(Note: This is a somewhat longer version of the same story that originally appeared in the Summer 2011 issue of the RRJ – Ed)

The local newscast in Victoria, B.C., looks much like any other local news broadcast. A handsome anchorman wearing a smart suit delivers news of the quest to find a young girl’s killer, using a voice that is both concerned and reassuring. A graphic of a police cruiser hovers over his left shoulder. This could be any city, but there is something significantly different about CHEK TV news.

Unlike in your hometown, this smiling anchor is a part owner of the TV station. And so is the camera operator, the assignment editor, chase producer, station manager, and everyone else who works at CHEK. This newscast represents a creative solution to a problem faced by a growing number of news outlets. From 2000 until 2009, CHEK, the second-oldest TV station in BC, belonged to Canwest Global. When Canwest began to flounder in earnest, CHEK employees knew it was just a matter of time until they’d be downsized out of jobs. Rather than let that that happen, station president John Pollard spearheaded a plan for employees and local investors to join forces and pool resources to purchase the station from Canwest and take control of it themselves.

It was a bold move, and a risky one. But it worked. Now all employees own a share of CHEK Media Group and are involved in the running of the station. With that bit of creative thinking, CHEK saved itself from extinction and is pioneering a new model of independent operations in the process.

To say that journalism is in crisis is at this point a cliché, and everyone knows the basics: the internet hit, then the recession hit, and old media panicked. But amid all the downsizing and bleak-future talk, a new breed of journalist has found opportunity in the upheaval. Freed from traditional industry, these are pioneers rather than casualties, and by their practice, they are helping to reinvigorate journalism.

The people and organizations that exemplify this sort of new independence take a broad range of shapes and sizes. Mathew Ingram is a devotee of technology, both spreading the new word and living it through his work as a full-time blogger; The Mark is an intelligent but not elitist news-commentary site, led by a man with new ideas about the business of journalism and media; Nadja Sayej is a young upstart in the art criticism community and a prototype freelancer 2.0; and, of course, there’s CHEK, the newly independent TV station.

The name Mathew Ingram will be a familiar one to anyone who follows media and technology. The former Globe and Mail technology and business columnist has been a prolific Twitter user since the site’s inception (43,000 tweets and counting), engaging daily in enthusiastic conversations with those interested in the interplay between technology and information.

In its early days, few recognized the power of the internet and digital media and many were frightened of the vast, undomesticated wilderness it represented. Undaunted, Ingram chose to try and tame it. Starting at the Globe in 1994, following a stint at the Globe-owned Financial Times, he was part of the team that helped re-launch the Globe website in 2000, and he was the first writer to start blogging regularly in conjunction with his article and column writing. Ingram is an early adopter if there ever was one.

And he’s facilitating broader conversations around the ways in which technology is transforming the way we consume information. In 2006 he co-founded the mesh web conference in Toronto, after he and some colleagues noticed a lack of local events discussing the impact of Web 2.0 developments. “We wanted to get a bunch of smart people in a room and talk about how the web is affecting us,” Ingram says, and mesh quickly grew into something larger than “sitting around drinking beer and eating pizza” as Ingram had originally envisioned it. The now annual event, which had nearly 400 attendees last year, regularly holds panels and workshops on such topics as web business and marketing strategies, to the impact of social media and privacy in the digital age.

Ingram continued to write for the Globe throughout the 2000s. In 2008 he had the chance to put his know-how of social media and cutting edge technology to work, when he became the paper’s first communities editor. The job was to help teach the paper’s writers and editors how to better use sites such as Twitter and Facebook to reach their audiences, and he took it because the paper eliminated its new media section in the print edition. Ingram set to work shifting the Globe into the 21st century, which he describes as a “fascinating but frustrating” experience.

“It felt like we were succeeding in a half-hearted way,” and the Globe wasn’t moving as quickly as he would have liked. “I didn’t feel there was enough emphasis on what I thought we should do,” Ingram says.

Eventually the frustration of trying to teach a print-centric business to embrace the internet proved too much for Ingram, and in January 2010, he left the Globe to work for GigaOM, a major tech industry blog with a monthly audience of over four million readers. The move in fact resulted in a slight raise for Ingram over his salary at the Globe and he is now considered among the leading edge of writers whose work attempts to grapple with why new technology is changing media and society, and how it will continue to do so.

“It’s just like what I was doing before, but more. There’s no end to what you can write; the blog is never ‘full’. I’m always on deadline now. If my eyes are open, I’m on deadline,” Ingram says, conceding that becoming a full-time blogger has been a “kind of trial by fire.” Nonetheless, he can now focus on writing passionately about what he knows best, is allowed to do so with little interference and is making a living as a fully digital man.

Making a living in the digital realm is of course the biggest of the challenges facing the news media today. Ad dollars for print are dwindling, and their online counterparts are not enough to support the business of news making. There are many experiments underway to try to re-conceive journalism’s business model, many involving user-supported media — NPR in the United States is a large-scale example — to smaller initiatives like ProPublica and Spot.Us, in which individual supporters can fund public interest investigative journalism.

Closer to home, news commentary site The Mark is trying to fund online punditry in a new old-fashioned way. The site is trying to become profitable by redefining the ad/edit relationship in an online context.

Beta-launched in May 2009, The Mark was born of co-founder Jeff Anders’ desire to make a place for smart opinions from people with a range of backgrounds. “When it comes to commentary in this country there is a small number of people who do the vast majority of the speaking,” says Anders, the company’s CEO, who founded The Mark to try to remedy that problem.

The idea came to him in 2006 when he was working federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s campaign team. Anders says he met many intelligent and enthusiastic people who felt stymied by the lack of venues to write and comment on issues in Canada.

The Mark doesn’t rely on reporters to dig up stories, but invites contributors to offer analysis on current news stories. Almost anyone can become a contributor; the only criteria are professional credibility and a connection to Canada. The Mark’s writers are drawn from a broad range of academics, politicians and people from the business, science and non-profit sectors. They are free to write on whatever they choose, so long as it is compelling. The site’s editors are there to ensure clean and readable copy, not guide content.

Notably, contributors to The Mark are not paid. Because they are professionals in other fields, the individual value is in personal brand-building and exposure, rather than financial benefit. The Mark also has syndication deals in place with TorStar, Rogers and Yahoo where its content can be reprinted.

“We’re giving them massive reach for the piece that gets picked up by the other properties. The value that we give them is something they would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a PR company for,” says Anders.

It’s certainly not journalism as many journalists think of it, but there are more than enough non-professionals willing to write that Anders’ business model is working, for better or worse. Bob Rae, David Suzuki, Jack Layton and Jim Flaherty are among the site’s more high profile contributors — a key aspect of Anders’ vision for The Mark is non-partisanship or, perhaps more accurately, multi-partisanship. He hopes that by creating a hub of ideas that can come from left, right and in between, The Mark will challenge its readers. “People like to read what they already believe,” Anders says, referring to the political stances most publications take. “We are vastly more independent with our content than any other publication in the country.”

The content may be independent, but the support is mainstream. With an MBA from MIT and a masters in government policy and public administration from Harvard, as well as a background in management consulting, Anders has recruited some major players in Canadian business. In less than two years, The Mark’s advisory board has successfully completed two rounds of investment gathering. Though the exact details of the amount of funding are kept under wraps, the board includes people such as Arlene Dickinson, the CEO of Venture Communications and Dragons’ Den co-host; Jordan Banks, managing director of Facebook Canada and Brian Cooper, the CEO of Sports & Entertainment Sponsorship Group who was also previously involved in the business management of the Toronto Raptors and Argonauts.

Part of The Mark’s business plan is to court advertisers by creating an appealing space to invest money. Anders uses the hypothetical example of BMW sponsoring a three-month series on the future of transportation, which The Mark would curate. In this scenario, the company would not have any control over content, but would still benefit from the credibility of supporting intelligent debate. Already some sponsorships are in place for TV-style programs based around individual contributors.

Anders is savvy and ambitious, and his plans for The Mark don’t stop with political commentary. “We see ourselves very quickly evolving into a content studio, a media company,” Anders says.

Welcome to media empire 2.0.

As information migrates online, it’s those who have multimedia chops who are best placed to benefit. Freelancers have long cultivated an area of expertise as part of a sound business strategy, but the freelancer of the future is one who can do this across mediums.

Nadja Sayej has taken the classic freelancers’ approach to the nth degree. And the host of the online art-criticism show Artstars* — “the TMZ of the art world” — is extreme in more ways than one.

Sayej cuts a memorable figure: brash and ever-enthusiastic, clad in clothes borrowed from a more sensible Lady Gaga and perpetually wearing a pair of over-sized royal blue Ray Bans (recently broken during a photo shoot sadly), she eagerly acts as the provocateur and searcher of the show, which consists of three-minute segments posted at artstarstv.com.

In a recent episode, for example, Sayej attends an opening for a Houston, Texas-based artist named Mark Flood. Using the quick cuts and in-your-face camera style usually seen on MTV gossip shows, she quips about the absurd nature of the art work — writing spray-painted on cardboard sheets — and confronts the artist about rumours that he is in fact a double sent in place of the real Mark Flood. Switching between interrogating the artist and the gallery owner’s reactions to her questions, the episode captures the dizzying atmosphere and energy of the show, while also exposing a little of the artifice of the industry.

Sayej doesn’t make the bulk of her money from Artstars* though; her income comes as a side effect of the brand she has created for herself, largely through the show. Sayej hosts lectures and workshops which teach other journalists — and people in the art world — about self-promotion, brand-building and the business of getting fairly compensated for their work.

When not travelling for Artstars*, Sayej freelances as a writer for enRoute, the National Post and the New York Times, among others; before relocating to Berlin in 2010 she co-founded Toronto’s Press Pass event, a monthly booze-soaked meet-up for journalists.

The 30-year-old Sayej graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2004, and then completed the magazine writing and publishing certificate at Ryerson in 2006. A brief stint in Ryerson’s two-year undergraduate journalism program left her disappointed by the lack of focus on the business and career side of the industry. In between all this, Sayej began taking freelance assignments from the Globe.

Then the down-turn in the economy left her settling for a job at Starbucks to pay the bills. Sayej’s time as a barista was short lived, but went on long enough to give her the impetus to take her career into her own hands. The key to her success: relentless self-promotion. “It’s unattractive to look desperate by being a self-promoter,” says Sayej. “But at the same time, people with less talent and more motivation will get ahead [if they promote themselves right].”

Aggressive networking and self-promotion, like sending out regular newsletter-style emails to fans and colleagues, along with the move to Europe, have led to all kinds of opportunities. “Being a freelance foreign correspondent rules,” says Sayej. “I had so many more doors open up that would not have before. I’m writing airplane food reviews, I’m writing for the home section of the New York Times, I’m collaborating with Peaches for ArtStars*, I’m going to Riga, Latvia with this guy from VBS (Vice Broadcasting System) and we’re doing this ArtStars* — Vice collaboration.”

It’s not all milk and honey however. Sayej still faces the same issues as most freelancers: lack of job security and irregular pay. Her approach to the job may be creative and unique, but it’s still a fairly DIY operation. Some stability may be on the way though, thanks to a recent connection with some advertising executives may bring some sponsorships on board

This spring, Sayej returned to North America to give talks at the University of Toronto Art Centre, dishing about her journeys in Europe, and at the SAW Gallery in Ottawa, talking about business and PR. A visit to New York for a similar lecture is also in the works. All this is possible because of the freedom provided by working when and how she wants, and answering to no one but herself.

One person or even a small group can change plans easily. They can strike out on their own and try ideas that might result in a dead end. It’s relatively easy for freelancers today to adapt and change to the market around them. The transition from chopping block to independence for CHEK-TV was a little more challenging.

When CHEK launched in 1956 it was the only TV station on Vancouver Island and the first privately owned station in BC. Over the years its switched affiliations, from CBC to CTV, and then in 2000 Global purchased the station and integrated it into its new CH network (which eventually became E!).

It was an era of acquisition. Also in 2000, Izzy Asper’s broadcasting company purchased a newspaper chain from that other titan of media industry, Conrad Black. Greater numbers of media outlets were being controlled by fewer numbers of people, and media watchdogs and democracy advocates rang the alarm about the effects of media concentration on the quality of news.

But it wasn’t to last, and what’s happened since is instructive. Conrad Black has served a prison term, and Canwest shares were reduced to junk before the company entered bankruptcy and the finally dissolved, selling its broadcast assets to Shaw and newspapers to a consortium led by Paul Godfrey. Call it de-concentration of ownership.

The distinction between “mainstream” and “independent” media is diminishing, thanks to the accessibility and immediacy of the internet — which is not to say that problems of media ownership and democracy are solved. (One need only look as far as Fox news in the U.S. to see the influence that media corporations still wield.) But what’s interesting are the scores of independents who are beginning to see that the venerable media empires don’t have the iron grip they once did. Now is a chance for them to break free and stake a claim in a new, untested landscape.

When, in the summer of 2009, Canwest announced its intent to close CHEK’s parent company, E! television network, the lamentations were supposed to begin: the general loss of local news broadcasters, the loss of jobs for journalists and the loss of the second oldest TV station in British Columbia. Except, CHEK didn’t shut down.

Instead, its employees managed to come up with $2.5 million to purchase the station, raising funds internally as well as finding local business investment. Canwest was concerned the station didn’t have the funds to keep itself running and would be left holding the bag during the transitional period. The CRTC stepped in and offered to fast-track CHEK’s application for a new license, relieving Canwest financial obligation. Eager to shed weight, the media giant agreed to the sale over a whirlwind four-day renegotiation period. “We pretty much started from scratch on Monday and were finished by Friday,” says station manager John Pollard. “It was about a six month negotiation that was compressed into four days.”

Now new employees, once past their probation period, are expected to buy into the station — for an undisclosed amount — and remain partial-owners until they leave, at which time they can be bought out or keep their shares.

With the change in ownership came a renewed commitment to local programming, and Pollard says that change is policy now; content is continually reviewed with an eye to adapting and improving.

When Canwest relinquished control of the station in 2009 it was left with 29 full-time employees, down from 110 when it first took over in 2000. Now, CHEK employs over 40 full-time and 20 part-time staff and Pollard says it is financially strong and continuing to grow. On top of that, the station can once again call itself the oldest independent television station in B.C.

Journalism’s challenges are being navigated, plotted and overcome by the pioneers and searchers. More and more journalists are realizing that waiting for the system to find a “solution” and right itself is a fantasy. Success is being found in new territories online and by people willing to adapt, change, experiment and recreate within the industry. The colonies in the new world are starting to strike it rich, and a whole new wave of immigrants is sure to follow.

The local newscast in Victoria, B.C., looks much like any other local news broadcast. A handsome anchorman wearing a smart suit delivers news of the quest to find a young girl’s killer, using a voice that is both concerned and reassuring. A graphic of a police cruiser hovers over his left shoulder. This could be any city, but there is something significantly different about CHEK TV news.

Unlike in your hometown, this smiling anchor is a part owner of the TV station. And so is the camera operator, the assignment editor, chase producer, station manager, and everyone else who works at CHEK. This newscast represents a creative solution to a problem faced by a growing number of news outlets. From 2000 until 2009, CHEK, the second-oldest TV station in BC, belonged to Canwest Global. When Canwest began to flounder in earnest, CHEK employees knew it was just a matter of time until they’d be downsized out of jobs. Rather than let that that happen, station president John Pollard spearheaded a plan for employees and local investors to join forces and pool resources to purchase the station from Canwest and take control of it themselves.

It was a bold move, and a risky one. But it worked. Now all employees own a share of CHEK Media Group and are involved in the running of the station. With that bit of creative thinking, CHEK saved itself from extinction and is pioneering a new model of independent operations in the process.

To say that journalism is in crisis is at this point a cliché, and everyone knows the basics: the internet hit, then the recession hit, and old media panicked. But amid all the downsizing and bleak-future talk, a new breed of journalist has found opportunity in the upheaval. Freed from traditional industry, these are pioneers rather than casualties, and by their practice, they are helping to reinvigorate journalism.

The people and organizations that exemplify this sort of new independence take a broad range of shapes and sizes. Mathew Ingram is a devotee of technology, both spreading the new word and living it through his work as a full-time blogger; The Mark is an intelligent but not elitist news-commentary site, led by a man with new ideas about the business of journalism and media; Nadja Sayej is a young upstart in the art criticism community and a prototype freelancer 2.0; and, of course, there’s CHEK, the newly independent TV station.

The name Mathew Ingram will be a familiar one to anyone who follows media and technology. The former Globe and Mail technology and business columnist has been a prolific Twitter user since the site’s inception (43,000 tweets and counting), engaging daily in enthusiastic conversations with those interested in the interplay between technology and information.

In its early days, few recognized the power of the internet and digital media and many were frightened of the vast, undomesticated wilderness it represented. Undaunted, Ingram chose to try and tame it. Starting at the Globe in 1994, following a stint at the Globe-owned Financial Times, he was part of the team that helped re-launch the Globe website in 2000, and he was the first writer to start blogging regularly in conjunction with his article and column writing. Ingram is an early adopter if there ever was one.

And he’s facilitating broader conversations around the ways in which technology is transforming the way we consume information. In 2006 he co-founded the mesh web conference in Toronto, after he and some colleagues noticed a lack of local events discussing the impact of Web 2.0 developments. “We wanted to get a bunch of smart people in a room and talk about how the web is affecting us,” Ingram says, and mesh quickly grew into something larger than “sitting around drinking beer and eating pizza” as Ingram had originally envisioned it. The now annual event, which had nearly 400 attendees last year, regularly holds panels and workshops on such topics as web business and marketing strategies, to the impact of social media and privacy in the digital age.

Ingram continued to write for the Globe throughout the 2000s. In 2008 he had the chance to put his know-how of social media and cutting edge technology to work, when he became the paper’s first communities editor. The job was to help teach the paper’s writers and editors how to better use sites such as Twitter and Facebook to reach their audiences, and he took it because the paper eliminated its new media section in the print edition. Ingram set to work shifting the Globe into the 21st century, which he describes as a “fascinating but frustrating” experience.

“It felt like we were succeeding in a half-hearted way,” and the Globe wasn’t moving as quickly as he would have liked. “I didn’t feel there was enough emphasis on what I thought we should do,” Ingram says.

