The cover of the December 2008 issue of Style at Home, the 12-year-old shelter title published by Transcontinental, features an elegant white-on-white tableau tastefully accented by what a coverline deems “glam­ourous greenery”-a 30-inch wreath of salal and camel­lia leaves accented with silver apple ornaments-all set off by a pair of lamps with gold shades and, for a touch of whimsy, an antique birdcage. As you flip through this 192-page issue, there are several double-page-spread ads-IKEA, Kraft-before the two back-to-back contents pages. These tout the usual array of articles, organized into five categories: home, style, shopping, entertaining and “regulars,” which includes everything from Window Shopping (this issue, it’s Christmas stockings) to So Sim­ple (clever paper tricks for holiday gifts and decorations). Past the masthead, which lists 23 editorial employees, and Gail Johnston Habs’s editor’s column, Home Page, is the popular High/Low feature. This month it presents two similar “chic bedroom[s] for a little princess,” the high version priced at $5,764; the low at $2,302.

It isn’t until just after page 71, though, that you hit the real low: a full-page ad for the Kraft-owned, Bosch-manufactured Tassimo brewer “hot beverage system.” On the right, an acetate sheet printed with this device makes it appear it’s gracing the counter of a kitchen that’s part of a five-page editorial takeout on the home of Citytv news anchor Anne Mroczkowski.

Is this blatant contravention of two of the Canadian magazine industry’s guidelines regarding the separation of editorial and advertising a sign that trouble is brewing in the usually recession-proof shelter sector?

Untillatewinter there were three major national English-language shelter magazines-industry parlance for titles about home décor. Canadian House & Home is the largest, not just in overall size but in circulation, which is currently 259,000 per issue. In 1984 Lynda Reeves and her then husband invested in the magazine and eventually purchased the title a year later. She was an interior decorator when she took over in 1986 and later became publisher. The Reeveses split some time ago, but the magazine is still independent, and its brand is now attached to the House & Home with Lynda Reeves TV show and House & Home Style for Living Home products. The magazine is notable for its lavish covers and articles that often depict the beautifully decorated homes of the rich, famous and fabulous, including Canadian actress Kathleen Robertson’s vacation oasis in Palm Springs and HGTV’s Peter Fallico’s transformation of a dowdy Toronto house into an “airy, contemporary living space that showcases a mix of modern and traditional.” Last year this visual bonbon carried close to 1,500 ad pages-more than many magazines’ entire book size.

Style at Home, Canada’s second-ranking shelter maga­zine in circulation, was created in 1997 when parent Transcontinental repositioned its predecessor, Cana­dian Select Homes. In 2008, its per-issue circulation was 237,000, and its readership was 1,716,000-about 800,000 lower than Canadian House & Home‘s. Accord­ing to long-time publisher Deborah Trepanier, “It focuses very much on the interiors and that kind of ‘you can do it’ inspiration and accessibility.” The Style at Home reader might run up her own curtains, while Canadian House & Home‘s audience is more likely to turn to a decorator. But in other respects, the two books are similar: House & Home‘s version of High/Low is called More or Less and Canadian House & Home‘s Finds section is mir­rored by Style at Home‘s Home & Style, each of which highlights new products. Overall, Doug Bennet, publisher of Masthead (now an online-only publication), feels Style at Home tends to be slightly more “informational” while Canadian House & Home is more “inspirational.”

Smallest in circulation and youngest of the three was Canadian Home & Country, which started life as Cen­tury Home in 1984, was re-launched as Home & Country in 2002 by new owner Avid Media Inc. and bought by Transcontinental in 2004. In January it was repositioned yet again, the most obvious change being a total makeover. While the content remained mostly unchanged, the magazine’s frequency was cut from eight times a year to six. Editor Erin McLaughlin, who had been with the book since the Avid purchase, was assigned to edit both Home & Country and sister-title Canadian Gardening, whose frequency has dropped from eight times yearly to seven.

Even before any recession-related impact, this title was much less robust than the older magazines, with a per-issue circulation of just 135,000, and ad sales of not quite 325 pages in 2008. Magazine circulation expert Jon Spencer said of the rollback in the publishing schedule: “A reduction of frequency is usually an attempt to man­age the bottom line a bit more effectively.” Translation: chances are the magazine was losing money.

Over the last decade, economic downturns spared shelter books. After the dotcom blowout of 2000, Bill Shields, former editor of Masthead, notes, “We saw this great period of expansion for shelter titles.” Post Septem­ber 11, people travelled less. Instead of spending $3,000 or $4,000 on a holiday, they put that money into their home. The same pattern held in the United States.

There are ominous signs, though, that this time is different, just as the early ’90s saw the demise of Comac Communications’ Ontario Living and Maclean Hunter’s City and Country Home and other shelter titles. Since the beginning of 2008, Martha Stewart Living’s Blueprint, Hearst’s O at Home, Hachette Filipacchi’s Home, Time Inc.’s Cottage Living, Meredith Corporation’s Country Home and Condé Nast’s Vogue Living all folded.

The biggest shocker occured earlier in 2007, when Condé Nast announced the demise of its venerableHouse & Garden, launched in 1901, was closed. For the surving titles, a few-like Veranda, House Beautifuland Elle Décor-ended 2008 with ad sales declines of less than 10 percent. Others, including Dwell andCountry Living, showed average drops of 15 percent or, in the case of Country Home, just over 30 percent. This January, Condé Nast announced it would stop publishing the three-year-old shopping and home décor magazine Domino as of March. There hasn’t been as much of a shakeout in the Canadian market, at least yet. In November 2008 though, St. Joseph Media shut down Wish and Gardening Life, both of which relied heavily on retail advertising, as shel­ter magazines also do. Then, in mid-February, Transcon announced it was folding Home & Country, even while the relaunch issue was still on newsstands.

Not surprisingly, insiders like Deborah Trepanier, publisher of Style at Home and the late Home & Country, say they are upbeat about the future of shelter magazines. “I think people are always going to be house-proud,” Trepanier says confidently. “They are maybe not going to be thinking of moving,” she adds, instead suggesting, “They are going to think, ‘Now what can I do?'”

Kirby Miller, senior vice president and general man­ager of House & Home Media, is equally sanguine. He feels House & Home has “become a bit recession-proof in terms of content. When people are buying newer and bigger houses we’re going to get that market and when things aren’t so great, they are staying home and renovat­ing and not buying luxuries but still want their home to look good.” The same goes for Style at Homeeditor Gail Johnston Habs: “The whole cocooning and nesting idea is even stronger during soft economies.”

But cocooning doesn’t necessarily equal consum­ing. Cindy Foresto, a 48-year-old production specialist with Magna International Inc., who lives in Oakville, is a long-time shelter reader, she admits, “I probably won’t buy them as much, because I won’t have any money to do the things I see.” Her favourite Canadian title is Style at Home, which she used to buy every other month or so because of its elaborate covers and local sources. “I really like anything to do with renos, especially the before-and-after spreads,” she says.

Like Foresto, Kim Ferguson, a 50-year-old dietary aide in Midland, Ontario, appreciates that Style at Homeand House & Home point her to the sources of items featured. “I also like to keep up to date on the latest trends and paint colours.” Although she’s been a shelter book fan for 20 years, she admits that her reading may soon be confined to supermarket checkout lines.

Karn Graham, 48, a Toronto homemaker, isn’t planning to cut décor magazines from her media diet completely. She’s used to turning to them when she wants to update something or seek ideas of how she can reuse what she already has at home. She’ll likely continue to subscribe to House & Home because it’s become “a force of habit,” but imagines she’ll be buying fewer magazines at the newsstand. Like other readers, she considers shelter titles “an escape and relaxation tool,” and feels this is why others won’t stop buying them, either: “I like to look in them and say, ‘Oh, wow! That’s a great idea,’ and then look around for the item or idea a little cheaper.”

But with magazines themselves unless you subscribe, you can’t look around and find them a little bit cheaper-you either pay the cover price ($5.95 and $5.50 for House & Home and Style at Home, respectively) or you don’t get the issue. For some time fewer people have been buying at the newsstands. As Spencer notes, there has been a downward trend in sales since about 1995, and that seems to have accelerated in the past two years. Publishers have responded by cutting the number of magazines sent to stands. “If your number of units selling is going down, people try to put fewer copies out there so the sell-through rate will improve. That doesn’t work for all magazines; it works to some extent for larger publishers,” Spencer concludes.

Worse, magazines tend to be leading indicators at the top of a recession and lagging indicators at the end, and the signs aren’t good. In 2006, House & Home carried close to 1,700 ad pages, according to Leading National Advertisers (LNA), an advertising tracking service. Last year, the number had fallen by almost 200.Home & Country‘s count dropped from 377 to 323. Style at Home‘s pages fell from 1021 to 989. The first two months of this year followed suit: 57 to 56 pages for House & Home in January and 68 to 55 in February; 39 to 33 in January and 44 to 29 pages in February for Style at Home. Home & Country, which doesn’t publish in January, showed a slide from 35 to 24 in February, despite the relaunch.

Some media buyers remain fairly optimistic about the category. Crystal Oxley, an account director at ZenithOp­timedia, points out that, for example, House & Home is a top performer and therefore anyone looking to buy ad space targeting women 25 to 54 is going to turn to this title. Brenda Bookbinder, vice president group account director for PHD Canada, isn’t as upbeat. “The finan­cial crisis isn’t going to do Canadian shelter titles any favours,” she says, but notes that “a lot of advertisers have the attitude that they have to advertise during this time and that the advertisers and brands that are most successful after the recession are the ones that adver­tised and reminded people about their brand during the recession.”

Like Kraft’s Tassimo brewer. Joy Sanguedolce, strategy director with MediaVest, a division of Starcom MediaVest Group (SMG), explains that in today’s economic climate “marketers have to do everything in their power to break through, especially in a weakening economy. Where an advertiser can really stand out and connect to a con­sumer, it will be to their benefit at the end of the day.” Sanguedolce was involved in the creation of the Tassimo ad that saw the product land on an editorial countertop in Style at Home. She believes the ethics-challenging ad constituted a breakthrough of another kind: “It’s really taking a static medium, print, and making it more dynamic, more interactive and highly engaging.”

Sanguedolce notes the reports of falling ad sales but is still optimistic: “I think people will still look to shelter magazines for eye candy and inspiration. You may not be able to afford that $2,000 chair, but it does give you a sense of what you may be able to accomplish for less.”

One hopes. But as problems continue to percolate through the industry, some titles are still waking up to smell the profits.

Over at the “recession-proof” House & Home, Miller suggests that Canada’s shelter titles won’t be hit as hard as those in the United States because this country hasn’t suffered the same mortgage crisis-an inevitable damper on home-geared publications. While he admits Canadian House & Home‘s LNA numbers are down slightly, he doesn’t seem to be worried.

Despite the uncertain economy, House & Home went ahead with plans to launch a French-language version called Maison & Demeure at the end of January. According to Miller, the company set modest circulation targets for the first year, but exceeded them within the first month. And the business is growing rather than shrinking. “Every time I turn around here, there’s another new person,” he says. “We have opened up a new office in Quebec and we have about 11 people working there.” Miller also points to the federal Home Renovation Tax Credit announcement in the January budget as a blessing for shelter books like his. In short, he talks like only someone with money in a recession can. “This is an opportunity,” he says. “When things turn around, we will be well positioned for big, big growth.” The prospect of future expansion hasn’t been enough to keep House & Home from playing nice with an advertiser, though. Its March 2009 issue featured a Swiffer ad that rivaled the Tassimo spot for blurring the advertising/editorial divide. Also the work of Starcom, the offending creative infringed on an editorial takeout on laundry rooms. The opening spread features a right-hand page of an otherwise spotless room in which muddy footprints track across the floor. Turn the page and there’s the same photo, but with a clean floor and a Swiffer device propped against the counter. Prominent copy declares: “Swiffer gives cleaning a whole new meaning.”

Christine Saunders, senior vice president, group media director for Proctor & Gamble ad agency SMG, toldMarketing magazine in February: “What we love about it is that it’s a surprise for the clever reader. You literally do a double-take.”

Kirby Miller loved it, too. In the same month he unapologetically told Masthead, “In large part it is our key advertisers to thank in this market for our continuing ability to affordably deliver great decorating content to our Canadian subscribers and newsstand purchasers. House & Home along with the rest of the magazine industry is working hard to remain economi­cally viable in this market.”

But when the market revives, both House & Home and Style at Home will have to put on the hot beverage system, haul out the mopping solution and engage in a serious scrub down.

It seemed like a good idea at the time. On a mid-September day in 2007, Toronto Star reporter Kevin McGran walked into the Toronto Maple Leafs’ dressing room to file his daily story, but, along with a notebook, he carried a hand-held video camera. The paper, as part of its push into the digital marketplace, had recently added video to its online edition, and McGran took the sports section’s first assignment. When he arrived at Ricoh Coliseum, the first print reporter with a video camera, other journalists flashed knowing smiles. The implication was obvious: soon they would need cameras too. For happy-go-lucky McGran, the medium didn’t matter. Video simply offered another way to tell a story. Go to the arena, talk to a few players, shoot some tape. TSN, Sportsnet and the CBC did it all the time-why couldn’t he?

McGran bounced from player to player, point­ing his camera and asking, tongue planted in cheek, “What’s it take, beyond anything else, to be an NHLer?” Most spewed back a laundry list of sports clichés: hard work, dedication, talent. But Wade Belak, then a bruising Toronto right-winger, answered with a playful smirk, “Lots of kissing ass.” It was the kind of quirky, personality-driven material McGran wanted. A short, crudely edited clip went live on thestar.com in the following days, the first of its kind for Toronto sports sections. McGran thought the piece was funny, an unconventional take that went beyond standard game summaries. Leafs management, however, had a different opinion. Less than three weeks later-without consultation or warning-Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment banned the use of all hand-held video cameras in the dressing room, both at home and on the road. Although McGran assumed Belak’s lan­guage set off the organization, MLSE senior vice president John Lashway said the ban addressed privacy issues: the organization didn’t want nude clips of its players ending up on the internet.

Journalists at The Canadian Press and major Toronto dailies reacted immediately, outraged by what they per­ceived as a red herring. TV crews did interviews in the dressing room every day without exposing naked Maple Leafs on the net. Veteran columnist David Shoalts, breaking the news on The Globe and Mail‘s hockey blog, accused MLSE of attempting to limit the newspapers’ online presence. Chris Zelkovich, the Star’s sports media reporter, followed with an angry column describing the ongoing turf war between pro sports teams and the press. In it, Lashway admitted the ban was more about protect­ing MLSE’s commercial interests than protecting players’ privacy. “We should have a natural advantage in terms of developing our website,” he told Zelkovich. “It’s a competitive marketplace and we have to make our web content more attractive to people.”

But what initially seemed to be a pissing match between local journalists and the Leafs over a minor policy quickly morphed into a pivotal struggle in a much larger battle. Newspapers, watching as their revenues decline and their audiences dwindle, are looking to reinvent themselves on the internet, in what is, per­haps, a last-ditch effort to remain viable. At the same time, billion-dollar enterprises like MLSE are expanding their own media operations, racing to grab a share of the untapped and potentially lucrative online market. But in the last five years, The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse have faced heavy-handed restrictions levied by powerful sports bodies in France, Germany and Australia, resulting in a bitter tug of war over the control of information. In the fight for position on this new playing field, journalists fear cash-rich sports franchises might shut down access entirely, putting at peril the very practice of objective sports journalism.

In the wake of the ban on video cameras, CP editor-in-chief Scott White issued a call to arms. White, at 50, is a veteran news editor and a bona fide sports nut. His office is a makeshift shrine of sports memorabilia, with Blue Jays bobble heads perched over his desk, random ball caps scattered throughout the room and a bulletin board tacked full of mementoes-a framed playing card of Hall of Fame slugger Ted Williams, a black-and-white Sparky Anderson photo pulled from the CP archives and a Toronto Sun clip on his daughter Mad­die, the first girl to pitch for the York Mills high school baseball team. White claims his reaction to MLSE’s ban was not fueled by his love of sports but his commitment to good journalism. “It was a very strict editorial thing for me,” he says two years later. “Every time there’s a new technology, a tighter restriction is imposed. But I think it’s fundamentally wrong for them to decide what way we tell our story.”

White closely follows access-related issues in other countries, and he feared the MLSE ban might be the first step toward more serious restrictions in Canada. A month before the Leafs’ move, at the World Cup of Rugby in France, the Associated Press, Agence France-Presse and Reuters, along with nearly 40 other media organizations, organized a two-day boycott over online photo limitations. That followed a similar uproar in 2006, when the Fédéra­tion Internationale de Football Association instituted photo embargoes on World Cup soccer matches. But the most troubling example involved Cricket Australia, which incensed international media when it attempted to control print, online and mobile content through its accreditation terms, prompting Agence France-Presse chairman Pierre Louette to charge that the organization is “making it impossible for news agencies to achieve the impartial and independent coverage that is our mis­sion.” In comparison, North American sports media enjoy relative freedom-but White saw a slippery slope ahead. Says CP sports editor Neil Davidson, “Scott really led the way in recognizing this was a danger to media outlets. Whereas perhaps some people saw it as just a little step down the road, Scott realized it was going to limit what we could do.”

