icon Madame de Sévingé. Moira Farr (1985) wrote After Daniel: A Suicide Survivor’s Tale. Judy MacDonald (1988) penned Jane and Grey: Stories for Grown-Ups. Gemma Files (1991) wrote Kissing Carrion, a collection of dark fantasy stories. Howard Ackler (1991) is the author of The City Man. Cori Howard (1992) edited Between Interruptions: Thirty Women Tell the Truth About Motherhood. Sarah Curtis (1992) wrote Health and Societies: Changing Perspectives. Anita Lahey (1993) published a collection of poetry, Out to Dry in Cape Breton. Dominic Ali (1996) is the author of Media Madness: An Insider’s Guide to Media. Karen van Kampen (née Moffat,1999) wrote The Golden Cell: Gene Therapy, Stem Cells and the Quest for the Next Great Medical Breakthrough. Ryan Jennings (1999) co-authored Cooking With Booze. Adria Vasil (2003) turned her columns for NOW into Ecoholic: Your Guide to the Most Environmentally Friendly Information, Products and Services in Canada. Several others graduates have written children’s books, including Garry Hamilton (1986) and Doug Paton (2004).

By Hayley Citron

Who’s in broadcasting

After Mark Leger (1995) sold his New Brunswick– based weekly, Here, in 2004, he traveled to Ghana to help Liberians in a refugee camp improve a newspaper called The Vision. Between the two gigs, he spent a year and a half reporting and producing for CBC Radio in Fredericton. After adjusting from weekly to daily deadlines, Leger noticed that preparing radio reports and documentaries required many of the same skills as magazine writing, especially the need to find good colour. “Journalism,” he says, “is the same wherever you go.”

Marichka Melnyk (1994) started out as an editorial assistant on The National, then reported on upcoming events as the Go2It Girl for CBC Radio One show Here and Now. Her jobs got her pole dancing, climbing the CN Tower and dodging glass during an anti-poverty riot at Queen’s Park. She is now a producer of the program.

Kit Melamed (1984) and Marie Caloz (1987) are both producers at CBC TV’s the fifth estate, while Susan Bonner (1985) has been a parliamentary reporter for CBC TV since 1999.

Beyond CBC, Pilar Segura (1988) produces Outlaw In-Laws, a reality show about insufferable in-laws on Slice. And Mick Gzowski (1992), who did time as a copyboy—or “coffee boy”—at the Toronto Sun while in school, worked on more than 10 documentaries, including Corporation, Subway Elvis and Ocean Ranger Disaster. In 2004, he became the prime minister’s videographer, travelling with Paul Martin’s entourage. He chuckles about the time he entered a room in the White House and found himself awkwardly facing George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice. He now travels with Liberal leader Stéphane Dion.

By Alina Seagal

Who’s editing

Western Living editor Charlene Rooke (née Yarrow, 1993) still occasionally considers chucking everything to go back to school to become an architect or engineer. “Then I realize I could never afford my current lifestyle of global travel, privileged experiences, great meals, etc., without this career,” she says. “Humbling.”

David Dias (2001) isn’t complaining either. He wrote the story he dreamed about writing at Ryerson this year, when he flew to California on a private jet to check out GM’s new electric car, the Chevy Volt. Last year, he mingled with execs in Hong Kong. “In business, you’re always talking to geniuses and egomaniacs,” says the associate editor of Financial Post Business. “It’s been great.”

Closer to home, Angie Gardos (1989) is executive editor at Toronto Life, where she has been for 19 years. Neil Morton (1995) has moved around a bit more, landing his first full-time journalism gig at Elm Street (“paying job including benefits!”) and later doing a stint as editor of Shift. Both magazines are no longer with us and he is now the founding editor and associate publisher of 2: The Magazine for Couples.

Dawn Calleja (1999) is acting deputy editor at Report on Business Magazine while Samantha Israel (2005) just left her job as managing editor of Financial Post Business to take the same position with Oxygen and Clean Eating. Michael Totzke (1987) is editor of Canadian Interiors. Elizabeth Pagliacolo (2002), Susan Nerberg (1999) and Paige Magarrey (2007) are at Azure. Jackie Kovacs (1988), Sandra E. Martin (1992), Lisa van de Geyn (née Goldman, 2002) and Dafna Izenberg (2005) work together at Today’s Parent. Maureen Halushak (2002), Vanessa Milne (2005) and Jacqueline Nunes (2006) are at Chatelaine while Leah Rumack (1998) is fashion features editor of FASHION. Patricia D’Souza (1998), senior editor of Canadian Geographic; Aaron Kylie (1999) at Outdoor Canada; Liza Finlay (1991) at Outpost, Cathy Gulli (2003) at Maclean’s; and Dick Snyder (1994) at Redwood Custom Communications are some of the others still working in magazines.

By Mimi Szeto

Who fell in love

The close quarters and high stress of working together can strain even the most promising relationships, but at least three Review couples are now married. Nicolle Charbonneau Wahl and Andrew Wahl (1998) started dating in third year after deciding to ditch the second half of a psych class. Though Lynn Cunningham was reluctant to put the pair on the same issue, separating couples had resulted in crankiness in the past, so she took a chance. Today, Wahl is a senior writer for Canadian Business while Charbonneau is the manager of marketing and communications for the University of Toronto’s Mississauga campus. They have a three-year-old daughter with another child on the way at press time.

Two of their colleagues—Kathryn Hayward and Andre Mayer (1998)—got together too. She has been at Toronto Life since 2000 and is now the senior editor there; he is the arts producer for CBC Arts Online. They have two girls.

Drinks and video games after long nights in the magazine lab led to something more serious for Lisa Weaver and David Fielding (2001). A brief hiatus in their relationship created some awkwardness at the launch party, but it didn’t last. Weaver has gone from making $260 a week at natural health magazine, Vitality (“We were eating canned beans for a while,” he says), to copy editor at Toronto Life. Fielding, who spent three years at Toro, is now associate editor at Report on Business Magazine. No babies yet, but he says, “I would discourage my kids from going into this industry—I’d get them to pick up sports or something.”