Eventually the frustration of trying to teach a print-centric business to embrace the internet proved too much for Ingram, and in January 2010, he left the Globe to work for GigaOM, a major tech industry blog with a monthly audience of over four million readers. The move in fact resulted in a slight raise for Ingram over his salary at the Globe and he is now considered among the leading edge of writers whose work attempts to grapple with why new technology is changing media and society, and how it will continue to do so.

“It’s just like what I was doing before, but more. There’s no end to what you can write; the blog is never ‘full’. I’m always on deadline now. If my eyes are open, I’m on deadline,” Ingram says, conceding that becoming a full-time blogger has been a “kind of trial by fire.” Nonetheless, he can now focus on writing passionately about what he knows best, is allowed to do so with little interference and is making a living as a fully digital man.

Making a living in the digital realm is of course the biggest of the challenges facing the news media today. Ad dollars for print are dwindling, and their online counterparts are not enough to support the business of news making. There are many experiments underway to try to re-conceive journalism’s business model, many involving user-supported media — NPR in the United States is a large-scale example — to smaller initiatives like ProPublica and Spot.Us, in which individual supporters can fund public interest investigative journalism.

Closer to home, news commentary site The Mark is trying to fund online punditry in a new old-fashioned way. The site is trying to become profitable by redefining the ad/edit relationship in an online context.

Beta-launched in May 2009, The Mark was born of co-founder Jeff Anders’ desire to make a place for smart opinions from people with a range of backgrounds. “When it comes to commentary in this country there is a small number of people who do the vast majority of the speaking,” says Anders, the company’s CEO, who founded The Mark to try to remedy that problem.

The idea came to him in 2006 when he was working federal Liberal leader Michael Ignatieff’s campaign team. Anders says he met many intelligent and enthusiastic people who felt stymied by the lack of venues to write and comment on issues in Canada.

The Mark doesn’t rely on reporters to dig up stories, but invites contributors to offer analysis on current news stories. Almost anyone can become a contributor; the only criteria are professional credibility and a connection to Canada. The Mark’s writers are drawn from a broad range of academics, politicians and people from the business, science and non-profit sectors. They are free to write on whatever they choose, so long as it is compelling. The site’s editors are there to ensure clean and readable copy, not guide content.

Notably, contributors to The Mark are not paid. Because they are professionals in other fields, the individual value is in personal brand-building and exposure, rather than financial benefit.The Mark also has syndication deals in place with TorStar, Rogers and Yahoo where its content can be reprinted.

“We’re giving them massive reach for the piece that gets picked up by the other properties. The value that we give them is something they would have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to a PR company for,” says Anders.

It’s certainly not journalism as many journalists think of it, but there are more than enough non-professionals willing to write that Anders’ business model is working, for better or worse. Bob Rae, David Suzuki, Jack Layton and Jim Flaherty are among the site’s more high profile contributors — a key aspect of Anders’ vision for The Mark is non-partisanship or, perhaps more accurately, multi-partisanship. He hopes that by creating a hub of ideas that can come from left, right and in between, The Mark will challenge its readers. “People like to read what they already believe,” Anders says, referring to the political stances most publications take. “We are vastly more independent with our content than any other publication in the country.”

The content may be independent, but the support is mainstream. With an MBA from MIT and a masters in government policy and public administration from Harvard, as well as a background in management consulting, Anders has recruited some major players in Canadian business. In less than two years, The Mark’s advisory board has successfully completed two rounds of investment gathering. Though the exact details of the amount of funding are kept under wraps, the board includes people such as Arlene Dickinson, the CEO of Venture Communications andDragons’ Den co-host; Jordan Banks, managing director of Facebook Canada and Brian Cooper, the CEO of Sports & Entertainment Sponsorship Group who was also previously involved in the business management of the Toronto Raptors and Argonauts.

Part of The Mark’s business plan is to court advertisers by creating an appealing space to invest money. Anders uses the hypothetical example of BMW sponsoring a three-month series on the future of transportation, which The Mark would curate. In this scenario, the company would not have any control over content, but would still benefit from the credibility of supporting intelligent debate. Already some sponsorships are in place for TV-style programs based around individual contributors.

Anders is savvy and ambitious, and his plans for The Mark don’t stop with political commentary. “We see ourselves very quickly evolving into a content studio, a media company,” Anders says.

Welcome to media empire 2.0.

As information migrates online, it’s those who have multimedia chops who are best placed to benefit. Freelancers have long cultivated an area of expertise as part of a sound business strategy, but the freelancer of the future is one who can do this across mediums.

Nadja Sayej has taken the classic freelancers’ approach to the nth degree. And the host of the online art-criticism show Artstars* — “the TMZ of the art world” — is extreme in more ways than one.

Sayej cuts a memorable figure: brash and ever-enthusiastic, clad in clothes borrowed from a more sensible Lady Gaga and perpetually wearing a pair of over-sized royal blue Ray Bans (recently broken during a photo shoot sadly), she eagerly acts as the provocateur and searcher of the show, which consists of three-minute segments posted at artstarstv.com.

In a recent episode, for example, Sayej attends an opening for a Houston, Texas-based artist named Mark Flood. Using the quick cuts and in-your-face camera style usually seen on MTV gossip shows, she quips about the absurd nature of the art work —  writing spray-painted on cardboard sheets — and confronts the artist about rumours that he is in fact a double sent in place of the real Mark Flood. Switching between interrogating the artist and the gallery owner’s reactions to her questions, the episode captures the dizzying atmosphere and energy of the show, while also exposing a little of the artifice of the industry.

Sayej doesn’t make the bulk of her money from Artstars* though; her income comes as a side effect of the brand she has created for herself, largely through the show. Sayej hosts lectures and workshops which teach other journalists — and people in the art world — about self-promotion, brand-building and the business of getting fairly compensated for their work.

When not travelling for Artstars*, Sayej freelances as a writer for enRoute, the National Postand the New York Times, among others; before relocating to Berlin in 2010 she co-founded Toronto’s Press Pass event, a monthly booze-soaked meet-up for journalists.

The 30-year-old Sayej graduated from the Ontario College of Art and Design in 2004, and then completed the magazine writing and publishing certificate at Ryerson in 2006. A brief stint in Ryerson’s two-year undergraduate journalism program left her disappointed by the lack of focus on the business and career side of the industry. In between all this, Sayej began taking freelance assignments from the Globe.

Then the down-turn in the economy left her settling for a job at Starbucks to pay the bills. Sayej’s time as a barista was short lived, but went on long enough to give her the impetus to take her career into her own hands. The key to her success: relentless self-promotion. “It’s unattractive to look desperate by being a self-promoter,” says Sayej. “But at the same time, people with less talent and more motivation will get ahead [if they promote themselves right].”

Aggressive networking and self-promotion, like sending out regular newsletter-style emails to fans and colleagues, along with the move to Europe, have led to all kinds of opportunities. “Being a freelance foreign correspondent rules,” says Sayej. “I had so many more doors open up that would not have before. I’m writing airplane food reviews, I’m writing for the home section of the New York Times, I’m collaborating with Peaches for ArtStars*, I’m going to Riga, Latvia with this guy from VBS (Vice Broadcasting System) and we’re doing this ArtStars* — Vice collaboration.”

It’s not all milk and honey however. Sayej still faces the same issues as most freelancers: lack of job security and irregular pay. Her approach to the job may be creative and unique, but it’s still a fairly DIY operation. Some stability may be on the way though, thanks to a recent connection with some advertising executives may bring some sponsorships on board

This spring, Sayej returned to North America to give talks at the University of Toronto Art Centre, dishing about her journeys in Europe, and at the SAW Gallery in Ottawa, talking about business and PR. A visit to New York for a similar lecture is also in the works. All this is possible because of the freedom provided by working when and how she wants, and answering to no one but herself.

One person or even a small group can change plans easily. They can strike out on their own and try ideas that might result in a dead end. It’s relatively easy for freelancers today to adapt and change to the market around them. The transition from chopping block to independence for CHEK-TV was a little more challenging.

When CHEK launched in 1956 it was the only TV station on Vancouver Island and the first privately owned station in BC. Over the years its switched affiliations, from CBC to CTV, and then in 2000 Global purchased the station and integrated it into its new CH network (which eventually became E!).

It was an era of acquisition. Also in 2000, Izzy Asper’s broadcasting company purchased a newspaper chain from that other titan of media industry, Conrad Black. Greater numbers of media outlets were being controlled by fewer numbers of people, and media watchdogs and democracy advocates rang the alarm about the effects of media concentration on the quality of news.

But it wasn’t to last, and what’s happened since is instructive. Conrad Black has served a prison term, and Canwest shares were reduced to junk before the company entered bankruptcy and the finally dissolved, selling its broadcast assets to Shaw and newspapers to a consortium led by Paul Godfrey. Call it de-concentration of ownership.

The distinction between “mainstream” and “independent” media is diminishing, thanks to the accessibility and immediacy of the internet — which is not to say that problems of media ownership and democracy are solved. (One need only look as far as Fox news in the U.S. to see the influence that media corporations still wield.) But what’s interesting are the scores of independents who are beginning to see that the venerable media empires don’t have the iron grip they once did. Now is a chance for them to break free and stake a claim in a new, untested landscape.

When, in the summer of 2009, Canwest announced its intent to close CHEK’s parent company, E! television network, the lamentations were supposed to begin: the general loss of local news broadcasters, the loss of jobs for journalists and the loss of the second oldest TV station in British Columbia. Except, CHEK didn’t shut down.

Instead, its employees managed to come up with $2.5 million to purchase the station, raising funds internally as well as finding local business investment. Canwest was concerned the station didn’t have the funds to keep itself running and would be left holding the bag during the transitional period.  The CRTC stepped in and offered to fast-track CHEK’s application for a new license, relieving Canwest financial obligation. Eager to shed weight, the media giant agreed to the sale over a whirlwind four-day renegotiation period. “We pretty much started from scratch on Monday and were finished by Friday,” says station manager John Pollard. “It was about a six month negotiation that was compressed into four days.”

Now new employees, once past their probation period, are expected to buy into the station — for an undisclosed amount — and remain partial-owners until they leave, at which time they can be bought out or keep their shares.

With the change in ownership came a renewed commitment to local programming, and Pollard says that change is policy now; content is continually reviewed with an eye to adapting and improving.

When Canwest relinquished control of the station in 2009 it was left with 29 full-time employees, down from 110 when it first took over in 2000. Now, CHEK employs over 40 full-time and 20 part-time staff and Pollard says it is financially strong and continuing to grow. On top of that, the station can once again call itself the oldest independent television station in B.C.

Journalism’s challenges are being navigated, plotted and overcome by the pioneers and searchers. More and more journalists are realizing that waiting for the system to find a “solution” and right itself is a fantasy. Success is being found in new territories online and by people willing to adapt, change, experiment and recreate within the industry. The colonies in the new world are starting to strike it rich, and a whole new w

When my older brother and I were kids, around ages 10 and 6, we would gather with our friends by a small river on the other side of the fence of our grade school. When the sun went down we’d scour the neighbourhood, collecting empty aerosol cans and building small piles of them by the riverside. Later, when our parents weren’t around, we lit our treasures and ran as fast as we could into the nearby bushes. When the cans exploded they sounded like thunder blasting through the sky, powerful enough to jolt anyone passing by on the street.

Our childhood days were endlessly exciting. We spent the spring and summer running around grassy, open fields and crossing cold, fast-flowing rivers in which I’d hop on my brother’s back, my bare feet bobbing in and out of the water. We loved searching through deep, quiet forests and swimming in calm, clear waters, slipping on clay stones all the way back home; muddy and tired, with satisfied grins on our faces. It was near perfect.

And it would not last.

The end came in the waning days of the spring of 1992. It came when tanks punched through mountain valleys. It came when soldiers marched past my school, my forest hideout, my home. It came when the sounds of explosions no longer signaled a bunch of mischievous kids giggling behind bushes, but real death and injury. And it came when the river, my water wonderland, carried bits of grenade and other armaments from battles upstream to us. The water was no longer a fresh, cleansing tonic, but a river of misery and sorrow that often ran ash-grey and, if you believed the propaganda, ran thick with the blood of civilians.

I was born in Bosnia in 1984. My father is a Bosnian Serb, and my mother a Bosnian Croat. Which technically makes me a Serbo-Croatian Bosnian and, now, also a Canadian. Both my parents worked as teachers, which gave us a certain amount of prestige and a respectable income in what was then Yugoslavia; a communist federation which comprised Bosnia, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, Macedonia, Montenegro, and two autonomous regions in Serbia, Vojvodina and Kosovo. It was a federation of handcuffed nationalities, full of tensions and hidden fears that would erupt in the years following the 1980 death of the country’s president for life, Josip Broz Tito. In his time, Tito was viewed by many as not only the country’s liberator, but also as a kind of holy man in an atheist dictatorship. In every classroom, hospital and government office, as in our family home, there was a framed photograph of Tito. His story and his legacy, my parents would later learn, are littered with cover-ups, secrets and murder.

“Back in those days,” says my mother, “we heard stories of people simply disappearing into thin air for having a negative viewpoint on Tito’s government. It was one party, one man and one god. No alternatives.” Following his death, the country introduced a nine-member presidency rotation. Then, in quick succession, came the fall of the Berlin Wall, the dissolution of the Soviet empire, Slovenian independence and a referendum on Bosnian independence, which was boycotted by Bosnian Serbs. On the other hand, Bosnian Muslims and Croats voted in favour, prompting local Serbs to occupy Bosnia’s capital, Sarajevo. Hostilities escalated and spread to other areas in the country, including the region where I lived.

It didn’t take long before my mother began to receive repeated death threats from her 14-and 15-year-old students because of her ethnicity. They warned that bombs would be thrown at our house if she didn’t give them the grades they wanted. Fearing for our safety as explosions and gunfire in the hills carried on night after night, my mother fled our hometown of Šibošnica, just outside of Tuzla, taking my brother and me with her. My father stayed behind to pack our belongings.

In 1991 the first wave of residents escaped, unfortunately we were not among them. They were lucky enough to take most of their possessions with them. We had stayed far longer, despite my mother’s protests to my father, who was counting on it all being over soon. But once the tanks’ presence became permanent and the whistling of the grenades were more frequent, our mother had seen and heard enough. One night as darkness fell, she and a family friend led us through a forest to my grandparents’ house in Tuzla, 30 kilometres away. We would stay there for a month before fleeing to Croatia.

We were the last family to leave Šibošnica. Later our hometown would become the setting for a prisoner exchange—a desolate place where government officials would come to barter for members of their community. It is estimated that of the near 4.5 million people inhabiting Bosnia in 1992, more than 100, 000 of them were killed in the war; though even today the statistics and death tolls remain disputed and it is presumed there are many undiscovered graves. But no matter the exact number, the conflict involving Bosnia, Serbia and Croatia would lead to the highest death toll in Europe since World War Two.

Within days following our hasty retreat from Sibosnica, tensions rose from all sides, resulting in the closure of borders and preventing my father from reuniting with us. Phone calls were rare and letters travelled slowly, usually through UN representatives my father knew. It would be two years before we saw him again. He spent those years teaching with a few of his former colleagues in a makeshift school near our hometown. He was often accused of being a spy because of his open and vocal disdain for the war and his reluctance to blame one ethnicity for what had happened. He visited old friends, both Croatian and Serbian, and wasn’t afraid to travel on foot across mountains and through military blockades—despite being constantly scrutinized for his actions and often held at gunpoint. He was once directed to walk through a forest, only to find out later it was a trap and that he had walked through a minefield. But he never gave in to fear and never gave up on his ideals. Today when he recalls those times he recoils with a kind of sadness I haven’t seen in him before.

When my family finally arrived in Canada from Croatia in 1996, the group of church sponsors—who fronted money for our plane tickets and found us a small house to live in—were surprised that my mother and 12-year-old me were not covered by veils like the Balkan women they often saw on TV prior to our arrival. We faced weeks of demoralizing integration into the western world, like watching the sponsors show us how to flush the toilet, make coffee, and turn on household appliances—all of which we knew full well how to do. Then came the unnecessary lessons in grocery
shopping and banking. We took English lessons at the local community centre to overcome the language barrier in an attempt to put our lives back together.

We turned out to be pretty regular citizens. My parents took jobs as line workers at the local Green Giant, and I entered Grade 7 at St. Pius X Catholic Elementary School in Tecumseh, a small town outside of Windsor, Ontario. At the time I just wanted to be a regular kid and leave the past behind. Being in Canada was the first time I had felt safe since leaving Bosnia and I didn’t want anyone to know where I came from and why. I was embarrassed of my roots, of my parents’ thick accents, of being different from everyone else. I certainly didn’t know much about what happened politically in Bosnia, or who was to blame for the war, and I didn’t think too much about the pictures shown on TV of the continuing warfare going on back home: the Srebrenica (a Bosnian Muslim town) massacres, where a UN report estimated as many as 7,000 men and boys were executed; the constant shots of rural Muslim women wearing traditional garments; the streams of people walking down dirt roads, following horse-drawn carriages; dirty children crying; corpses by the roadside.

For years I pushed those memories to the back of my mind. But as a 2011teen I started to think more about my past, my present, and all those pictures from Bosnia and other Balkan regions that influenced how Canadians saw my family and our homeland. By age 16 I was developing an interest in journalism, informed in part by wanting to fully understand why and how everything got so bad so quickly. I also wanted to understand this: why my younger self blamed Canadian media for failing to fully expose the Bosnian horror.

Shortly after my arrival at Ryerson University to study journalism, my mother mailed me an envelope filled with letters. They were not a secret. I knew my father had corresponded with my mother during the war in addition to the smaller notes he sent me. But at the time I never really understood what my mother read and why she always cried when she read them. When I finally got to see the letters, I noticed the many passages smeared by her tears. They were passed down to me like a treasured piece of jewellery or a photo album. They are all we have of the past. I read all 30 in one night and wept. The trove of letters became one more thing that fuelled my desire to know everything: how the war affected local and national media in Bosnia and other Balkan regions; how it affected international media trying to get news out; how it affected Canadian journalists trying to uncover the truth behind the war; and how it affected my family. My parents were heartbroken and angry, sometimes explosively so, from the years of lugging their lives around to keeping us safe. My father, in particular, still feels the pain of betrayal. The country he had so loved and believed in did not exist anymore. He had believed in Tito’s Yugoslavia. And in a moment, everything had fallen to pieces.