White believed that calling out MLSE in print simply wasn’t enough: to protect its traditional rights, the media needed to take real action. As the editor-in-chief of a news-gathering agency that doesn’t have its own print or online commercial operation, he occupied a unique position-the neutral party that could bring a group of erstwhile competitors together. He started working the phones, calling on Toronto newspaper editorial execu­tives to create that united front. Fred Kuntz, then the Toronto Star‘s editor-in-chief, received one of those calls. “Scott reached out to everybody and it was a lot of work for him. It’s not anywhere in his job description, but I think he saw it as an opportunity to show the value of Canadian Press, that it can be the mortar between the bricks of Canadian media.”

By mid-October, after a series of e-mails and confer­ence calls, White had assembled an impromptu coali­tion of eight local editors: Kuntz and sports editor Mike Simpson from the Star, Globe executive editor Neil A. Campbell, Globe online sports editor Steve McAllister, Toronto Sun editor-in-chief Lou Clancy, Sun sports editor Dave Fuller, and Davidson, CP’s sports editor. They met in CP’s newsroom to discuss tactics. One editor argued for an outright boycott on Leafs coverage. But White, more diplomat than rabble-rouser, advocated dialogue over direct confrontation, opting to send a friendly but firmly worded dispatch to MLSE president Richard Peddie and executive vice president Tom Anselmi. Everyone in the room agreed on the principle: in a democratic society, the free flow of information is critical. Says Kuntz: “Journal­ists and newspapers need to be able to report on whatever they want, whether it’s culture, politics, war or sports. In general, the whole social discourse needs to be free and open. It’s our intellectual content, news as we tell it, and if people set limits on what you can post on your website, it seems oppressive. It’s like erasing journalism, erasing history.” But the Leafs are a private enterprise, and, unlike Parliament or the courts, the media don’t have a legal right to access-the coalition understood that only an appeal to goodwill and shared economic interests might sway MLSE to lift its ban. Dated October 30, 2007, the group’s letter stressed that “restrictions would harm all of our interests-including the Leafs…. Our goal is to provide the best possible reporting on the Leafs, for the sake of our readers both in print and online. Your goal is likely to increase excitement and interest in the Leafs. If you are able to see how our separate goals are in sync, then you will understand the importance of leaving the widest possible latitude for all media to do the best job possible in their reporting.”

Then they waited for the Leafs’ brass to respond.

Maple Leaf Sports & Entertainment’s broad­cast headquarters are housed in a small, two-storey building tucked under the Gardiner Expressway at the dreary corner of Lake Shore Boulevard and Parliament Street, nine blocks from the Air Canada Centre. Despite the uninspiring location, there is a sense of excitement inside, indicative of high hopes for the organization’s digital enterprises. Here, MLSE’s senior vice president, broadcast, Chris Hebb, is in charge, overseeing the company’s main media operations-MapleLeafs.com, Raptors.com, Leafs TV, Raptors NBA TV. Tall, charming and sporting a pair of funky specs, Hebb joined the Leafs in 2006, after 11 years with the Vancouver Canucks in a similar role. And just a few months into the job, he was sent over the boards by Leafs executives to craft a response to the coalition’s missive, without, they hoped, provoking a major skirmish. Hebb maintains the Leafs were not trying to “muzzle the media.” Rather, he says, “We were saying, ‘Hold on a second. We don’t know where this stuff is going or how it’s being used, so we’re uncomfortable with it just flying out the door.’ It wasn’t whether or not we had a problem with the newspaper having video on its online site. It was the capture and control of it. With digital, it’s harder to keep track.”

The real impetus for the ban rested on that one key principle: control. Though preserving the players’ pri­vacy was a concern, the driving issue was that the Leafs didn’t know what to make of newspapers moving into the digital realm. “When we instituted the video restric­tion, we knew it would have to change, that it was only temporary,” John Lashway, then MLSE’s head of com­munications conceded. “We didn’t know how to maximize the economics of the web yet and that’s why we moved to create limitations on what newspapers could run on their sites. A team’s assets are its players, its coaches and its access to them. We didn’t know exactly what to do with those things yet, but we also didn’t necessarily want to give that access up.” Lashway says MLSE brass discussed the issue extensively before imposing the ban-the media’s response simply accelerated the need for a quick resolution. However, addressing the problem demanded a certain amount of nuance: the Leafs needed to protect their property but they didn’t want to alienate the press in the process.

Playing in Canada’s largest media market has made the Leafs one of the most recognized and richest sports franchises in North America and management is loathe to upset what it sees as a symbiotic relationship. The press provides effective, free publicity for the team; the Leafs offer content that newspaper audiences desire. “It’s a good thing for the Toronto Maple Leafs to be covered by the media,” emphasizes Hebb. “We don’t try to corner the market, we don’t say this is our exclusive property. It’s not about us trying to shut down outlets in order to get eyeballs. That would ultimately hurt our product.” The Leafs insist that the ban on video, prompted by McGran’s foray into the dressing room, allowed a brief respite to assess the new playing field unfolding before them. But the coalition’s response forced them to address the issue head-on. With that in mind, Lashway invited White and company to a lunchtime tête-à-tête at the Air Canada Centre set for November 22, 2007.

When newspapers began to cover sports in earnest in the 1920s and ’30s, the sports pages were playfully referred to as the “toy department,” a moniker still occasionally bandied about newsrooms today. Though these sections often nurtured talented wordsmiths (The New Yorker ran an article in 1925 declaring “the quality of writing in the sporting pages is, in the large, much superior-wittier, more emotional, more dramatic and more accurate-to the quality of writing that flows through the news columns”), reporters served more as boosters than watchdogs, rarely writing anything critical or investigative. George Solomon, a sports editor atThe Washington Post for 28 years and now visiting professor at the Philip Merrill College of Journalism at the Univer­sity of Maryland, says the relationship between reporters and athletes used to be much chummier than it is today. Writers and athletes earned similar incomes, travelled together and talked openly over post-game cocktails. “If you ask hockey players from that generation,” he says, “many of their friends were journalists.”

But sports coverage changed significantly in the 1960s. Instead of reporting strictly on a team’s performance and personalities, newspapers started pursuing stories about the organizations themselves. According to Joe Gisondi, an associate professor at Eastern Illinois University and a contributor to the Journal of Sports Mediablog, increased competition sparked the metamorphosis. Where print journalists previously enjoyed a monopoly on local cover­age, radio and later television coverage forced them to be more aggressive. “But back in the day it wasn’t the way it is today,” says Gisondi. “Over the years, the coverage has grown dramatically and it’s also become much more critical.” That, in turn, prompted teams to become more media savvy, ultimately trying to control or even restrict coverage by holding the press at arm’s length through press conferences and public relations personnel.

But the emergence of the web presents more than a technological blip on the continuum. For the first time, newspapers and pro teams are on the same platform, competing to tell the same stories and attract the same audience. But the two camps, struggling to stake claims in a marketplace rich with potential, are wildly mis­matched. In one corner: the cash-cow MLSE fighting for more dollars, more control. In the other: ever-shrinking Toronto sports sections, fighting for their very survival.

A recent Deloitte Technology, Media and Telecommu­nications study predicts that in 2009, one in 10 papers will either have to reduce print frequency, move to digital only or, worse yet, shut down entirely. To stay alive, newspapers are becoming content companies, replicating their print editions online with additional web-exclusive content-breaking news, blogs and multimedia. Whether that proves to be a viable business model, however, is deeply uncertain. “When it comes to the internet we’re grasping at straws, we don’t really know what we’re sup­posed to be doing,” admits the Star’s Chris Zelkovich. “I think we have to look at the new landscape and ask ourselves what our role is here. We want to access the YouTube generation, so we come up with this idea of putting video on our sites-but that’s not really what we do. We’re supposed to be the source of information; we’re supposed to be the source of analysis.”

Increasingly, the major problem for the sports pages is staying relevant. Fans don’t have to wait for a local newspaper to land on the doorstep for the latest scores. They can get breaking news from online sports jugger­nauts ESPN and SI.com, flip to TSN, Sportsnet or The Score for up-to-the-minute highlights, or even have the team deliver results to their e-mail inbox moments after they happen. Globe online sports editor Steve McAllister says the onslaught of information is great for sports fans; the onus is now on newspapers to develop value-added coverage to court an audience. But that’s hard to do when teams shut them out, and many journalists worry that franchises will start to question why they should accommodate pesky reporters at all if they can connect to their fan base without them. Star columnist Damien Cox, a veteran Leafs reporter and ardent critic of MLSE management, believes that question underlies the cur­rent battle. “You’re in an ever-changing media situation where the old rules don’t apply and I think pro sports teams are deciding if they need us anymore. They talk about controlling their information, their message, their product, but it goes beyond that. If they were honest, I think they would tell you they’re thinking about a day when they don’t have to have a press box.”

A brief tour of MSLE’s media headquarters quickly reveals that if the Leafs want to get information out, they don’t need newspapers to do it anymore. Their website, MapleLeafs.com, is the centrepiece of their digital information delivery system. Dressed in Leafs colours-metallic grey, dark blue and midnight black-it provides scores, statistics and game highlights and features a multimedia centre, Leafs TV on demand, video interviews and Steve Dangle’s irreverent video blog, delivered from the “studio” of his bedroom.

MLSE’s TV operations are also moving online-four TV producers recently joined five full-time web produc­ers. Leafs TV, with a standard “screen” image occupying the top right corner, looks more like a web page. Stand­ings and statistics flash on a sidebar to the left and the day’s weather forecast is tucked in the bottom right. The model is CP24, only all-Leafs info, all the time. Hebb plans to move in-house content onto every platform he can, connecting with fans on whatever digital device they choose: TV, online and even mobile. “We’re mak­ing some major leaps in the direction of the computer generation being able to access our content,” he says. “Instead of ignoring the next generation, we’re feeding them what they want.” MLSE is not leaving anything behind, either. To ramp up newspaper-style coverage, MLSE hired former Toronto Sun columnist Mike Ulmer to report for the website. He may not write scathing columns about Leafs management, but his copy is just as critical of the squad’s on-ice performance. One example: in early February, he wrote, “The Maple Leafs are not a very talented team. Don’t take my word, ask the coach, ask the general manager.”

MLSE execs argue these developments shouldn’t threaten the mainstream media and that their buffed-up site is not hauling in the big bucks-yet-but that’s certainly the intention. Says Lashway: “Do you want your audience getting information about your team from a newspaper or your website?” He quickly answers his own question. “You want them to come to your site because you want to increase revenue. Teams exist to make money-they’re a business.”

When White led his ad hoc coalition of eight Toronto editors into the Air Canada Centre in late November 2007, neither the journalists nor the Leafs knew exactly what to expect. Though each side entered somewhat suspicious of the other, by the end of the 90-minute discussion a tentative consensus had emerged. The press required unfettered access; the Leafs wanted their web­site to grow. But both parties agreed on one critical point: coverage, in any form, is good for business. “You want to maximize your own business, but you don’t want to hurt anybody else’s,” says Lashway, who left MLSE to start his own communications firm last November. “We do business every day and everybody wants to have a good relationship. These were really bright people that were in the room with us. Frankly, we came out of it and changed our view significantly.”

Despite the talk and good will, the meeting produced little more than an uneasy peace. The Leafs didn’t rescind the ban, but they agreed not to enforce it. MLSE claims it drafted a new policy, but the Toronto press corps hasn’t seen it. White calls the situation a “temporary truce,” and last fall Kuntz said the group was in a period of détente where “nobody really wants to start the war.” Yet an even bigger battle looms. After the Leafs instituted their restrictions on video, the National Hockey League developed league-wide restrictions on online content. Designed as “guidelines” and written into each team’s accreditation agreement, the policy stipulates “reason­able amounts of audio or video content … may be posted to the internet.” But that means only 120 seconds of content per day and a 72-hour archive limit. As well, any online audio or video must provide links to nhl.com and the featured team’s website. Undeterred, the Star continued to post video in direct violation of the league’s restrictions, but neither MLSE nor the NHL has complained. “We’re just doing whatever we want on our websites,” said Kuntz, who spoke on the issue before his tenure with the Starended. “We’re not wiping our archives. We’re not doing anything on the basis of their rules. We’re going to games, to the locker room. We’re following our own practices for what works for our websites. The Leafs aren’t saying anything about it.” But White can’t escape one nagging question: If the teams have rules they aren’t going to enforce, then why do they need them?

Toronto sports journalists believe there’s a clear and critical difference between the information news­papers deliver and what in-house organs disseminate, and, if readers understand that, they will appreciate the role of traditional media. According to Sun sports columnist Lance Hornby, that role is to hold multibillion-dollar franchises like the Leafs accountable. “We ask the questions the fans can’t,” he says. “The Leafs, in many ways, are a public trust. They’re not one man’s or one corporation’s to own. Generations of fans have invested a lot in the team. I think it’s our duty to keep all that in perspective.” But journalists like Star sports editor Mike Simpson and Star reporter Damien Cox are concerned that the way sports teams are mimicking news media is warping the public’s perception of what the press is supposed to provide. Says Simpson: “We worry that the lines get blurry, especially with younger readers who have only ever got their news from the internet.” And Cox is even more blunt: “They don’t do what I do,” he says. “They’re there to fellate, not to be journalists.”

The media can scream “We’re relevant!” and wave the banner of journalism all they want, but sooner or later it begins to sound like a hockey player saying he’s going to give 110 percent-the sports pages can’t just proclaim their value, they need to prove it. In the Janu­ary/February 2009 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review, Gary Andrew Poole argued that if sports sec­tions are going to remain relevant, they need to revisit their past. Poole, who freelances for Time, GQ, Wired, The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, believes that sports journalists spend too much time fixated on the almighty scoop instead of doing what they actu­ally do best-tell stories. “I think we’ve come to this point where we’re trying to get information out there so rapidly, but without much interpretation,” he says. “We need to start writing again instead of just regurgitating stats. That kind of stuff defeats the whole purpose of good journalism. It takes away newspapers’ competitive advantage.” He says good sports reporting provides context, nuance, narrative and insight-the stuff of legendary sports writers like Red Smith, W.C. Heinz and Grandtland Rice (who, according to that 1925 New Yorker piece, “can give a methodical and rather stupid baseball game all the glamour and vivid flame of a gladiatorial combat”). By focusing on constantly breaking news at the expense of deep analysis and investigation, journalists today are missing their raison d’être. Evidence? A sports article hasn’t won a Pulitzer Prize in nearly 20 years. “In marketing parlance, sports sections have degraded their brand,” Poole writes in his essay. “The sports pages used to hold the honour as one of the best-written and best-reported sections in the newspaper. It’s important for sports, for newspapers and for our society that they recapture that mantle.”

Meanwhile, in Toronto, local media and the Leafs con­tinue to coexist online, neither side willing to upset the delicate détente in these uncertain times. But the man who led the coalition against the Leafs, Scott White, harbours no illusions that things will go back to the good ol’ days. At the 61st World Newspaper Congress in June 2008, the World Association of Newspapers issued a resolution expressing its concern over sports organiza­tions attempting to control editorial coverage. Closer to home, the National Football League adopted stringent video and audio restrictions, limiting any content that might undermine its digital operations. White knows the battle for online supremacy is still simmering. Though he believes the two sides can move forward together, each staking out its turf in the digital market, he also knows where he stands if they don’t. “The thing I keep saying is, ‘Give a little, give a lot.’ You have to fight. If you give in once, you establish a new line that people keep pushing and pushing. It’s a dangerous game, but serious news organizations are always going to stand up to it. You don’t always win, but you always have to fight the fight.”

It’s a cool day in October 1976, and Connie Smith is working toward making history. In a time when television news stories are recorded on film and edits are spliced together, Smith starts her first day at CHCH TV, where she will become the first female anchor of weekday news in Hamilton. On this day she’s a general assignment reporter wearing a grey-green trench coat tied at the waist and big earrings that peek through her blond hair. She walks into a little house on Jackson Street, where the news team at Canada’s first independent station is about to have its morning meeting. Although she will break through the glass ceiling over her three decades at the station, even happy stories come to an end, and Smith’s is no exception.

