And so, after five years in France, it came time for Adam Gopnik to leave. As The New Yorker‘s Paris correspondent, he’d covered the trial of a former secretary-general for complicity in war crimes during the Nazi occupation and the media circus that ensued (“a kind of O.J. trial, without television or a glove”). He’d spoken with chefs on the state of haute cuisine and watched the city shut down as mailmen and metro workers went on strike. His journalism was good, but his personal essays on foreign culture—the comedies of difference between Paris and New York City life—were especially well received.

The local gym was a far cry from its American counterpart, it turned out. A single weekly visit was considered disciplined. In “The Rookie,” he’d tried to explain baseball to his son, Luke—there were, understandably, few local teams—mythologizing its rules and rivalries for added amusement. And in a recurring Gopnik theme, he would visit Luxembourg Gardens, with its carousels and puppet shows, relics of old-world living. “You grasp more of French life by seeing how they birth a baby than by following election returns,” he explained. Paris to the Moon, a collection from his five-year correspondence, is now an international bestseller.

But in 2000, it was time to go home. He and his wife had a newborn daughter, and the couple wanted to send their son to a New York school. Meanwhile, Gopnik had grown wary of repeating himself. “Your readers know it even if they can’t put their finger on what it is,” he says. “The moment I thought self-consciously about how I would engineer a little comedy of difference”—learning how to drive, for example—”that’s shtick.”

When the 55-year-old author and essayist writes about himself, he’s not really the subject. We don’t read Adam Gopnik to hear about him, but to hear from him—what he thinks and how the world looks through his eyes. His comic sentimental essays are not merely inward-looking observations; he avoids self-indulgence in pursuit of a greater truth. He excels at this style of writing—and yet, he is ready to move on. His children are getting older, their experiences no longer his to share. And so he writes about them less. Where he once documented the death of his daughter’s fish or his young son’s linguistic errors, he now draws connections between Darwin and Lincoln instead. And just as he left Paris, in part, fearful of shtick, he’d rather not be typecast as the man who primarily writes about his kids.

In the prime of his career, he no longer hesitates to call himself an essayist, and has set his sights on a higher standard defined by The New Yorker‘s early literary greats—a difficult goal for any writer to achieve. His focus has shifted to grander, more humanist subjects, from information overload to the history of romanticized winter. But in becoming an old-school essayist, there is certainly an element of risk. On the one hand, readers are enthusiastic about long-form writing again in a way that no one could have predicted. Online sites such as Longreads exist for the sole purpose of finding the best in-depth stories on the web. On the other, a declining print industry means smaller budgets and fewer features, things once in abundance for essayists of old. And perhaps most importantly, there is no guarantee that new readers will take to Gopnik’s style, or that it will succeed in any enduring way. But if a classical revival is what Gopnik wants, there might not be a better time than now.

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

On January 16, the major news story—major enough to be compared to Titanic—was the sinking of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia. Teaching Kids News ran with the story: “Cruise Ship Runs Aground In Italy.” But on GoGoNews—”Big News For Little People”—the featured stories were about a Chinese duck making its way to California and a penny that was auctioned off in Florida for $1 million.

Unfortunately, GoGoNews and Teaching Kids Newsare the full range of English-language options available for Canadian children who are interested in current events but, the thinking goes, not old enough to consume mainstream news. By contrast, there are many American news-for-kids outlets:Scholastic News Online, KidsPost (produced by The Washington Post), and Time For Kids(an offshoot ofTime magazine) are a few of the prominent ones.

If the future of the legacy media rests on developing the next generation of news consumers, what does such a dearth of Canadian news content for children say?

Tony Burman, former managing director of Al Jazeera English and one-time editor-in-chief of CBC Television, is blunt: “Clearly, there’s a need for news organizations in this very competitive world to grab new audiences, and clearly, young people, according to every imaginable survey, don’t interact with traditional news outlets as much as perhaps their parents did. And that is a threat to the business model of newspapers and television stations and radio stations.”