By Chlöe Tse

Who’s at indie mags

In their final year at Ryerson, Melinda Mattos and Nicole Cohen (2003) created a prototype of a magazine for teenage women. After graduating, they turned their class project into Shameless, an indie publication “for girls who get it.” Mattos and Cohen were co-editors and publishers for three years. “Shameless was an incredible amount of work and exhausting at times, but then we would go to a launch party, I would say, ‘Oh, this is why I’m doing this,’” says Mattos. “There would be young people sitting on the floor reading, which was awesome. Every time I saw one girl feel a little less isolated, or alone or freaky, that was enough.”

In 2007, Mattos—who is now special sections editor and copy editor at Eye Weekly—and Cohen—who is doing her PhD on the political economy of media at York University—passed the editor’s chair to Megan Griffith-Greene (2004), who also works at Chatelaine. In addition to putting out the magazine, she is co-editor of a Shameless anthology of essays about teenage experiences written by women that will be published in 2009.

Lindsay Gibb (2002) always felt more connected to the art scene than traditional journalism, and she found her alternative niche as editor of Broken Pencil, the magazine of zine culture and independent arts. “The people that I end up talking to, who then went on to work at Canadian Business or something like it,” she says, “they had a different view of journalism than I had.”

By Jasmyn Burke

Who got out of journalism

Lee Oliver (1995) didn’t think anything was awry. While interviewing a government official for a story about air ambulances for Emergency Pre-Hospital Medicine magazine, he noticed the bureaucrat’s brand new Mercedes-Benz. “At the time,” he says, “I remember thinking, ‘Oh, bureaucrats must make more than I thought.’” He mentioned it to another reporter, and six or eight weeks after his story came out, the Toronto Star revealed that the bureaucrat was taking kickbacks from ambulance suppliers. Anybody could have missed that, but it made Oliver question his journalistic instincts—and he eventually decided journalism wasn’t for him.

He is now the communications director for the Toronto Humane Society. “I needed to feel like I was going to do something more important in my life than just writing or just editing,” he says. “And unfortunately, a lot—oh, man, I’m gonna be in a lot of trouble now—a lot of magazines are just really looking to separate the ads with some copy.” Working at the Humane Society means saving animals. He’s personally rescued eight or 10.

Another person working in public relations is Kristy Woudstra (Thorne, 1999) who does communications for World Vision, a charity for Third World children. Education is among the other professions former Review staffers have entered. Danielle Black (née Dobi, 2001), for example, is now a teacher; so, too, is Keri Schram (2004) after years of working at small-town papers.

Simon Smith (2000) does scientific research into marketing in his self-run Commune Media Inc. He can pinpoint the exact moment he knew journalism wasn’t right for him: when an instructor said, “Journalism cannot change the world.”

By William Stodalka
Into the Deep
Our current leader reviews why we write long, demand 40 interviews and more
By Bill Reynolds

Jan Wong walks into the Review’s annual launch party in a downtown Toronto nightclub. It’s just past 5:30 on a warm April afternoon. She’s one of the first luminaries to arrive. Wong sees me. She doesn’t say hello, only: “Where’s Julia?”

Julia is Julia Williams, writer of the Jan Wong profile that has just landed in the Summer 2004 edition. “Over there,” I say, “I’ll take you to her.”

Wong sees Williams in a booth. Wong sits down, uninvited. She opens the magazine and finds “Little Miss Mischief.” She reads the story directly across from her profiler.

Williams is pinned to her chair, awkwardly awaiting a response. Who the hell is going to mess with Jan Wong?

The woman who once took people for lunch and then eviscerated them in The Globe and Mail blasts through 3,146 words. “Not bad… could have been tougher.”

Coming from Wong, “not bad” ain’t half bad, especially after she told Williams at the beginning of the assignment: “You’re not going to write a puff piece, are you, like the one the Review did on Eddie last year?”

Eddie being Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief of the Globe. Melinda Mattos, who wrote that Summer 2003 cover story, poked and cajoled for six months, trying to get someone, anyone, to say something, anything, less than positive—you know, maybe Eddie, once upon a time, on his way to the top, maybe he made a bad decision, maybe he showed he was human like everyone else. Uh-uh. No way. No one, not one journo, wanted to go negatory on the big guy.

Journalists are like that. They pry, they sweet-talk, they ask invasive questions—they do get stuff out of people. But try, just try, getting something out of them and see how far you get. What’s your angle? Who’ve you been talking to? Why would you want to do that story? There’s no story there. I’ll tell you what your story is. Listen, what would you know about this world anyway? The Review messed up a fact in a story eight years ago, I’m never speaking to you guys again. And my new favourite: really love to meet the wise guy who told them to do 40 interviews.

Forty interviews… yes, we tell them to keep interviewing until they start hearing the same things over and over. You know what, sometimes that takes 40 or more interviews. Oh I know, out there, in that real world of real journalism, this is not always possible, practical or even preferable. But we tell them to do it anyway because, being rookies—we treat them like professionals but we do recognize that in fact, yes, they’re students—sometimes they need a bit longer than a Jan Wong to understand their material. They don’t have the accumulated knowledge pros do, so they need to spend extra time getting up to speed, feeling comfortable, confident. They want to be able to say to themselves, “Guess what? I’m an expert on this subject. I get to make that claim, that statement, that thesis. I’ve earned that right.”

Yes, final-year university students, under the guidance of professionals, write the Review. And yes, some see an institutional flaw imbedded in the magazine—how dare these callow students criticize the methodology, the practice, the actions of real journalists? And, by the way, just exactly how stupid is it for students to criticize the very people on whose doors they’ll soon be knocking? And oh yes, it’s not a real journalism review like the one they have in New York, the Columbia Journalism Review, now is it? Those stories are by real pros.

I used to buy all these arguments. Now I don’t.

If the students do the work—not always a done deal, I know—they’re entitled to make a professional judgement based on the evidence. We offer counsel. We ask them to provide context. We ask them to prove their statements. We do not advise them to do hatchet jobs, but we don’t want them to let anyone off the hook either.

And strangely, as other magazines abandon long-form features, we’ve made a conscious effort to embrace them when appropriate. If our reporter works long and hard to dig up stuff we hope will surprise our—let’s face it—skeptical readers, we let her run with it. Last year, Lauren McKeon was so diligent in following up leads about The Walrus magazine’s charitable status, including filing Freedom of Information requests, that we ran her story at nearly 7,500 words, the longest ever in the Review. Her effort didn’t go unnoticed—she received congratulatory letters from people who’d been inside the beast itself, a former Walrus editor and a former Walrus consultant.