For the last half-century, CHCH has offered award-winning local coverage to the Hamilton, Halton and Niagara regions, delivered daily news to over 1.5 million people and gained a reputation for homegrown programming and community involvement. Even most employees were local. When Smith, who was raised in Burlington and now resides in Hamilton with her family, started there, the station broadcast two half-hour news segments per day, one at 6 p.m. and another at 11 p.m. This allowed each reporter to focus a lot of time on his or her stories. And it’s a good thing, too, because in 1976 broadcasting was significantly more time-consuming. With fewer stories to chase, reporters could thoroughly research and develop their pieces, engage viewers and build relationships with their subjects and audience. This connection has been the foundation of CHCH’s local success.

Fast-forward to the present and there’s an average of six hours of news daily, leaving little time for reporters to nurture contacts and get involved in the community. The increased workload is only one of a series of cost-cutting changes—changes that could spell the end for employees, as well as the station’s regional identity. Patrick O’Hara, vice president of eastern stations at Canwest MediaWorks and general manager at CHCH Television, declined multiple requests for an interview. But when job cuts were first announced in 2007, O’Hara told The Hamilton Spectator that viewers wouldn’t notice. His reasoning: reporters and anchors would remain and all losses would be behind the scenes. Then, Canwest Global Communications Corp. announced last November that it would eliminate another 560 jobs from its 9,800-person workforce, one measure among many, to save $61 million annually. Smith was told that her anchor duties would end, and her SaturdayStraight Talk, a public affairs show covering local issues, would be cancelled. “The letter read that my anchor position was being terminated, and I said, ‘Okay, this is it. My time has come.’” Even then, she was thinking of her viewers. “They’re going to see their community station as [being] under attack.”

Even in the early years,the station was proud to be in Hamilton. On June 7, 1954, Jack Burghardt, one of CHCH’s original on-air personalities, said the first words ever broadcast on the station, then a CBC-owned channel: “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is Hamilton. And this is Hamilton’s own TV station on the air.” But in 1961, CHCH seceded from CBC and became a part of Niagara Television Ltd., a broadcast consortium. This move made CHCH the first independent television station in Canada. With no network affiliation, CHCH was able to focus on local programming and avoid the obligation to carry CBC content. The station became known for its own shows, including the fondly remembered Tiny Talent Time,The Red Green Show and extension courses offered by McMaster University.

In 1997, the station was renamed ONTV and its frequency extended to all of Ontario, under the new direction of the Western International Communications  company, which purchased the station after a series of ownership changes. But in 2000, Canwest MediaWorks purchased ONTV, and in the fall of 2007, CHCH turned over management to U.S.-based E! Entertainment. Smith says, “As ownership changed through the ’90s, it tugged away at the station’s identity and will.” For Canwest, it meant glamming up a small community station with the flash-and-bang of international entertainment news.

The five CH stations became E! as part of Canwest’s ownership changes. But the news direction was unchanged: E! affected other programming and, unfortunately for some, job stability. And as a result of the agreement, Canwest planned to centralize control of its network, meaning for the CH stations (including Montreal’s CJNT) across Canada, local control rooms would be eliminated and re-established with fewer people and more technology. Local studios were closed and relocated to larger, neighbouring cities—for example, Victoria to Vancouver. It appears that CHCH will be the last of Canwest’s E! holdings to complete the control room transformation, but no company rep would verify this. Individual calls to all other stations confirm that they have already switched to digital technology. Warren Yanish worked as on-air director for CHCH News starting in 2003, and was responsible for making sure segments moved smoothly from the control room. “For the stations that have already switched over to the digital technology, it’s cookie-cutter news,” he says. News on all stations looks the same, and there’s no room for creativity. Yanish, 34, is one of the many production people in Hamilton who were told they would lose their job if the control room moved to Toronto. He has since been let go, even without the move. And without hard feelings or lingering resentments, he maintains that a problem with proposed “robotic cameras” and an unstaffed local studio is the potential for delay and mistakes. “You have people in Vancouver controlling people in Victoria, for example, and with virtual technology, things can go really badly, really quickly,” says Yanish.

For Smith, now 54, Canwest’s purchase of CHCH was a bittersweet transition time. With Canwest came the opportunity to be part of a strong national network with global corporate ties that back in 2000 had plenty of money to spend. But there was also growing pressure to marry its prime time programming with the news—using the news segments to endorse programs coming up in prime time. “Our news fulfils our mandate for CRTC, but prime time pays our bills,” Smith says.

Still, according to Nick Garbutt, a CHCH microwave-truck operator and local president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers unit, Canwest seemed more fiscally responsible than past owners, and with that came more resources for the newsroom. For example, Canwest launched Morning Live, a weekday morning news segment airing 5:30 to 9 a.m., and it has since become one of the most successful programs at CHCH. In 2000, Canwest allowed the station to return to its roots—Hamilton, Halton and Niagara—becoming the best version of itself once again. Smith was named Halton Woman of the Year in 2004, and earned an Exceptional Public Awareness Award for the 2003 documentary Elizabeth’s Hope, the story of a local woman’s fight with Lou Gehrig’s disease. Until fall 2007, Canwest exerted limited influence over news coverage and reporting. That was true even after E! became involved. The good times were bound to end.

CHEK in Victoria, B.C., was one of the first examples of Canwest applying its ownership powers, when it announced in fall 2008 the transformation from a full-service control room in the Victoria studio to a digital control room in Vancouver. John Pollard, general manager of CHEK, was promoted from senior account executive after the control room switch. According to him, the move to the digital system allowed CHEK to be quicker—it could share stories across the country and didn’t have to wait for feeds. But the shift hasn’t been smooth. Minor technical glitches have cropped up: for example, audio that is slightly off, making anchors appear to be lip-syncing. Pollard says, “It’s tough at first but not impossible.” And, he says, it makes the station cheaper to run.

Finances are a major consideration for Canwest Global, which reported a $33-million loss last November compared to a profit of $41 million for the same period a year earlier. Canwest stated at the time, contrary to earlier announcements, that any plans to invest, including the move to digital, would be put on hold. Instead, 14 full-time CHCH staff were let go, and the station closed its Halton bureau, cancelled four shows and reduced its News at Noon program by half, to 30 minutes.

These changes indicate the slow demise of the station, but for now, viewers are getting diminished quality news and less coverage. The remaining employees have been asked to absorb the workload of their laid-off colleagues, and since there aren’t enough reporters to cover all local news, there’s less time for the surviving reporters and videographers to research and polish their broadcasts. Kurt Muller, professor and coordinator of the journalism program at Mohawk College in Hamilton, believes in order to provide in-depth coverage of the local community, the station needs bodies. “When you cut back on the number of journalists that get that news,” he says, “there’s no doubt the coverage will suffer.”

And it might not end there. In November, Canwest president and CEO Leonard Asper told The Canadian Press that the company intends to do whatever is necessary to improve its financial performance. But with the depressed economy and a considerable debt from its acquisition of Canadian papers from Hollinger International Inc. back in 2001, “whatever it takes” turned into a desperate attempt to slash its operating and capital costs. Canwest was thinking about divesting non-core assets. In February 2009, it put its five E! stations up for sale as it faced a seemingly insurmountable principal debt of $761 million, with a $30.4 million interest payment due in early April. If Canwest cannot sell the CH stations, it may close them down entirely (at press time, CHCH was still operating). Even before this, in late fall, Smith was offered a choice between a de facto demotion—return to a reporter position—or leaving the station. Dan McLean was also in negotiations to save his job. Both personalities are the most recognizable on-air figures in Hamilton and have called CHCH home since the 1970s. Losing these faces could cost the station more than it was hoping to save. Muller says, “When people see TV anchors and personalities they grew up with moving on to other things, it’s like losing a family member.” Garbutt agrees: “I think viewers develop a bond with the on-air people they’ve come to know and trust.” He believes the person delivering the news is just as important to the viewer as the news itself.

Whether it’s news or anchors, change is hard to handle, and disappointment with local media is spreading among its loyal audience. Wendy Mans-Keddie, president of Mountaineer Movers, a small local business, describes the problem at CHCH as one where a local station is being gobbled up by the big, bad conglomerate. “They’ve lost some of that small-town feel,” she says, “and that’s what made them who they are.” Mans-Keddie has lived in Hamilton all her life and has been watching CHCH for 40 years. “I’ve grown up with CHCH and I’ve seen it evolve over the years.” Although she loves the Morning Live segment, she wants to see the community aspect brought back into the news and more of an emphasis on volunteer groups and local farmers.

After the early 2009 decision to put CHCH up for sale, Mans-Keddie joined the Facebook group “Save CHCH News.” Says the group page: “The viewers … need to take a stand and let our voices be heard…. First we lose our long-time anchors Dan McLean and Connie Smith and now we may very well lose our entire station.” The group has over 13,500 members and supports the proposal to make CHCH News community-owned and controlled. This model would operate like a hospital, governed by a local board of directors. It would focus mainly on local content and would air no American programming. This Facebook group is an example of the passionate viewership’s commitment to the station.

Not all viewers are willing to fight for its survival; some viewers have just moved on. For the Hamilton chapter of the Greater Toronto Lions Club, the annual dog walk, a fundraising event in May, has benefitted from community involvement and exposure from the local media since its inception in 1983—local media, of course, being CHCH. But that coverage stopped three years ago. “In the past, anything to do with the Lions, they were there. Now they’re not,” says Mark Gunby, vice-district governor of the Hamilton chapter. This isn’t just sour grapes on Gunby’s part: the Lions Club counts on volunteers, so when the local news station no longer covers its events, fewer people know about the organization and fewer of them sign up as volunteers. “They’re not the local news station they used to be,” he says. Gunby no longer watches CHCH Channel 11. His go-to station for news is Cable 14, a local specialty channel.

But some like the changes. Rick Zalitack has been watching CHCH for 30 years and likes Morning Live and the traffic helicopter introduced in 2007. “My mom likes to watch entertainment after the news, and I love how the helicopter shows the traffic on the local highways.” Zalitack doesn’t see why E!’s involvement with the station would be an issue. According to him, American programming is the “best,” and if Canwest’s agreement with E! allows for access to that, then it was a great deal.

After weeks of quiet deliberations, both McLean and Smith decided to end their affiliation with CHCH. The two anchors are leaving behind a combined 69-year legacy with the station. Smith sees her departure as a financial decision: “Dan and I leaving was a desperate bid to change some numbers on a ledger page,” she says. News at Noon on November 28 last year was Smith’s final broadcast. In her farewell, she thanked her viewers and the station for taking a chance on her. “Thank you for allowing me into your hearts, into your homes, for sharing your stories,” she said.

“Dan and I were there through thick and thin—two Gulf wars, 9/11, major political stories. We covered a lot of history together,” she says over the phone, days after that final sign-off. Viewers have been writing to theSpectator, voicing their sense of loss over Smith and McLean. As they say goodbye to their beloved anchors, viewers may just have to bid adieu to CHCH as well.

I was a summer intern at an Alberta business magazine-you can’t be an intern and not be lowly. I was making a list of rich CEOs, people with the kind of money a student of magazines shouldn’t think about if he wants to stay sanely out of business school. Then the news of The Walrus  reached across the country andfound me. I knew I’d get involved. This wasn’t going to be simple. It was bigger. Even if the money was a hell of a lot smaller.

By late September, I was in Toronto and on the case. Here’s what I knew: money from a philanthropic backer was drying up; an editorial shakeup was on the way; the magazine would get smaller; and the co-founder and current editor, Ken Alexander, the man who had led the charge to attain charitable status for the foundation that publishes The Walrus,was out. His replacement: John Macfarlane. If Canadian publishing were a war, he’d be a decorated general, complete with the scars of a few lost battles. Lingering around the facts was the smell of controversy, sweet and spoiled, that attracts journalists the way starlets attract paparazzi. Gossip. My job was to get past that smell and answer the questions that caused it. Why did Alexander leave? Why Macfarlane? And why does The Walrus deserve so much ink?

When I began making notes, a picture shot into my head: the sign in the window of a shop that exists in every neighbourhood, that store that’s always making eyes at insolvency, like a homegrown café sitting next to a Starbucks. The sign reads: Now Under New Management. And you can’t help wonder if another owner can succeed where others couldn’t. In fact, there’s a place like that outside The Walrus. It’s a restaurant-one of those cheap, familiar places that serves everything, but you’d only ever order breakfast. In the window is the sign: Temporarily Closed. Re-opening Soon. New management is implied. I look at the darkened windows and the mail piling up against the locked, grimy door and, call me a college kid, but I see a metaphor.

The Walrus office feels like the kind of place you discover while exploring a strange school off hours. It has a familiar, bookish smell, clinical fluorescent lights, but it’s too quiet to be really comfortable. Except in her office, which looks as if it got hit by a campaign bus: papers loitering on two desks, a garage sale of books crammed into the bookshelf, magazine covers on poster board leaning against the walls. On a large whiteboard she has a list of celebrities, some circled or with checks beside their names-all people who will play a role in an upcoming fundraiser. She came to The Walrus in 2006 and her name is Shelley Ambrose. She’s the magazine’s co-publisher and executive director of The Walrus Foundation. She’s got a tough job: “I stand on street corners every day and tell people that we are in financial trouble. We’ve been in financial trouble since day one, and we’ll be in financial trouble until we get a $20-million endowment. It’s a gerbil wheel,” she says. “We have no sustainable funding. Every $1,000 I raise this week, I will have to raise it again next year.”

Without donations, the magazine would die the death of its predecessors. “No national general-interest magazine in Canada has ever been able to draw enough advertising to stay alive,” Don Obe told me. He’s a magazine-industry veteran and an old, friendly rival of Macfarlane. “Advertisers want targeted audiences; they don’t want general audiences. That’s been going on for 30 years.”

Ambrose rattles off the financial woes easily, like articles of faith: “We had a 12.5 percent paper increase last year, we had another 12.5 percent paper increase this year, we had to renegotiate rent, it went up 23 percent. The board has asked us for big budget cuts.”

The cuts are part of her responsibility to keep the shortfall between what The Walrus makes through ads and circulation and what it needs to make charitably “at $1 million or less,” she says. She’s trying to run a $3-million operation, down $1 million from what Alexander spent. Most of that shortfall used to be taken care of by the Chawkers Foundation, run by Alexander’s family, which had donated $1 million per year for the past five.

“The biggest challenge has been replacing Chawkers while raising other money,” she explains. “When it’s just you, it’s hard. We’re not children or AIDS.”

When Alexander left, she knew the kind of person she wanted: “I didn’t need a story editor or assignment editor. I needed an editor-in-chief, somebody who understood the financial side. And was a poster boy for unbelievable professionalism.” She wanted Macfarlane.

“Put it this way,” she says. “I had no Plan B.”

But getting him meant convincing him away from his retirement dreams. He had just spent 15 years atToronto Life. It’s tough to stay interested in a thing for 15 years. Ask the cast of Cats. The last thing on Macfarlane’s to-do list was to take the helm of another magazine.

But Macfarlane gave her an opening. When he heard about Alexander’s exit, he called board member Richard O’Hagan and offered to help. Next thing he knew, he got the pitch from Ambrose, which he turned down. She took him out a second time, now flanked by Allen Gregg, chairman of the foundation, and laid all the magazine’s financial woes on the table. “If you won’t take the job,” she said, “will you at least help out for a while?” This time Macfarlane agreed, provided “helping out” wouldn’t last long, and he wouldn’t be expected to do it full time.

Fortunately for Ambrose, he soon changed his tune.

If this were a television show, right now Macfarlane’s stone-cut face would fill the screen and letters would click across it in Courier font, complete with the obsolete sounds of a typewriter.

Macfarlane, John. Age: 67.

At 23, started at The Globe and Mail, as an editorial writer. Later, moved to the Toronto Star as entertainment editor. By 30, he had worked at Maclean’s, and was editor of Toronto Life for the first time. He then honed his business skills at a PR agency. “The money is good and he gets his name on the door-all the wrong reasons to leave journalism,” quotes a 1992 Toronto Star profile. Then came Weekend, a weekly newspaper supplement that gave him his first big success, and his first taste of magazine defeat. When that died, he was hired to be publisher of Saturday Night, which will die in 2001 (years after he left).After getting the boot from there once it was sold, he shuffled over to the Financial Times to become editor and associate publisher. TheGlobe bought that in 1989, and he was out again; after a brief stop at CTV, he returned to edit Toronto Life. While at The Financial Times he also started a publishing company, called Macfarlane Walter & Ross, which died in 2003.

Hobby: Guitar.

If you’re keeping track, that’s four dead ventures to one still alive. Those failures, though, they don’t mean much. Without sounding like a doting stage mom, his failures weren’t entirely his fault. Sure, Saturday Nightlost money like a pirate without a mapmaker, but that’s the nature of the beast. In his memoir, Best Seat in the House, former Saturday Night editor Robert Fulford describes the days when Macfarlane was at the magazine as some of the best it ever had. “We won all the National Magazine Awards it was possible to win, we were quoted more than any other magazine,” he says. That to me sounds familiar. Weekend was ambitious, but its desire to be great isn’t why advertisers started pulling out. It was the ’70s. Blame television.