My father’s sister, Vesna, is who opened up the next set of gates for me. The last time I saw her was during my visit to Bosnia in 2008. We took a drive through the central part of the country, crossing into Serbian territory to visit some relatives. I remember trying to read the road signs in Cyrillic, while aunt Vesna and my parents laughed on. The script was taught to me in Grade 1, but it was a struggle to remember it then and still is today.

As we drove on, she started to ask me questions of what I remembered from the early days. I said not much, though I could recall spending some nights on the floor and keeping away from windows. I told her I was embarrassed I didn’t know how it all happened. In her tender, professor’s voice, she began to tell me of details such as the invasion of Tuzla, how the civilians took up arms and stood against the tanks, how the death tolls kept rising and the food supplies depleting.

There is one night I did remember quite clearly. We had spent a few nights at aunt Vesna’s in the month before heading to Croatia. When the first bomb exploded, it sent thunder and debris all the way up to the 10th floor, where we had been sleeping soundly in her apartment. There was immediate panic, broken glass and sirens wailing madly. The other tenants piled out of their units in their pyjamas, people’s worried faces running step by step, in a row, down to the basement, staying away from the windows. In the large, underground bomb shelter, the beds squeaked, and the thin grey, military blankets barely covered the metal mesh underneath. Aunt Vesna’s only son Jasmin, my brother and I played cards as the building shook, and the echoes of worried parents pervaded the night.

About 80 kilometres away, the civilians in the capital, Sarajevo, saw worse atrocities. Sarajevans were under constant attack from the surrounding hills. Canadian journalist and CBC RADIO As It Happens host Carol Off was in the Balkans during that time and in her 2001 book, published well after the war’s end, The Lion, the Fox and the Eagle, she writes about a particular gruesome scene and the impact it had on civilians:

“In Sarajevo, the assault began with an attack on passengers of a streetcar in the centre of the city. By noon, the convoy of Serb soldiers rolled through the downtown area toward the presidency building, and in the late afternoon, the Serb nationalist forces blew up the main post office and telephone exchange in the heart of the city. This deliberate act of sabotage, planned well in advance as a divisionary tactic, managed to take out most of the phones in the city, cutting off residents from a crucial lifeline. From this day forward, the people of Sarajevo would have little information from other parts of the country and the outside world, and it would come to have a powerful psychological effect on them. They would freeze, starve and be bombed to death over the next four years, all in a state of primitive isolation.”

Near the top of my long list of things to discover: In a Balkans blanketed by censorship and propaganda, were there any journalistic heroes? The answer: not many, which makes the story of Kemal Kurspahic´ and his staff so remarkable. He was editor-in-chief of OSLOBOđJENJE, the Bosnian daily in Sarajevo. Throughout the war and afterward, OSLOBOđJENJE, which means “liberation,” has been internationally praised as the voice of ethnic and religious tolerance amid ravages of conflict and received numerous awards. Kurspahic´’s 2003 book, Prime Time Crime: Balkan Media in War and Peace, speaks directly about the struggles local journalists faced: “Covering the war in their own city and country presented Bosnian journalists with the ultimate personal and professional challenge. On a personal level, regardless of whether they were Muslim or Serb, Croat or Jew, they experienced the same terror. Their apartment buildings and neighbourhoods were shelled from Serb artillery positions in the hills surrounding the city; their families were deprived of basic needs, from bread and milk to water and electricity; and yet they never blamed the ‘Serbs’ because many Serbs suffered the same as they did. On a professional level, they still wanted to publish a daily with their editorial office building under constant artillery and machine-gun fire, without newsprint, without water or electricity, and without a phone/fax line to communicate or a kiosk to sell their papers.”

By the war’s end, five OSLOBOđJENJE staffers were dead and 20 were wounded in the line of duty. Despite the odds, the newspaper managed to publish an issue every day during the three-and-a-half-year onslaught.

Another hero: Vehid Gunic´, former journalist for Radio Sarajevo, later Radio-Television Sarajevo, who lost his wife Fatima. She died along with four students after a bomb blast at a local school, an explosion that wounded 23 others. Gunic´ points out that Sarajevo didn’t experience the kind of censorship seen elsewhere in the region. “I spoke about what I saw with my own eyes, and heard with my own ears,” he says. “[But] the flow of information was very limited because we were in a blockade: there was no electricity, communication by telephone or communication with the station’s journalists who were on the scene. There were no media representatives in the newly formed Bosnian army, so we did what we could with the limited resources at hand.”

Outside of Sarajevo, though, what other voices were trying to cut through censorship and propaganda? Consider Radio B92, an independent station located in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia. From 1991 to 1998, Aleksandar Vasovic´, now with Reuters’ Belgrade office, had faced numerous threats from the government of Slobodan Miloševic´ while he was reporting for Radio B92. He says there was censorship among the regime-controlled media on all sides, but that independent media was much freer because they would pay the price—fines imposed by censors—to stay free. Though there were times when a payout was not an option: “Radio B92 was shut down twice,” he says, “the first time on March 9, 1991, during anti-Miloševic´ protests; the second time on March 24, 1999, when the police came in and took over the station. We were all fired.”

In his 2002 book, Guerilla Radio: Rock ‘n’ Roll Radio and Serbia’s Underground Resistance, journalist and author Matthew Collin writes about the tactics used by Radio B92 reporters to show their listeners a side of the war they may have not been seeing or hearing: “B92 wanted to drag the war into Belgrade’s living rooms, to expose the bloody truth about what Miloševic´ and his cronies were really doing. It established links with like-minded radio stations such as Studio 99 in Sarajevo, Radio 101 in Zagreb and Radio Student in Ljubljana to transmit collaborative programs and on-the-spot reports from the other (now former) Yugoslav republics.”

In 1998, while the media situation in Serbia was still tense and strictly government-controlled, the country was trying to clean up its post-war image. After being forced out of Radio B92, Vasovic´ began working full-time for The Associated Press. He recalls the day Serbian journalist and independent news publisher Slavko C´uruvija was gunned down in the streets of Belgrade on April 11, 1999, Serbian Orthodox Easter. Vasovic´ knew C´uruvija well and happened to pass him on the street, he recalls, mere minutes before he was killed: “Every journalist who was working for an independent media outlet was worried and scared because no one knew who would be next.”

“Radio B92 assumed even greater importance as the regime extended its media blackout,” writes Collin. “It was beginning to reach out beyond its fashionable urban liberal audience and become a source of information for all those opposed to Miloševic´. Aware of this, the state began to jam its signal.”

Why, though, was Radio B92 allowed to operate for so long? Adrienne van Heteren, currently a project manager for the bbc World Service Trust but held two senior positions at B92 during the war, wrote: “The radio station was broadcasting illegally as its initial one-year local licence had expired. This secret was a ticking time bomb. Although B92 had positioned itself firmly in the heart of the anti-war scene in Belgrade…it was considered to be of little threat to the authorities because its signal was relatively weak, confined to Belgrade and not even clear in all parts of the city. It was assumed that as long as it was small the authorities would not bother with it. Besides, the authorities were more than happy to use B92’s existence to show the world that they were not that bad.”

Finally, to get a citizen’s view on the propaganda that filled official publications and broadcast outlets, I talked to my cousin Jasmin, who grew up in Tuzla and is now in his 30s. He remembers things much better than I do, like the constant hunger pangs, the sirens and the television broadcasts.

“Journalism during war time was complicated,” he says, “because the country was divided into three parts, and sadly there were three versions of propaganda. There were so many unimaginable lies.” Jasmin’s neutrality stems from the same place as my own. He
is a child of an ethnically mixed marriage; a Bosnian Muslim father and a Bosnian Serb mother, and he never gave in to growing nationalism.

“Here’s an example,” he says, “of what journalists on the Serb side were saying at the beginning of the war. News came out that 5000 Serbs were imprisoned on our soccer field, where in fact you couldn’t even fit that many people. Other reports stated there were corpses floating down the river Jala, a tiny river about a half a meter deep. That was the kind of propaganda that we heard daily.”

Croatians and Bosnians made their own outlandish claims.

One of the many aspects of my search that I kept wondering about was why it took as long as it did for the carnage and destruction to reach international media. And also: Who were the journalists who helped tell the world about it?

One of the first foreign correspondents on the ground in Bosnia was Roy Gutman, reporting forNewsday at the time. Gutman, now Baghdad bureau chief of McClatchy Newspapers in Washington, D.C., won a Pulitzer Prize for exposing the concentration camps and other methods of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia. In April 2010 Gutman was honoured with a key to the city of Sarajevo.

“The official Bosnian Serb propaganda had nothing to do with reality,” he says. Those early stories that were emerging out of Bosnia “began to shine a light on how destructive the situation really was, and also unravelled some of the untold tales local media were unable to cover.”

“When I went to visit the Serbian military in Banja Luka [a Bosnian city bordering Croatia, with a large population of Bosnian Serbs] and asked for a briefing, the information they gave me seemed like something from a possible script written for radio,” Gutman says. “Some elements in it were preposterous. Serbian officials accused Bosnian Muslims of setting up concentration camps and organizing the systematic rape of Serbian women, when Muslims had neither the power nor the resources to do so. It took me hours to determine that enough of it was a big lie that it cast doubts on everything they told me.” And the headline on his eventual August 2, 1992 Newsday article read: “Death camps: Survivors tell of captivity, mass slaughters in Bosnia,” a story about Serbian-led concentration camps.

New York Times reporter David Rohde was another prominent journalist on the scene, then reporting for the Christian Science Monitor. Rohde was following a developing story that led him to the borders, where the Croats were driving the Bosnian Serbs out of Krajina. He eventually discovered the graves in Srebrenica. His stories were graphic and heartbreaking, especially the scene in Srebrenica when the excavation of the massive graves began.

Rohde would go on to write about this gruesome atrocity, including the discovery that in these graves were young Bosnian Muslim boys who were led out of their schools, blindfolded and executed on the spot. It was in front of a school that two of the mass graves were found. To corroborate his evidence, Rohde tracked down the survivors and after hundreds of interviews, which proved nearly identical eyewitness accounts, his story checked out. Rohde was the only journalist on this story, and after his piece ran in the Monitor in August 1995, the world took notice, bringing among others, cnn’s Christiane Amnapour, who reported out of Vehid Gunic´’s Radio Television Sarajevo. Still, increased international coverage did not immediately help to bring an end to hostilities. That would come, but not before more death and tragedy.

“Not only myself, and not only the local journalists,” says Gunic´, “but everyone felt that the war would come to an end only with some kind of U.S. intervention. Sadly, that came too late. We naïvely believed that America would stop the war, but they didn’t; not as quickly as we were expecting. Because of the slow progression of the U.S., and the world for that matter, Bosnia saw a kind of devastation that the modern world couldn’t even imagine, and I had hoped that after the first broadcast by famed reporter, Christiane Amnapour…that the war would end. But it didn’t.”

Paul Knox, one of The Globe and Mail‘s international affairs writers at the time, wrote about Bosnia from Toronto. He says that other than the complexities that come with reporting about a country and not physically being there, it was difficult to get a sense of the bigger picture of former Yugoslavia.

“There definitely was a feeling at this point that it was a kind of an impenetrable story, and the feeling out there among Canadians, among the audience, was that it was really hard to figure out,” says Knox. “The roadmap was really complicated. I mean you start out with six republics, six constituents, or entities of the former Yugoslavia, that’s tough to begin with. Then it turns out that one of them has three different ethnic identities in it, two of which are also names of other republics. It turns out that the Bosnian Serbs to a certain point don’t have the same interests as the Serbs in Belgrade.” But, Knox adds that nothing is impossible if a journalist works hard enough to try and understand it.

That said, Canadian reporters were making efforts to cover the war in the Balkans. In June 1993, CBC Television broadcast one of the first in-depth reports in North America which exposed the Srebrenica massacre. And according to news outlets around the country, CBC Off also did terrific work throughout the late 1990s in her coverage of the post-war reconstruction of the Balkans, and Yugoslavia’s war crimes trials.

Canadian journalist Scott Taylor also reported from the Balkans and was there at the start of the war. Taylor is a former soldier who in 1988 founded Esprit de Corps, a military magazine with coverage that includes exposed crime and corruption in the Canadian Forces. His oppositional view intrigued me. As I spoke with Taylor, I couldn’t shake the feeling that he wanted me to really understand his side. This may be partly because he has been scrutinized in the media for being a so-called Serb supporter of which there are only a few, as most people view the Serbian side as the aggressors in the war and rarely the victims. He holds that while all sides have committed crimes, the faults of the Croatian media are largely underreported.

“It was a terrible disconnect between the facts,” he says. “The Croatians were quite quick to jump on the public relations bandwagon. They knew how to woo the foreign media. You were taken into a press office in Zagreb, and outside there was a whole bunch of bricks with names on them and the women there were always crying and lighting candles, which made a great photo opportunity.But there was no way to verify that each brick was somebody that was massacred by the Serbs. And in my subsequent visits I saw the same two ladies crying at the same spot. The first connection people had to the war, they were already being set up visually.”

Another issue, he explains, is that most journalists went to the capitals without branching outside to gain different perspectives. But both Rohde and Gutman did, and it was the reason they found the new information that no one had known about before. Yes, they filed their stories from the capitals, such as Sarajevo and Zagreb, because they had to; but they did travel to the outskirts and the villages, much like Taylor himself.

As for Taylor being a supporter of Serbs, he says he merely wants to present some balance to what’s out there. “Of course Serbs killed people. Yes there were mass graves. Yes they shot people, but they also got shot. And that’s the difference. How do you possibly present that?”

I eventually began to see that the lack of coverage, or accurate media coverage, wasn’t the fault of the Canadian media as my younger self believed. The story is complicated, and I realized how difficult it is summarize this war—any war for that matter. There are always complicated factors, and there are many sides to every story. There are victims and there are aggressors. There are newspaper headlines, journalists to be interviewed and history books written and then rewritten. There are angry people, profiteers and graves. There are always so many graves. And though I have learned a lot during this search, there is still so much I don’t know and a lifetime ahead to discover more. If I decide to…

The last time I was in Tuzla, in 2008, I walked through town with my parents, trying to remember more about what it was like when I was a child. My parents told stories of their youth as their hands were grazing walls as if each brick held a memory. When we entered the town square they noticed a new marble monument called Kapija (The Gate) with a quote engraved on it in large black letters: “Here we do not live only to live, here we do not die only to die, here we die, only to live.” It is a memorial site for a massacre in the middle of the downtown square, where my parents once flirted over Turkish coffees, running late for their lectures and curfews. At night the restaurant patios in the square are jammed with young people, but in wartime, fear kept most people inside their homes or bomb shelters. As the war was winding down, young people felt safe going out again and trickled into the town square, meeting friends and trying to catch a breath in the chaos. On May 25, 1995, at around 9 p.m., a grenade was fired into the crowd killing 71 people. Most were between the ages of 18 and 25. More than 200 others were wounded in the attack. We visited the rows of graves up on a small hill, reading the names and ages written on the headstones and fighting back tears. We didn’t visit our family home, which is just minutes outside of the city. We heard it was riddled with bullets and that the grass had overgrown. Old friends had told us it was a sad scene. I’m going back this summer, not to look at the house in which the picture of president for life Tito probably still hangs (I don’t think I’m ready for that), but to stand by that small river and just be there for a little while, remembering how things once were when we were just kids, picking up scraps of aerosol cans on the shore waiting for them to explode.

Innovation in Newspaper Design

American newspapers have long been the paragon of newspaper design, but in the past decade many have “lapsed into a lethargy that’s made them homogenized, sanitized and deca einated,” said Mario Garcia, in a 1996 American Journalism Review article. Today many are shackled to a bottom-line mentality as a result of cutting costs to survive instead of trying to innovate; they practice a no-change-is-good-change philosophy and then wonder why advertisers and readers are disappearing.

Newspaper design in Canada is a bit more optimistic. Intense competition between the Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail and the National Post, makes art directors take risks. There is no room for complacency, and that is what makes us leaders in design, says Gayle Grin, the National Post’s managing editor of design and graphics and former president of the Society for News Design (SND).

This year at SND’s 32nd annual Best of Newspaper Design Creative Competition, Portugal’s i newspaper received the World’s Best-Designed Newspaper award.

Canadian newspapers also received multiple awards for their designs:

• The National Post won 32 design awards, and for the third consecutive year its design was named among the top five in the world by SND (next to the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Times of Oman in the Middle East, and The New York Times)
• Montreal’s La Presse won 26 awards
• The Toronto Star won 14 awards
• The Globe and Mail won six awards, one being an SND Award of Excellence for its 2010 redesign

I stand next to Adrian Norris, The Globe and Mail’s managing editor of design and presentation. Norris, with a cardboard cup of cafeteria coffee in hand, gives me a brief tour of his second home: the redesign room, a closet-like visual spectacle of an offi ce tucked in the corner of the third floor. It’s hidden away from the features section and the quiet, open-concept, conservatively corporate cubiclemaze that is the Globe newsroom.

Inside, a freakishly levelled and evenly spaced jumbo grid of full-colour pagelayout proofs and typography experiments cover the walls; the entire paper is dissected like a frog, its organizational skeleton and journalistic organs magnified, taped-up and studied for their functions. The side table holds a cache of thepast weeks’ papers, some scribbled on with circle and arrow Sharpie doodles:autopsies of disfi gured designs. Here, Norris with co-designers Devin Slater and Jason Chiu—their noses pressed to the Mac screen—spent most hours of most days for the last 18 months researching, planning, prototyping, designing and editing theGlobe’s 2010 magnum opus: “Proudly Print” redesign.

I ask Norris about fonts, an infallible conversation-starter when interviewing designers. He points to a piece of paper outlining the Globe’s signature Pratt Pro typeface. Days were spent deliberating over the precise combination of weight, height, curve and negative space for each letter of each italic, outline, bold and extra bold variations. “Everything was thoroughly thought through, from the font selection to the colour palette,” says Norris. “The design is not trying to do anything showy. It is about conveying information in a pure way.”