The CBC, for example, has a site for kids, only it has no news content. No one at the CBC kids division, a self-described “safe place for kids to play fun online games,” responded to my request for a statement as to why it doesn’t offer news content for children. Chris Ball, spokesperson for CBC English Services, directed me to What’s Your News, a 30-minute television show that presents “news” for preschoolers where “the news is not the latest car crash or war story, but word that Zander has lost a slipper-sock or that Maya can play the piano with both hands,” CBC explains. Zander and Maya are digital puppets.

In contrast to the major U.S. kids’ news sites, GoGoNews and Teaching Kids News are mom-and-pop operations. Teaching Kids News launched in 2009, a collaboration between freelance journalist Joyce Grant and teachers Jonathan and Kathleen Tilly, who share an interest in the development of children’s literacy skills. Fascinated by how voracious a reader her son was—he could read the yield sign at three and wrote a book report on Romeo and Juliet at nine—Grant created a blog in 2009 called Getting Kids Reading to provide tips for parents. She believed kids would be interested in reading about current events, but thought newspapers were inaccessible because young readers wouldn’t know the difference between a headline and an advertisement. Her path crossed Jonathan Tilly’s in 2009 when he taught her son in Grade 3. Together they developed a 30-minute-a-week current events class, which, at Tilly’s urging, soon became the website. Teaching Kids News features one original news article each weekday for students in Grades 2 to 8; typical pieces cover stories that are of political or human-interest nature, like “Republicans Prepare For U.S. Election In November” or “Stephen Hawking Turns 70.” “We learned from the Grade 3 current-events class that kids don’t want to hear about toys and Justin Bieber and Hannah Montana,” Grant says. “They want to hear about hard news.”

A different philosophy seems to drive GoGoNews, founded by Toronto businesswoman Golnar Khosrowshahi, who was concerned by the age-inappropriate images her twin daughters, then five years old, were seeing on the front pages of newspapers. So in 2006, she created a daily newspaper for her kids—it was basic, she says, reporting little more than the weather and the occasional sports or event-based story. The next year, this daily family paper expanded into a website, which is aimed at seven- to 13-year-olds—roughly the same audience that Teaching Kids News is designed to cater to. Khosrowshahi still writes all the content herself, while holding down a position as president of Reservoir Media Management, a New York-based music publishing company.

A typical home page on GoGoNews might have a main story on a rare white penguin, along with other pieces on everything from a 17-year-old “science star” to a pop culture round-up of Hollywood engagements and divorces. There’s little in the way of current news stories that one would find headlining mainstream news outlets. According to Khosrowshahi, though, the goal is to captivate the child through the entertainment value while slipping in some educational content. “There are so many stories out there that are interesting, and funny, and topical, and appealing,” she says, giving as an example GoGoNews‘s story last fall that suggested Bigfoot might exist. “We don’t want to be seen as something you have to do, for a child. And they don’t need to know that they’re learning anything.”

The two ventures differ in other ways. Teaching Kids News is a simple, easy-to-navigate site that organizes its stories under the headings news, entertainment, science, arts, sports, and politics, plus ESL. A standard piece might be 300 words long, tagged by subject and reading level. The only interactive tools are links to social media accounts and a dictionary search bar.GoGoNews, on the other hand, is multimedia-driven, with articles sorted into five categories: planet, cool, fun, picks, and in-depth. A carousel on the home page features a photo and headline of each piece, linking to the full-length stories, which tend to be no longer than 200 words, and a sidebar provides links to interactive features like GoGoMap—a world map on which the user can click on a country to read GoGoNews articles pertinent to that geographical area. The site’s home page also provides a link to a free GoGoApp on iTunes.

Kate Hammer, education reporter at The Globe and Mail, says both sites present information in a child-friendly way, but she believes Teaching Kids News is superior in terms of content, whileGoGoNews‘s presentation and multimedia interactivity are better. “I think what’s impressive about Teaching Kids News is the issues they tackle on their site. They don’t shy away from controversial or tense situations,” Hammer says. “They tend to take a really thoughtful approach to the news and to what they cover for kids.” As for GoGoNews, she says, “I feel like they’re more on the presentation, on the different features that come with it, which I think are great, too, but there’s a little less substance.” For example, she calls the site’s coverage of the recent political turmoil in Libya, “What’s Happening in Libya?,” not very thought provoking.