Back in the 1980s, when Macfarlane arrived at Saturday Night, which Fulford was running, tongues wagged. Some foresaw a rivalry or a takeover, but instead they worked together as a team until somebody named Conrad Black decided it was his turn to lose money on it. He fired Macfarlane, though these days he has nothing but nice things to say about him. Sort of.

“I never really knew John Macfarlane and don’t feel qualified to comment on him, except that I think he was a dedicated and resourceful champion of the Canadian magazine,” he writes me in an e-mail from prison.

Fulford’s praise is less ambivalent: “He’s a first-class professional and has a finely developed sense of quality.” Long-time friend Gary Ross says, “John’s the kind of guy that when he goes on holiday, he’s good for about half a day of sitting on the beach, then he starts wondering, ‘Why the fuck am I not doing something?’

“So,” he goes on, “the idea of his retiring to travel with his beloved, and sit on the occasional board and teach the occasional class-I had trouble picturing that.”

Ross, now editor of VancouverMagazine, is easy to talk to. He’s friendly. Even laughs at my nervous jokes. And he’s a good enough friend to come up with some dirt on Macfarlane, and then not come up with much. He also speaks in pull quotes.

I ask him why Macfarlane, specifically. “He would be perfect for The Walrus in many ways. He’s got a big Rolodex. And The Walrus needs a big Rolodex of people who might consider supporting the magazine.” Which makes me chuckle because, sure it’s a figure of speech, but it also dates Macfarlane. Who still uses a Rolodex?

Ross continues, “And he has decades of experience, and he’s not a complete wanker.” Then, “He loves serious journalism, and serious journalism is going the way of the dodo. The Walrus is a holdout, the last bastion of serious journalism. It’s a match made in heaven.”

“But why,” I press, “will he find the money?”

“He’s well connected.”

“In ways others aren’t?” I ask. “I guess, naively, I don’t understand what connection means here.”

Ross sighs and says, as if it should be obvious, “John’s partner is Roz Ivey, of the London Iveys-the Richard Ivey School of Business. Through her, he’s been exposed to all kinds of people who have tonnes of dough and sit on boards and write seven-figure cheques for the revamping of the Royal Ontario Museum. So he knows who is philanthropically inclined and is able to be supportive and able to get people on the phone. It really helps when you have personal connections and have been on the person’s sailboat when you say, ‘By the way, we’re looking for a couple of hundred thousand dollars.'”

Ambrose sounded the same: “He knows a lot of people. Fundraising is relationship-building. Period. Over. And no one is going to give you an endowment of $20 million if they haven’t first given you $1,000.”

But all that would be nothing, Ross stresses, without  Macfarlane’s journalistic credibility.

I’m more nervous to meet Macfarlane than I am going into a job interview. It feels like, if he doesn’t like me, after graduation I’ll be relegated to penning desperate blogs from my parents’ basement. After the breezy talk with Ross, I have more confidence. Ross told me that Macfarlane has a boyish quality to him, and that he likes to laugh. So speaking to Macfarlane should be easy, too. Only that assumption is a rookie mistake. He picks up the phone. I introduce myself. “Yes,” he says, as if I’m not done. He knew I would be calling, but he doesn’t get down to business. He lets me do it. A suitor asking a father if he can date his only daughter.

“Glad I could get hold of you finally,” I continue. “How was your vacation?” Good question: I figure it shows I talked with Ross, which should give instant credibility, while being casual. Only he doesn’t bite.

“Good,” he says.

“Good,” I say.

Nothing.

“Well, that’s all I needed-to know your vacation went well,” I say. It’s a joke.

Nothing.

“Okay. Well, I was wondering if this would be a good time to talk to you?”

“How about we meet Thursday?”

“Great. Talk to you then.”

“Great.”

If this were a round, he’d have taken it.

Macfarlane’s office looks spartan, as if it’s being rented. He hasn’t bothered to decorate it much, and the only point of interest you can find is a huge, seemingly petrified walrus dick laying on a small table, a gift from the last possessor of the office. Macfarlane points it out, knowing I’ll need colour.

As I sit down, I remember something Ross told me: “In his early days, he used to travel with a bottle of Windex, because things might be dirty. He was the king of the renovated office. Whenever he could, he’d persuade the owners that we should remodel and hire a decorator.” So I ask Macfarlane about the office.

“Saturday Night and Weekend were the only places I redecorated,” he clarifies. “Here, it would look bad.” He tells me that when he was editor of Toronto Life the second time around, he stayed in the same shitty office with the same shitty couch for more than a decade. His words. He says it as if he’s got something to prove.

“I was going to reinvent myself as a corporate director,” he says of his pre-Walrus plans. He’s been on non-profit boards since the ’70s, and likes that it keeps you intellectually involved without getting your hands dirty with the day-to-day operation. He even enrolled in a course at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Afterward, he started meeting with headhunters, refining his pitch. He also set up his home office, agreeing to edit a book about Toronto.

He then moves on to talk about Saturday Night and I get an idea. “Is there a redemption narrative I should be picking up here?” I ask.

He smiles. Laughs a bit. And says, “I did it for me. Seven years at Saturday Night trying to save it and not succeeding, but knowing that Canada needs that kind of magazine. I learned a lot of things before I was atSaturday Night, I learned a lot since, and I’m going to try to employ those things here. But I don’t see this as kind of Saturday Night, Part II.”

I can’t resist the crack: “Macfarlane’s Return.”

He pauses: “Return of the Macfarlane.”

He’s right. His is funnier.

Macfarlane is nothing if not professional. Some read it as being cold and aloof, impersonal, wanting to avoid confrontation while keeping his hands clean. Others see in it a desire to nurture and give second chances. The one flaw Ross was able to pinpoint was that Macfarlane could be too slow to fire people.

Both Macfarlane and Ambrose will tell you they haven’t had to lay off any employees. But if you’re a fan of reading mastheads, you’ll notice the absence of Nora Underwood and Marni Jackson. They both took leave at the same time, to pursue their own writing. Before her leave ended, Jackson was told by Macfarlane there wouldn’t be a job for her anymore. Then she told Underwood. Macfarlane never did. “I’m sure Macfarlane would have told me officially, even though I already knew, if I had given him the chance,” Underwood tells me. “I don’t really need to go through the motions. I don’t need the guy to have a coffee with me since he found out that I’d heard that I don’t have a choice anymore.”

Liz Primeau, former editor of CanadianGardening, tells an eerily similar story from when Macfarlane took overWeekend and brought in British talent to work on the art direction. People use that as an example of his eye for skill and his willingness to go big. But according to Primeau he hired the new talent without telling the old talent his job had been farmed out.

To be fair, Underwood had never met Macfarlane, and she doesn’t seem to have hard feelings. And Macfarlane will tell you that the awkward job shuffle at Weekend came when the magazine was planning to move to a new city, and he was told to keep quiet about it. But somewhere incidents become indicative of character, the way a social drag becomes a smoking habit.

Then, by contrast, Richard Siklos, now editor-at-large at Fortune, tells me that I should be so lucky to get to work with Macfarlane, who not only helped launch Siklos’s career, but did it by allowing him to create a comic strip for the Financial Times. Imagine giving an untested j-school grad the chance to run something new in a business magazine. Doesn’t exactly seem cold. Sarah Fulford, who took over his job at Toronto Life, says the same thing. You can see her gush on YouTube even. Supportive. Nurturing. How he’ll defend you when the hate mail comes in. It’s touching. Seriously.

When Primeau decided she wanted out of Weekend, she says when she told Macfarlane she was quiting, he said. “But I haven’t decided about you yet.”

David Hayes, freelance journalist, was speaking to my class, where I learned that Macfarlane was playing with his band that night. Like a groupie, I go.

The dim lights bounce off the brick walls in the Gladstone Hotel, and the whole room feels warm and intimate. As if we’re all at a loft filming a beer commercial. Only everyone in the room is too old to be in a beer commercial. The room swells with boomers, hunched, sweating and dancing in that way parents do, so recklessly un-self-conscious that if their kids saw them, the kids would want to be dead. Macfarlane is the one making everyone dance. Well, he’sone-eighthof the reason. One-ninth if you count all the wine. It’s a book launch party. The band, 3 Chord Johnny, is the entertainment.

Other than the guitar, Macfarlane doesn’t look much different on stage than he does at The Walrus. The jeans he’s wearing tonight look like the same ones he wore when I met him a week earlier, which means he either dresses as if he’s rocking out at work, or that he rocks out dressed as if he just got away from the office. I remember something that Alexander had said when he was comparing himself to Macfarlane: “He’s a completely different character than I am. His hair is in place. His teeth are better. It struck me that he might even iron his jeans.”

While he’s playing, Macfarlane’s face forms into a hawkish smile, as though he knows a good joke and is getting ready to tell it. In other words, he looks as if he’s having the time of his life. Unlike his contemporaries on stage, his face doesn’t follow the bluesy rock with any musical contortions. But he has a way of putting his top lip behind his lower lip, tightening his already compressed smile. When he hears a solo that’s especially good, his lips will part, as if the joke he told landed.

His territory is in front and he doesn’t meander. He’ll turn around, sure, but he doesn’t stray from his small patch of stage. But that could be because the stage is so goddammed full of middle-aged professionals pretending. It could be Broken Social Scene up there. Or Broken Social Security Scene. After the show, Hayes, who is also in the band, concedes there were some slip-ups, but I didn’t notice. I was too busy wondering if this scene had any meaning other than a man enjoying his hobby.

And I think it does: from the way he stands in front, but doesn’t get too crazy. That’s Macfarlane. I talk to him after the show, and it’s strained. As if he’s uncomfortable with the intimacy I just saw on stage. It’s no surprise that the next time I meet with him, we’re back at his office.

The theme of this visit: his Walrus.

The office looks the same. Nothing seems to have changed. His act toward me hasn’t changed either. Our talk is about as personal as two commuters waiting for the bus in the cold. Interviewing him, I feel as if he studied talking points beforehand, and that, frankly, he doesn’t trust me. In about 15 different ways he says: We’re going to focus the magazine, spend less money, be more timely, commission more…. And you get the point. No surprises. He doesn’t allow any.

“You keep asking about specifics,” he says as if I’m Frost and he’s Nixon. “I’ve been around this track. There are things you don’t want to talk about until they are public.” And then it’s back to generalities. The magazine is going to be beautiful, it’s going to be topical. It’s going going going. Oh, the places it will go….

I get the February issue in the mail, his first. Back in September I came across a posting on The Walrus‘s site written by contributing editor Don Gillmor, praising the departing chief: “The Walrus is Ken Alexander, both in conception and attitude (democratic, wide-ranging, messy).” I wondered if The Walrus would become Macfarlane. In the same way you can see traces of a parent in the squished face of a newborn, this newWalrus does look a bit like its new father. You also have something that looks a hell of a lot like Saturday Night in the ’80s, says Hayes. Which is either exactly as it should be or a sacrilege, depending on whom you ask.

Macfarlane’s a man of his word. He told me that he was going to tighten up the mix. Each issue, he said, would have a profile, an essay, a piece of reporting, a memoir or a photo essay and a piece of short fiction. Stick that in between a revamped front of book and a slightly altered back of book, and you have the newWalrus.

“If they do some Saturday Night redux it will go the way of the dodo,” Alexander had told me after our discussion of why he left-to spend more time with family, to write a novel and because looming cuts to budgets, he seriously believed, would compromise the hard-won charitable-status agreement he and others negotiated in 2003 (a charge both Ambrose and Macfarlane say has no merit). It’s easy to assume Alexander’s criticism springs from wounded pride. But under his sprawling method of editorial selection, the magazine reached its peak circulation of 60,325. So, he reasons, if he was successful, why change?

According to magazine consultant D.B. Scott, The Walrus‘paid circulation has hit a plateau. Its last audited number was a little lower than Alexander’s stat (58,763 on average), but in the same neighbourhood.

“We’re hoping the redesign and sharper focus of the magazine will result in higher newsstand sales, subscriptions and renewals, which will help with increasing revenue from the circulation area,” says Ambrose.

Macfarlane’s magazine, more than anything, seems to be an attempt to show the public that The Walrus has grown up. If that sounds condescending, especially coming from a two-bit student journalist who’s never been paid for an article, let me explain.

What makes Alexander impressive is his idealism. Without it, The Walrus wouldn’t exist at all. As writer Marci McDonald sees it: “I sometimes wonder if he simply became too successful at putting out a magazine that didn’t cater to the usual establishment suspects.” It takes idealism to do that. Some might call it naiveté. Take Alexander’s idea of Walrus readers. They are mythical in their intelligence: “The Walrus reader reads a lot,” he told me. “The vast majority have read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.” The Walrus, he added, needs to talk up to people like that.

Macfarlane sees it a little differently. It’s not that he thinks less of his audience; it’s that he wants to expand his audience. If he can understand who that audience really is, Macfarlane has shown in the past that he can give it what it wants.

One reason he was successful at Toronto Life:he knew his audience, and had the insight and discipline to construct a magazine tailored to it. Marq de Villiers, his predecessor at Toronto Life, mentioned that Macfarlane focused the magazine’s editorial mandate. It was about Toronto, damn it. De Villiers, by contrast, would let a feature sneak in even if it wasn’t Torontocentric.

As for The Walrus, his audience, as Macfarlane sees it, wants changes. Readers want a magazine that is of the moment. People mentioned that Alexander’s Walrus lacked consistency. Macfarlane now has weekly meetings with his staff, at which they build a list of pressing issues facing Canada, so they can stay current. It’s a shift from a writer-driven magazine to an editor-driven one. Which leaves some writers unhappy, but I wonder if the typical reader will notice.

His first issue, with Stephen Harper painted in profile, may not hit the mark exactly, but it’s a clear statement that there is a new direction. Starting with that cover.

“It’s saying Harper should have been on the cover six years ago,” says Hayes. “How can you have an intelligent national magazine about ideas and culture and not profile the sitting prime minister?”

His peers see where Macfarlane is going, even while they concede he isn’t there yet. “In a lot of ways it’s better; in a lot of ways it still sucks,” says Ross.

This isn’t a surprise to Macfarlane. He almost seems disappointed with his premier issue of The Walrus: “I think most people who know me will tell you I’m always more inclined to focus on things that are wrong.” At least one article, for example, wasn’t exactly what he wanted. But the statesman doesn’t elaborate. “If people want to judge me on one issue, they can go ahead. I’ve been around too long to worry about that. I don’t even know if it will be fair to judge me a year from now.”

A few weeks after the issue hit stands, I ask around. Obe hasn’t read the new Walrus. “I’m not as curious as I once was,” he says. When I call them, neither had Fulford or John Fraser, who became Saturday Night editor after Black bought it. They tell me to give them a few days and call back. I do, but they don’t. Anne Collins, former managing editor at Toronto Life under Macfarlane, didn’t have time for it or me. Black hasn’t looked at it, but he has an excuse. Hayes had skimmed through it. Same with Ross.

When the issue came out, Hayes asked what people thought of it on his Toronto freelancers e-mail list. He got an underwhelming response, though some talk about how the issue was sexist because it didn’t have many female voices in it. But little talk about the articles.

Now is not the time for apathy, not for any magazine, but especially not The Walrus. I look at the newsstand sales numbers of The Walrus since September, and they aren’t good: more than a 20 percent drop in sell-through rate on average. That could be the recession speaking, but it still doesn’t bode well.

But I’ve read the issue, which came out just before this edition of the RRJ went into production. It’s not bad. People mostly slag the Harper profile, and I can see why: bland, nothing new. But there’s an interesting bit about the recession, which is timely. There’s a big piece about endangered tortoises that was well written, but would I have read it if not because of this story? I liked that the arts section at the back opened with an essay on video games. That seemed current. I can see Macfarlane’s push to be of the moment, but I can’t help but wonder if maybe that’s just because I was looking hard for it. Plus, The Walrus is easier to navigate, which makes the whole enterprise seem more welcoming.

But it still seems somehow tragic, like curtains rising on a theatre half-full of drowsy spectators looking at their watches. Still, there’s hope. Recently Ambrose was able to hire a part-time fundraiser. And that fundraising gala pulled in a net sum of $175,000. They also had a lunchtime conference to help promote it. And the employees are happy. For The Walrus, that’s something.

When I visit The Walrus for the last time, the restaurant across the street has taken the sign down from the window, along with the hope of reopening. It’s no big loss. The country doesn’t need another pancake place. I’m not sure the same is true about a magazine. Writers want a place to write, and Canadians want a place to engage with Canadian ideas. If The Walrus fails, history has shown that it won’t be the last of the general-interest magazine. But I’m still struck by the shuttered restaurant. Maybe if they knew their customers better the place would’ve stayed open. Maybe if they served better food. Or had somebody helping them pay the bills. Maybe.