And then I say something that makes most newspaper designers cringe: “There is always that argument that design makes things look prettier.” Norris’s eyes narrow.

Thirteen days earlier, on October 1, 2010, the Globe launched the newfangled national newspaper-magazine hybrid; its latest look features a trimmed page-size, colour on every page, emphasis on photography and graphics, and certain sections printed on semigloss paper stock. In his opening column, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse called it “the most significant redesign in the Globe’s history.” His reason for changing the look of the 167-year-old rulingclass broadsheet: “We’re evolving because we’re confident in the future of the printed word—and the power of insight and ideas.” Criticism of the redesign disseminated. Some readers approved: “Love the print redesign…thanks for not standing still, but having the courage to adapt and evolve based on the needs of your readers.” Many hated it: “Style over substance,” and “To think a huge team of people approved this design change is unbelievable. I shudder to see the print version in the a.m.” Journalists were critical: “The new tarted-up, glossy, colour Globe and Mail is many things, but it is not a real ‘newspaper.’ It has been ‘dumbed-up’ and robbed of much of its news content.” Academics were skeptical: “The Globe’s ringing endorsement of the future of print is charming, but deluded.”

Opinions abounded. It was as if both the general and journalistic populace squeezed their heads into common stock black turtlenecks and became pseudo designers. Missing from the media discourse were the explanations and insights from the newspaper designers themselves.

So, just how do newspaper designers think?

“Good newspaper design should be invisible,” Norris says in his English accent. Design exists as the communication framework, a containing vessel through which people see, engage and understand the content it holds. It is the journalistic “Show, don’t tell!” mantra, literally.

“There is nothing superficial about it,” rebukes Norris. “People think it is change for change’s sake, which it is absolutely not.”

I sense an underlying exasperation, perhaps the result of trying to explain to journalists, like myself, that newspaper design is not just a decorative afterthought.

This isn’t the first time the Globe has changed its look. Over the past 21 years it has undergone five major redesigns, directed by three British visual experts: Tony Sutton, the redesign renegade in 1990; David Pratt, the design philosopher in 1998, 2000 and 2007; and Adrian Norris, the newsroom conductor in 2010. All have played a key role in strengthening the clout of modern visual thinking at the Globe, a far cry from its grey, boring past when the majority of newsroom denizens referred to design as mere “ornamentation,” remembers Pratt. “This made me very angry. I told the person so and they got angry too.”

In the early days, design was not part of the editorial process but operated as a ghettoized subsidiary. Journalists were separate from the production of the newspaper they created content for; they wrote their articles, dropped their copy on their editors’ desks, and then the revised articles, with a roughly sketched layout, would be “transferred along a pneumatic tube into the bowels of the building…[where] gangs of two-fingered typesetters along with their thuggish leather-aproned compositor-cum-psychopath pals…would miraculously turn it into a newspaper. And that, more or less, was that, give or take a few expletives or two along the way,” wrote Sutton in a 1992 article titled “The Perils of Pagination.”

Editors at the time took it upon themselves to control what they viewed as hyper-creative designers (the idea that the designers might take creative charge was unthinkable for most newspaper management). Paul Hollister, the man responsible for pioneering the photo-filled format of Life magazine in the ’30s, had a particularly interesting theory for constraining them: “What you do is get an art director and put them at a drawing board. Put tire tape over his mouth, because whatever he has to state should drain off through his fingers onto paper. Never let an art director talk…If they’re right, you pat him on the head. If they strayed from the mood of the basic format, you take a small hammer, which you have chained to the wall for the purpose, rap him smartly over the skull.”

Newsrooms were long divided into two camps: the word people and the visual people, the oppressor and the oppressed. The all powerful word supremacists determined the journalistic natural order and imposed a hierarchy of “serious” information: words were elite, photos and graphics further down. The two camps clashed daily, vying for editorial power and the ego-boosting status associated with broadsheet acreage. Communication between the word people and visual people was limited. Neither really understood nor seemed to care what the other did. News organizations struggled to make sense (and arguably still do) of the newspaper binaries: design vs. journalism, physical vs. intellectual, form vs. content, and product-making vs. storytelling, wrote Jan White, consulting art director and author of the book Editing by Design: The Classic Guide To Winning Readers.

Gradually newsroom technology improved and helped spur visual victories in newspapers: the 20th century hot-metal typesetters were replaced by the cold type of the ’60s, followed by linotype mechanical contraptions, Letraset rub-off lettering, early digital image-setters, Xeroxes, offset printing. “And then God gave designers the Mac,” wrote Sutton. The dawn of inexpensive, robust, easy-to-edit desktop publishing software helped station designers in the nucleus of the newsroom, fraternizing alongside their word counterparts. The redesign revolution was launched.

In any redesign these days—if you retain the traditional thinking and conventional structure of the newsroom, you will inevitably assume the values of the past—explains Robert Lockwood.Lockwood is the leading newspaper designer, co-founder and first president of Society of News Design (SND), an international organization aimed at enhancing communication through visual journalism. In his 1992 book, News by Design, he writes, “To redesign the newspaper you need to redesign the operation.”

Tony Sutton: The Redesign Renegade

“But you’re a visuals person! Why are you discussing content?” said a Globe senior editor.

Tony Sutton, the Globe’s 1990 design director, provoked a momentary mutiny in an editorial meeting by speaking critically about articles in the previous night’s paper. The issue wasn’t the criticism itself, but rather the fact that it was coming out of an art director’s mouth.

But leave it to Sutton—an outspoken, once-chief-copy-editor- turned-Fleet-Street-magazine editor—a self-described “journalist who happens to design”—to disregard the division between word people and visual people at the Globe. Sutton was recruited by the Thomson-owned daily in 1989, after 14 years of editing, designing and developing the South African edition of Drum, a photo-heavy magazine. Sutton currently lives in Georgetown, Ontario, where he runs News Designs Associates, his worldwide design and editorial consulting company. About the 1990s’Globe newsroom Sutton says, “There was very much a demarcation.”

When Sutton arrived at the Globe he had the “good fortune” of working with a dreadful-looking newspaper: solely black and white, badly printed, grim, with lots of grey type and few photographs— essentially, very little projection of content. Sutton had five months to revamp what he saw as an “upmarket product without an upmarket look.” The Globe’s editor-in-chief William Thorsell didn’t want flashy, glitzy or garish. He was looking for a design that would project the quality of the newspaper’s writing. The new look was partly inspired by a WWII edition of London’s The Daily Telegraph with its Old Goudy Style Bold headlines and the “wonderful amount” of information in its deks—“they had dek on dek on dek,” said Thorsell in aStrategy magazine article.

“Thorsell knew precisely what he wanted and he was very involved in what we were doing. There is nothing worse in doing a redesign than when the designer isn’t getting good, provocative feedback,” says Sutton. “We have to talk, we have to discuss, we have to fight for what we think is right. You have to have reasons for why you are doing things.”

The rest of the newsroom wasn’t nearly as involved. Designers at the time never got to see the stories they were to design; instead they were given story lengths and photographs and haphazardly determined headline lengths based on the page layout using dummy type (which were later fi led by copy editors). “It all struck me as being crazy,” says Sutton, “design is driven by the content, by the tone of the story, and by the quality of the story…all of which we hadn’t read.”

Sutton’s redesign modernized the historic flourish of the Globe’s Old English nameplate with a specially commissioned logotype based on the more classical Bembo typeface. Other visible changes included the use of the very-readable Goudy Old Style Bold typeface for headlines and the paper’s shift to six columns from the previous five. “In the end, we took the paper against the industry trends,” said Thorsell in a Canadian Printer article. Thorsell didn’t believe that the widespread USA Today trend with its colourful design and avalanche of photographs, maps, graphs, charts and information graphics was appropriate for the Globe.

Sutton saw the redesign as a success, but he was far from satisfi ed with the attitude of the newsroom and its “dullness,” and so he jumped at the chance to relocate about two kilometres down the road to Thomson Newspapers’ head offi ce. There he worked as head of design for the company’s North American operations, where he got to “fly around the continent at the company’s expense.” During Sutton’s seven years at Thomson, he witnessed the abuse of design as nearly every North American newspaper tried to mimic USA Today. Thomson soon purchased Macintoshes for the newsroom designers of the 163 dailies it owned across North America at the time, and a few months later requested samples of what each publication had been doing. According to Sutton, around 90 percent of the graphics were “total crap.” Some small-town newspapers were running full-page national weather graphics, but that’s not what people looked to a local paper for. “Technology is fi ne if it is used properly, but it is not a substitute for intelligence,” says Sutton. “Nobody was thinking.”

Lockwood noted a similar misuse of design when he saw pages with splashy, colourful, “megagraphics” of planes swooping down during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “A lot of times people didn’t know what design is intended to do,” said Lockwood in an American Review of Journalism article. “Visually, the people in charge accepted a Marvel comics version of the war on the front page. If a story was written the way graphics were presenting the information, the writing would have been too much fl ourish and not been accurately telling the story. No editor would have allowed such a story on the front page.”

Lockwood and Sutton both state that editors must scrutinize the work of designers as rigorously as they do stories. According to Jan White, this problem often arises as editors are afraid and their knowledge is inadequate to talk about design; so they ignore it or talk about it in such vague abstractions that it has no meaning.

David Pratt: The Design Philosopher

“I’ve redesigned the Globe three times, which is more than enough for anyone,” wrote Pratt in an email.

He agrees to an interview, and a few days later I find myself sitting across from Pratt at his kitchen table. The scene is appropriate, almost verging on stereotypical of what I imagined the designer lifestyle to be: Pratt in his bold, blue, tortoise-shell glasses, sitting in his modern kitchen with his MacBook Pro and Canon DSLR camera in close reach.

“Take care when writing the article,” says Pratt. “I am going to talk to you very freely. I spent 10 years on the masthead, so I’ve seen how things happen. Have a little care that you don’t compromise anything I say. I’ve got another few years at the Globe and I want them to be relatively smooth.” In 2007 Pratt stepped down from being in charge of the department and now works as a general Globe design editor and design consultant. Pratt stresses that while he offered the lead designers occasional advice and some of the redesign’s architecture was maintained from his 2007 work, the paper’s 2010 look fully refl ects the work of its lead design team: Norris, Slater and Chiu.

Pratt is a well-known name at the Globe. Anytime somebody changes the typeface on the computer there is a drop-down list of his name: Pratt Pro Bold, Pratt Pro Heavy, Pratt Pro Light and Pratt Pro Regular. (With Pratt’s art direction, typographer Nick Shinn created the font family for the 2007 redesign which was expanded with additional serif varieties for the latest 2010 design.) “I want to maintain a low profile, but it is hard to,” he says.

Pratt arrived at the Globe in March 1998 after working for 18 years as the head of design at theBangkok Post, an English language newspaper in Thailand. The Globe was amidst huge shifts in management and the publisher and business executives proposed a major redesign as a marketing initiative to maintain, increase, or find new markets for the paper’s sales. Thomson Newspapers struggled to find a suitable designer to lead the redesign and while they sent staff to “deal with the situation,” no fundamental changes occurred. Then Lockwood, one of Thomson’s outside consultants, recommended Pratt, whom he worked with on Bangkok Post’s 1996 redesign. The Globe’s redesign was to launch in June, giving Pratt and his small team of designers about 16 weeks to redesign the entire thing— for a major redesign, twice that amount of time would still be very tight. (The recent 2010 redesign took 18 months.) The reason for all of this panic-stricken change: the pending launch of another national newspaper, the National Post.

Journalists were terrifed. Little was known about the forthcoming Post at the time, except that it was going to be printed in colour. The Globe and The New York Times were two of the few newspapers in the world still embracing black and white designs at the time. “It was seen as an identifi cation of serious journalism at the highest end,” says Pratt. The Times believed it, and so did the Globe. “You look back and think, ‘God, what were we thinking?’” Thomson knew it was essential that the Globe print in colour to compete with the Post for readers’ and advertisers’ attention.

Like most redesigns, the 1998 Globe redesign was prompted by factors external to the actual newsroom: competition, technology updates, and new management and editors wanting to stamp their mark on the newspaper. The one factor Pratt has never faced: a publication’s last desperate effort to survive. “Designers love redesigns for failing newspapers because they generally get to do a lot more,” says Pratt. “Yet, in the history of newspapers, a failing newspaper has never been revived by a redesign using design alone. It is a negative response, to a negative situation, and it has a negative outcome. It shows us the effect of a redesign alone: zero.”

The redesign was not without its challenges. Upon seeing the difference between the interior and exterior of the newspaper’s Front Street headquarters, Pratt was perplexed by how theGlobe was able to communicate with and engage its audience. “You step outside onto Spadina, walk a few hundred metres up the street, not even as far as Chinatown, and it’s like two different universes,” he says. “Inside it was middle-aged and white. Outside it was young and multicultural. That is very roughly speaking, but it was so.” The result: the traditional thinking behind the paper was revealed in its choice of photo subjects. This was a design deterrent because readers connect to photographs; people pick up a newspaper and subliminally are looking for their own refl ection, people that look like them, says Pratt. “As soon as we open our eyes half of our brain is engaged. When we look at a newspaper most of what is registered happens in the first 400ths of a second.” When readers can’t relate to a photograph, he adds, you have done huge damage to your communication potential from that fi rst instant; they feel excluded even before their eyes have made their way to the writing. While diffi cult to maintain, Pratt made a conscious effort to deliberately vary photo subjects: “Make it a person of colour, make it a younger person, a female, anything but a middle-aged white guy.”

“No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design,” continues Pratt, channeling Sherlock Holmes: “Whether you’re thinking of that as an act of journalism or an act of design will determine how you see this thing we’re speaking of.”

What designers must do, he explains, is look to the “zeitgeist,” or “sense of the time,” and then recognize changing perspectives and social attitudes. Designing a newspaper is as much an assignment in cultural change as an exercise in changing how a newspaper looks, which is why Pratt made a point of getting outside the Globe‘s building and exploring the city. He learned this method from Lockwood, who always takes to the streets before redesigning a newspaper. For instance, a month before starting a redesign of the German Berliner Zeitung in September 1997, Lockwood did nothing but drive around and observe the city. He was trying to fi gure out what it means to live there and what kinds of people are there, he explains in The American Editor. “This gave me a deeper understanding of the city’s past and present, but what’s more, it sensitized me to the different expectations readers from the eastern and western parts of the city had for their newspapers.”

Two of Pratt’s biggest obstacles for the buck-the-Post-early challenge was IT and production. While the Globe was eager to flaunt full-colour design and photos on its marquee pages (mostly section fronts and backs), he realized the paper would not be able to output the redesign with the current infrastructure.

Pratt brought his concerns to Thorsell.

“I don’t see why not, we’ve printed colour adverts in the past,”Thorsell said.

“Well maybe we have, but we haven’t printed so many colour pages on a deadline schedule, routinely,” said Pratt. The Globe needed to upgrade its entire network to be able to successfully transmit the larger fi les required for colour printing. If it didn’t, the network would have choked. Today, as he reflects on that moment, he says, “Looking back, I might as well have been talking Japanese.” The Globe hadn’t considered the myriad factors surrounding the redesign; design still seemed to be disconnected from the larger editorial and production process.

“In order to be part of that you have to step into other people’s territories,” says Pratt. “I can make nice typefaces and prototypes, but as soon as a I start thinking how are we actually going to achieve this in reality, how are we going to execute it, then questions start to arise. And those questions lead me into the offi ces of all sorts of people who immediately ask, ‘What the heck am I doing there? What business is it of mine?’”

In the end, the networks were changed and the 1998 redesign launched on July 9, a month later than planned. The redesign launched with a full-colour, front-page photo of the French team celebrating a 2-1 victory over Croatia in the World Cup soccer semifinals. “It was a very bizarre photo with only three people in the entire photo; ninety percent of it was fi eld. The photo was run at about three columns, but essentially it was a three-column photo of green stuff with a few black fi gures wearing blue uniforms,” he says. “It was really weird. I don’t know why we chose that, but we proved that we could print grass, in colour—green.”

Despite designers’ knowledge and visual instincts, they rarely get to determine when a redesign should happen. But they sure can tell when a paper needs one, says Pratt. “They begin to look either very ad hoc, sections start to look different as different editors have their effect, or it starts to look untidy and incoherent and things don’t relate to one another. That is the structure breaking.”

Correcting that breakdown is at the top of any designer’s to-do list—a process that often involves moving elements around—which can upset readers. Following the 1996 redesign of theBangkok Post, Pratt says, “One of the most persistent complaints I had was from someone who was upset that we moved the horoscopes. His problem wasn’t that he couldn’t fi nd [them], because we made sure that we put information on the front and second page telling people where everything was. His problem was that since we moved the horoscope his luck had gone south completely; his life was in the toilet and he needed the horoscopes to go back where they were before to stabilize himself. That is obviously an unusual example, but readers’ concerns are often more prosaic than we think,” and newspapers need to be consider this.

The ultimate success of a redesign is determined by factors that are separate from its actual effect on the market; design itself isn’t meant to have a measurable effect on readers, instead it is meant to present the content, explains Pratt. Like a lot of major projects, redesigns are a “strategic initiative” that involve huge investments in terms of money, people’s commitment and prestige. “You pay x number of dollars, and you say this is going to achieve ‘so’ and ‘so,’ [but] once it is done you’ve got to say it achieved it. You can’t say ‘Hmm, that was a screw-up,’” says Pratt.

Designers feel a certain institutional pressure, he concludes. “Suddenly you’re directly exposed to the corporate offi ces. As you’re working through the project, it feels very empowering, but when the reality comes around and execution has to be done, then you feel the weight of it. Everyone is nervous, so the weight is especially great.”

Adrian Norris: The Newsroom Conductor

Norris appears anxious. His coffee cup trembles slightly as we speak in the Globe cafeteria. I can’t determine if he is naturally nervous when he talks about his work, or if he has in fact been sworn to corporate secrecy and can only say good things about the Globe’s latest redesign. Perhaps a bit of both.