Jeffrey Dvorkin, director of the University of Toronto’s journalism program and former managing editor and chief journalist for CBC Radio, also believes both sites are laudable. However, his concern is whether they’re reaching their target audience—a similar concern he recollects from when he worked at the CBC while Anybody Home?, an hour-and-a-half magazine radio program for kids that ran from 1979 to 1983, was still on air. “In my experience, organizations that create news sites for younger readers often end up getting their parents,” he says. “There’s the balancing act that these sites need to do, which is to speak to kids on their own terms without talking down to them. To me, that’s the issue here. These are all terrific ideas and concepts. I’m just not sure whether it reaches the right folks.”

To check his point, I showed Teaching Kids News and GoGoNews to David Pastor, 12, and Celia Vercillo, 13. David, a sports enthusiast from Toronto, believes Teaching Kids News is better than GoGoNews because of its sports coverage and layout. Being too shy, he passed this message along to me through his mother, Lucy Pastor. She says aside from watching The Scoreevery morning to get sports reports, her son doesn’t keep up with the news, but he appreciates the fact that Teaching Kids News more closely resembles a newspaper. Celia, a classmate of David’s, says she sometimes reads the Toronto Star and National Post and often logs on to the CTV news site to catch up on what’s happening in the world—a habit her parents and teachers encourage. She thinks both sites are interesting, but prefers GoGoNews for its variety of topics and the multimedia aspect. Teaching Kids News is better suited to kids who are less knowledgeable, she says, because it’s a lot more descriptive than GoGoNews. She’ll return to both sites, Celia says, because she’s interested in learning more about what she hears her peers discussing.

That’s the idea, according to Grant: “Kids are hearing about it, so we want to be a safe place where they can understand it.” Still, there are types of news neither site will cover, like sexually related stories, raising the question of what the boundaries are when sanitizing news for children. She adds, “We strive to be kid-friendly but also kid-appropriate.” Khosrowshahi uses the expertise of both a psychologist and educational consultant to help her vet stories. Zein Odeh, English curriculum coordinator at Toronto French School, who is GoGoNews‘s educational consultant, notes that news can be very traumatizing to children. “If you’re going to talk about September 11, let’s say, you can’t be bringing in pictures of corpses or Ground Zero.”

Clare Brett, associate chair of graduate studies at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education’s curriculum teaching and learning department, thinks content geared to younger children can be valuable, as news is either inaccessible or overwhelming in quantity. But she questions the upper age of the audience that Teaching Kids News and GoGoNews aim to reach. “By the time they get to Grades 7 and 8, frankly, I think they should be reading newspapers,” says Brett. “If you’ve ever watched children playing video games—I mean, they’re doing that. So having these cleaned-up news stories—there’s something a little disingenuous about that.” She also points out that kids have a real social conscience and love to talk about things that matter in the world. “That idealism that they have gets squandered on the frivolity, but you really can engage them,” Brett says. “I think by ignoring real news, you’re saying it doesn’t really matter. Or you’re saying, ‘Well, this is something that only adults think about.'”

Hammer also thinks kids are ready for unbowdlerized content earlier than the websites’ creators do. She estimates that Grade 6 students should be able to benefit from reading theGlobe. As for younger children, she says, “I think certainly in the younger grades it would be a little harder to understand. And it’s a shame because the language might be difficult, but the content has a lot of lessons.”

The age issue aside, why is it that none of the country’s big news operations have produced news sites for kids?

Grant assumes Teaching Kids News is almost alone in serving kids because everyone wants to get paid, while she and the Tillys make no money off their site. Khosrowshahi, meanwhile, saysGoGoNews is the only site of its kind because it’s time-consuming to produce news content for kids 24/7.

They seem to be right. Asked why their organizations have no spin-off print or online sites for kids, Philip Crawley, publisher and CEO of the Globe, and Benjamin Errett, managing editor of features at the National Post, both cited a lack of resources. As Crawley said in an email, “By and large, editions for children lose money. They don’t attract advertisers in sufficient numbers to cover the costs, and the kids can’t pay, so the business model only works when an education body helps to fund it.”

Similarly, Errett emailed, “Our strategy is really to focus our energy and resources on what we do best,” adding, “And personally, I remember finding news-for-kidz pages dumb even when I was a kid. It’s very hard not to come off sounding like Poochie the Dog.”