It was mid-October 1939 when Gladys Arnold sailed aboard the luxury liner the Washington, on her way back to France. There was a strange atmosphere on the ship. The truth hung low over the almost 300 passengers’ heads; they were sailing into the unknown. Watching land fade into open sea, Arnold wondered whether she would ever see Canada again. Lights onboard the ship blazed into the darkness. Although there was an underlying feeling of dread among the passengers, they filled their time watching movies, eating grand dinners and spending evenings in the lounge, where they had long chats about Canada, books and music-everything except the war. Decades later, in her memoir One Woman’s War: A Canadian Reporter with the Free French, Arnold would recall, “[M]y crossing of the Atlantic was full of foreboding. The unreality of that trip still troubles me.”

Arnold, Paris correspondent for The Canadian Press since 1936, was on the Washington because she “wanted to see firsthand the conflict between fascism and democracy.” Gillis Purcell, her CP editor, tried to warn her off-“We can’t be responsible for you if you go back”-but later Arnold would explain that she couldn’t imagine not going. Purcell raised her salary from $15 to $20 per week and wished her bonne chance.

Born in 1905 in Macoun, a town in southeastern Saskatchewan, Arnold felt strong ties to the Canadian prairies. Her father, Cyrenus, was a stationmaster for CP Railways and died when she was nine years old. Arnold had a close relationship with her mother, Florida May, and her younger brother, Maxwell Samuel Arnold. She became interested in journalism while in high school, a notion she got after reading an article about the Governor General Viscount Willingdon and his wife crossing the country that was writ­ten by a female reporter: “It was my first idea that women could do reporting like this and Iimmediately thought this is what Iwanted to be-a reporter.” First, though, after graduating from Weyburn high school in Saskatchewan, she did the pragmatic thing and trained as a teacher. In 1930, after a few years in the classroom, she took a pay cut-not an insignificant decision in the midst of the Depression-to join the Regina Leader-Post as an editorial assistant to D.B. MacRae, the editor in chief of the paper. Once installed, Arnold wheedled her way into writing. Besides regular reporting, she began contributing regular column. The subject matter of “It’s a Secret But…,” which appeared under the pseudonym “Robin,” ranged from hunting (“Many a man who never notices that his wife has a new gown … will spot the flicker of an eyelid of a Hungarian partridge”) to the lessons in organization teachers could take from the on-to-Ottawa trekkers (“[O]n subjects of vital interests to teachers some unity of purpose might be established”).

Arnold left for her first trip to Europe in 1935. She took her savings, $500, and boarded a grain freighter in Churchill, Manitoba. Her original plan was to stay a year and her reason for going was what she called “politi­cal curiosity.” As she later recalled, “Living through the drought and unemployment of the Depression in Saskatchewan, those of us in our twenties passionately debated the pros and cons of socialism, communism, fascism and democracy, searching for answers to why more than a million Canadians could not find a job. In Saskatchewan it was difficult to examine these isms first­hand. But in Europe surely we would find some answers.” Barry Robbins, a cousin, suggests there may have been another motivation too: “She got to the point where it was either stay in Saskatchewan and live on a farm and have six children or travel and see the world.”

What she found in France was a country that enchanted her. “Ifeel as though this is my city, my very own,” she would say of Paris. The spell was so powerful that five years later she would be the sole Canadian journalist in the city as the Germans approached.

After nearly five months in England, Arnold crossed to France and headed to Paris, where she quickly acquired French. Money was a little harder to pick up, but while on a short visit to London in February 1936 Arnold met Clifford Sifton Jr. of the Sifton papers. He informed her that The Canadian Press didn’t have a Paris cor­respondent. Arnold saw this as the perfect opportunity and began sending articles every week to CP on spec, but got no response. Three months later, when her funds were about to dip below $100, she wrote to Gil Purcell, the editor at CP, stating that she could no longer write for the outfit unless she was paid. She received the news back that she would now be the official Paris correspon­dent for CP and would be paid $15 per week. Arnold supplemented her income by freelancing for one cent per word for various publications, including the Sifton papers, as well as the Regina Leader-Post, even, on a few occasions, The Christian Science Monitor. Her topics ranged from how the mode for London swells was car­rying gloves, not wearing them, to the hold Mussolini exerted on Italians, and the so-called reforms in Hitler’s Germany (“[T]he ghettos … are to be re-established so that the German people may be protected from having a Jew for a neighbour….”).

A letter about a visit to Versailles from this time reveals her infatuation with the country, as well as intimations of looming conflict: “To pass through those rooms with the beautiful tapestried walls, carved doors and ceilings, magnificent paintings, the ornate furnishings of the Louis 15 and 16th periods and out into the quiet sculptured gardens with graceful fountains and statues … makes one change one’s ideas of whether we are living in the best age or not. There was a graciousness about the 17th and 18th centuries (for some people at least), a quiet peace, time to enjoy music and art and poetry, the beauties of the outdoors and friendship. I am afraid we are inclined to think we are living in the civilized age with our television, radio, aeroplanes, army tanks, bomb-proof cellars and trenches; armies in gas masks and oil scandals. Iwonder?”

Arnold had originally only planned on staying in Europe for a year. Soon, though, she realized she couldn’t learn enough about the isms in such a short time and decided to extend her visit. She did colour reporting about the royal visit of King George VIand Queen Elizabeth to Paris in 1938, and, in a more serious vein, measured the mood of Parisians after Germany’s annexa­tion of Austria (“Conversation in café or restaurant has dropped to a murmur, but to listen to it is to realize that the Frenchman is fully aware of the situation which is menacing his peace”). At her pension, Gabrielle Roy (“[S]till trying to make up her mind whether to be a writer or an actress”) was a fellow resident; there she also encountered Thomas Mann, in flight from Germany. But in 1939, with the war threatening, she sailed home in August for a brief visit to see her family and her birthplace. “I had been homesick for the sight of the big night sky and the golden haze of windborne chaff, and for the smell of wheat baking in the sun.”

She was still under those big night skies on September 1 when Hitler invaded Poland. Two days later, Britain and France declared war on Germany, and Canada fol­lowed suit on September 10. By then Arnold had already booked her passage back to France.

Seven days after departing from New York, the Wash­ington docked in Southampton on its way to Bordeaux. There Arnold found most people were equipped with a small, square box: a gas mask. Blacked out windows and poorly concealed guns were impossible to ignore. In a CP article Arnold described the scene: “Little by little the shadows eat into the streets. The sun sinks, the twilight grows, and no lights come on. Now the whole city is swallowed in obscurity. Double-decked trams crawl along packed with human beings. Almost com­plete blackout now. A dimmed red globe illuminates the interior of the tram…. All windows are painted over; it takes courage to force one’s way into the gloom. The motorman examines your fare with his flashlight. Inside you suffocate among strange odours, pressing bodies, the touch of damp cloth or a hand.”

The ship departed from Southampton the following afternoon, and a short trip later arrived in Bordeaux. While her ultimate destination was her beloved Paris, Arnold first stopped in Périgueux, roughly 100 kilometres northeast of Bordeaux, for a few days to write about the recent arrival of more than 200,000 evacuees from Strasbourg, Alsace, who had had 48 hours to prepare for their relocation. Strasbourg was an urban centre and the Périgueux region was largely a farming region: “How, Iwondered, could these small cities and the countryside cope with such a sudden influx of so many people?” Her conclusion: “I realized that war has many faces we never see.”

A few days later, she stepped off the train in Paris “and felt for the first time a change in atmosphere. The quiet was audible. There was none of the noise and confusion I associated with French stations, no quick-tapping heels and nervous, high-pitched voices. Now travellers silently picked up their valises and moved off.”

Arnold’s concern was finding a place to move off to. She fetched up at the Foyer International, first opened as a residence for female American students in 1920, but by this point a refuge for women from places as diverse as Greece, Romania and Egypt. Unlike other options, it had heat, although the elevator was moth­balled, meaning Arnold had to climb seven stories to her room. She didn’t seem to mind. Her room had a big sunken tub, the meals were good and her tapping away at her typewriter wasn’t an issue. “This certainly is a preposterous war,” she mused as she surveyed the room. “For a struggling young journalist trying to exist on the dubious bounty of the Canadian Press and precarious freelancing at a cent a word, the war was certainly treating me well. So far, except for a few false air alerts, no war was visible from Paris.”

From this cozy base, Arnold spent her time searching for stories. “Time was interminable for all the frustrated jour­nalists haunting the Hôtel Continental”-headquarters of the information and censorship offices-“and the Ministry of War, pulling strings wherever we could to get permission to visit the Front, the Maginot Line or the naval bases,” she would later write. “‘Stick to human interest stories’ I had been ordered. ‘The boys in the London Bureau will look after political and military stuff.'”

Not surprisingly, she was undeterred. “Canadian Press, perhaps unwittingly, gave me the real story to write,” she later noted. The real story from her perspective was the people who “gave me the faith in the successful outcome of the war.” She reported on what the troops were eating and how the army managed to feed 200,000 troops at one supply station every day. She accompanied writer and pianist Eve Curie, daughter of Marie, whose acclaimed biography had been published a few years earlier, on expeditions to see French women at work, driving buses, running farms, staffing factories, and doing all the other jobs the mobilized men had previously carried out. And she had tea with Mme. Marguerite Lebrun, the wife of the President of France, and chatted about food shopping.

In an effort to get good briefing information instead of what she characterized as material that “might have been suitable for Queen’s Quarterly,” she met with the head of the Press and Propaganda Commissariat, Jean Giraudoux. Giraudoux, an accomplished playwright miscast in his new role, listened as she passionately explained that Canadians were not the same as Ameri­cans and outlined the news they needed: “People want to know about the food situation. What are the medical services, the hospitals and nursing services? How are you going to get enough blood for transfusions once the real war starts? What do the French think is behind this ‘phony’ war.” The press czar rather crankily replied “Mademoiselle, to tell the truth I know nothing about press and information matters, or what I am doing here. I’m a writer, not a journalist.”

On June 10, 1940, she received news the Germans were going to invade Paris in the next couple of days. She was advised to evacuate immediately or risk being sent to a concentration camp. To get her articles to CP she needed to reach Tours, and find the censorship and information personnel who had already fled the city. What was normally a three-hour drive took Arnold and two friends several days. At one point en route she “sud­denly realized Iwas leaving Paris. Iwas leaving not out of my own free will; Iwas being pushed out. It made me furious, but Iwas also broken hearted.”

Once in Tours, Arnold and her friends learned the government had already relocated to Bordeaux, swollen from 300,000 to two million by refugees. She also had another problem: she had lost her identification 10 days earlier. Anxious to remain in France, Arnold sought accreditation first at the American Consulate, before moving on to the British Embassy: “As a journalist did Inot have an obligation to report the fate of these innocent victims whom Ihad come to admire so much?” Instead, she was given a pass allowing her on a ship carrying refugees to England.

It was while in London attending a reception for the BBC that Arnold first encountered General Charles de Gaulle, leader of the Free French. Intrigued by French journalist’s Genevieve Tabouis’ obvious interest in him, she suggested to her boss, Sam Robertson, the London CP bureau chief, that she should do an interview with de Gaulle. In private, she found the general compel­ling: “Iwas surprised by his great height, his grave and thoughtful mien and the warmth of his keen eyes. As he welcomed me, his voice was soft and his manner touched with old-world courtesy.” Soon captivated, she blurted out, “Is there a place for me in your volunteer army?” While at the time de Gaulle pointed out that at the moment he didn’t have one tank, Arnold’s impulsive offer would shape the rest of her life and lead her away from journalism and to a career in the service of France.

By late August 1940, Arnold was once again at sea, this time travelling back to Canada with a shipload of child refugees from Britain and, of course, writing about the trip. On arrival, she would fetch up in Ottawa, still in the employ of CP. Within a year, after unsuccessfully lobbying CP to be reposted to London, the allure of covering “women’s events and … affairs interesting to women” was less than her avocation of spreading the word “about the French tragedy, about the Free French and the wonderful way Britain was responding to the Nazi challenge.” In October 1941 she left CP to help set up the Free French Information Service, and 30 years later she received the Légion d’honneur, France’s high­est honour, for more than two decades of distinguished service to the country. When VE Day came she mused, “I had gone to Europe ten years earlier to find out firsthand about communism and fascism. I had discovered that both meant totalitarian dictatorship, the mortal enemy of a free and democratic society. The importance of VE Day was that fascism had been defeated. But had it really been defeated? How does one defeat an idea?”

With the war over, Arnold became the head of the Information Service with the French Embassy in Canada, where she served until her retirement in 1971. Despite having left full-time journalism, she was a long-time member of the Women’s Press Club, travelled to 60 countries and continued to be an eyewitness to history. On her retirement she moved back to Saskatchewan’s big night skies.

Montreal, Sept. 22, 1941 (CP): “They (the child refugees in Canada from London) ate hearty meals in a Montreal station restaurant last night, the rattle of trains rather than the roar of aerial battles overhead accompanying their chatter.”

Did Gladys Arnold write that? We may never know, since most of her stories for CP didn’t carry bylines. We know that after the war she laboured over several drafts of an unremarkable novel called Chimera that was never published. She produced poetry, too, although it was also undistinguished (“They looked, unseeing / Felt, unfeeling / Loved, unknowing / Behind the glass in whose reflection they dwelt”). Rather poignantly, in the 1960s she even had dealings with the Famous Writers School, which ultimately became most famous for its dubious business practices. In honesty, her journalism was workaday, even if her life was not. While still in Paris, she had cheerfully admitted she was “not part of the small charmed circle of the Big League but …was happy to be in the league at all.”

And that was what made her exceptional: a small-town prairie girl with the moxie to talk her way into a reporting job when female reporters were still uncommon, then head out to a country whose language she didn’t know, create a job for herself through sheer persistence and return to her adopted home as war loomed. She may not have been a Kit Coleman, but she was a groundbreaker just the same.

As Patricia Prestwich, history and women’s studies professor emerita at the University of Alberta, who has studied Arnold, says, “In many ways she was a very talented woman, but a very ordinary woman. She didn’t make a huge impact on Canadian journalism. We are interested in how she exemplifies the opportunity for women in journalism at that time.” At a time when the world was in turmoil, Arnold was determined to experi­ence life. When she died in 2002, at 96, her eulogist, Barbara Campbell, concluded this way:

“Gladys had a signature way of signing her letters. A shortened form of her name.

“She simply called herself … ‘Glad.'”

The second-floor workout studio of the Du Parc YMCA in Montreal has four large windows with a view across an alley to a Hasidic synagogue. Built in 1912, the Y is functional, not fancy. It’s a place where strings of toddlers shuffle in and out of play areas throughout the day and teenagers shoot pool on Friday nights. On November 6, 2006, Bahia Kennedy was on her way to an aerobics class when she stopped to chat with La Presse arts journalist Sylvie St-Jacques in the locker room. “Did you hear about the frosted windows story?” she asked. “And the petition?”

St-Jacques, a swimmer, hadn’t heard a thing about the synagogue paying for new windows so worshiping youth wouldn’t be exposed to women sweating it out across the way. The synagogue had approached the Y about the tattered blinds that shielded the windows more than once. Eventually, the Y asked for new windows-frosted windows-instead. But the now-dim studio and the idea that they should feel ashamed in their gym clothes made the women angry enough to start a petition calling for the removal of the new windows.

St-Jacques immediately saw a story, but her boyfriend didn’t want her to pursue it. “You’re crazy,” he said. “It’ll be war.”

“No,” she insisted. “It symbolizes something.”

She may have been right, but he definitely was-and the media dropped the first bomb.

St-Jacques’s story ran the next day on page one. The  prominent headline read “Cachez ce short qu’on ne saurait voir” (Hide your shorts because we don’t want to see them). The piece generated more than 600 letters and e-mails. The story about four windows in a smallish YMCA then ran on local newscasts and dominated talk radio. Soon it seeped onto the airwaves and into the pages of papers across the country: CTV, CBC Radio, The Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail, the Winnipeg Free Press, The Guardian in Charlottetown. Ultimately, out-of-province editorialists addressed the furor in terms that tended to be less than flattering to Quebecers. “This was a ‘dispute’ blown so wildly out of proportion,” argued the Globe, “it became an election issue.”

More than that, it became a heated and sometimes ugly debate over how-and how much-to accommodate people from other cultures. The windows, and similar incidents, tapped into something that had been nagging at some Quebecers. But today, the words “reasonable accommodation” no longer stir such strong emotions, and journalists and others are wondering, were the media just doing their job or are they guilty of irresponsibly hyping the issue?

It was an interesting story,” says Karim Benessaieh, the general news chief at La Presse. When St-Jacques pitched the Y windows piece to him, he said, “Yes, definitely do it.” But the reporter now says, “I had no idea it would explode like that.”