Norris explains the structure of the muted newsroom. “The way we are arranged here, designers are associated with sections… they are much like satellites,” he says. Norris knows the entire offi ce well. Since coming to the Globe in 2000, he has worked as a design-editor ofReport on Business magazine, presentation and production in the news department, and creative director of digital media before his current position as managing editor of design and presentation. Before the Globe, Norris studied design in Nottingham, England and worked for London, England’s The Sunday Times, The Times, Times Supplements Ltd, and The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The newsroom’s silence, I find out, is in part a by-product of the CCI NewsGate content management system that allows reporters, editors, copyeditors, photographers, designers and web editors to assign, create, share and manage stories and related resources in software folders. Instantaneous digital collaboration has replaced some of the newsroom’s personal conversations.

Newspaper redesigns often extend to involve the restructuring of the physical organization of a newsroom. When Stackhouse took over in May 2009, three months later in a staff memo he requested: “Fewer walls. More integration. Much more innovation.” Increased collaboration has largely enhanced the integration of design into the newsroom. Designers now interact most closely with copy editors and editors of their designated sections, says Norris. Throughout the redesign process he encouraged an “opendoor policy” and worked to “empower and educate reporters and editors about design.” He also modelled the redesign as a “tool kit” that gives journalists examples of non-linear narratives, or alternative story formats.

But having designers work as integrated satellites has its disadvantages: it makes it easy for the design to have some inconsistencies. Norris’s role, especially with the redesign, is to try to make things look like they’ve been designed by one hand. Like an orchestra conductor, Norris talks about the importance of design having the right “tones” and hitting the notes. Such uniformity adds to the paper’s larger brand experience. British graphic designer Rian Hughes similarly talked about design in terms of music: “What I’m trying to do is produce the visual equivalent of the chord change that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.”

The final redesigned Globe was not what Norris had expected. “Where I thought we would end up and where we have ended up are two different places. But I think we ended up in the right place, knowing we wanted to connect with our readers,” he says.

Norris thought they’d be influenced more by European newspaper design, but instead the design team looked to high-end magazines for inspiration, such as The Economist, The New York Times Magazine, Fantastic Man and Monocle. In the end, Globe designers took advantage of the fact they could afford colour on every page and high-quality printing and a heat press set option. The redesign’s apparent “sense of elegance and smartness” tried to reach the paper’s unapologetically elite target audience: 35-55-year-old, university-educated, generally upper-income Canadians.

I ask Norris about the excitement, the frustrations, the unexpected surprises, and the often confl icting designer/editor interactions. But I get what seem like cautious answers: “A lot of the decisions actually make themselves…It is a straightforward process…I don’t think the design has forced itself on to editorial thinking or vice versa. It has been a hand-in-glove thing really.”
Readers experience design better than they are able to articulate the effect it has on them, says Pratt. “As soon as you start to talk to readers about design they become editors and designers, ‘Yes, I think the font is a bit too big here.’” This contributes to whether a redesign is declared a success or not. No doubt there will be more Globe redesigns in the years ahead as it, and the entire newspaper industry, explore new pathways and consider the words of people like Mario Garcia—a leading newspaper designer who in the past 40 years has collaborated with over 550 news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, Die Zeit, along with medium-to-small community newspapers. Garcia was the initial recipient of the Society for News Design’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “In our business of designing newspapers and magazines we often use design as an end in itself. We create models. We test prototypes. We tweak. We have done this for decades. In the process, perhaps we fail to see that it was not the newspaper that needed to be redesigned, but the industry as a whole,” says Garcia in an October 2009 blog post.

“The crisis in which our industry fi nds itself now,” adds Garcia, “is the most opportune time for us to put ourselves out of our comfort zones, to transform ourselves into design thinkers, taking design upstream. Sort of innovation riding on the coattails of survival.”

I stand next to Adrian Norris, The Globe andMail’s managing editor of design and presentation. Norris, with a cardboard cup of cafeteria coffee in hand, gives me a brief tour of his second home: the redesign room, a closet-like visual spectacle of an offi ce tucked in the corner of the third floor. It’s hidden away from the features section and the quiet, open-concept, conservatively corporate cubiclemaze that is the Globe newsroom.

Inside, a freakishly levelled and evenly spaced jumbo grid of full-colour pagelayout proofs and typography experiments cover the walls; the entire paper is dissected like a frog, its organizational skeleton and journalistic organs magnified, taped-up and studied for their functions. The side table holds a cache of thepast weeks’ papers, some scribbled on with circle and arrow Sharpie doodles:autopsies of disfi gured designs. Here, Norris with co-designers Devin Slater and Jason Chiu—their noses pressed to the Mac screen—spent most hours of most days for the last 18 months researching, planning, prototyping, designing and editing the Globe’s 2010 magnum opus: “Proudly Print” redesign.

I ask Norris about fonts, an infallible conversation-starter when interviewing designers. He points to a piece of paper outlining the Globe’s signature Pratt Pro typeface. Days were spent deliberating over the precise combination of weight, height, curve and negative space for each letter of each italic, outline, bold and extra bold variations. “Everything was thoroughly thought through, from the font selection to the colour palette,” says Norris. “The design is not trying to do anything showy. It is about conveying information in a pure way.”

And then I say something that makes most newspaper designers cringe: “There is always that argument that design makes things look prettier.” Norris’s eyes narrow.

Thirteen days earlier, on October 1, 2010, the Globe launched the newfangled national newspaper-magazine hybrid; its latest look features a trimmed page-size, colour on every page, emphasis on photography and graphics, and certain sections printed on semigloss paper stock. In his opening column, editor-in-chief John Stackhouse called it “the most significant redesign in the Globe’s history.” His reason for changing the look of the 167-year-old rulingclass broadsheet: “We’re evolving because we’re confident in the future of the printed word—and the power of insight and ideas.” Criticism of the redesign disseminated. Some readers approved: “Love the print redesign…thanks for not standing still, but having the courage to adapt and evolve based on the needs of your readers.” Many hated it: “Style over substance,” and “To think a huge team of people approved this design change is unbelievable. I shudder to see the print version in the a.m.” Journalists were critical: “The new tarted-up, glossy, colour Globe and Mail is many things, but it is not a real ‘newspaper.’ It has been ‘dumbed-up’ and robbed of much of its news content.” Academics were skeptical: “The Globe’s ringing endorsement of the future of print is charming, but deluded.”

Opinions abounded. It was as if both the general and journalistic populace squeezed their heads into common stock black turtlenecks and became pseudo designers. Missing from the media discourse were the explanations and insights from the newspaper designers themselves.

So, just how do newspaper designers think?

“Good newspaper design should be invisible,” Norris says in his English accent. Design exists as the communication framework, a containing vessel through which people see, engage and understand the content it holds. It is the journalistic “Show, don’t tell!” mantra, literally.

“There is nothing superficial about it,” rebukes Norris. “People think it is change for change’s sake, which it is absolutely not.”

I sense an underlying exasperation, perhaps the result of trying to explain to journalists, like myself, that newspaper design is not just a decorative afterthought.

This isn’t the first time the Globe has changed its look. Over the past 21 years it has undergone five major redesigns, directed by three British visual experts: Tony Sutton, the redesign renegade in 1990; David Pratt, the design philosopher in 1998, 2000 and 2007; and Adrian Norris, the newsroom conductor in 2010. All have played a key role in strengthening the clout of modern visual thinking at the Globe, a far cry from its grey, boring past when the majority of newsroom denizens referred to design as mere “ornamentation,” remembers Pratt. “This made me very angry. I told the person so and they got angry too.”

In the early days, design was not part of the editorial process but operated as a ghettoized subsidiary. Journalists were separate from the production of the newspaper they created content for; they wrote their articles, dropped their copy on their editors’ desks, and then the revised articles, with a roughly sketched layout, would be “transferred along a pneumatic tube into the bowels of the building…[where] gangs of two-fingered typesetters along with their thuggish leather-aproned compositor-cum-psychopath pals…would miraculously turn it into a newspaper. And that, more or less, was that, give or take a few expletives or two along the way,” wrote Sutton in a 1992 article titled “The Perils of Pagination.”

Editors at the time took it upon themselves to control what they viewed as hyper-creative designers (the idea that the designers might take creative charge was unthinkable for most newspaper management). Paul Hollister, the man responsible for pioneering the photo-filled format of Life magazine in the ’30s, had a particularly interesting theory for constraining them: “What you do is get an art director and put them at a drawing board. Put tire tape over his mouth, because whatever he has to state should drain off through his fingers onto paper. Never let an art director talk…If they’re right, you pat him on the head. If they strayed from the mood of the basic format, you take a small hammer, which you have chained to the wall for the purpose, rap him smartly over the skull.”

Newsrooms were long divided into two camps: the word people and the visual people, the oppressor and the oppressed. The all powerful word supremacists determined the journalistic natural order and imposed a hierarchy of “serious” information: words were elite, photos and graphics further down. The two camps clashed daily, vying for editorial power and the ego-boosting status associated with broadsheet acreage. Communication between the word people and visual people was limited. Neither really understood nor seemed to care what the other did. News organizations struggled to make sense (and arguably still do) of the newspaper binaries: design vs. journalism, physical vs. intellectual, form vs. content, and product-making vs. storytelling, wrote Jan White, consulting art director and author of the book Editing by Design: The Classic Guide To Winning Readers.

Gradually newsroom technology improved and helped spur visual victories in newspapers: the 20th century hot-metal typesetters were replaced by the cold type of the ’60s, followed by linotype mechanical contraptions, Letraset rub-off lettering, early digital image-setters, Xeroxes, offset printing. “And then God gave designers the Mac,” wrote Sutton. The dawn of inexpensive, robust, easy-to-edit desktop publishing software helped station designers in the nucleus of the newsroom, fraternizing alongside their word counterparts. The redesign revolution was launched.

In any redesign these days—if you retain the traditional thinking and conventional structure of the newsroom, you will inevitably assume the values of the past—explains Robert Lockwood.Lockwood is the leading newspaper designer, co-founder and first president of Society of News Design (SND), an international organization aimed at enhancing communication through visual journalism. In his 1992 book, News by Design, he writes, “To redesign the newspaper you need to redesign the operation.”

Tony Sutton: The Redesign Renegade

“But you’re a visuals person! Why are you discussing content?” said a Globe senior editor.

Tony Sutton, the Globe’s 1990 design director, provoked a momentary mutiny in an editorial meeting by speaking critically about articles in the previous night’s paper. The issue wasn’t the criticism itself, but rather the fact that it was coming out of an art director’s mouth.

But leave it to Sutton—an outspoken, once-chief-copy-editor- turned-Fleet-Street-magazine editor—a self-described “journalist who happens to design”—to disregard the division between word people and visual people at the Globe. Sutton was recruited by the Thomson-owned daily in 1989, after 14 years of editing, designing and developing the South African edition of Drum, a photo-heavy magazine. Sutton currently lives in Georgetown, Ontario, where he runs News Designs Associates, his worldwide design and editorial consulting company. About the 1990s’ Globe newsroom Sutton says, “There was very much a demarcation.”

When Sutton arrived at the Globe he had the “good fortune” of working with a dreadful-looking newspaper: solely black and white, badly printed, grim, with lots of grey type and few photographs— essentially, very little projection of content. Sutton had five months to revamp what he saw as an “upmarket product without an upmarket look.” The Globe’s editor-in-chief William Thorsell didn’t want flashy, glitzy or garish. He was looking for a design that would project the quality of the newspaper’s writing. The new look was partly inspired by a WWII edition of London’s The Daily Telegraph with its Old Goudy Style Bold headlines and the “wonderful amount” of information in its deks—“they had dek on dek on dek,” said Thorsell in a Strategy magazine article.

“Thorsell knew precisely what he wanted and he was very involved in what we were doing. There is nothing worse in doing a redesign than when the designer isn’t getting good, provocative feedback,” says Sutton. “We have to talk, we have to discuss, we have to fight for what we think is right. You have to have reasons for why you are doing things.”

The rest of the newsroom wasn’t nearly as involved. Designers at the time never got to see the stories they were to design; instead they were given story lengths and photographs and haphazardly determined headline lengths based on the page layout using dummy type (which were later fi led by copy editors). “It all struck me as being crazy,” says Sutton, “design is driven by the content, by the tone of the story, and by the quality of the story…all of which we hadn’t read.”

Sutton’s redesign modernized the historic flourish of the Globe’s Old English nameplate with a specially commissioned logotype based on the more classical Bembo typeface. Other visible changes included the use of the very-readable Goudy Old Style Bold typeface for headlines and the paper’s shift to six columns from the previous five. “In the end, we took the paper against the industry trends,” said Thorsell in a Canadian Printer article. Thorsell didn’t believe that the widespread USA Today trend with its colourful design and avalanche of photographs, maps, graphs, charts and information graphics was appropriate for the Globe.

Sutton saw the redesign as a success, but he was far from satisfi ed with the attitude of the newsroom and its “dullness,” and so he jumped at the chance to relocate about two kilometres down the road to Thomson Newspapers’ head offi ce. There he worked as head of design for the company’s North American operations, where he got to “fly around the continent at the company’s expense.” During Sutton’s seven years at Thomson, he witnessed the abuse of design as nearly every North American newspaper tried to mimic USA Today. Thomson soon purchased Macintoshes for the newsroom designers of the 163 dailies it owned across North America at the time, and a few months later requested samples of what each publication had been doing. According to Sutton, around 90 percent of the graphics were “total crap.” Some small-town newspapers were running full-page national weather graphics, but that’s not what people looked to a local paper for. “Technology is fi ne if it is used properly, but it is not a substitute for intelligence,” says Sutton. “Nobody was thinking.”

Lockwood noted a similar misuse of design when he saw pages with splashy, colourful, “megagraphics” of planes swooping down during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. “A lot of times people didn’t know what design is intended to do,” said Lockwood in an American Review of Journalism article. “Visually, the people in charge accepted a Marvel comics version of the war on the front page. If a story was written the way graphics were presenting the information, the writing would have been too much fl ourish and not been accurately telling the story. No editor would have allowed such a story on the front page.”

Lockwood and Sutton both state that editors must scrutinize the work of designers as rigorously as they do stories. According to Jan White, this problem often arises as editors are afraid and their knowledge is inadequate to talk about design; so they ignore it or talk about it in such vague abstractions that it has no meaning.

David Pratt: The Design Philosopher

“I’ve redesigned the Globe three times, which is more than enough for anyone,” wrote Pratt in an email.

He agrees to an interview, and a few days later I find myself sitting across from Pratt at his kitchen table. The scene is appropriate, almost verging on stereotypical of what I imagined the designer lifestyle to be: Pratt in his bold, blue, tortoise-shell glasses, sitting in his modern kitchen with his MacBook Pro and Canon DSLR camera in close reach.

“Take care when writing the article,” says Pratt. “I am going to talk to you very freely. I spent 10 years on the masthead, so I’ve seen how things happen. Have a little care that you don’t compromise anything I say. I’ve got another few years at the Globe and I want them to be relatively smooth.” In 2007 Pratt stepped down from being in charge of the department and now works as a general Globe design editor and design consultant. Pratt stresses that while he offered the lead designers occasional advice and some of the redesign’s architecture was maintained from his 2007 work, the paper’s 2010 look fully refl ects the work of its lead design team: Norris, Slater and Chiu.

Pratt is a well-known name at the Globe. Anytime somebody changes the typeface on the computer there is a drop-down list of his name: Pratt Pro Bold, Pratt Pro Heavy, Pratt Pro Light and Pratt Pro Regular. (With Pratt’s art direction, typographer Nick Shinn created the font family for the 2007 redesign which was expanded with additional serif varieties for the latest 2010 design.) “I want to maintain a low profile, but it is hard to,” he says.

Pratt arrived at the Globe in March 1998 after working for 18 years as the head of design at the Bangkok Post, an English language newspaper in Thailand. The Globe was amidst huge shifts in management and the publisher and business executives proposed a major redesign as a marketing initiative to maintain, increase, or find new markets for the paper’s sales. Thomson Newspapers struggled to find a suitable designer to lead the redesign and while they sent staff to “deal with the situation,” no fundamental changes occurred. Then Lockwood, one of Thomson’s outside consultants, recommended Pratt, whom he worked with on Bangkok Post’s 1996 redesign. The Globe’s redesign was to launch in June, giving Pratt and his small team of designers about 16 weeks to redesign the entire thing— for a major redesign, twice that amount of time would still be very tight. (The recent 2010 redesign took 18 months.) The reason for all of this panic-stricken change: the pending launch of another national newspaper, the National Post.

Journalists were terrifed. Little was known about the forthcoming Post at the time, except that it was going to be printed in colour. The Globe and The New York Times were two of the few newspapers in the world still embracing black and white designs at the time. “It was seen as an identifi cation of serious journalism at the highest end,” says Pratt. The Times believed it, and so did the Globe. “You look back and think, ‘God, what were we thinking?’” Thomson knew it was essential that the Globe print in colour to compete with the Post for readers’ and advertisers’ attention.

Like most redesigns, the 1998 Globe redesign was prompted by factors external to the actual newsroom: competition, technology updates, and new management and editors wanting to stamp their mark on the newspaper. The one factor Pratt has never faced: a publication’s last desperate effort to survive. “Designers love redesigns for failing newspapers because they generally get to do a lot more,” says Pratt. “Yet, in the history of newspapers, a failing newspaper has never been revived by a redesign using design alone. It is a negative response, to a negative situation, and it has a negative outcome. It shows us the effect of a redesign alone: zero.”

The redesign was not without its challenges. Upon seeing the difference between the interior and exterior of the newspaper’s Front Street headquarters, Pratt was perplexed by how the Globe was able to communicate with and engage its audience. “You step outside onto Spadina, walk a few hundred metres up the street, not even as far as Chinatown, and it’s like two different universes,” he says. “Inside it was middle-aged and white. Outside it was young and multicultural. That is very roughly speaking, but it was so.” The result: the traditional thinking behind the paper was revealed in its choice of photo subjects. This was a design deterrent because readers connect to photographs; people pick up a newspaper and subliminally are looking for their own refl ection, people that look like them, says Pratt. “As soon as we open our eyes half of our brain is engaged. When we look at a newspaper most of what is registered happens in the first 400ths of a second.” When readers can’t relate to a photograph, he adds, you have done huge damage to your communication potential from that fi rst instant; they feel excluded even before their eyes have made their way to the writing. While diffi cult to maintain, Pratt made a conscious effort to deliberately vary photo subjects: “Make it a person of colour, make it a younger person, a female, anything but a middle-aged white guy.”