Even with profiles, we sometimes let our most talented writers go long. When Spring 2007 cover subject Ian Brown realized Julia Belluz might, just might, underneath that irrepressible, effervescent, quirky, slightly Valley Girl–esque tone, actually be taking in absolutely everything he was saying and doing—everything—he joked half-menacingly, “Look, Reynolds, how would you like it if I talked to 40 people about you? I can write a story about you, too, y’know!”

More recently, Erin Tandy earned the respect of Toronto Star editor-in-chief Fred Kuntz (Spring 2008) when she confronted him point-blank about those nasty attacks courtesy of Frank magazine way back when. His reply: “I was wondering when you’d get around to asking some tough questions.”

Asking questions, asking them again in more detail, and taking the time to explain the complexity of an issue to the reader … look, we know we’re fighting a rearguard action, okay, but we preach going long and going deep. We believe that when our graduates hit the marketplace they’re equipped to write well-researched features—even if this now goes on more in theory than in practice in Canada.

That’s just the way it is, and the way we are.

Bill Reynolds has been in charge of the Review since 2004. He is an assistant professor.
Stayin’ Alive
Our longtime leader reviews—listen up, media suits!—our financial weaknesses
By Lynn Cunningham

Five years ago, as the Review’s annual launch party was approaching, I sent out some email invitations. You can guess my mood from the fact that I appended a note along the lines of “Come celebrate our 20th anniversary—the way things are going, it may be our last.”

The way things had been going was this: a senior administration official, the one who had to sign off on cheques, had failed to okay payment to the design and layout studio. The art director, who had been waiting for some of his money for months, in turn was refusing to release the finished pages to the printer (quite reasonably, in my opinion). It was the time of year familiar to all current or former Review staff. The project that had seemed either a lark or a chimera back in the fall had by now engulfed us all. Most were in the office six or seven days a week, except when they were in class or at work. The stress level was stronger than Kryptonite. Even people who weren’t criers were weeping over their keyboards. Those who were normally laissez-faire about style issues were obsessing over serial commas. This phase has been forever encapsulated by the memory of one beleaguered staff member, normally the most self-contained of men, shouting plaintively, “I want my life back.”

I can’t remember whether I cried, but I did storm the office of the money-withholding official and demand he pay the art director. He did. Later, though, I had to sit through a meeting in which he offered deeply unhelpful suggestions for cost cutting. How about no colour inside? Well, then there would be no colour ads, which generate much more revenue than black and white. Maybe we should apply for government money from the Canada Council or the Department of Heritage’s magazine fund. We aren’t eligible for funding under either of those programs. Maybe downgrade the paper stock? The magazine is printed on floor stock, the equivalent of buying at Winners rather than Holt Renfrew.

Around the same time, a representative of an international media company invited me to lunch to share his idea of how the magazine could be “saved.” All we had to do, he explained, was move our deadlines back about a month, ship the film to England, where the books could be printed at cost, then shipped back to Toronto. “Cost” turned about to be about what we were paying our local printer. Oh, and the company would want the outside back cover ad position for free. Couldn’t they just give us, say, $5,000 a year?

The notion behind the Review from its inception has been that it provides the staff with real-world experience and demands real-world standards. Unfortunately, for much of its life, it has also experienced real-world money troubles. The magazine is largely self-sustaining, generating most of its income from ad sales, circulation revenue and, more recently, fundraisers. Last year, these brought in $40,000. But just like everywhere else, there are always the unforeseen expenses: a scanner dies, an advertiser reneges, mailing costs go up. This is why, for years, the offices I really wanted to storm were those of the major media outlets. My speech would go something like this:

“You regularly look to Ryerson to provide your new hires. You do this because you know that our grads are smart and well-trained and will make excellent employees. They’re getting your magazines out, reporting for your papers, staffing your copy desks and writing and editing content for your online sites. In return, you may fund an award or two at Ryerson, but your ads are noticeably absent in Canada’s only magazine about journalism practice, and the incubator for a lot of the talent you engage each year. If your company, and all the others, were to commit to a double-page colour spread in the Review each year, you would be demonstrating that you’re genuinely interested in something other than your profit ratio. Yes, we may on occasion have criticized some aspect of your operation. Remember the old adage, ‘Speak truth to power?’ You’re not in the PR business and neither are we. While I’m at it, buy some subscriptions instead of being comped year after year, and stop stonewalling our writers. Your business relies on people talking to your staff, so talk to ours.”

Of course, the likelihood of this fantasy playing out is about the same as the National Post endorsing the NDP in the next federal election. But it’s seductive to imagine getting issues out without fretting that a full-page colour ad—worth $2,500 these days—has just fallen out. Or turning the staff into unskilled labourers, hand-inserting “blow-in” cards into the 1,000-plus newsstand copies.

You’ve heard of the Columbia Journalism Review and the American Journalism Review, neither of which is student-produced. In their markets they have circulations of 19,000 and 25,000 respectively. Apply the standard multiply-by-10 rule, and the Review would be in the same realm, at 50,000.

There’s some solace in recalling that both titles have had their own financial troubles over the years. And there’s more than a little smugness in contrasting CJR’s one nomination and AJR’s zero in the U.S. National Magazine Awards, which were established in 1966, versus the RRJ’s 13 in the Canadian equivalent since we started entering in 1993.

At a more seemly level, it’s gratifying to think that there’s hardly anywhere in the media universe that Review grads haven’t colonized. They are or have been producers at W-Five and the fifth estate and The National, reporters for CBC Radio and cbc.ca, writers or editors at everything from Maclean’s to Masthead, Cottage Life to Western Living, Canadian Business to Canadian Lawyer. They’ve published books, fiction, non-fiction, poetry. They win writing awards regularly. One, Graeme Smith, is currently reporting for the Globe from Afghanistan, where I hope he manages retain his very talented head.

I also hope that the media conglomerates might lose their heads long enough to pony up out of gratitude for all the years they’ve benefited from the Review journalism boot camp.

Lynn Cunningham has been responsible for more issues of the Review than any other instructor. She is an associate professor.