The explosion might have been contained if not for a spate of similar stories that followed. On November 15, 2006, La Presse wrote that the Montreal police had suggested female officers call a male colleague when dealing with Hasidic men. Then on January 15, 2007, Le Journal de Montréal published the results of a Léger Marketing poll, co-commissioned by the paper. The front-page headline read: “59% of Québécois say they’re racist.”

A little over a week later, La Presse carried a story that seemed to back up Léger’s results. Hérouxville, a community of 1,300 northof Trois-Rivères, had drawn up a “code de vie.” Henceforth, stoning, burning alive and throwing acid on women would be illegal, as would be wearing a hijab or taking a kirpan to school. Then, at the end of February, Le Journal de Montréal reported that an 11-year-old girl had been barred from a soccer tournament for playing in her hijab.

The next month, the same paper was virtually hyperventilating over the news of a Mont-Saint-Gregoirecabane à sucre owner who had asked patrons to move out of a room so a group of Muslim customers could pray briefly and served pea soup devoid of the traditional ham to accommodate Muslim patrons. Le Journal‘s head on one story was an incendiary “Il faut respecter nos traditions”(It’s necessary to respect our traditions), a quote from the head of the sugar-shack association.

Premier Jean Charest couldn’t have been unaware of the negative press such antics were generating elsewhere. A Toronto Star editorial had drawn parallels between Hérouxville’s council and the Ku Klux Klan, while The Gazette in Montreal had pointed out that the “code of life” story had been reported in unflattering terms “from New Zealand to Bahrain.” With a provincial election set for March 26 and with Mario Dumont, leader of the right-of-centre Action Démocratique de Québec, dogging Charest to stop bending over backwards to accommodate minorities, the Quebec premier had to ménager le chèvre et le chou (run with the hare and hold with the hounds). So he did the Canadian thing: he created a commission.

The mandate of the infelicitously named Consultation Commission on Accommodation Practices Related to Cultural Differences, which Charest announced February 8, was to explore how accommodation was or was not being practised in Quebec, measuring this against other societies’ approaches, and making recommendations “to ensure that accommodation practices conform to the values of Quebec society as a pluralistic, democratic, egalitarian society.” To lead this worthy-sounding venture, Charest tapped respected historian and sociologist Gérard Bouchard (yes, brother of, and also a nationalist) and philosopher and public intellectual Charles Taylor. By the time the sugar shack story broke, a week before the election, Bouchard and Taylor were engaged in their first tasks: “discussion groups with experts”; “meetings with the managers of government departments and public agencies”; “focus groups with individuals.”

Voting day was a chastening focus group for the Liberals, who dropped from 76 seats to 48. The big winner was Dumont’s ADQ, which went from four to 41 elected members. In an article the next day, The Gazette‘s Jeff Heinrich attributed at least part of that impressive showing to the ADQ’s no-accommodation stance: “Dumont’s momentum soared after he came down hard on the ways Quebec institutions, like schools and hospitals, have been trying to cater to the demands of conservative Muslims and Hasidic Jews. By proposing a Quebec constitution spelling out common values here, he played to the rural vote, where he had the most to gain.”

The Gazette had greeted the news of the commission with an editorial, praising Charest for “doing exactly the right thing,” and declaring: “Yesterday, Charest sounded convincingly like the premier of all Quebecers, insisting this whole question has to be ‘far beyond partisanship’ and that we need ‘thoughtful and respectful dialogue’ on it.” La Presse also agreed with the commission’s creation, though it pointedly noted Dumont’s central role in its establishment: “If he really wanted to look for a solution to this delicate problem, M. Dumont would recognize that M. Charest finally did what he had to do.”

The Bouchard-Taylor road show-$3.7 million, 901 memoirs, four corners of Quebec, three months of travel, for one report, 37 recommendations and loads of coverage-provided a forum for people to come right out and talk about reasonable accommodation, religion, life experience, diversity, immigration and integration. And open mikes attract bigots. Everywhere.

It started in Gatineau on September 10, 2007, but before anyone else spoke, an “ashen-faced” Bouchard offered his sanglot de remorse. In an August 17 interview with LeDevoir, he had suggested that there are difficulties in justifying the reasonable accommodation process to “people who aren’t intellectuals, but get their news from TVA or TQS, or best case scenario, Téléjournal.”

All three Montreal papers covered the public forums the way small-town dailies report five-alarm fires. Each sent a reporter who provided a wrap-up of every open-mike hearing and then some. They duly reported on comments from those with a hobbyhorse (the government, not the Catholic church, should establish the date for Easter), the frightened (“It’s visceral, the fear I have of the burqa and things like that”) and the aggrieved (“The founding people have become third-class citizens-there are the Indians, there are the immigrants, and finally there’s us-we’ve been relegated to the last rank”).

But there were also context pieces. On September 24, La Presse dedicated a full page to a conversation columnist Michèle Ouimet had with Afifa Naz-one of maybe 30 women in Quebec, the paper estimated, who wears a niqab. The issue of this face-hiding piece of fabric had been yet another media flare-up prior to the Bouchard-Taylor hearings. In March 2007, the general elections director announced that fully veiled women could vote without having to show their faces-contrary to electoral procedures at the time. The interview showed that Naz “is not submissive, or beaten, or forced to stay at home with a throng of children.” In fact, the 25-year-old has no children, holds a degree in electrical engineering and works at a pharmaceutical company. Ouimet described how Naz rolled her eyes at the question of voting in a niqab. “The elections director tried to accommodate us. Which is good, but we didn’t ask. I lift my veil; it takes two seconds. It has never bothered me. On the contrary, it’s normal.”

On the same day, in the same front section of La Presse, reporter Mario Girard wrote about abbot Dominique Boulet, who has been giving mass in Latin for two decades. He asks parishioners to follow a dress code that encourages women to wear a black or white lace headscarf.

These stories provided a closer look at the diversity in the province while showing the similarities between the groups. This is how the reporting throughout the commission differed from the stories that came before it-the ones that hinted at a malaise in the community. Journalists were finally reporting on how people actually lived instead of highlighting how different cultures couldn’t live together.

La Presse is on a hill going south on Boulevard St-Laurent. The entrance feels like a back door and, in one breath, you’re standing in front of a glass box talking through a hole to security guards. But in the newsroom, it’s high ceilings, ’80s furniture, TVs wherever there isn’t a window, a sea of desks and waves of heat. In early 2006, the paper received over 970 letters after a Supreme Court of Canada ruling in favour of Gurbaj Singh Multani. The young Sikh boy’s kirpan had fallen out of his shirt in the schoolyard, causing some parents to worry that he would use the small ceremonial knife as a weapon. The response to the story was a clear indication that the public cared about the subject. “When we see our readers are interested in a topic,” says chief editorialist André Pratte, “we cover it extensively.”

In 2002, reporter Laura-Julie Perreault wanted to cover immigration in Montreal. Her boss at the time, Marcel Desjardins, looked at her and said: “Do you think they read us?” Perreault thought so and started covering those communities regularly. For example,in 2004, she wrote a two-page feature about public pools in Montreal that looked at what arrangements had been made for various religious groups and included an explanation of reasonable accommodation. “Nobody,” she says, “went up in arms.” And yet, four years later, an article about four frosted windows set off a crisis in Quebec society. St-Jacques still thinks the story was silly. “It was a stupid mistake on the part of the [Y’s] director and I don’t think he thought much about it or had a religious agenda.” She believes that if it hadn’t been that story, it would have been another one. Perreault thinks so, too: “I was seeing that there was a problem with intolerance in Quebectoward religious diversity, and we were totally negating it.” But the response to the YMCA story suggested a latent malaise just looking for an excuse to become a public conversation.

On November 16, 2006, Le Journal de Montréalreported that a local community service centre and free clinic wouldn’t let men take prenatal classes to accommodate Muslim, Hindu and Sikh women. La Presseresponded the next day with a story quoting Dumont’s uncompromising demands that egalitarian principles must be reaffirmed with the elimination of the prenatal course. But when La Presse columnist Rima Elkouri looked into it, she discovered that rather than a prenatal class it was a meeting for immigrant women. “A lot of the times with reasonable accommodation stories,” she says, “the facts get distorted.”

At the end of January, La Presse columnist Vincent Marissal forwarded Benessaieh an e-mail from Hérouxville city councilor Andre Drouin that said, according to Benessaieh, “Look, I’m in this small municipality called Hérouxville and we’repreparing a code de vie and it basically says: We, in Hérouxville, have a Christmas tree, yada yada yada. We, in Hérouxville, do not whip women or veil their faces….”

The world was suddenly looking at little Hérouxville.

The Gazette is sandwiched between an HMV and a Fido store on Rue Ste-Catherine in downtown Montreal. From the outside, it looks like Superman’s the Daily Planet, sans the big globe. Once you’re through the revolving doors, ornate brass work, high ceilings and low light give you an old newspaper feeling, despite the escalators. Past security, though, the newsroom is inelegantly 21st century: low ceilings, an ocean of cubicles, the deafening hum of computer fans and very beige.

Back in 2001, Heinrich wanted to show how global issues eventually become local, and vice versa, so he pitched a “Global Village” column idea to his editors, which became the diversity beat in 2003. “It’s not that it hadn’t been done, just not in a systematic way,” he says. “Let’s call it diversity, and let’s not just cover parades and costumes and all that folkloric stuff but really, what are the challenges of immigrants? What does the data say?” The 2001 census, released in 2003, provided a lot of material, while 9/11 sparked curiosity about minority cultures and beliefs.

Despite being the only daily paper with an official diversity beat, The Gazette never broke a major reasonable accommodation story. Heinrich found it difficult to confirm the “mini-scoops” that surfaced. “I think I resisted, at first, covering each one because I knew these things had explanations of their own and were topical, but they couldn’t necessarily be seen as a tendency in society,” he says. More interested in the phenomenon than the individual stories, he let events play out for a few days in case a contradictory version emerged. “What was different about the accommodation debate was the quantity and ferocity of the news coming out and the reactions to it.”

Editor-in-chief Andrew Phillips believes his paper “stood up for minorities a lot more than other papers and media outlets,” and that French-language papers tend to be more concerned with the rights of the majority. “The Gazette was a very important voice speaking up on behalf of minorities and trying to calm the whole debate.”

Nevertheless, Paul Waters, the paper’s editorial writer and letters editor, says most of the letters it received didn’t show much tolerance. “The arguments came from people who wrote literate sentences with subjects, verbs and objects, but their logic was non-existent.”

When Le Journal de Montréal released the racism poll, Heinrich couldn’t ignore it. But he didn’t have to buy it either. He pointed out in an article the next day that the Journal never defined racism and made broad statements about communities-it claimed, for example, that “Arabs” are “very open to the demands of the Québécois,” but didn’t specify what those demands were.

Meanwhile, La Presse published an op-ed piece by Léger’s president that showed how easily the poll results could be played with and concluded that 82 percent of Quebecersare only a little or not all racist. “TheJournal de Montréal poll was abominable,” says Benessaieh. “We amalgamated people who say they’re ‘a little racist’ with racists for a spectacular number.” After that, he started asking: “Should we be giving this a place in the public discourse?”

Heinrich and Le Journal de Montréal‘sValerie Dufour were the only journalists who attended every day of the three-month commission. They thought they would have easy access to the professors, but Bouchard and Taylor refused to grant interviews or hold debriefing sessions. Heinrich says access would have changed the way he approached stories. He also wanted to know how the commissioners decided when to draw the line and cut the mike.

Most of the time they just let people talk. “Lots of discourse that I consider highly xenophobicwas legitimized by the commission,” says Perreault, “and if you can say it out loud and someone hears you and thinks, ‘Well, I think the same, so this is mainstream.'”

Taylor now claims that intellectuals do have a responsibility to the media, but he and Bouchard didn’t want to frame the inquiry as us versus them, or intellectuals versus the general population. “I want people to focus on the facts,” he says. “We both figured this is not the time to get into that kind of debate.” He believes the pre-commission coverage mirrored society’s fears and exaggerations of “the other” and that people were angry that they weren’t included in the diversity debate playing out in the media. As a result, the forums “released a sense of frustration.”

When people made comments such as “Don’t they know they’re in this country and they should abide by our rules?” Bouchard often used the opportunity to educate  them. So did the newspapers. On November 26, 2007, La Presse ran a two-page spread that cited some myths brought up by speakers-and the facts. At the hearings that day, Taylor said: “Finally, the commission has an impact on La Presse; they’ve started doing their job.”

Perreault was boiling and went to Taylor. “You know what? I’ve been doing this for years!” she told him. “And the number of phone messages I left with you before the commission, when I was doing a dossier on RA [reasonable accommodation] and multiculturalism and all that, you never even once returned my phone calls.”

On December 19, 2007, Bouchard and Taylor delivered a breakdown of the comments they had heard and claimed the province was tolerant.

The journalists thought that was sugar-coating the reality. Perreault asked commission advisors if they felt the same way. They didn’t. Then she asked for examples of comments that belonged in the tolerant category, and a lot of them opened with “I’m not racist, but….” She pointed that out in an article that quoted Pierre Bosset, a commission consultant, saying that the report should have discussed anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Another committee member, Jacques Beauchemin, said Bouchard and Taylor should intervene when they heard intolerant comments. After the piece appeared, the commission’s press representative, Sylvain Leclerc, called Eric Trottier, managing editor of La Presse, accused Perreault of bias and asked him to remove her from the story.

Trottier refused, of course, but the request showed how much some people-even those who should have known better-wanted to shoot the messengers.

“It never ceased to astonish me,” says Paul Waters. “You can walk out on St. Catherine Street on any given day in July and there are great rivers of human flesh moving up and down with staples through their navels and tattoos all over them and nobody murmurs. But let one poor 11-year-old show up on a soccer field with a head scarf and the world goes berserk.”

Quebec went berserk over reasonable accommodation for two reasons, according to Marissal, who is now the political and national affairs columnist for La Presse. First, Mario Dumont needed to play the nationalist card to catch up in the polls. Second, the media. “I’m ashamed to say that, but that’s true.” A La Presseheadline that read, “No veiled women would be able to vote in Charlevoix” was the low point, says Marissal. “I mean, how many Muslims and how many veiled women do we have in Charlevoix?”

Though some journalists have a few regrets, they don’t think they have anything to be ashamed about. Heinrich admits the press initially went in “half-cocked.” Journalists blew incidents out of proportion because they ran with them before knowing all the facts. The sugar shack story was an example of that: the commission discovered that though the music in the dance area stopped for less than 10 minutes so Muslims could pray, the owner never asked anyone to leave.

In addition, Heinrich argues that it wasn’t an easy issue to cover. “It wasn’t studies, it wasn’t numbers and the rest, it was real people,” he says. “And how can you do justice to a person by giving them a couple of lines in the newspaper?” At least he could take comfort in seeing his coverage attacked by all sides. “Then you know you’ve done your job because if everybody dislikes it equally, it must mean you’re bang-on,” he says. “You weren’t complacent or overly negative.”

Perreault suggests that to properly cover and understand Quebec society, all media organizations should have immigration beats. Critics can blame the media, she says, but parents aggressively protested after the Supreme Court ruling on the kirpan case. “There were people yelling things, there was angry demonstrations.There was a real story and real tension.”

Her paper covered reasonable accommodation stories because people wanted to read them. “I write about other things,” she says, “and you know what? I don’t get that kind of reaction.”

While Dufour thinks her paper might have contributed to the controversy, especially when it printed the poll results, she refuses to believe the media created the story. “I think that we helped point something out,” she says. “If there’s no story, the story just dies.”

The final Bouchard-Taylor report, released in May 2008, contained no big surprises for Dufour, Perreault or Heinrich. It recommended that Quebecers get closer to the communities around them, become more open to the world, know several languages, be more aware of discrimination and so on. Essentially, the only government response since its release was introducing a mandatory declaration for immigrants, committing them to respect Quebec’s common values: French as the official language, gender equality and separation of church and state. Otherwise, the report has been shelved.

Even days before the commission was announced, Marissal was on his way out of the office when Trottier stopped him to ask if a story involving Hassidic men wanting male driving examiners was important enough to run on the front page. “The fact that we had to ask ourselves this type of question,” says Marissal, “is probably because we realized, somehow, that we went too far.”

Still, he suggested putting the story below the fold on page one, but in the end it ran above the fold. Looking over the stories that preceded the commission, he thinks the papers wouldn’t do it much differently. “Unfortunately, we would react the same with another story, with another debate, because we like good stories.”

And they were good stories. In their eagerness to give readers what they wanted, the Montreal papers may have gone too far a couple of times (the poll on racism being the most notable example) and made the problem seem worse that it actually was. But that doesn’t mean journalists created the story-or that they wouldn’t do it again.

“Bangalore,” I say. “India.”

“Um, okay,” he says, quickly. “I’m just about to go into a news meeting. Can you call me back?”