“No, Watson, this was not done by accident, but by design,” continues Pratt, channeling Sherlock Holmes: “Whether you’re thinking of that as an act of journalism or an act of design will determine how you see this thing we’re speaking of.”

What designers must do, he explains, is look to the “zeitgeist,” or “sense of the time,” and then recognize changing perspectives and social attitudes. Designing a newspaper is as much an assignment in cultural change as an exercise in changing how a newspaper looks, which is why Pratt made a point of getting outside the Globe’s building and exploring the city. He learned this method from Lockwood, who always takes to the streets before redesigning a newspaper. For instance, a month before starting a redesign of the German Berliner Zeitung in September 1997, Lockwood did nothing but drive around and observe the city. He was trying to fi gure out what it means to live there and what kinds of people are there, he explains in The American Editor. “This gave me a deeper understanding of the city’s past and present, but what’s more, it sensitized me to the different expectations readers from the eastern and western parts of the city had for their newspapers.”

Two of Pratt’s biggest obstacles for the buck-the-Post-early challenge was IT and production. While the Globe was eager to flaunt full-colour design and photos on its marquee pages (mostly section fronts and backs), he realized the paper would not be able to output the redesign with the current infrastructure.

Pratt brought his concerns to Thorsell.

“I don’t see why not, we’ve printed colour adverts in the past,”Thorsell said.

“Well maybe we have, but we haven’t printed so many colour pages on a deadline schedule, routinely,” said Pratt. The Globe needed to upgrade its entire network to be able to successfully transmit the larger fi les required for colour printing. If it didn’t, the network would have choked. Today, as he reflects on that moment, he says, “Looking back, I might as well have been talking Japanese.” The Globe hadn’t considered the myriad factors surrounding the redesign; design still seemed to be disconnected from the larger editorial and production process.

“In order to be part of that you have to step into other people’s territories,” says Pratt. “I can make nice typefaces and prototypes, but as soon as a I start thinking how are we actually going to achieve this in reality, how are we going to execute it, then questions start to arise. And those questions lead me into the offi ces of all sorts of people who immediately ask, ‘What the heck am I doing there? What business is it of mine?’”

In the end, the networks were changed and the 1998 redesign launched on July 9, a month later than planned. The redesign launched with a full-colour, front-page photo of the French team celebrating a 2-1 victory over Croatia in the World Cup soccer semifinals. “It was a very bizarre photo with only three people in the entire photo; ninety percent of it was fi eld. The photo was run at about three columns, but essentially it was a three-column photo of green stuff with a few black fi gures wearing blue uniforms,” he says. “It was really weird. I don’t know why we chose that, but we proved that we could print grass, in colour—green.”

Despite designers’ knowledge and visual instincts, they rarely get to determine when a redesign should happen. But they sure can tell when a paper needs one, says Pratt. “They begin to look either very ad hoc, sections start to look different as different editors have their effect, or it starts to look untidy and incoherent and things don’t relate to one another. That is the structure breaking.”

Correcting that breakdown is at the top of any designer’s to-do list—a process that often involves moving elements around—which can upset readers. Following the 1996 redesign of the Bangkok Post, Pratt says, “One of the most persistent complaints I had was from someone who was upset that we moved the horoscopes. His problem wasn’t that he couldn’t fi nd [them], because we made sure that we put information on the front and second page telling people where everything was. His problem was that since we moved the horoscope his luck had gone south completely; his life was in the toilet and he needed the horoscopes to go back where they were before to stabilize himself. That is obviously an unusual example, but readers’ concerns are often more prosaic than we think,” and newspapers need to be consider this.

The ultimate success of a redesign is determined by factors that are separate from its actual effect on the market; design itself isn’t meant to have a measurable effect on readers, instead it is meant to present the content, explains Pratt. Like a lot of major projects, redesigns are a “strategic initiative” that involve huge investments in terms of money, people’s commitment and prestige. “You pay x number of dollars, and you say this is going to achieve ‘so’ and ‘so,’ [but] once it is done you’ve got to say it achieved it. You can’t say ‘Hmm, that was a screw-up,’” says Pratt.

Designers feel a certain institutional pressure, he concludes. “Suddenly you’re directly exposed to the corporate offi ces. As you’re working through the project, it feels very empowering, but when the reality comes around and execution has to be done, then you feel the weight of it. Everyone is nervous, so the weight is especially great.”

Adrian Norris: The Newsroom Conductor

Norris appears anxious. His coffee cup trembles slightly as we speak in the Globe cafeteria. I can’t determine if he is naturally nervous when he talks about his work, or if he has in fact been sworn to corporate secrecy and can only say good things about the Globe’s latest redesign. Perhaps a bit of both.

Norris explains the structure of the muted newsroom. “The way we are arranged here, designers are associated with sections… they are much like satellites,” he says. Norris knows the entire offi ce well. Since coming to the Globe in 2000, he has worked as a design-editor of Report on Business magazine, presentation and production in the news department, and creative director of digital media before his current position as managing editor of design and presentation. Before the Globe, Norris studied design in Nottingham, England and worked for London, England’s The Sunday Times, The Times, Times Supplements Ltd, and The South China Morning Post in Hong Kong. The newsroom’s silence, I find out, is in part a by-product of the CCI NewsGate content management system that allows reporters, editors, copyeditors, photographers, designers and web editors to assign, create, share and manage stories and related resources in software folders. Instantaneous digital collaboration has replaced some of the newsroom’s personal conversations.

Newspaper redesigns often extend to involve the restructuring of the physical organization of a newsroom. When Stackhouse took over in May 2009, three months later in a staff memo he requested: “Fewer walls. More integration. Much more innovation.” Increased collaboration has largely enhanced the integration of design into the newsroom. Designers now interact most closely with copy editors and editors of their designated sections, says Norris. Throughout the redesign process he encouraged an “opendoor policy” and worked to “empower and educate reporters and editors about design.” He also modelled the redesign as a “tool kit” that gives journalists examples of non-linear narratives, or alternative story formats.

But having designers work as integrated satellites has its disadvantages: it makes it easy for the design to have some inconsistencies. Norris’s role, especially with the redesign, is to try to make things look like they’ve been designed by one hand. Like an orchestra conductor, Norris talks about the importance of design having the right “tones” and hitting the notes. Such uniformity adds to the paper’s larger brand experience. British graphic designer Rian Hughes similarly talked about design in terms of music: “What I’m trying to do is produce the visual equivalent of the chord change that makes the hairs on the back of your neck stand up.”

The final redesigned Globe was not what Norris had expected. “Where I thought we would end up and where we have ended up are two different places. But I think we ended up in the right place, knowing we wanted to connect with our readers,” he says.

Norris thought they’d be influenced more by European newspaper design, but instead the design team looked to high-end magazines for inspiration, such as The Economist, The New York Times Magazine, Fantastic Man and Monocle. In the end, Globe designers took advantage of the fact they could afford colour on every page and high-quality printing and a heat press set option. The redesign’s apparent “sense of elegance and smartness” tried to reach the paper’s unapologetically elite target audience: 35-55-year-old, university-educated, generally upper-income Canadians.

I ask Norris about the excitement, the frustrations, the unexpected surprises, and the often confl icting designer/editor interactions. But I get what seem like cautious answers: “A lot of the decisions actually make themselves…It is a straightforward process…I don’t think the design has forced itself on to editorial thinking or vice versa. It has been a hand-in-glove thing really.”

Readers experience design better than they are able to articulate the effect it has on them, says Pratt. “As soon as you start to talk to readers about design they become editors and designers, ‘Yes, I think the font is a bit too big here.’” This contributes to whether a redesign is declared a success or not. No doubt there will be more Globe redesigns in the years ahead as it, and the entire newspaper industry, explore new pathways and consider the words of people like Mario Garcia—a leading newspaper designer who in the past 40 years has collaborated with over 550 news organizations, including The Wall Street Journal, The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Miami Herald, Die Zeit, along with medium-to-small community newspapers. Garcia was the initial recipient of the Society for News Design’s Lifetime Achievement Award. “In our business of designing newspapers and magazines we often use design as an end in itself. We create models. We test prototypes. We tweak. We have done this for decades. In the process, perhaps we fail to see that it was not the newspaper that needed to be redesigned, but the industry as a whole,” says Garcia in an October 2009 blog post.

“The crisis in which our industry fi nds itself now,” adds Garcia, “is the most opportune time for us to put ourselves out of our comfort zones, to transform ourselves into design thinkers, taking design upstream. Sort of innovation riding on the coattails of survival.”

Boutet seems the perfect figure to head the paper’s web team. Wearing a dark blazer and square, thick-framed glasses, and sporting a hint of stubble, he’s young but not too young, cleancut but Silicon Valley casual, professional but enthusiastic.Even though social networking is only one aspect of Boutet’s job as the Post’s senior producer of digital media, it takes up a hefty chunk of his workday. “We’re not a large newsroom,” he says. “We have to be really careful about how we parcel our time.”

The Post’s web team is probably the scrappiest and most experimental of any mainstream Canadian media brand, judging from the way websites like Mediabistro, SocialTimes and the Nieman Journalism Lab cover its web activity. The Post currently maintains more than a dozen Twitter feeds, an extensive network of blogs, a busy Facebook page, and occasionally reporters live-chat with readers. The Post is also experimenting with Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app, and other mobile social networking tools. Whenever the web team sees traffic flooding to a Post article from an aggregate site like Reddit, they embed a banner in the body of the story: “Welcome Reddit readers!”

In 2010, the web team branched out into Foursquare, the location- based social networking site that lets users “check in” at real-world locations (like city hall or Starbucks) to tell their friends where they are. Then members can read tips and upload photos related to the venue. The person who checks in the most often becomes a location’s “mayor.” Boutet and his staffers started playing with the platform in May 2010, when it was just over a year old, creating imaginary venues and leaving silly tips. (According to Foursquare, the National Post’s headquarters is home to “Chris Boutet’s Soul,” which is described as the finest theme park and hookah bar in Toronto.)

Office games aside, Boutet saw enough value in Foursquare to establish an official partnership in which the Post provides reviews and news stories about locations that Foursquare users visit. “We’re not doing it because we think it’s cool,” he claims. It’s unclear, however, how the Postcan benefit from a service that doesn’t have all that much to do with its national audience. Foursquare is a relatively tiny service, with only 6.5 million users worldwide (Twitter has 175 million; Facebook has 500 million) and, as the Post discovered, it has its limitations. Much of the content that the web team is able to publish is Toronto-centric—a problem that has stopped other publications from jumping on board. “I think it’s very exciting,” says Jennifer MacMillan, communities editor for The Globe and Mail. But based on where the Globe’s readers are, it hasn’t adopted Foursquare. For now, it’s sticking to Facebook and Twitter.

But like the bosses at many news organizations, those at the Post are hungry for innovation. “If we don’t do things differently, then we’re just not going to survive. People want to get their news when they want it, on the platform that they want to receive it on,” says Paul Godfrey, Postmedia ceo, during a keynote speech at the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ annual conference last November. The event was titled “Media in Transformation: Harnessing Today’s Digital World,” and Godfrey believes that social media is a big part of that transformation. But thePost’s web editors take on new projects largely based on interest, with few formal policies and little top-down direction.

Boutet says the approach has been “shotgun-blasting content everywhere” to see what works. On Foursquare, his team posted up to a dozen stories every day from July to January, at varied venues like Roy Thomson Hall and Dairy Queen, but they’ve scaled back to five or fewer. According to Boutet, tips like “Try the cappuccino!” often drowned out breaking news that thePost was pushing. Their reviews also saw limited return in number of readers. “It takes nothing— basically nothing—for us to put them up, so we still put them up,” he says. “But we don’t see a lot of actual trackback on that.”

The Post made a bigger splash in January after it revived its presence on the blogging platform Tumblr. The Post’s “Trenta graphic — which showed that the newest Starbucks coffee cup is actually larger than the average human stomach — spread rapidly through social networks and blogs, ending up on cnn the same day. Its success was partly due to the team’s “brute force” strategy: after tagging a post by subject, they find all the online social channels related to that topic and “just hit follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,” to try to catch tastemakers’ attention. They believe that by paying attention to the people who set the online conversation, they will reciprocate and help spread the Post’s message. “It’s a very manual, laborious process,” says Boutet.

The hope is that all of this effort, including hours steeped in analytic software, will help the newspaper find a solvent place in the digital era. Yet for all of Boutet’s enthusiasm, it’s unclear exactly what the Post gains from the web team’s hard work—and that’s dangerous. The Post is investing a lot of staff time and energy (and thus money) that could go toward other projects. In a world of shrinking newsrooms and unprecedented competition, where investigative journalism, fact-checkers and copy editors are often dismissed as luxuries, a news organization needs to be able to justify every strain on its resources. If a dollar value can’t be found, then they’re wasting their time just as much as a teenager surfing Facebook at the back of the class.

It’s not just the Post that’s gone crazy for social media, of course. It’s described in messianic terms almost everywhere. “I think it offers the key to survival,” says Mathew Ingram, senior writer at GigaOM, a technology blog that covers everything from iPhone games to biofuel. It is listed among the world’s top blogs by tech-news and reviews site CNET and the leading blog directory Technorati. “I don’t want to overstate it, but I think that’s the only thing newspapers have going for them,” Ingram says. Businesses of all kinds have embraced the future: according to a 2009 survey of over 500 American companies, 86 percent are using social networks for business purposes. Amongst the news media, there are few holdouts, says Jay Rosen, press critic, writer and professor of journalism at New York University. Rosen is known for supporting citizen journalism. In February, he was selected as a member of Postmedia’s new digital advisory board. “There is a dwindling number of curmudgeons that says journalism is journalism, and that we don’t need any of this new technology,” he says. “They’re slowly disappearing and they have no influence.”

By now, the business uses of social media are fairly well understood. It can help push your content out to the masses and reach people outside your core audience. By using Tumblr, for instance, the Post has tapped into a younger, female demographic. Social media can help build loyalty to a brand by encouraging repeat readers. And when the newspaper model is often dismissed as obsolete, it’s useful to be perceived as tech-savvy and progressive. But so far, newsrooms have banked on the conventional wisdom that if you build a big audience, advertising dollars will follow; soon, they hope. Unfortunately, you can’t pay your staff with your reputation. The question is whether social media is capable of paying off in real dollars and cents.

“If you want to really do community and social media properly, it costs money,” says Ingram, who served as the Globe’s communities editor until January 2010. “It takes resources and time. The only thing worse than not doing it at all is doing it in a half-assed way because that actually can make your reputation worse.” However, Ingram’s thoughts on how to make a return on that investment are still fuzzy. “There is no clear value chain between responding to someone on Twitter and some tangible net income. There just isn’t.” Even with the availability of analytical data like what sites readers came from, or how long they spend on the page, the monetary value of social media is frustratingly vague. Ingram argues that this shouldn’t matter— many news outlets’ priorities are just as intangible. “What’s the return on investment of having fewer mistakes in your newspaper?” he asks. “The reality is that people read newspapers that are riddled with mistakes all the time, and they don’t seem to care.”

But in an era of diminishing revenues, media owners need to care. The reality is that online advertising is so cheap that it may not be worth the effort—and the rates are only getting cheaper. In 2009 the average cost to reach 1,000 viewers on news sites dropped 10 percent from $11.40 to $10.26 in just half a year, according to Adify—now known as Cox Digital Solutions—an organization which helps maximize revenue for advertisers, agencies and publishers. ComScore, an Internet marketing research company, reports that the low cost of advertising on social networking sites could be to blame for cheapening online ad sales overall. Its figures suggest social networks dragged down average rates by as much as 18 percent between mid-2009 and mid-2010.

One former newspaper executive is skeptical of how much social media can deliver in terms of driving page views. “Look at how much traffic Facebook and Twitter really contribute,” says Ken Maclean, who until August 2010 was vice president of digital media for Postmedia’s eastern properties. “The most important traffic driver you’ve got is making sure you rank high on Google. That is going to drive a lot more traffic than a lot of the activities you do around social media.” Take the Vancouver Sun, for instance. According to Maclean, the Sun has achieved tremendous success by using its man-hours to go deeper into stories than anyone else, striving to reach the top spot on web searches. “If you look at the sheer volume of page views that you can monetize,” he says, “Google at this stage is at least as important, if not more so, than social media.”

One would expect that with so much talk, so much promise and so much at stake, news organizations would track social media closely, developing long-term action plans and figuring out how this will help them survive. For Postmedia at least, that doesn’t seem to be true. “At least in the environments I have worked in, there wasn’t a really consolidated social media strategy,” says Maclean. The activities didn’t get their own budgets, for instance, so the return on investment was unclear. “I don’t know too many folks who have really taken it to that level yet.” This seems to be the standard—a 2009 survey found that only 40 percent of companies using social media had budgets for them, and only 16 percent were trying to track the return on their investment.

So why have news organizations been so quick to adopt social media? “There’s a certain level of pressure to chase the shiny cat toy,” says Maclean. The omnipresent hype has pushed people to get into these new channels without clearly thinking about the why— they just feel they need to be there. Maclean compares it to the proliferation of iPad news applications, which are often rushed out by publishers who don’t know how they’re going to make any money off them. “I’m a big believer of ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,’” Maclean says, “and I would apply that to everything, but social media is the one place where it really is not that well defined. Everything else, every dollar we have spent, every activity we undertook, I would always look at it and say, ‘What is this actually delivering in terms of something we can monetize?’ But I would say that for social media, people are not tracking it well and they don’t really understand what the benefit is versus the effort that’s being put into it.”

Somehow social media has been absolved of the burden of proof. Analytics services can provide nuanced data about readers, who are much easier to track online than off. But even though the tools are there, they aren’t always being used effectively. “There haven’t been any direct requests about specific social media campaigns, per se,” says Ali Shah, a web data analyst for Postmedia. “I think we’re just touching the tip of the iceberg.” Shah creates general week-by-week reports that include some social media metrics, and content producers have access to statistical data on their own, but no one’s really asking for the richer detail and the analysis that the research team can provide.