On April 16, 2007, at 7:15 a.m., Cho Seung-Hui killed two students in West Ambler Johnston Hall, his coed residence at Virginia Tech, before returning to his dorm room, changing his clothes and deleting his school email account and computer hard drive. At 9:01 a.m. he mailed a package containing an 1,800-word essay; photographs of himself holding a hammer like a baseball bat, putting a knife to his own throat and pointing his guns at the camera; and a video of his hate-filled rants. Then he entered Norris Hall, the engineering building, chained the doors shut and posted a note claiming that a bomb would go off if anyone attempted to escape. He moved up to the second floor where he started shooting with a Glock 19 and a Walther P22. Police arrived, broke down the barricade and entered the building—by the time they reached the second floor the shots had stopped.

The shooting spree ended with 33 people, including Cho, dead and another 27 injured. As reporters descended on Blacksburg, Virginia, they all wanted to know who the shooter was and why he did it. Some of the answers were in the package Cho had mailed that morning, but because he’d used the wrong zip code, it didn’t reach NBC News for two days. Shortly after it arrived the American network aired the videotape. “You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience,” a detached Cho said at one point in the video. “Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and defenseless people.”

Troy Reeb was watching in Toronto and realized he had a difficult decision to make. The vice-president of news operations at Global News quickly consulted senior executive producer and anchor Kevin Newman and Global National producer Marc Riddell. They all agreed the video was newsworthy and that the public had a right to see it, but they also knew Cho’s last wish was to garner fame. At 7:25 p.m., Reeb did something he rarely does: he sent a memo with guidelines to all Global News and CH News programs across Canada. “The video created by Cho Seung-Hui was clearly designed to frighten and to glorify his own madness. We should not assist him in either goal, and therefore must be very judicious in how we use the video, as well as the photographs and audio accompanying it,” the memo read. Reeb explained that airing the video was warranted as long as programs did so in context and didn’t “allow the broadcast of Cho’s own words to justify his actions.” Use of the videotape and photos should be kept to a minimum—for example, in stories that hoped to explain the psychology of murder—but not as “wallpaper.” Instead, Reeb suggested reporters and editors use footage of the campus or stills of the victims. The memo also noted that the anniversary of the Columbine massacre was the next day and coverage of that event had inspired another shooting the following week.

A little further east in the Toronto suburbs, Robert Hurst faced the same dilemma. After a 15-minute discussion with senior editors, the CTV News president decided his show would also air the video, but sparingly and with warnings about the nature of the content. He then sent out a “red line call,” an alert to all the networks’ news directors and senior producers that an issue needed to be handled immediately.

But in downtown Toronto, Tony Burman came to a different conclusion. The CBC editor-in-chief had a conference call with the senior staff of The National for 30 minutes and decided the video was not illuminating; airing it would only romanticize Cho in the eyes of others. “It was like the verbal diarrhea of a very sick man,” says Burman, who left the corporation last July. Instead, CBC News reported the essence of the video and ran a still of Cho without showing any weapons.

That decision was consistent with a position the network developed after a spate of school shootings followed the one at Montreal’s Dawson College in September 2006. “I think that sent alarm bells certainly in the minds of a lot of specialists who often expressed worry that because of the media coverage of these incidents, that there was the real possibility of copycat killings,” says Burman. Although he felt his network’s coverage of the Dawson tragedy was strong, he worried CBC could be guilty of glorifying gunman Kimveer Gill. “We basically said, ‘Look, the tragedy of these kinds of stories is that they will happen again, and when it happens again, we will try to be a bit more restrained,’” he explains. “And really, that’s what I think one saw in CBC’s coverage of Virginia Tech.”

Burman posted a letter on the network’s website explaining he and his team wanted to apply the lessons they had learned from the autumn shootings, and from audiences and experts. After NBC News aired the video, he included a postscript: “I imagined what kind of impact this broadcast would have on similarly deranged people.” He then added, “I had this awful and sad feeling that there were parents watching these excerpts on NBC who were unaware they will lose their children in some future copycat killing triggered by these broadcasts.”

Few recurring tragedies challenge the news judgement of journalists the way school shootings do. Aside from not wanting to give the perpetrators the publicity they so desperately seek, producers, editors and other decision-makers must worry about their coverage inspiring imitators. And yet these horrific events are not just news, they also raise difficult questions about gun laws, mental health systems and other issues, so staying away is not an option. All three agree that shootings need to be handled delicately, but beyond that, there’s plenty of debate.

In April 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Colorado’s Columbine High School dressed in black trench coats and armed with several weapons. They killed 12 students, one teacher and wounded 23 other people before turning their guns on themselves. It wasn’t the first school shooting, but the amount of media coverage it received helped make it both a template and a motivation for other disturbed minds. At least four school shootings followed before the end of the year. And Columbine remains a powerful example even now.

Kimveer Gill had talked about his obsession with that massacre in a video he posted on YouTube before carrying out his own version at Dawson College. The 25-year-old drove to the school, grabbed his Beretta Cx4 Storm semi-automatic carbine and opened fire before entering the building. He then moved through the premises toward the cafeteria, where he fired at two students and ordered others to get back. When it was over, Anastasia DeSouza and Gill were dead. It later came out that he had been an avid player of a video game that simulated the events of Columbine.

Cho also referred to “Eric and Dylan” as “martyrs.” And the day before 18-year-old Pekka Eric Auvinen killed eight people at a Finnish school in November 2007, he posted “Jokela High School Massacre” on YouTube. In it, “Stray Bullet,” by rock band KMFDM—whose lyrics were cited by Harris and Klebold—played in the background as Auvinen announced his intentions.

Many of the shootings that came after Columbine created their own clusters of copycats, according to Loren Coleman, author of Copycat Effect. After Dawson College, he emailed CTV saying, “I predict that this week or next, there may be another major ‘going postal’ workplace rampage or school shooting.” Two weeks later, a man held six girls hostage in a Colorado high school and killed one of them. Two more shootings occurred within the next five days.

While Hurst knows about the research that suggests media coverage leads to imitators, he says there is no definitive proof. “There are studies done on the other side saying if you withhold terrible information that you are being counterproductive to the progress of society,” he says, adding that the coverage may encourage others to seek help. “If there was real empirical evidence, an overwhelming body of evidence, that a Virginia Tech or a Columbine or a Dawson College actually generated and produced copycats saying that was their prime motivation, we would report on the studies and evidence.” Hurst also believes showing the video of Cho not only helps public understanding, but that psychologists, sociologists and university educators learn from it too, especially when the gunman explains what drove him to mass murder.