“Yeah,” I say. “How long will that take?”

“About an hour.”

So I call him back in an hour. And then 15 minutes after that. And then seven more times over the next week. And then I call others, including his boss, but I never find out what he knows about how, and why, his newspaper’s copy–some of it, anyway-travels from Toronto to India.

In the end, though, I do find out what’s going on. There, and throughout the industry. The puzzle pieces are scattered far beyond Toronto and India and involve not one but hundreds of papers. I find some pieces in Hamilton, Ontario, and a few more on Wall Street. Others come from Montreal, Vancouver, London, Miami, New Delhi and a place called Mangalore-not Bangalore, as I’d initially thought-in India. These locations, which differ in culture and history, are connected by well-known struggles in the western media industry: declining print readership, low advertising sales and, of course, a troubled economy. All of these threaten the very existence of newspapers and there are no ready, or free, solutions.

This is a story about editorial experimentation, job losses, union fights, management silence, tough choices at the desk and a big but convenient time zone difference. And it’s a story-copy editors will love this-about the meaning of words: words like offshoring, outsourcing, centralization, pagination and dummies. It’s about spelling and local usage, the difference between NFL and MLB, and even a touch of voodoo.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. The search begins in Toronto, last fall, when one of my journalism profs tells me she’s heard rumours that newspapers in the U.S., and maybe even Canada, are outsourcing their copy editing to India.

Well, if they are, there’s a reason.

The Toronto Star was one of the first newspapers to make significant cuts in 2008, announcing in April that it would shed 160 jobs. By the end of the year, the Canadian media had eliminated 1,200 jobs during the final three months alone, most of them at Sun Media and Canwest. Then, in early 2009, The Globe and Mailannounced it was cutting 80 to 90 jobs, around 10 percent of its workforce.

Even during the best of times, large daily newspapers are expensive ventures whose success is easily affected by changes in technology and economic climate. At the mercy of advertising trends, which have seen a shift to niche-specific media and online classifieds, print-based news hardly needed the current downturn. A Deloitte study predicts that in 2009, one in 10 newspapers will have to either reduce its print frequency, move to online only or cease printing entirely. But don’t fret-the report says it isn’t the end of the industry. Instead, newsrooms must emerge with new business practices, including “shared backroom infrastructure.” Nowhere does the document mention outsourcing or centralizing, but by the time I’m finished my research on the changing universe of copy editing, I will know perfectly well what “shared backroom infrastructure” really means.

A major shakeup of the newspaper business happened in the late 19th century, when newspapers were forced to refocus on middle-class interests like entertainment and sports-or close down. During the Great Depression, times were so tough in the industry that the Regina Leader-Post resorted to accepting chickens in exchange for subscriptions. The advent of radio, television and then the internet each yielded major threats for print-based news. So, I wonder, if outsourcing copy editing saves some journalists’ jobs in Canada, if it maybe saves the odd newspaper, is it so bad? Anyway, I start by making calls to the only place I know for certain, at the outset, that has outsourcing going on.

Animal sacrifice, says the voice over the phone from Miami, is done “when you’re trying to appease the gods.” I’m speaking to the first of several North American copy editors who will ask that I not use their names. This individual, along with the rest of the remaining staff on the copy desk at TheMiami Herald, is uneasy about the long-term prospects for copy editing as a profession. Immediately after the Herald announced it was moving some of its copy editing to India last summer, a stuffed rooster appeared on a shelf next to the mailboxes in the newsroom. Voodoo and Santeria are familiar in Haitian and Cuban communities in Miami, and employees recognized the symbolism. A piece of paper taped to the rooster’s body read, “Brought in by a Santeria priest … to help save our jobs.” As fears grew among copy editors, so did the grimly comedic spiritual offering. Employees added a shot glass filled with rum, a few bills of foreign currency and numerous mementoes they’d kept on their desks for years. Though the offering managed to lighten the mood in the newsroom, it couldn’t stop the cuts. In the local news department, taking a buyout was optional. Those at the international edition of the paper, a version of the Herald that is distributed in nine cities in Latin America and the Caribbean, weren’t so lucky. Five were laid off with two to three months’ notice, just enough time for the international edition to work out the kinks with its new copy-editing staff at a company called Mindworks in New Delhi. (“Now the international edition is truly international,” quips one Herald copy editor.) “The mood here is very sombre,” says Douglas Rojas-Sosa, a 34-year-old copy editor and page designer who has managed, so far, to keep his job at the local edition of the paper.

Bill Oates, the editor of the international edition, says the push to outsource came from the Herald‘s parent corporation, the McClatchy Company. Executives had originally targeted the small, regional community inserts in the local paper, known as the Neighbors editions. Instead, they chose to outsource the international edition, which was more conducive to copy editing by people living outside Miami. Also, many of the stories in the international edition have already been copy edited for the city edition. It’s the repurposing of those stories for an international audience-changing the headlines, creating a new layout-that is now done in India. Oates admits, “There are a few wrinkles, but we’re improving.” Aside from technological inconveniences such as electronic file sharing, language differences have occasionally posed problems. Some English words don’t carry the same meaning in India as they do in America, and stories sometimes come back from the Indian company missing the articles “the” and “a.” Still, Oates says, “We’re getting a little better result than we got when we started. We’re almost where we want to be.”

Though the Herald initially dubbed its attempt at outsourcing a “trial,” Oates hints that the likely price of failure is the end of his edition: “It’s an all-or-nothing thing right now.”

For British media giant the Press Association, newspapers’ cost-cutting imperatives are a business opportunity for outsourcing operations. “Why tie up valuable manpower on national and international news pages,” its website demands, “when our unit can do the job for you-often at a lower cost?” For years, dailies have bought external pagination services for sports statistics and financial agate columns, but India offers new advantages, such as a steady supply of English-speaking university graduates, a convenient time zone difference that allows for overnight turnaround and, of course, labour costs that are among the lowest in the world.

Information technology companies, customer service operations, law firms, real estate agencies and Wall Street financial offices have been sending jobs to the subcontinent for up to a decade, so why not newspapers? A backgrounder on the Mindworks website outlines its “pioneering mission: to make a significant and positive difference to the media industry worldwide during a period of dramatic change.” ButHerald copy editor Rojas-Sosa chuckles about one news item that was forwarded to him via newsroom instant messaging. The Mindworks team’s headline announced that the Florida Marlins, a baseball team, was playing the Houston-misspelled Houstan-Texans, a football team. Given the importance of both sports in the south, it’s a good thing a local copy editor caught it before it went to print.

But the shrinking local desk can’t catch everything. As one of the paper’s few remaining copy editors puts it, “We’re just makeup artists.” Instead of fact-checking and making detailed style and structure corrections, the job now consists of “making sure the copy is in English, that it’s not libellous, and crossing our fingers that it doesn’t need to be corrected in the next day’s paper.”

It’s like one of those little flying-under-the-radar operations with a lot of genius in them,” says Kirk LaPointe over the phone from Vancouver. LaPointe is the managing editor of TheVancouver Sun and he’s praising a Canwest move to save money without sacrificing either papers or copy editing. “They do it all out of a shop in Hamilton with a few dozen people and they’re very efficient at it,” he says. This part of the story isn’t about India, and it isn’t, strictly speaking, outsourcing. It’s something called centralizing, and the Hamilton-based Canwest Editorial Services (CES) is the “genius” group that handles copy-editing services for about 160 newspapers around the world. CES has centralized the pagination duties-laying out pages, copy editing, headline writing, story cutting and photo cropping-to varying degrees for all of Canwest’s newspapers, including LaPointe’s Sun. Vancouver’s South Asian Post is produced entirely by CES. In most cases, though, the CES “operators” communicate over the phone and via e-mail with local copy desks to produce pages.

“There’s sort of a polite tension,” says Jordan Zivitz, a copy editor at TheGazette in Montreal, whose union is currently fighting to stem the tide of work sent to Hamilton. “There haven’t been shouting matches in the halls,” he says, “but it’s sort of the elephant in the room.” So far, favourable contract wording has allowedTheGazette to avoid sending out anything but page-design duties-keeping editing, copy cutting and headline writing in-house-but at the time of writing, the contract itself is up for grabs as the paper gears up for a strike.

On the phone from Ottawa, Scott Anderson, senior vice president of content for Canwest Publishing, tells me that centralization frees up local staff “to concentrate on creating local content, which is where our future lies.” The point of CES, he says, isn’t to cut newsrooms but “to do things as efficiently as possible.” So I ask Zivitz, does sending the layout to Hamilton save you time? He pauses, and then replies, “It’s something that we continue to have discussions about.” Officials of the Communications, Energy and Paperworks union and the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild (SONG) are less diplomatic about what they see as cost-cutting attacks on newsrooms, but even a SONG vice president, Maureen Dawson, says that in order to fight such measures SONG would have to come up with a better idea to cut costs. “And are we going to agree to cut people’s wages for those savings?” she asks. “My answer would be no.”

LaPointe says CES’s critics assume that CES is involved in creating editorial content, when in truth, “We have not lost one scintilla of our own decision making.” Anderson adds: “People are always nervous about change.” Communication between local copy editors and CES “operators,” he says, is no different than if they were sitting in the same newsroom, and there’s no effect on the resulting pages. When discussing the Hamilton operation with potential clients, Anderson says, he’ll “put two pages in front of someone and tell them to pick the one that was done in Hamilton and the one that was done in their own newsroom; they can’t tell the difference.”

But if hyperlocal coverage is the way of the future, as Anderson says, wouldn’t cutting local staff be viewed as a step backward? Chris Wienandt, president of the American Copy Editors Society and a copy editor atTheDallas Morning News, which does not outsource copy, says readers’ expectations of a newspaper include knowledge of its community. Someone in India might not know the difference between the Dallas neighbourhood of Oak Lawn and suburb of Oak Cliff, he points out, and while an overseas copy editor could look it up on the internet, he first has to recognize they aren’t the same.

At a time when newspapers are struggling for credibility, Philip Meyer sees copy editors as “the last line of defence in protecting a newspaper from error.” Meyer is a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and a leading researcher on the newspaper business. While copy editors don’t routinely fact check, they’re expected to notice a misspelled word, a location that doesn’t exist or a puzzling statistic before a story goes to print. In his 2004 book The Vanishing Newspaper: Saving Journalism in the Information Age, Meyer analyzed correlated community-penetration circulation data, the rate of errors requiring correction, the number of copy editors employed by newspapers and satisfaction surveys among those editors. Among other things, he found that “the number of copy editors explains 25 percent of the variation in spelling accuracy,” and treating copy editors better relates to circulation success. “Newspapers whose copy editors score a two or better on the five-point respect scale hung on to an additional 1.5 percentage points” of circulation penetration. Newspapers with healthy copy desks, he concluded, were better able to hold on to readers.

That was five years ago, and the threat of newspapers vanishing is darker today. To prevent it, newsrooms must change in dramatic ways that include merging, shifting resources from print to online, investing in quality staff and technologies with the hope that their investments pay off in the long term, or simply folding their tents. “I don’t think there’s a newsroom in the world that isn’t feeling the pressure right now,” says Scott White, editor-in-chief of The Canadian Press. His organization doesn’t outsource its jobs and has no plans to do so, but he admits CP has had to make some sacrifices to deal with the downturn. “I think most of our bureaus right now are running at least one reporter under,” he says. “Ultimately, it just means that everybody works harder. You just learn to prioritize and that’s really all you can do.” To alleviate his stretched staff, White says CP is working on developing a computer software program that can switch the American spellings in Associated Press copy to Canadian spellings. You might call it digital outsourcing.

Canwest dropped its CP membership in 2007 to rely on its own syndicated news service, but the media company might well be considered the poster child for the industry’s troubles. In November 2008, Canwest shares plummeted 35 percent, following news of $33 million in losses. The company is heavily in debt, has put some properties up for sale and is trying to stay afloat. In short, Canwest is in even greater need than some of its competitors of what LaPointe calls genius innovations.

On a grey afternoon in late January, I take the bus to Hamilton armed with a notepad and camera. My attempts to arrange a visit to the CES newsroom and an interview with its founder, Alex Beer, have proved fruitless. “Sarah, I’ve thought about it,” Beer told me finally, “and I think you have enough information for your story.” He declined even a cursory tour of the place, but here I am, half-sure I’m on a fool’s errand that will end in the lobby of some nondescript office tower, with Get Smart-style stainless steel security doors blocking the office entrance. Instead, Fortress CES turns out to be a small, one-storey brick building the colour of a wet log, with long windows along the façade, a giant red CES Canwest Editorial Services sign and directions to the visitors’ parking lot.

I can see clear into the office from my spot on the sidewalk, and from what I can tell, CES is set up like a miniature newsroom, with its few desks (LaPointe’s “few dozen” looks right enough) arranged side by side. When I start clicking shots, newsroom staff peer at me through the windows. I think about knocking at the door, but there’s now a man standing watching me with his arms crossed who looks about as welcoming as Beer sounded. I smile nervously and leave, and spend the bus ride home wondering how CES manages to complete the pagination duties of 160 newspapers in such a tiny office.

“She should talk to Chris Watson” yet another unnamed copy editor tells my editor-Watson being the man who told me to call him back in an hour when I said the word “India,” but then disappeared from my life forever. He’s executive editor of the Financial Post. For weeks prior to that call, I’d heard rumours about FP sending pages to India for copy editing. Of the Post staffers I had reached, some said they thought it was going on but couldn’t say for sure; others believed it wasn’t happening at all and some refused to speak to me. I get some more solid information on deep background, and then, finally, an FP copy editor, who makes me promise not to reveal even his or her sex, confirms that, yes, the Post is outsourcing some copy editing to India.

The arrangement has been kept so quiet that some copy editors in the Toronto newsroom don’t know it’s happening. Only smaller parts of the newspaper, such as the Working and Small Business sections of the Financial Postare being outsourced. Post staff on the larger news sections that are being produced entirely locally may go about their daily duties with no idea it’s going on. The copy editor says there are corners of the office where everyone is aware of the deal in India, but “there’s a general consensus that we’re not supposed to talk about it.” Though no one has explicitly told staff to keep silent, the overall vibe coming from the top is that the paper is just testing out the process, and so no one needs to know about it. That appears to be Watson’s view, at least: a total of 10 calls to him and to Post editor-in-chief Doug Kelly, including messages specifically inviting comment on the India arrangement, all went unanswered.

The “test” involves sending copy from specific newspaper sections electronically to an Indian affiliate of Britain’s Press Association. According to the head of communications at PA, the company has offered this service for 20 years, and today creates over 8,500 pages a week for around 220 newspapers and magazines. PA’s page production service has offices in Howden, East Yorkshire, in the U.K., and in Mangalore and Pune, India. As far as we know, the Post works with the office in Mangalore, a coastal city a few hundred kilometres west of Bangalore, and operates through a large outsourcing company there called MphasiS.

Here’s how it works: Post copy editors working on the sections being outsourced upload the day’s photos and stories to the PA website, along with page “dummies” outlining where advertisements will be placed. Someone in India then downloads the documents, completes the headlines, layout and necessary story cuts, and returns the pages to the site overnight so that Post staff can download the stories the next morning, Toronto time, and begin translating British English phrases and correcting style errors. All communication with India is via e-mail and through the PA site, but as the quality of the edited copy varies among pages, Canadian staff assume there’s more than one person dealing with it at the other end-PA assures me that they’re all journalists, including a few senior PA staffers who have relocated to India.

From London, England, John Spencer, the group managing editor of PA, says it’s only to be expected that outsourced copy, at least in the beginning, require some re-editing by the home newsroom. Mistakes having to do with local terminology, for instance, might presumably be overlooked by the outsourcing firm. Spencer explains that a completed page “goes straight back to a customer’s news desk or copy desk-or whatever you call it in Canada-and it’s checked there as well.”

Sure enough, my chief Post source says the quality of the pages done in India has been improving over time, as the Canadian copy editors train the Indian staff about Post style. Still, as the copy editor grimly explains, “It’s slightly bizarre to be helping someone get better at their job when the better they get, the more obsolete my job is going to get. It’s really hard, in my mind, to want them to improve through the tips I give them, because as soon as the system is ironed out, they don’t need us anymore.”

Spencer assures me the quality of PA services is top-notch. After all, PA has existed for more than 140 years. “We’ve always been an outsourcing business, really,” he says. “News organizations come to us to do work that they can’t necessarily get to do themselves.” Papers, he says, “certainly don’t lose anything in terms of quality” when they use PA services. “And they wouldn’t do it if they did,” he says. “We wouldn’t expect them to.”