Dvorkin questions their argument. “Media organizations in Canada feel they are under such enormous financial pressures that they feel this is not a good use of limited resources,” he says. “And I think they’re wrong, because I think media organizations have a social obligation to do these things which will create a better sense of civic engagement.” He acknowledges that “most people don’t get serious about consuming the news until they are in their late 20s and early 30s,” and imagines media organizations are saying, “We just need to wait and they’ll catch up with us.” This perspective he characterizes as “short-sighted, to say the least.”

Burman is just as mystified as to why Canadian news organizations aren’t more aggressive and creative in appealing to youth. “It’s certainly in the self-interest of news organizations to figure out creative ways of engaging young people so that as they grow up, so to speak, they’ll be customers of the future,” he points out.

“News-for-kids websites are like media literacy training wheels,” Dvorkin says. Without these training wheels, he worries that children will turn out to be university students who don’t have the media literacy skills necessary to connect with significant news sites on their own. “I’ve actually come to this realization after teaching this term. My first-year students don’t know how to read a newspaper,” he says. “So I’ve been struggling with this idea of, do we need to start really from the beginning and help 18-year-olds understand how a newspaper is constructed, how to really deconstruct a newspaper, how to listen to a newscast, and watch a newscast, and what the significant elements in a newscast are?”

“Young people need to be exposed to the exciting and important world that’s flowing around them,” Burman continues. “It’s easy to get occupied with Taylor Swift, or Charlie Sheen, or Paris Hilton, and all of these things that are in front of young people in the guise of news, when in reality, the world they’re about to inherit is changing as we speak.”

Photographs by Peter Bregg.

Beauty director Laura Fraioli-Keogh was working in her office at Fashion magazine when a publicist for a luxury beauty advertiser called. A major exclusive he had organized with Fraioli-Keogh had just hit newsstands, and he wasn’t happy. “How dare you put someone else’s product on my page!” he demanded. (An exclusive is an article that covers the launch of a new product or personality—in this case, it was the brand’s new “super-groovy” artistic director. One magazine is given priority access to the story and can cover it before its competitors.) “I had put one of the brand’s products that the makeup artist had used on the page, but when she went on to describe the things that she did, she had made mention of other products she used,” recalls Fraioli-Keogh. Naturally, she mentioned all the products used to create the look—not just those of the advertiser. Despite the publicist’s aggressive reaction, Fraioli-Keogh held firm: “It’s not anyone’s page but mine. Last time I checked, my card said Iwas beauty director.”

Well, yes and no—at least when it comes to fashion and beauty publishing. The fashion magazine industry has long been perceived as rife with “nudge-nudge, wink-wink” agreements that leave editorial content nearly devoid of journalistic credibility. However, this generalization doesn’t account for the complexities in the relationship between advertising and editorial. For editors at Canada’s mainstream fashion and beauty magazines, there are frequent pressures to cater to advertisers, especially where beauty is concerned. Like readers, for whom editors work first and foremost, advertisers are clients who need to be kept happy, says Rita Silvan, former editor-in-chief of Elle Canada. Fraioli-Keogh’s experience may have been more dramatic than other editors’, but it’s implicit when covering fashion and beauty. “The reader had better be your primary client,” Silvan says, but you’re also working for advertisers if you expect your magazine to survive.

The need for advertising support is hardly unique to fashion magazines. But while other magazines may have the occasional editorial quandary over a pushy advertiser, it would seem to be the norm in the fashion niche. That should raise red flags for all magazine editors: If advertisers feel comfortable muscling in on fashion books, how long will it take before they expect the same from everyone else? And though many product launches merit editorial attention in fashion and beauty magazines, at what point does coverage clash with credibility?