Psychologists have already identified disturbing similarities among the people responsible for these tragedies. “If you pull suicide so far inward, it turns to homicide,” says Coleman. School shooters are often narcissistic and resentful, feeling the whole world should know about their problems. “Someone with extremely malevolent motives has figured out a way to manipulate the press and has gotten a tremendous amount of press by doing it,” says Jordan Peterson, a professor of clinical psychology at the University of Toronto. He doesn’t believe in censorship, but would like to see these events covered with less focus on the killer. Bill Radunsky, a professor of journalism ethics at Cambrian College in Sudbury and the brother-in-law of Kristen French, who was killed by Paul Bernardo, agrees. “Some people have a bent idea of how fame works. They don’t care how they get fame or how they get into the news,” he says. “It’s the perpetrator that gets remembered and the victims get forgotten.” Sometimes the media get caught up and further hurt the survivors. In the Virginia Tech case, several families of the victims cancelled plans to appear on NBC’s Today show to protest the network’s heavy use of the video. NBC News responded by reducing how often and how much of the video it used.

Every member of the Radio-Television News Directors Association of Canada adheres to the organization’s Code of Ethics, which states that, “Reporting on criminal activities such as hostage-takings, prison uprisings or terrorist acts will be done in a fashion that does not knowingly endanger lives, offer comfort and support or provide vital information to the perpetrator(s).” CBC also has its own Journalistic Standards and Practices, which breaks down how to handle language, sex and nudity, grief and suffering and violence. It states that violence is not to be exploited and that there “must be a balance between respect for the audience and the obligation to respect reality.” While television networks face the most pressure to rethink the way they report such tragedies, at least one newspaper, the Toronto Star, is rewriting its policy manual. Managing editor Joe Hall says a subcommittee is looking at the coverage of crime and victims.

The three bosses at CBC, CTV and Global News made different decisions when confronted with Cho’s video—but none of them has any regrets. CBC refused to comment on whether new publisher John Cruickshank would follow Burman’s guidelines, but the former boss hopes the debate over broadcasting the gunman’s “media manifesto” will encourage all journalists to think twice next time. Still, Global’s Reeb, stands by his decision. He worries that not airing the video would have simply driven viewers, especially impressionable ones, to seek it out elsewhere. “And those locations,” he says, “aren’t necessarily going to have the responsible context professional journalism would provide.”

When Hurst and Burman took part in a Radio and Television News Directors Association panel discussion in Vancouver last June, both were critical of how the other’s organization had handled the issue. Although Hurst didn’t comment on Burman’s decision, he believes any news organization that wants to hold back or restrain information had better have more to go on than just a gut reaction. Journalists, he says, should avoid putting themselves in the position of playing God, of saying to the viewers, “‘I’ve seen the video and it’s horrible, and you can’t handle it.’”

Elly Alboim, a journalism ethics expert at Carleton University and a former CBC parliamentary bureau chief, believes his former network’s instincts were largely correct, but the decision not to show any of the video was going too far. He argues the public had a right and a need to see it. “There’s a difference between providing enough information for people to make a judgement,” he says, “and running it for its own sake.”

For his part, CBC ombudsman Vince Carlin thought the video might be of interest to some segments of the population, but doesn’t think including it added much to the reporting. “Visual elements are often done for competitive reasons,” he says, “not for journalistic reasons.”

Alboim agrees that NBC’s judgement may have been coloured by competition with its rivals. Although the network’s decision to air the material it received from Cho generated disgust and outrage from the public, NBC Nightly News ratings averaged 10.3 million compared to the usual 9.2 million viewers. “People are less conscious of their moral and professional obligations because no matter what they do, the material is going to be available,” says Alboim. “There’s so much pressure on the competitive side. The odds of keeping the gate shut and being a sole participant in that situation are very small.”

But competition isn’t the only consideration. Hurst warns that any producer, editor or reporter can do is perform his or her job responsibly and ethically. “Journalists are not psychologists, we are not sociologists, we are not medical doctors,” he says. “When you, as a news organization, set yourself up as believing you know better, you are performing the role of a psychologist, which you are not trained to do.”

Karen Best relaxed at a rental cabin outside Quebec City with her family, taking a well-deserved break in July 2006. She’d spent most of the previous four and a half months covering a land claim dispute that had divided her normally peaceful home of Caledonia, Ontario, along racial lines and garnered national media attention. As a senior reporter and photographer for The Haldimand Review, Best’s beats had included the sleepy county council, Six Nations and general news in a community where natives and non-natives—as the people in the area refer to each other—rarely considered racial divisions. They lived on the same streets, shopped at the same stores and sent their kids to the same high schools. But all that changed once a group of protestors from the neighbouring Six Nations reserve blocked road access to a housing development they say was part of 950,000 acres of land given to them by a British government proclamation in 1784. Covering that story was no easy feat, given the tensions it stirred up, but Best persisted. “This is history,” she says. “It’s the story of a lifetime.”

So, after working on that story since February 2006, Best was enjoying her summer vacation one sunny morning when her cellphone rang. A source from Caledonia was calling to tell her the barricades that had blocked the entrance to the disputed housing development site for eight weeks were finally coming down. Within minutes, she was on the phone with her editor. “You gotta cover it!” she told him. “You’ve gotta have somebody go.”

But even then, she knew he wouldn’t send anyone to cover the story, despite her urgings—a decision that bothers her to this day. Although national media outlets were a common sight in town, Best’s paper, just a short drive away, didn’t touch it. Not for the first time, she was the only local journalist who seemed to understand the importance of the events unfolding around her.

The largely rural Haldimand County, with a population of about 56,000 people, boasts six weekly newspapers, so competition alone should have ensured good coverage. But that’s not the case. Some of the papers have almost completely ignored the conflict, while others have taken a decidedly one-sided approach. According to most editors and reporters in the area, the pressures of dealing with a national story from a local perspective, fear of retribution and personal involvement have put them in a delicate position. So instead of providing fair, balanced reporting on a situation that is tearing their community apart, most have opted to pick sides or ignore the story altogether, throwing the ideals of journalism out the window.

Caledonia is quintessential small-town Ontario. Located about 30 kilometres south of Hamilton along the Grand River, it’s home to 10,000 people, a 135-year-old agricultural fair and a historic downtown where kids can still buy penny candies at the local bakery. Until recently, it was best known for its nine-span bridge, the only one of its kind in Canada. Subdivisions are going up on the outskirts in response to demand from commuters with jobs in nearby Hamilton or Brantford, but the town retains much of its old-time charm. Just west are two reserves collectively called Six Nations of the Grand River, with a population of 11,000. For generations, the communities lived side by side without hostility.