Unless there’s no feasible alternative. As tough as it is for copy editors to come to grips with the outsourcing of their calling, it must also be difficult for the Post‘s executives to send their pages overseas. “No editor at the Post wants to do this,” the Post copy editor tells me. Page layout was one of the main elements that set the Post apart from other Canadian dailies when it began 10 years ago. Its arrival on the stands influenced other newspapers, such as TheGlobe and Mail, to move toward bolder, more colourful pages with big visuals. In 2008, the paper won 51 awards at the annual Society of Newspaper Design’s Best of Newspaper Design Creative competition. Only TheNew York Times and the Los Angeles Times won more. “Every editor loves having control of what their page looks like,” my source says. “It’s their baby.”

But sending passages to India isn’t the only tough decision Post execs have had to make. Faced with declining circulation and estimated annual losses of up to $10 million, the paper pulled out of some markets and is now, as always, for sale. In August 2008, a Globe article stated that the asking price was around $30 million.

“Just one more thing,” I say to John Spencer at the end of our interview. “Is there any way I can speak to a journalist who works on a copy desk in India?”

“No,” he replies.

I’m confused. I ask, “Is that for logistical reasons?”

“No,” he repeats. “I’m speaking to you. I’m the group managing editor of the Press Association. We’re not going to have our staff being interviewed by anybody else. That’s not what we do-in India, in England, in New York, in Dublin or anywhere else. It’s our policy.”

So I keep looking. The phone at MphasiS in Mangalore is constantly busy, and someone in marketing at the Mindworks office in New Delhi refers me back to executives in the U.S. I contact Indian journalism schools to find someone who edits outsourced news pages. But it isn’t until I get an e-mail from Anuj Chopra, an Indian journalist, who has freelanced occasionally for the Globe, that I hear from anyone even remotely connected to the process at that end. Chopra tells me that about four years ago he was approached by an outsourcing firm he thinks handled the copy for The Times of London. With newspapers in decline, Chopra says it’s inevitable that some of them will opt to send their copy east. “I wasn’t surprised to hear about it,” he says.

And how much did the company offer him for this work? Twenty thousand rupees a month, he says.

Back here in Canada, we call that $500.

Clive Thompson is burly and about six-two. He’s wearing a full set of chain mail and Soldier’s Wrist Guards of the Eagle and has a large mace-a Giant Mace-strapped to his back like a parade baton. He’s 40, a Canadian expat living in New York, former editor of This Magazine, a journalist and father of two who writes a monthly games column for Wired and has been published in The New York Times Magazine, New York and The Walrus. He’s also a paladin.

I meet Thompson in the dirt courtyard of a stone abbey. A medieval storybook forest of beech and oak surrounds us, veined with babbling brooks and dirt footpaths. Downy rabbits hop through the underbrush. It looks nice, but the area has a bit of a wolf problem.

“I got into this game,” he says, “partly because I was reviewing it-when it first came out, this is almost five years ago-for Slate,” he says. Then, “Oh, hold it.” He stops. “Come up here-I’ve got my mining [radar] on and there’s some ore I’ve got to mine.” He laughs, runs off the path we’ve been following and disappears into the woods.

Up until this brief geological break (copper ore, nothing too thrilling), we’d been talking shop. Shop for Thompson, at least in part, is video games journalism. We’re on our way back to the road when a wolf jumps out from behind a squarish tree and bites me savagely on the stomach. I back away, waving my arms uselessly, but it’s faster than I am.

“I got him, I got him,” says Thompson. He brains the wolf with his Giant Mace. It collapses.

“There we go. I’ll keep you safe from these dudes. You’ll just get-do you even have a weapon?”

We’re playing World of Warcraft. WoW, as it’s known to its more than 11.5 million subscribers, is the most popular title to emerge from the awkwardly named massively multiplayer online role playing game (MMORPG) genre. Players from Saskatoon to Seoul pay a monthly fee to vanquish fiends, seek magical artifacts, mine copper and gold, forge weapons and shriek creative insults at each other in Blizzard Entertainment Inc.’s fantasy world. There is no real “end” to the game. Playing it is somewhat like paying to push Sisyphus’s boulder up a hill. It’s fun!

WoW is the most popular massively multiplayer game, but the field is glutted with other options-many of them Tolkienesque WoW rip-offs, of course, but also some originals. EVE Online is the most interesting, conceptually: a science-fiction world with a player-created economy and 260,000 inhabitants. EVE has an in-house economist, publishes an 80-page quarterly magazine called EON and regularly flies its user-elected government to Iceland to meet with the developers.

For people uninterested in counting “strength” and “agility” stats or comparing copper and mithril helmets (or lasering space pirates), there are non-game virtual worlds like Second Life, a loosely knit collection of player-created islands. Players buy and sell real estate, create art and functional objects, and launch businesses (including virtual outposts of recognizable brands). Linden dollars, the coin of the realm, have an established exchange rate with U.S. dollars (generally 260 to 270 Linden dollars to one greenback), and last year saw the equivalent of U.S. $100 million move through the LindeX, Second Life’s trading index. Reuters thought Second Life important enough to establish a bureau there in 2006, making Second Life officially more interesting than Somalia, either of the Congos or Tibet. Media interest in Second Life crested a year later, and the bureau was folded in 2008.

If online gaming is a collection of countries, then home consoles are duelling worlds. Nintendo, home of cherubic Dadaist plumber Super Mario, posted 2008 profits of U.S. $2.6 billion. In the past year, Nintendo has sold 10.5 million casual-gamer-focused Wii consoles in the United States alone. From its 2005 release to 2007, the Guitar Hero series-the Apple Jacks of rhythmic guitar simulation, creating an experience less like guitar performance and more like weaving through oncoming traffic while playing an ocarina-made over a billion dollars for its publisher, Activision. When it was released in late June last year, Guitar Hero: Aerosmith boosted sales of Aerosmith’s back catalogue by 40 percent. If games can make people, often young people, spend their money on Aerosmith albums, then truly they must be the most powerful force on earth.

According to The New York Times, video games made $32 billion U.S. worldwide in 2008, $6 billion more than Afghanistan’s GDP for that year.

Conventional wisdom says that all this gold comes from where gold usually comes from-under the ground. Specifically, basements, proffered from under couches by the waving arms of mushroom men. Hard-core gamers, as the mushroom men like to be called, are still an important slice of the games market. But the market is changing. In 2008, 53 percent of American adults (including half of all women) played games-and the percentage rises among people with higher incomes and post-secondary educations. The majority of gamers are now urban people with varied interests, spending money, lives. People who look, incidentally,a lot like the kind of people the old-guard media need to attract to survive. Ninety-seven percent of American teens-the future audience of the press-are gamers.

Are the media listening? Not really, argues Blaine Kyllo, a game reviewer for Vancouver’s Georgia Straightand Calgary’s Fast Forward Weekly. “Video games have become-not a cultural ‘phenomenon,’ because it’s been building for years. It’s to the point now where games can’t be ignored,” he says. “Media, and especially traditional media outlets, really need to recognize that gaming is a part of culture and society, and they are doing themselves and their audience a disservice by not covering it.”

When Canadian media outlets cover gaming, they tend to jail it in the tech section or lump it in with crazes for whippersnappers, like Pogs or Cabbage Patch Kids or laser tag. Or they lamprey onto the “reality confuses nerds” evergreen, like this: “Second Life Affair Is Leading to First Real-Life Divorce After U.K. Wife Discovers

Husband Cheating on Her with Virtual Character.” Sometimes they try to work up a moral panic (“40, Married, Gaming Addict”), but their hearts aren’t in it the way they were when Columbine was still wrapped in police tape.

There is smart American games writing. Thompson does regular pieces for Wired‘s website and used to contributeto Slate; Seth Schiesel files insightful pieces for The New York Times; Tom Bissell recently tackled games in the New Yorker‘s fantastic “The Grammar of Fun.” But in-depth analysis is rare in Canada.

Thompson looks at gaming as more than amusement. In his semi-regular Wired column, he’s discussed morality (“Why We Need More Torture in Video Games”), the environment (“Flower Power Blooms in First Climate-Change Game”) and the design process itself (“Sweet Success, Fascinating Failure: 48 Sleepless Hours at Global Game Jam”). “Play is one of the oldest forms of human activity and incredibly unscrutinized,” says Thompson. “When you look at the way that people play, you learn a lot about what they care about, what they think about.” We walk under the keystone of an arch, into a tunnel and under a thick stone wall. “You have to think about what play means: why people play, what encourages them to play, why they get addicted to it, why they get turned off, what they consider ‘fair’ play, what they consider ‘unfair’ play.”

Though papers like The Globe and Mail regularly publish reviews-and the Globe does a better job than most-they don’t go much further. “I think that criticism is happening in places that people don’t expect to see, and it’s still a pretty small group of people who are interested in it,” says Kyllo. “Gaming is pretty much in its infancy. If you assume that the modern era of video gaming, which started sort of late ’80s, after the collapse [in the early ’80s], if you assume that is the de facto beginning of the video game industry as a cultural product, an entertainment product, we’re still really young.” The collapse, caused by pressure from versatile personal computers, several high-profile failures, a glutted market and a price war among manufacturers, was a devastating extinction event. The corpses of Ataris, ColecoVisions, Intellivisions, Tandyvisions, CreatiVisions, Odysseys and Arcadias were left behind to petrify and smaller, warm-blooded consoles from Japan took over. Modern game forms emerged, kingdoms of odd visual grammar and peculiar dream-logic that persist today. Kyllo continues: “How long was cinema around before Pauline Kael was writing about movies in the way that she was? Sixty years? The fact that we’re even talking about criticism within the scope of video games in 16 years is amazing.”

Why aren’t Canadian editors looking at criticism when the industry is worth roughly $10 billion more than our projected federal deficit this year? “Adolescent, prurient drivel,” says Ian Bogost, an Atlanta-based video game researcher and designer for Persuasive Games. “That’s what they see games as.”

Perhaps high-art snobbishness is the problem-and many games are indeed drivel-but the issue is more than just an aversion to nerds. In fact, talking to editors reveals an interest in new media at odds with Bogost’s generalizations.

“If newspapers, or newspaper-slash-websites, want to stay alive and stay relevant in the coming years, we have to cover stuff that new, younger readers are interested in,” says Doug Cudmore, entertainment editor at the Toronto Star. “Increasingly, among that crowd, video games, along with new media and the web, are important.” The problem, he continues, is “people get their video game news from specialized video game sites, magazines. They’re onto leaks and sneak peeks months and months beforehand. Newspapers can’t cover video game releases as though video game fans are getting their first word from us.”

“Games journalism moves at a breakneck pace,” says Scott Colbourne, a freelancer and former editor of theGlobe‘s entertainment section. “It is online based. By the time I get Gears of War finished, then there’s four or five days of production time between when I send in my piece and it gets published, and by that time people have moved on.”

Journalists complaining about the internet? Hard to believe, but Cudmore and Colbourne have a point-at least about mushroom men. The gamer enthusiast press is the last word for the hard-core. Its reviews and previews are obsessively detailed and unbeatably fast. But mushroom men don’t read papers, there’s more to real coverage than 500 words and a percentage score and the enthusiast press has problems of its own. It’s the press that’s lying. The scores of magazines and websites that form the enthusiast press depend on game advertising as their primary source of income. Publishers punish unfavourable coverage by withdrawing ads. Editorial becomes embedded reporting.

“Oh yeah, that’s an age-old thing,” explains Dan “Shoe” Hsu, San Francisco-based former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Electronic Gaming Monthly. “You hear things from game publishers all the time. They’ll kind of let you in, like ‘yeah, you know, we were able to get this kind of coverage out of them because we threatened this or that, or they’re worried about this kind of thing.'”

Though Shoe stresses EGM‘s editorial independence during his tenure as editor, not everyone else can be expected to maintain critical distance.

“When Gears of War 2 was first announced nearly a year ago, Cliffy B [Gears of War lead designer Cliff Bleszinski] made the bold statement that it would be bigger, better and more badass than Gears 1,” says Nate

Thompson and I are tourists in Stormwind City, humanity’s capital in WoW. It is painstakingly rendered in a style that splits the difference between a chunky Playmobil village and a Boris Vallejo painting. I like to call it “Fantasy Bland.” Stones are grey, wood is a light caramel. Cloth flags wave, blue-the sovereign colour of the Alliance, the pact binding humans together with dwarves and gnomes and Night Elves and Draenei, a race of purple aliens. The city is nondescript because the players are the focus here-their interactions and arguments and especially their commerce. Distribution of goods and wealth within WoW’s busy internal economy happens through an eBay-style auction service, and many of the lines of chat that march from the bottom of the screen begin with “WTS”: want to sell.

“WTS Combatant Claymore.”

“WTS Helm of the Burning Soul.”

“WTS Mendicant’s Robe of Mendacity.”

“LOL what a name, Mendicant’s Robe of Mendacity.”

Gamers don’t find mendacity as funny when they think Ahearn, an editor at IGN.com (a major internet review site owned by News Corporation) in a November 2008 video review. Onscreen, we watch a Jeep-sized armoured man gore an alien with a chainsaw/assault rifle. The alien screams. The man uses the chainsaw to lift the alien off of the ground and throws it over his head. Ahearn continues breathlessly. “It was quite a daring claim at the time, given how beloved the first Gears is, but don’t worry about being disappointed, Gears fans-Cliff was right on the money.” He continues in a linked print review:

Now we’re entering the second chapter in the universe Epic Games created. The events of the first ended with Marcus and Dom delivering the Lightmass Bomb into The Hollow after killing General Raam. Sadly, the bomb had about the same effect as sticking a bull in the ass with an ice pick. The Locust only doubled their efforts and have been sinking cities on Sera ever since. Now only one remains: the city of Jacinto, whose foundation is thick enough to keep the Locust at bay. But not for long. The Locust are poised to crush just as they have every other city. Soon humanity’s struggle will be over, all hope extinguished.

But not yet.

This isn’t criticism. Criticism is done with more than one hand.

“It’s not like our industry’s made up of ex-New York Times reporters and journalism grads,” notes Shoe on his blog. “A lot of game journalists (like me) didn’t come from any sort of journalism background. We didn’t necessarily get the proper training or influences up front.”

In early May 2008, for the first previews of Command and Conquer: Red Alert 3, a Cold War-themed strategy game, the developer flew members of the North American, European and Russian games press into a decommissioned military base outside of Moscow.

How did the game look? Evan Shamoon, a San Francisco-based freelancer, crows that he and others were encouraged to fire surplus Soviet weaponry and joyride in tanks before being taken 20 storeys underground into a Cold War-era nuclear shelter,

subjected to a trumpet squad, fed gruel and finally shown the game. In an article for website 1UP.com,Shamoon weighs in: “The game looks pretty awesome. Like ‘sharks with laser beams attached to their heads’ awesome. Like ‘[World of Warcraft developer] Blizzard’s upcoming StarCraft II may actually have some competition’ awesome.”

The choice to pander is easy once the final block falls, Tetris-like, into place. Jeff Gerstmann, a reviewer and editor, was with major gaming website GameSpot for almost 11 years before his November 2007 dismissal. He made the mistake of giving Kane & Lynch: Dead Men a rating of “fair.” The following month, after the gaming press started referring to the firing as “Gerstmanngate,” GameSpot published a weakly worded FAQ denying that any external pressure had influenced Gerstmann’s dismissal. In January 2008, two of Gerstmann’s former co-workers, reviewer Frank Provo and reviews editor Alex Navarro, left the website, citing dissatisfaction with the way Gerstmann was treated.

Maybe it’s not that important that video games receive unbiased coverage from the hard-core press. There’s only so much you can expect from a shopping magazine. But CNET, GameSpot‘s parent company, was worth $1.8 billion to CBS when the company purchased it in 2008. Millions of people visit the website every month. That’s something. And Gerstmann was trying to make a living by delivering information, of a sort, to the public.

Heavy-handed game developers aren’t a factor for newspapers that don’t sell ad space to them in the first place. While there are no advertising rewards for newspapers covering games, there are also no penalties.

So, where do we go from here? Obviously, games aren’t going to “save” print media from the internet. At most they can provide a valuable tent pole, something to point to when questioned about the old guard’s continuing relevancy in a post Web 8.0/Twitbook/cranial bio-interface/whatever world. The future market is more than just players of video games. Most of them wouldn’t even self-identify as “gamers.” They’re the market that Nintendo went after with the Wii console, and they’ve pulled the company from a distant third-place position to the returned-king-of-procrastination-device manufacturers.

These people would pick up a story if they were given enough reason to, and people like Scott Colbourne are already trying the criticism angle within newspapers, with pleasing results.

A throng of mounted warlocks and warriors and rogues gallops past us on dark horses and steam-powered robot legs and mastodons. We briefly discuss Pong, the game that hooked Thompson in the first place, back in the electronic Cretaceous. Then Thompson stands up, bids me goodbye and disappears into the ether. “I should start writing my piece,” I say to myself. But I’m already steering Reportius, my WoW avatar, back to the abbey. Maybe I’ll put in a little time on the wolf problem.

“Just for 10 minutes,” I lie.