The Post team prefers to watch its own analytics—after all, the paper acts semi-autonomously from Postmedia and was the first to take full responsibility of its web presence. The organization as a whole is missing what Shah calls a “culture of analytics,” something he’s seen at previous employers, where people relied on the data to gauge performance and guide business decisions. “That is not happening,” he says, chuckling. “It’s more looking at it in aggregate: ‘Facebook: Is it going up or down?’” Most editors aren’t interested in the nuanced data; they only want to know if it’s driving traffic. But often web initiatives are started without tracking codes in place, so response isn’t even measured.

“When people have to be responsible for the numbers, there’s an element of fear,” Shah says. “When numbers go down, they’re accountable for it. When you bring in more accountability, backed by numbers, it kind of makes the situation a little scary.”

All of the buzz around social media is a by-product of unrealistic expectations. “The days of expecting your readership to come to your website are long gone,” claims Boutet. “They expect news to come to them.” But consider Twitter, the current paragon of social media. A Pew Research Center study done in June 2010 found that just 17 percent of American Twitter users regularly get news from the service. Just one percent of those surveyed called Facebook one of their top sites for news. Compare that with the full third of the general public that is using search engines at least three times a week to get their news. Apparently Twitter’s not that crucial to most people in terms of news gathering. Another Pew study, released earlier in 2010, found that “being able to follow the news site through social networking” ranked dead last in a list of eight features important to users, falling just behind “interactive content like graphics and quizzes.”

The reality is that social networking is not an absolutely essential component of a media brand—at least for now. “Has Malcolm Gladwell not being active on social media affected the  sales of his articles in The New Yorker, or his books? I would think not,” says Mitch Joel, president of digital marketing agency Twist Image, whose clients include Air Canada, TD Canada Trust and Microsoft. “There’s not a hard and fast rule that says this is the way it has to be. You can look at brands like the Economist—people will pay for that which they have defined as being valuable. Social media doesn’t really change that.”

It’s unfortunate that social media has had the role of saviour thrust upon it by a desperate industry. It has real, valuable applications in the newsroom, but working miracles is not one of them. “People see it as a zero-sum game, where if social media isn’t going to save you then there’s no point in doing it,” says Joel. “And that’s not true.” News organizations need to step back and reevaluate social media as a tool, not as a cultural trend. “Unless you have that core strategy in mind, just to do any of this stuff in the hope or prayer that it’s going to save you is insane.” It’s unknown what the Post has to gain by being the coolest kids on the digital block. But it’s all too clear what it has to lose.

I decided I wanted to be a writer when I was 15. I still have the “Personal/Professional Action Plan” I completed for a Grade 10 careers class that lists the 10 steps I would take toward success. My last five: “Apply to Ryerson University; Get accepted to Ryerson University; Enter into journalism program; Choose area of study; Work hard and succeed in area of study.” I estimated I’d spend $5,000 a year on tuition and an additional $2,000 in expenses to jump-start what I thought would be a happy and lucrative career.

I was a naïve high school student, and I also made a journalist’s biggest mistake: I didn’t do my research. For my fourth-year of journalism school, tuition was more than a thousand dollars over my original estimate. I’ve spent more than $2,000 a year on cigarettes to soothe me while juggling multiple deadlines and worrying about how to survive without Belmonts as I work for free after graduation.

I’m talking about unpaid internships, the bane—or lifeblood, depending on how you look at it—of today’s young journalists’ existence.

Since the first pack of unpaid interns started photocopying and fact-checking, journalists have engaged in a moral debate. Some see unpaid internships as necessary educational experiences; others think it’s slave labour. Since then, the debate has grown tired, the lines have long been drawn, and many have picked their side.

But exact figures rarely come up in this well-worn discussion. What are internships really worth in dollars and cents? Are youngsters throwing away thousands? Do media outlets need internships to preserve their bottom lines? Being budget-minded myself, this time, I decided to do my research and crunch some numbers.

School lets out in May. So what would a student like myself lose by interning for four months instead of flipping burgers this summer? If my full-time gig were to pay Ontario’s minimum wage of $10.25 per hour, I’d miss out on $5,221.28 after taxes. Since full-time undergraduate tuition in Ontario averages at $6,300, and the average student with a loan in Ontario owes $22,700 after graduation, the pay from the burger joint could cover about 83 percent of one year’s tuition, or 23 percent of the loan.

That’s some dismal math. But look at it another way: internships can act as a cheap replacement for further education. Tuition for a two-year master’s degree in journalism is $17,343 at Ryerson. For five semesters of study at the University of British Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism it’s $10,200. On top of that, you have to pay to eat and live somewhere while you write essays on media ethics.
So, for industry newbies, the cost can vary. But what about the publication’s costs? Let’s look at the most internship-reliant sector: magazines.

Canadian Living, for example, hires about 12 interns a year, who work three or four days a week for three month periods, says Doug O’Neill, the magazine’s executive editor. They contribute between 3,024 and 4,042 unpaid hours to the magazine annually. If each of these interns were paid minimum wage in 2010, the magazine would have spent anywhere from $30,996 to $41,328.

Perhaps in these tough times Canadian Living can’t afford the equivalent of one entry-level salary, but take into consideration the magazine’s 8 percent increase in revenue from 2003 to 2009, and its total revenue of more than $41 million in 2009. Paying all of its interns minimum wage that year would cost the publication less than 0.09 percent of its total revenue.

While Canadian Living does pay interns for features that are published in the magazine, I asked why it couldn’t afford to actually pay their young workers. Transcontinental Media declined to comment.

Fun fact: Transcontinental’s former CEO, Luc Desjardins, earned $4 million in 2008.

St. Joseph Media is a publishing company which publishes Toronto Life, Quill & Quire, and Canadian Family among other magazines. Its publications have attracted more than 6.5 million readers, according to its website, and boasts of 158 National Magazine Awards over the past five years. The company pools revenue from all of its publications, and then doles out budgets.
Interns at five of its top eight publications also work an estimated 26,040 unpaid hours per year.

Toronto Life made more than $9 million in 2009. The magazine employs interns in four departments who work full-time for four months, unpaid. All positions are not always filled, but in an ideal situation, the magazine would have 12 interns per year, says Matthew Fox, an online editor at the magazine.

In a 12-intern best-case scenario, paying each intern would cost Toronto Life $68,880, or around 0.6 percent of its revenue.

I do realize that my math is relying on revenue numbers. “I would suggest you look at profit instead of revenue because that tells a completely different story. If you look at those, your percentage of what it would cost to pay an intern goes way, way, up,” says Fox. Too bad many privately owned media outlets don’t release those numbers.

Though not every publication is cheaping-out on interns (at least according to my flawed math). At Maclean’s magazine, which is unionized, interns are paid; they receive $22,500 for one year, and those who help out for three months over the summer, are paid $1,750 a month. Not bad considering the publication saw an 11 percent drop in annual revenue in 2009, as well as a drop of nearly 18 percent in total revenue from 2003 to 2009. The publication took in over $30 million in 2009—a big chunk less than Canadian Living.

That year, there were 1,276 consumer magazines in Canada, along with thousands of TV and radio stations, newspapers and other media outlets that employ interns. But continuing my number crunching would make this article as tiresome as the moral debate.

The bottom line is that internships mean more financially to the trainees that work thousands of hours for free than they do to the big organizations that employ them. However, it’s still a cheaper option for new journalists than shelling out for grad school. Forget whining. No need to launch another intern blog. These are the cold, hard, facts.

Chris Boutet’s desk at the National Post would be completely unassuming if it weren’t for the towering, narrow monitor in the corner, swarming with activity. Its sole purpose: to display TweetDeck, a program that monitors Twitter feeds. Boutet, who follows 1,600 of them, needs it to stay organized. “I have that unblinking eye staring at me at all times,” he says, laughing. He’s categorized the chaos into 20-odd columns: National Post feeds, other big media outlets, social media experts, etc. The monitor is updated multiple times a second. In its shadow is his other computer: an Apple laptop about half the size. The Post’s homepage is on its screen, but he leans forward and points to the lower right-hand corner. This computer alerts him when new tweets are posted as well.

Boutet seems the perfect figure to head the paper’s web team. Wearing a dark blazer and square, thick-framed glasses, and sporting a hint of stubble, he’s young but not too young, cleancut but Silicon Valley casual, professional but enthusiastic.Even though social networking is only one aspect of Boutet’s job as the Post’s senior producer of digital media, it takes up a hefty chunk of his workday. “We’re not a large newsroom,” he says. “We have to be really careful about how we parcel our time.”

The Post’s web team is probably the scrappiest and most experimental of any mainstream Canadian media brand, judging from the way websites like Mediabistro, SocialTimes and the Nieman Journalism Lab cover its web activity. The Post currently maintains more than a dozen Twitter feeds, an extensive network of blogs, a busy Facebook page, and occasionally reporters live-chat with readers. The Post is also experimenting with Instagram, the iPhone photo-sharing app, and other mobile social networking tools. Whenever the web team sees traffic flooding to a Post article from an aggregate site like Reddit, they embed a banner in the body of the story: “Welcome Reddit readers!”

In 2010, the web team branched out into Foursquare, the location- based social networking site that lets users “check in” at real-world locations (like city hall or Starbucks) to tell their friends where they are. Then members can read tips and upload photos related to the venue. The person who checks in the most often becomes a location’s “mayor.” Boutet and his staffers started playing with the platform in May 2010, when it was just over a year old, creating imaginary venues and leaving silly tips. (According to Foursquare, the National Post’s headquarters is home to “Chris Boutet’s Soul,” which is described as the finest theme park and hookah bar in Toronto.)

Office games aside, Boutet saw enough value in Foursquare to establish an official partnership in which the Post provides reviews and news stories about locations that Foursquare users visit. “We’re not doing it because we think it’s cool,” he claims. It’s unclear, however, how the Post can benefit from a service that doesn’t have all that much to do with its national audience. Foursquare is a relatively tiny service, with only 6.5 million users worldwide (Twitter has 175 million; Facebook has 500 million) and, as the Post discovered, it has its limitations. Much of the content that the web team is able to publish is Toronto-centric—a problem that has stopped other publications from jumping on board. “I think it’s very exciting,” says Jennifer MacMillan, communities editor for The Globe and Mail. But based on where the Globe’s readers are, it hasn’t adopted Foursquare. For now, it’s sticking to Facebook and Twitter.

But like the bosses at many news organizations, those at the Post are hungry for innovation. “If we don’t do things differently, then we’re just not going to survive. People want to get their news when they want it, on the platform that they want to receive it on,” says Paul Godfrey, Postmedia ceo, during a keynote speech at the Audit Bureau of Circulations’ annual conference last November. The event was titled “Media in Transformation: Harnessing Today’s Digital World,” and Godfrey believes that social media is a big part of that transformation. But the Post’s web editors take on new projects largely based on interest, with few formal policies and little top-down direction.

Boutet says the approach has been “shotgun-blasting content everywhere” to see what works. On Foursquare, his team posted up to a dozen stories every day from July to January, at varied venues like Roy Thomson Hall and Dairy Queen, but they’ve scaled back to five or fewer. According to Boutet, tips like “Try the cappuccino!” often drowned out breaking news that the Post was pushing. Their reviews also saw limited return in number of readers. “It takes nothing— basically nothing—for us to put them up, so we still put them up,” he says. “But we don’t see a lot of actual trackback on that.”

The Post made a bigger splash in January after it revived its presence on the blogging platform Tumblr. The Post’s “Trenta graphic — which showed that the newest Starbucks coffee cup is actually larger than the average human stomach — spread rapidly through social networks and blogs, ending up on cnn the same day. Its success was partly due to the team’s “brute force” strategy: after tagging a post by subject, they find all the online social channels related to that topic and “just hit follow, follow, follow, follow, follow,” to try to catch tastemakers’ attention. They believe that by paying attention to the people who set the online conversation, they will reciprocate and help spread the Post’s message. “It’s a very manual, laborious process,” says Boutet.

The hope is that all of this effort, including hours steeped in analytic software, will help the newspaper find a solvent place in the digital era. Yet for all of Boutet’s enthusiasm, it’s unclear exactly what the Post gains from the web team’s hard work—and that’s dangerous. The Post is investing a lot of staff time and energy (and thus money) that could go toward other projects. In a world of shrinking newsrooms and unprecedented competition, where investigative journalism, fact-checkers and copy editors are often dismissed as luxuries, a news organization needs to be able to justify every strain on its resources. If a dollar value can’t be found, then they’re wasting their time just as much as a teenager surfing Facebook at the back of the class.

It’s not just the Post that’s gone crazy for social media, of course. It’s described in messianic terms almost everywhere. “I think it offers the key to survival,” says Mathew Ingram, senior writer at GigaOM, a technology blog that covers everything from iPhone games to biofuel. It is listed among the world’s top blogs by tech-news and reviews site CNET and the leading blog directory Technorati. “I don’t want to overstate it, but I think that’s the only thing newspapers have going for them,” Ingram says. Businesses of all kinds have embraced the future: according to a 2009 survey of over 500 American companies, 86 percent are using social networks for business purposes. Amongst the news media, there are few holdouts, says Jay Rosen, press critic, writer and professor of journalism at New York University. Rosen is known for supporting citizen journalism. In February, he was selected as a member of Postmedia’s new digital advisory board. “There is a dwindling number of curmudgeons that says journalism is journalism, and that we don’t need any of this new technology,” he says. “They’re slowly disappearing and they have no influence.”

By now, the business uses of social media are fairly well understood. It can help push your content out to the masses and reach people outside your core audience. By using Tumblr, for instance, the Post has tapped into a younger, female demographic. Social media can help build loyalty to a brand by encouraging repeat readers. And when the newspaper model is often dismissed as obsolete, it’s useful to be perceived as tech-savvy and progressive. But so far, newsrooms have banked on the conventional wisdom that if you build a big audience, advertising dollars will follow; soon, they hope. Unfortunately, you can’t pay your staff with your reputation. The question is whether social media is capable of paying off in real dollars and cents.

“If you want to really do community and social media properly, it costs money,” says Ingram, who served as the Globe’s communities editor until January 2010. “It takes resources and time. The only thing worse than not doing it at all is doing it in a half-assed way because that actually can make your reputation worse.” However, Ingram’s thoughts on how to make a return on that investment are still fuzzy. “There is no clear value chain between responding to someone on Twitter and some tangible net income. There just isn’t.” Even with the availability of analytical data like what sites readers came from, or how long they spend on the page, the monetary value of social media is frustratingly vague. Ingram argues that this shouldn’t matter— many news outlets’ priorities are just as intangible. “What’s the return on investment of having fewer mistakes in your newspaper?” he asks. “The reality is that people read newspapers that are riddled with mistakes all the time, and they don’t seem to care.”

But in an era of diminishing revenues, media owners need to care. The reality is that online advertising is so cheap that it may not be worth the effort—and the rates are only getting cheaper. In 2009 the average cost to reach 1,000 viewers on news sites dropped 10 percent from $11.40 to $10.26 in just half a year, according to Adify—now known as Cox Digital Solutions—an organization which helps maximize revenue for advertisers, agencies and publishers. ComScore, an Internet marketing research company, reports that the low cost of advertising on social networking sites could be to blame for cheapening online ad sales overall. Its figures suggest social networks dragged down average rates by as much as 18 percent between mid-2009 and mid-2010.

One former newspaper executive is skeptical of how much social media can deliver in terms of driving page views. “Look at how much traffic Facebook and Twitter really contribute,” says Ken Maclean, who until August 2010 was vice president of digital media for Postmedia’s eastern properties. “The most important traffic driver you’ve got is making sure you rank high on Google. That is going to drive a lot more traffic than a lot of the activities you do around social media.” Take the Vancouver Sun, for instance. According to Maclean, the Sun has achieved tremendous success by using its man-hours to go deeper into stories than anyone else, striving to reach the top spot on web searches. “If you look at the sheer volume of page views that you can monetize,” he says, “Google at this stage is at least as important, if not more so, than social media.”

One would expect that with so much talk, so much promise and so much at stake, news organizations would track social media closely, developing long-term action plans and figuring out how this will help them survive. For Postmedia at least, that doesn’t seem to be true. “At least in the environments I have worked in, there wasn’t a really consolidated social media strategy,” says Maclean. The activities didn’t get their own budgets, for instance, so the return on investment was unclear. “I don’t know too many folks who have really taken it to that level yet.” This seems to be the standard—a 2009 survey found that only 40 percent of companies using social media had budgets for them, and only 16 percent were trying to track the return on their investment.

So why have news organizations been so quick to adopt social media? “There’s a certain level of pressure to chase the shiny cat toy,” says Maclean. The omnipresent hype has pushed people to get into these new channels without clearly thinking about the why— they just feel they need to be there. Maclean compares it to the proliferation of iPad news applications, which are often rushed out by publishers who don’t know how they’re going to make any money off them. “I’m a big believer of ‘if you can’t measure it, you can’t manage it,’” Maclean says, “and I would apply that to everything, but social media is the one place where it really is not that well defined. Everything else, every dollar we have spent, every activity we undertook, I would always look at it and say, ‘What is this actually delivering in terms of something we can monetize?’ But I would say that for social media, people are not tracking it well and they don’t really understand what the benefit is versus the effort that’s being put into it.”

Somehow social media has been absolved of the burden of proof. Analytics services can provide nuanced data about readers, who are much easier to track online than off. But even though the tools are there, they aren’t always being used effectively. “There haven’t been any direct requests about specific social media campaigns, per se,” says Ali Shah, a web data analyst for Postmedia. “I think we’re just touching the tip of the iceberg.” Shah creates general week-by-week reports that include some social media metrics, and content producers have access to statistical data on their own, but no one’s really asking for the richer detail and the analysis that the research team can provide.

The Post team prefers to watch its own analytics—after all, the paper acts semi-autonomously from Postmedia and was the first to take full responsibility of its web presence. The organization as a whole is missing what Shah calls a “culture of analytics,” something he’s seen at previous employers, where people relied on the data to gauge performance and guide business decisions. “That is not happening,” he says, chuckling. “It’s more looking at it in aggregate: ‘Facebook: Is it going up or down?’” Most editors aren’t interested in the nuanced data; they only want to know if it’s driving traffic. But often web initiatives are started without tracking codes in place, so response isn’t even measured.