That peace began to collapse in February 2006 when a small group of protestors moved onto the Douglas Creek Estates (DCE) housing development in the southwest end of town. At issue was the ownership of the land called Kanonhstaton, Mohawk for “the protected place.” According to a 1784 treaty, Aboriginal bands have rights to 10 kilo-metres on either side of the Grand River, between its source and Lake Erie. Over the years, much of that land, which totalled about 3,800 square kilometres, was leased or sold. Or at least, that’s the government’s position. According to Six Nations residents and their supporters, the disputed land was only leased, and the government had no business selling it to housing developers such as DCE without their input, or without giving them a share of the profits.

As is so often the case with such disputes, it’s hard for most readers to know who’s right and who’s wrong. And in the absence of convincing evidence on either side of the centuries-old debate, it’s up to reporters to help people understand what’s at stake. With half a dozen papers serving the area, that shouldn’t have been a problem—but it was.

The Turtle Island News, The Dunnville Chronicle, The Haldimand Press, The Regional News This Week and The Tekawennake all come out on Wednesdays. But The Grand River Sachem, one of the oldest papers in Ontario and now owned by Metroland, lands in flyer bags at 19,000 homes across Haldimand County and the Six Nations reserve on Friday afternoons. It features a mix of local news, human interest stories and reports from local lawn bowling and 4-H clubs. “We’re the community’s newspaper,” says Neil Dring, the editor, general manager and associate publisher. As Katie Dawson, the lead reporter, says, “People like having their own newspaper that they can open up and see, ‘Oh, there’s my grandson and his hockey team.’”

The Sachem was the first non-Aboriginal paper to cover the dispute, but while the staff tries hard to provide bias-free, politically correct reporting, their attempts to not hurt anyone’s feelings appear to hurt their coverage instead. Some who live in the most affected areas describe it as “the worst” of the bunch—they say the Sachem exaggerated their problems or misquoted them.

For the papers off the reserve, the action started in October 2005, when six protestors held flags and banners on the southern end of Caledonia’s main drag as part of an information picket about development on the DCE. “We didn’t take it too seriously at the time, we just did it because it was local news,” says Dring, who ran a 120-word article on page 11. In hindsight, he says, it was gold, and after a quiet four months, the Sachem resumed its coverage when the protest moved to the disputed land at the end of February. DCE and many residents saw the action as an occupation; others, notably Six Nations residents, insisted it was a reclamation.

Either way, almost two months after the trouble started, the Ontario Provincial Police (OPP) botched a nighttime raid of the DCE. By the middle of the day, several hundred First Nations from across the country had poured in to support the protesters and established a barricade of tires across the main drag, stopping traffic through Caledonia, and at one point darkening the skies with a tire fire. Before mainstream media arrived, local papers “were on the scene first,” says Dring, whose photograph of a minivan being pushed off an overpass was picked up by The Hamilton Spectator and later won the Ontario Community Newspaper Best Spot News Photo Award for 2006.

Continuous coverage of the more than two years of the dispute has been difficult. “We just can’t keep up,” says Dring. “This is like a freight train that ran away from us.” With only one full-time reporter, he has had to be selective. If something happens, the paper will report developments in the conflict, but won’t write about it just to comment. Dawson was on maternity leave and Hamilton-based freelancer Mike Pearson, now with the Ancaster News, was filling in when the protestors took control of the DCE land. He says he and Dring talked a lot about how to cover the issue: “We didn’t want to take a side or take a stand,” he says.

“I tried to be a little more neutral, but it was a challenge trying to convey the message of both sides and not appear to favour any one side.”

Judging by the letters the Sachem and the other papers receive, many readers blame band members for some of the more controversial incidents—including a truck burning under a power transformer, cutting off power to the county and surrounding areas for a day or two and causing over $1.5 million in damages. They expected the paper to take the same line. But because the police did not press charges, Pearson wasn’t prepared to do that, saying, “We had the obligation to be objective and not to report hearsay.”

Although the paper publishes letters representing a range of readers’ views, Dring says many of the comments he receives are based on rumours and unsubstantiated information, so he isn’t comfortable printing them. “Some readers understand where we’re coming from and they respect that,” he says. “Other readers think we’re dropping the ball.”

It’s a different story altogether at rival The Regional News This Week, an independent weekly owned by editor Chris Pickup and her husband, publisher Kevan Pickup. The newsroom consists of a few desks huddled behind the counter of a printing and office supply shop that, like most Caledonia businesses, has seen a sharp decline in Aboriginal customers. Each Wednesday, 22,000 copies go free to readers across and outside Haldimand County, but not to the Six Nations reserve due to the high cost of delivery.

Known for being outspoken, the Regional News pays more attention to the land claim dispute than any of the other weeklies in town—it devoted four of its 12 news pages, plus the cover, to a march in October 2007. But the paper comes down hard against the protestors. “They’re looking at this as an illegal occupation and in their copy would refer to it as an illegal occupation over and over again, whereas we weren’t,” says Pearson. From the start of the dispute, “they were seen as anti-native.”

Editor Pickup doesn’t see that as a problem. “No newspaper is unbiased, despite what they say,” she counters. “We try to be fair all the way around. But that doesn’t mean to say you can’t state your opinion either, as long as you make sure people know it’s your opinion.”

Reporter and photographer Bill Jackson, who also writes a weekly column called Comment, says that outspoken attitude is what attracts readers. “I think people look to our paper because they want … someone to say what no one’s saying,” he says. “The paper has always had the reputation as being a little bit more controversial. Chris isn’t one to sit back and let people walk all over her. A lot of people read the paper because of my Comment, because I’ll blast off about the natives or something, but they like that.” Early on, readers from the reserve called and wrote to take the paper to task for a story that failed to report their history properly, but that didn’t bother Jackson, who says, “It’s all perspective, right?”

Although he claims he had “no problem with natives” before he began working in Caledonia five years ago, his experiences since then have affected him. In June 2006, he covered a skirmish at the local Canadian Tire parking lot, when an Aboriginal woman noticed he was taking pictures of the scene. She allegedly chased him down, grabbed his camera from his hands and scratched his arm with her nails, leaving a deep cut. “You can see how people get to the brink in this community,” says Jackson, who claims the police stood there, watched and did nothing. When a police officer finally returned his camera, the memory card was gone. Reporters who became that involved can find it difficult to separate their personal and professional feelings. “After this issue, do I have something against natives personally? I think it’s definitely coloured my perception on things as an individual. And I think it does overlap a bit into your reporting because it’s your perspective, it’s your objectivity.”

While such a notion might rub many reporters the wrong way, Jackson sees it differently. “You could really take a lot of angles on this and still be right,” he explains. So does he think that he and the Regional News have covered the story in the best way possible? “No, I don’t think I have, because I don’t think one person at a community newspaper could cover it in the best way. I think it’s too big of an issue for my job and my capacity to cover it in the best way possible, and I’ll be the first to admit that. I’ve done my best.”

While the Regional News covers the dispute thoroughly, The Haldimand Press has distanced itself from reporting on the conflict. With its long history—it’s been around in one form or another since 1868—and a circulation of 4,200, the paper should be right on top of the land claim issue. Instead, the Press is something of a 1930s society page throwback, relying heavily on submissions from community groups and other announcements; letters to the editor, which appear throughout the paper, rather than lumped together on one page; inspirational quotations and public service messages such as “Please Watch For Farm Equipment On Your Roads—slow down!” and “Never tell anyone they can’t sing.”

Robert Hall is a third-generation owner, editor, publisher and reporter at the paper. “A long, long time ago, I learned there’s always three sides to every story: yours, mine and the truth, and I’m just not interested in getting involved,” he says. “I’ve got friends on the Six Nations and I’ve got friends in Caledonia. You can’t really paint a hard picture on something and be fair to both sides. It’s just my decision to steer clear of controversies.”

While Hall claims he doesn’t cover any hard news, that’s not entirely true. On September 13, 2007, a group of Aboriginals attacked home builder Sam Gualtieri in the house he was building for his daughter on the Stirling Woods subdivision, another Caledonia development site that has been the setting of several confrontations (Six Nations representatives have acknowledged this attack happened). The story made the front page of the Sachem and the Spectator. It also made the Press, garnering 148 words on the inside cover, sandwiched between the results of a card game and a fundraising tricycle race. “I don’t try to be like everybody else just to be like everybody else,” explains Hall. “What we do is to try and please our subscribers. We have probably 50 compliments compared to one complaint about the style of our paper. I don’t think I could improve on that by doing all of those hard-nosed stories.”

Although Hall’s if-it-ain’t-broke approach to newspapers may strike some as decidedly un-journalistic, many people in the county consider the weekly a must-read.

One journalist who has never shied away from reporting both sides of the land claim dispute is Karen Best. The lead reporter at The Dunnville Chronicle first started working on the story while at a sister paper, the now-defunct Haldimand Review. An unassuming but tough woman, she comes across as much more hard-hitting on paper than in person. While other local journalists complain it’s impossible to report on the community they live in during this crisis, Best isn’t afraid to do her job, whether it’s covering Six Nations community meetings or interviewing protestors at the barricade. “I’ve had people say, ‘Is it safe for you to go there?’ Yeah,” she laughs, sounding like a kid saying, “Duh.” “What do you think they’re going to do to me?”

On Victoria Day 2006, an Aboriginal man allegedly bumped a couple of protestors from Haldimand County and surrounding areas while trying to block the main road with his car. A crowd of about 100 insisted he be arrested, so the OPP took the driver away, leaving the female passenger inside the car. A member of the Aboriginal Response Team, a special OPP squad, made her way to the car to drive the vehicle out of harm’s way. The crowd blocked the car and someone cried out that if it was a non-Aboriginal driver, the car would be towed. Six Nations spokesperson Janie Jamieson appeared with four men to help retrieve the stranded woman, but the crowd wouldn’t let them through. As they pushed forward, fists started to fly. Best watched as people inches away from her punched each other in the face, hurling angry, racist slurs. The force of the densely packed mob jostled her from the middle of the street, where she’d been standing, to the side of the road. Catching a glimpse of her neighbour’s 18-year-old son trying to pull someone out of the melee, she was concerned for his well-being and shouted at him to go home. But she stayed put. “I’m possessive of the story and I live there, so I’m going to cover the stuff.”

Best began covering the land claim controversy for The Haldimand Review in March 2006, after a tip led her to stake out an unpublicized meeting. The OPP, DCE developers and members of the county council and the Six Nations Band Council were getting together to talk about how to deal with the situation. As the only reporter waiting for officials after the meeting, she scooped her competition. “From then on it was my story. I’m compulsive and obsessive and will not give it up to anybody.”

She’s taken a markedly different approach from the other local papers: she made a point of writing about both sides of the story, including looking into the history of the Grand River land claim as well as allegations of discrimination against Aboriginal children. But her paper folded in November 2006 when its owner, Osprey Media, decided it would take too long to become profitable in such a crowded market. “It was a sad, sad day,” says Best. “I knew that I’d covered and written stuff that no one else has, and the door was being shut on that.”

Best returned to her other job at nearby The Dunnville Chronicle, another Osprey weekly that puts out 2,600 copies, but made it clear to her editor that she would not be abandoning the story. “I’m from Caledonia. I figure the way to serve my community best was to inform them, and that’s still my position,” she says. “I’m very even, I report what the Six Nations people say. Some people here are prejudiced and angry and frightened. There are all those emotions going on, and they may not want to read it, but I write it, straight up, and that’s what comes out.” Her work has not gone unappreciated: readers have called and emailed Best with praise. “And these were people,” she notes, “who lived in the most affected area.”

The Six Nations reserve has two of its own weeklies: The Tekawennake and The Turtle Island News. While both papers have covered the dispute extensively, they appear to take a one-sided approach to the land claim issue too. The publisher and editor of The Turtle Island News did not respond to interview requests for this story. The Teka, as readers call it, has a circulation of 2,500. The 35-year-old paper focuses on local news but also includes stories about First Nations communities from across Canada. It began covering the Caledonia story long before journalists at the weeklies in town even knew what was happening.