“When people have to be responsible for the numbers, there’s an element of fear,” Shah says. “When numbers go down, they’re accountable for it. When you bring in more accountability, backed by numbers, it kind of makes the situation a little scary.”

All of the buzz around social media is a by-product of unrealistic expectations. “The days of expecting your readership to come to your website are long gone,” claims Boutet. “They expect news to come to them.” But consider Twitter, the current paragon of social media. A Pew Research Center study done in June 2010 found that just 17 percent of American Twitter users regularly get news from the service. Just one percent of those surveyed called Facebook one of their top sites for news. Compare that with the full third of the general public that is using search engines at least three times a week to get their news. Apparently Twitter’s not that crucial to most people in terms of news gathering. Another Pew study, released earlier in 2010, found that “being able to follow the news site through social networking” ranked dead last in a list of eight features important to users, falling just behind “interactive content like graphics and quizzes.”

The reality is that social networking is not an absolutely essential component of a media brand—at least for now. “Has Malcolm Gladwell not being active on social media affected the sales of his articles in The New Yorker, or his books? I would think not,” says Mitch Joel, president of digital marketing agency Twist Image, whose clients include Air Canada, TD Canada Trust and Microsoft. “There’s not a hard and fast rule that says this is the way it has to be. You can look at brands like the Economist—people will pay for that which they have defined as being valuable. Social media doesn’t really change that.”

It’s unfortunate that social media has had the role of saviour thrust upon it by a desperate industry. It has real, valuable applications in the newsroom, but working miracles is not one of them. “People see it as a zero-sum game, where if social media isn’t going to save you then there’s no point in doing it,” says Joel. “And that’s not true.” News organizations need to step back and reevaluate social media as a tool, not as a cultural trend. “Unless you have that core strategy in mind, just to do any of this stuff in the hope or prayer that it’s going to save you is insane.” It’s unknown what the Post has to gain by being the coolest kids on the digital block. But it’s all too clear what it has to lose.

Indeed, mobile applications are a bright spot on the media landscape when it comes to ongoing efforts to attract and retain readers and viewers. Part of the success can be attributed to the exploding market for smartphones and other mobile devices. A spring 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 35 percent of adults in the U.S. have phone apps. True, most of them serve other uses—games, directions, even shopping—but apps are a natural fit for news media. The anytime, anywhere nature of smartphones makes it easier for news organizations to send out breaking stories or updates.

Apps represent the next step in digital distribution of news and information, and their adoption serves as a barometer of a publication’s devotion to evolution. The popularity of mobile applications is creating an environment in which competitors are pushing one another to devote more resources to app development, hopefully leading to better products and increased market share. “It’s like the early days of the internet,” says Alan C. Middleton, assistant professor of marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business.

Although apps offer intriguing possibilities for media companies, the future is uncharted. Companies are experimenting with app strategies to suit their own individual brands. For some, that has meant heavy investments in mobile applications to grow and develop an audience. Others are simply focusing on keeping their brand in the media mix. No major outlets, however, are ignoring mobile apps as a distribution tool. If one thing can be said for sure, it’s this: if you’re not currently in the mobile business, you’re already behind.

Dale Fallon lays out his impressive collection of phones on the table in his office—an iPhone 4, a BlackBerry Bold, a Google Nexus One and a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. He scrambles to find his Nokia somewhere in the boxes above his desk, clawing through old flip-phones, batteries and tangles of wires. “I have a lot of phones,” he says sheepishly.

Fallon has been Score Media’s director of mobile since 2007, when the network started devoting more resources to its mobile presence. Back then, its apps were fairly basic score services. Today it offers a broad range of apps, supported on a wide variety of smartphone platforms. Outside the network’s headquarters in downtown Toronto, a giant billboard ad jokes that the Score’s apps are too addictive and cautions passersby not to download them.

The Score started out as a 24-hour highlight reel, but the channel’s licence restrictions have been loosened over the years, allowing it to broadcast programs such as Raptors games, a satellite radio show, and mma/wwe fights. The channel now reaches 6.8 million homes across Canada, far more than with its original audience, but it still lags behind rival networks TSN and Sportsnet.

To compensate, the Score has been forced to expand its audience in different ways. It was the first Canadian sports network, for example, to create an iPad application. In June 2010, the Score launched its soccer app, Score Mobile FC, to coincide with the World Cup, picking up around 300,000 unique users. The network’s hardcore soccer following, served in part by the afternoon program The Footy Show, contributed to that number.

The Score’s apps have generated valuable international exposure for the network, including mentions on “Best App” lists around the globe. In the bigger picture, the network’s mobile strategy has helped lift company revenue to more than $43 million in 2010, from less than $30 million in 2006.

For ESPN, the largest sports broadcaster in North America, the emphasis of its app strategy isn’t necessarily trying to innovate, but to complement the network’s formidable existing coverage. If you can’t watch ESPN on TV, the network wants to make sure you pull out your smartphone. espn’s success in the mobile sector has come from leveraging its potent brand to make ScoreCenter the number one free sports app in Apple’s App Store.

“The best available screen is a principle of ours,” says Kevin Ota, ESPN’s director of digital media communications. “The optimal way to watch sports [apart from in person] is on a 55-inch HD or a 3D screen, but we all have busy lives.”

It should come as no surprise that sports media outlets are early leaders in the market for mobile apps. Sports fans, after all, have always pored over box scores. The nature of sports news itself is immediate and definite. A game is won or lost. A player is traded. That’s one of the reasons sports broadcasters and publications still dominate the news app rankings. Traditional news organizations, however, are also making important inroads.

For example, The Globe and Mail is putting more emphasis on creating and editing digital content for both its website and mobile app. The effort is paying off, especially on the app front. After its first launch in 2009, the Globe’s apps have been downloaded more than 750,000 times. Developed for both iPhone and BlackBerry devices, they grab 20 million page views a month. “It’s quickly becoming a third pillar of Globe and Mail content delivery,” says Matt Frehner, the Globe’s mobile editor.

Much of the Globe’s success in mobile news can be attributed to the fact that it was the first national Canadian newspaper to launch an app. “[The early rollout] was the experimentation phase,” Frehner says. “We’re still testing the waters, seeing what works and what doesn’t work.

That head start meant that the paper was able to benefit sooner from user reaction, and had more time to refine its offering before the market started becoming more competitive. It also meant the Globe was able to benefit sooner from user reaction. That early launch strategy is carrying over into other digital projects. The Globe’s iPad app, for example, was quickly built in a couple of months. “[The app] was about getting something out there that we were proud of, that we thought worked well and we used it as a basic first approach,” Frehner says. “If you try to put out the perfect app, you’ll never make it out to market.” Even with a basic effort, the paper pre-sold the first three months of ad inventory for the iPad app.

Laying down the early groundwork has allowed the Globe to improve, and its mobile traffic has doubled in the past year. That figure reflects industry-wide growth—the Gartner research firm recently released a study forecasting 17.7 billion app downloads worldwide in 2011, more than double the 2010 figure. But while the Globe may have an early lead, its competitors are closing the gap. Both the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest paper by circulation, and the National Postlaunched apps for the iPhone and the iPad in 2010.

Although the Post trails the Globe in traditional readership, it is counting on its brand to carry its app. “We always get lumped in with The Globe and Mail, but the fact is, we’re not the same,” says Duncan Clark, director of product management for the Post. The paper is focusing on its core audience—a “fiscally conservative” readership with “personality” and a “sense of humour,” according to the paper.

Even so, the Globe is miles ahead. The Post launched its app just before Christmas 2010, to take advantage of the spike in new mobile users during the holidays. But the company only recently started taking advantage of reader feedback on its app. Still, Clark is optimistic about its prospects. “We’ve been extremely happy with the response,” he says. “What we’ve learned from these apps is that we can reach people not just in a different place but in a different time of day from newspaper consumption.” Up next for the Post this spring, support for a burgeoning Google Android phone market.

Meanwhile, the Globe has started to move into the next phase of development, focusing on what it calls “agile” mobile development. While something such as the Globe’s main news app may take up to eight months to develop, agile development aims to build a smaller product every couple of weeks. For example, the paper, in partnership with Xtreme Labs, released their Globe Politics application for Apple products just before the 2011 Canadian election was announced. The daily hopes this will help its mobile development stay up to date.

Whether the Post follows the Globe down this road remains to be seen. For the time being, however, Clark is not overly concerned about short-term competition. “I don’t feel there are people saying, ‘Am I going to download the National Post or the Globe or the Star?’” he says. “I think it’s likely that they’ll have all three. Will they like using all three? Every user’s focus is different. When it comes to us, we have a heavily financial focus. There’s a myriad of apps [beyond traditional newspapers] that are, quote unquote, competitors to us.”

For an industry with flagging readership and advertising, mobile applications are a new way to bolster ad sales and increase distribution. Even so, there are plenty of obstacles and uncertainties in this evolving market. For instance, when it comes to traditional digital, print or broadcast distribution, news organizations are in control of the process. They own their servers, trucks and towers, or contract businesses that deliver the best service at the best price. When it comes to mobile applications, media companies must depend on app stores, which operate under their own agendas. Apple, for example, is infamous for removing content it finds objectionable. The company has also earned criticism from publishers for taking a hefty share of the revenue earned from paid applications, like magazine subscriptions.) Smartphone technology
is also changing rapidly, forcing the media to continually invest in updating and developing new applications for the latest mobile devices.

But these issues can be largely ascribed to growing pains in a market that shows considerable promise. They certainly aren’t deterring media companies. “We’ve seen a tremendous appetite for this,” Clark says. “It’s an ever-evolving medium. This one seems to be evolving more than others.” Audiences are moving with the times. For news organizations, that’s a sign that the best is yet to come—perhaps sooner rather than later.

If you want proof that mobile applications have big potential in the media industry, you’ll find some of the most telling evidence in sports. Fans are downloading them in spectacular numbers. The Hockey News announced in September that its app was downloaded for the millionth time, a notable achievement given the magazine’s single-sport niche. The numbers are even more remarkable for national sport broadcasters. The mobile apps for the Score, Canada’s third-place sports cable broadcaster, together average 2.1 million unique users every month. During TSN’s 2011 NHL trade deadline coverage, its “TradeCentre” program was the second most-downloaded free sports app on the Canadian iTunes store—impressive considering it was a once-a-year event.

Indeed, mobile applications are a bright spot on the media landscape when it comes to ongoing efforts to attract and retain readers and viewers. Part of the success can be attributed to the exploding market for smartphones and other mobile devices. A spring 2010 survey by the Pew Research Center found that 35 percent of adults in the U.S. have phone apps. True, most of them serve other uses—games, directions, even shopping—but apps are a natural fit for news media. The anytime, anywhere nature of smartphones makes it easier for news organizations to send out breaking stories or updates.

Apps represent the next step in digital distribution of news and information, and their adoption serves as a barometer of a publication’s devotion to evolution. The popularity of mobile applications is creating an environment in which competitors are pushing one another to devote more resources to app development, hopefully leading to better products and increased market share. “It’s like the early days of the internet,” says Alan C. Middleton, assistant professor of marketing at York University’s Schulich School of Business.

Although apps offer intriguing possibilities for media companies, the future is uncharted. Companies are experimenting with app strategies to suit their own individual brands. For some, that has meant heavy investments in mobile applications to grow and develop an audience. Others are simply focusing on keeping their brand in the media mix. No major outlets, however, are ignoring mobile apps as a distribution tool. If one thing can be said for sure, it’s this: if you’re not currently in the mobile business, you’re already behind.

Dale Fallon lays out his impressive collection of phones on the table in his office—an iPhone 4, a BlackBerry Bold, a Google Nexus One and a Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. He scrambles to find his Nokia somewhere in the boxes above his desk, clawing through old flip-phones, batteries and tangles of wires. “I have a lot of phones,” he says sheepishly.

Fallon has been Score Media’s director of mobile since 2007, when the network started devoting more resources to its mobile presence. Back then, its apps were fairly basic score services. Today it offers a broad range of apps, supported on a wide variety of smartphone platforms. Outside the network’s headquarters in downtown Toronto, a giant billboard ad jokes that the Score’s apps are too addictive and cautions passersby not to download them.

The Score started out as a 24-hour highlight reel, but the channel’s licence restrictions have been loosened over the years, allowing it to broadcast programs such as Raptors games, a satellite radio show, and mma/wwe fights. The channel now reaches 6.8 million homes across Canada, far more than with its original audience, but it still lags behind rival networks TSN and Sportsnet.

To compensate, the Score has been forced to expand its audience in different ways. It was the first Canadian sports network, for example, to create an iPad application. In June 2010, the Score launched its soccer app, Score Mobile FC, to coincide with the World Cup, picking up around 300,000 unique users. The network’s hardcore soccer following, served in part by the afternoon program The Footy Show, contributed to that number.

The Score’s apps have generated valuable international exposure for the network, including mentions on “Best App” lists around the globe. In the bigger picture, the network’s mobile strategy has helped lift company revenue to more than $43 million in 2010, from less than $30 million in 2006.

For ESPN, the largest sports broadcaster in North America, the emphasis of its app strategy isn’t necessarily trying to innovate, but to complement the network’s formidable existing coverage. If you can’t watch ESPN on TV, the network wants to make sure you pull out your smartphone. espn’s success in the mobile sector has come from leveraging its potent brand to make ScoreCenter the number one free sports app in Apple’s App Store.

“The best available screen is a principle of ours,” says Kevin Ota, ESPN’s director of digital media communications. “The optimal way to watch sports [apart from in person] is on a 55-inch HD or a 3D screen, but we all have busy lives.”

It should come as no surprise that sports media outlets are early leaders in the market for mobile apps. Sports fans, after all, have always pored over box scores. The nature of sports news itself is immediate and definite. A game is won or lost. A player is traded. That’s one of the reasons sports broadcasters and publications still dominate the news app rankings. Traditional news organizations, however, are also making important inroads.

For example, The Globe and Mail is putting more emphasis on creating and editing digital content for both its website and mobile app. The effort is paying off, especially on the app front. After its first launch in 2009, the Globe’s apps have been downloaded more than 750,000 times. Developed for both iPhone and BlackBerry devices, they grab 20 million page views a month. “It’s quickly becoming a third pillar of Globe and Mail content delivery,” says Matt Frehner, the Globe’s mobile editor.

Much of the Globe’s success in mobile news can be attributed to the fact that it was the first national Canadian newspaper to launch an app. “[The early rollout] was the experimentation phase,” Frehner says. “We’re still testing the waters, seeing what works and what doesn’t work.

That head start meant that the paper was able to benefit sooner from user reaction, and had more time to refine its offering before the market started becoming more competitive. It also meant the Globe was able to benefit sooner from user reaction. That early launch strategy is carrying over into other digital projects. The Globe’s iPad app, for example, was quickly built in a couple of months. “[The app] was about getting something out there that we were proud of, that we thought worked well and we used it as a basic first approach,” Frehner says. “If you try to put out the perfect app, you’ll never make it out to market.” Even with a basic effort, the paper pre-sold the first three months of ad inventory for the iPad app.

Laying down the early groundwork has allowed the Globe to improve, and its mobile traffic has doubled in the past year. That figure reflects industry-wide growth—the Gartner research firm recently released a study forecasting 17.7 billion app downloads worldwide in 2011, more than double the 2010 figure. But while the Globe may have an early lead, its competitors are closing the gap. Both the Toronto Star, Canada’s largest paper by circulation, and the National Post launched apps for the iPhone and the iPad in 2010.

Although the Post trails the Globe in traditional readership, it is counting on its brand to carry its app. “We always get lumped in with The Globe and Mail, but the fact is, we’re not the same,” says Duncan Clark, director of product management for the Post. The paper is focusing on its core audience—a “fiscally conservative” readership with “personality” and a “sense of humour,” according to the paper.

Even so, the Globe is miles ahead. The Post launched its app just before Christmas 2010, to take advantage of the spike in new mobile users during the holidays. But the company only recently started taking advantage of reader feedback on its app. Still, Clark is optimistic about its prospects. “We’ve been extremely happy with the response,” he says. “What we’ve learned from these apps is that we can reach people not just in a different place but in a different time of day from newspaper consumption.” Up next for the Post this spring, support for a burgeoning Google Android phone market.

Meanwhile, the Globe has started to move into the next phase of development, focusing on what it calls “agile” mobile development. While something such as the Globe’s main news app may take up to eight months to develop, agile development aims to build a smaller product every couple of weeks. For example, the paper, in partnership with Xtreme Labs, released their Globe Politics application for Apple products just before the 2011 Canadian election was announced. The daily hopes this will help its mobile development stay up to date.

Whether the Post follows the Globe down this road remains to be seen. For the time being, however, Clark is not overly concerned about short-term competition. “I don’t feel there are people saying, ‘Am I going to download the National Post or the Globe or the Star?’” he says. “I think it’s likely that they’ll have all three. Will they like using all three? Every user’s focus is different. When it comes to us, we have a heavily financial focus. There’s a myriad of apps [beyond traditional newspapers] that are, quote unquote, competitors to us.”

For an industry with flagging readership and advertising, mobile applications are a new way to bolster ad sales and increase distribution. Even so, there are plenty of obstacles and uncertainties in this evolving market. For instance, when it comes to traditional digital, print or broadcast distribution, news organizations are in control of the process. They own their servers, trucks and towers, or contract businesses that deliver the best service at the best price. When it comes to mobile applications, media companies must depend on app stores, which operate under their own agendas. Apple, for example, is infamous for removing content it finds objectionable. The company has also earned criticism from publishers for taking a hefty share of the revenue earned from paid applications, like magazine subscriptions.) Smartphone technology
is also changing rapidly, forcing the media to continually invest in updating and developing new applications for the latest mobile devices.

But these issues can be largely ascribed to growing pains in a market that shows considerable promise. They certainly aren’t deterring media companies. “We’ve seen a tremendous appetite for this,” Clark says. “It’s an ever-evolving medium. This one seems to be evolving more than others.” Audiences are moving with the times. For news organizations, that’s a sign that the best is yet to come—perhaps sooner rather than later.