In fall 2005, Jamieson and Dawn Smith, two of the leaders behind the protest, approached the Confederacy Council, a traditional governing body, and the elected Band Council to ask for their blessings to start an awareness campaign about the ownership of the land. The story made the front page of the Teka on March 1, 2006, and continued to do so for the next 19 weeks. Jim Windle, who has worked at the paper for six years, is the assignment editor and lead reporter. Although he is not Aboriginal, he says that gives him an advantage when doing his job—not having ties to members of the Six Nations means he doesn’t need to worry about angering family members with his work. “I find the fact that I’m not native to be more beneficial because I can afford to be more objective. It’s not like if I say something wrong I’ll upset my auntie.” Windle, like Best, has given up many hours of his free time to cover the story. “When things started to happen, news was breaking all the time so you pretty well had to be there. There were many nights I spent there, sleeping in my car.”

He’s disappointed that his rivals have focused on juicy, unproven details instead of investigating and reporting the facts. He tried to substantiate stories of children fearfully eating lunch under their desks and Canadian flags pierced with bullet holes—what he calls “outrageous crap”—with school and OPP officials, but was told both were gross exaggerations. “I’m not saying nothing happened. But I am saying that 80 per cent of what got out to the major media either didn’t happen or was completely embellished,” says Windle. “There was so much misinformation being fed to the mainstream that only the native population and those who took it upon themselves to research the facts knew the real story.” Still, he concedes that this may not have been the reporters’ faults entirely. Outside media, as the Teka refers to mainstream news organizations, and some non-Aboriginal local papers, were repeatedly denied entrance through the barricade to talk to the protest leaders and their supporters, Windle says, “so all they got was angry Caledonians.”

The Sachem ’s Dring says he isn’t surprised by the Teka’s stand. The Aboriginal papers are “very much cheerleaders for their side of the issue,” he says. “But you know what? A paper should serve the community and they do a good job of representing their communities.” The problem, of course, is trying to represent people when no one will talk. For the town papers, it was tough to get comments from people on the Six Nations reserve—and, in many cases, it’s just as hard to attribute quotes, or do on-the-record interviews with people on the other side of the barricade because no one wants to be a public spokesperson or the voice of Caledonians. “The biggest problem is the lack of information residents are getting, but it’s the same for us,” explains Sachem reporter Dawson. “We don’t get information about how the negotiations are going, there’s nobody here who will tell us, so how do we report it? I think that frustrates people—I know it frustrates me.”

Fear kept many from speaking to reporters. People were so afraid of backlash from either side “they didn’t want to have their names out there and justifiably so, when you see what happened to Dave and Dana,” says the Sachem ’s Pearson. Dave Brown and Dana Chatwell live on the edge of the DCE site, and during the most heated days of the dispute they were unable to travel freely to and from their home. They had to abide by the protestors’ rules—including no alcohol—and carry “passports” signed by Mohawk security. They endured vehicle searches, during which items such as groceries or beer were often removed, and their home was broken into and many of their possessions destroyed. They have since filed a $12-million lawsuit against the OPP and the provincial government for failing to protect them.

So reporters were stuck between a frightened population and reticent protestors. “I did have some difficulty trying to go down to the barricade site and get comment from people there because they would always say that they’re not authorized to speak,” says Pearson, who was often told to talk to absentee spokespeople. “It probably resulted in the native side not being fully represented in the news coverage, but we always made the effort.”

When local media fail to cover important issues, or cover only one side of them, readers inevitably have to look elsewhere. In Caledonia, many go to Caledoniawakeupcall.com, created by Gary McHale. He has taken it upon himself to fight a perceived lack of law and order, subjecting himself to hatred, ridicule and near bankruptcy in a debate he can’t tear himself away from. Though he sold the site to someone he describes as “like-minded” late last year, he still contributes to it. And even some reporters are impressed. “I think he’s done a really, really good job of putting any information that he can get his hands on out there for people to read,” says Dawson. “Really, if people didn’t have that they’d be in the dark even more than they are.”

McHale and his friend Mark Vandermaas, who runs a site called Voiceofcanada.ca, don’t live in Caledonia, but are well-known figures in the community. Both sites link to hundreds of stories about the conflict, and they are opposed to the way protesters behave and how the dispute is policed. One of the images on Caledoniawakeupcall.com calls the protestors “terrorists,” another accuses protestors of “extortion” and a third shows a banner that reads, “KKKANADA.” Below, it links to videos that, the web page suggests, “could be seen as proof for a Native Supremacy Movement.” It’s not clear whether these are McHale’s own editorial comments or simply gathered from other sources. The site is an aggregate: it takes content from everything from Aboriginal papers to the National Post to blogs. The site has attracted about 22,000 visitors a month since its creation in June 2006. “I’m only involved because the media failed. That’s my fundamental statement I have made to the public many times,” says McHale. “I would not exist if the media had done their job. In a democracy, it’s the media that finally puts the pressure on governments—and it’s not happening in Caledonia.”

But McHale is not just a citizen journalist. He has organized a number of protests, including the Remember Us March two days before the provincial election in October 2007. He and Vandermaas say they are fighting two-tier justice, not the Six Nations residents themselves, although some people have a hard time believing it. They also believe the OPP are treating the actions of First Nations and locals differently. At a resident-organized rally in December, police arrested and charged McHale with counselling to commit mischief, following an altercation between him and an Aboriginal man. At press time, he is currently restricted from entering Caledonia and surrounding areas, though he is appealing the order. This March, he failed in his attempt to subpoena nine OPP officers, including Commissioner Julian Fantino, to testify at his bail review, during which the courts will examine the conditions of his restrictions.

At the annual Caledonia Fair, in both 2006 and 2007, the absence of people from the reserve was hard to ignore, especially since the event has traditionally been a time for everyone to celebrate; it generally attracts 30,000 visitors over its three-and-a-half-day run.

The conflict has given the area a poor reputation and Pearson says his out-of-town colleagues shudder when he mentions Caledonia. Living and working in such a small community, where families have stayed for generations and reporters risk alienating everyone around them, makes it hard to decide how to cover such a divisive story. But when journalists choose not to report it, or to report only one side, they fail not just their readers, but their neighbours as well. “It’s sad to see the rift that’s between the two communities now,” says Pearson, who lived in the county from the age of eight to 18 and who still follows the story closely from his home in Hamilton. “There’s a real split. People look at each other differently.”

An ugly standoff is not what Caledonians want to be famous for. They were much happier with their previous claim to fame. “What we were known for is our bridge,” says Dawson. “I hope that’s what we’re still known for.”