“No one ever says, ‘Listen, if you don’t cover this the way I want you to, we’re pulling our ads,'” says Ceri Marsh, former editor-in-chief of Fashion, “but people definitely let you know if they’re happy or not happy with the coverage they’re receiving.” Often, this comes in the form of a civilized phone call after an issue hits newsstands, but it’s not always that easy; boundaries are blurred, and advertisers sometimes forget that magazines are for readers—at least that’s how some editors see it. At Canadian fashion mags in particular, beauty departments feel the most pressure, because the beauty industry buys the most ads. “There would be no fashion magazine publishing in Canada without beauty advertisers,” says Marsh. “Fashion advertising is there, but it’s not the driver that the beauty industry is,” so the beauty editor is often on the receiving end of feedback from disgruntled advertisers. Fraioli-Keogh says that while she was working at Fashion, advertisers even put pie charts in front of her, critiquing her coverage of their brand, how she stacked up against other magazines, and where her deficiencies were. The fact that three corporations (L’Oréal Group, Estée Lauder, and Procter & Gamble) own many of the brands that advertise in fashion publications only further complicates matters (see page 52). “Estée Lauder owns everything,” says Diana Jackson (not her real name). “So if you don’t make Estée Lauder happy and you don’t make [Procter & Gamble] happy, it’s not good.”

Though Marsh says she’s never seen an advertiser threaten to pull out of a publication, it’s not entirely unheard of. “One time, we had an incident where it went so far that the company went to the chairman and they wanted to pull advertising across the board, for all of our books, based on a decision I made,” says Fraioli-Keogh. The situation involved a miscommunication around an exclusive; the advertiser felt it had been done wrong and was ready to cancel its ads in all St. Joseph Media’s publications, which include Toronto Life and Canadian Family, among others. “Exclusives are a tricky issue, and sometimes those things happen,” says Fraioli-Keogh. “You learn lessons, but sometimes the shit hits the fan. If you’re lucky, you’re supported by your editor-in-chief and your publisher, and everyone stands together and you say, ‘Okay, how do we want to address this?'”

Addressing the pressure can be difficult for editors, who have to juggle staying true to their magazines’ mandates with the demands and expectations of their advertisers. “In general, most consumer magazines have a policy of church and state that says advertising can’t sell directly based on editorial,” says Gwen Dunant, a longtime ad sales representative, president of Dunant Consulting, and professional development coordinator for Magazines Canada. In other words, a magazine ad salesperson should not offer a brand editorial coverage in return for an ad purchase. “You don’t want advertisers influencing the editorial in any way,” says Dunant, but advertisers expect the world from magazines, which can be a real challenge for editors. There tends to be more pressure on fashion magazines to give editorial coverage, Dunant says, because of the nature of fashion. The industry itself is very timely, and advertisers demand a synergy between ads and editorial content.

“The old theory of church and state”—that the journalistic side and the business side of a publication are completely separate—”has never been entirely true,” says Alan Middleton, a marketing professor at the Schulich School of Business at York University. Though an editor may never have to speak directly to an advertiser, she would absolutely be aware of who her advertisers are, and like Fraioli-Keogh, she would have to deal with the messages they project through their public relations agents. The relationship between advertising and editorial in fashion and beauty books doesn’t always come down to messages from advertisers and publicists, though; it can be internalized in the publications themselves, as a means of avoiding the possible consequences of displeasing the brands that pay the bills.

Pressure from advertisers in the fashion and beauty mag world is certainly not a secret, says Fraioli-Keogh, but many editors and staffers at Canada’s best-known fashion magazines refused to talk or did not reply to interview requests for this story. Some of those who did agree to speak asked to have their real identities hidden.

One was Diana Jackson. Three years after finishing her undergraduate degree in journalism, she got her first real magazine job: editorial assistant at a successful Toronto-based women’s book with heavy beauty content. When someone from the sales staff asked her to go through each issue and count how many times, and on which editorial pages, particular brands had been mentioned, she thought it was strange. When she realized why she was doing it—the publisher was using the information to pull in advertising from particular brands—she was dismayed. But then her editor told her their content was fluff anyway, and one of the magazine’s most influential stylists said to her, “We ain’t saving babies, so we might as well have fun!”

A few years into Jackson’s career at the magazine, she was asked to work on the beauty pages for a spinoff of a major fashion book. “So, you only have six negotiated pages,” said her editor in their first meeting. A negotiated page, Jackson soon learned, is a story based entirely on advertiser spending. She was expected to write a piece about an advertiser’s spring makeup line. “It was brutal,” she says. “I didn’t go to journalism school to write public relations.”

Jackson was surprised again when she found out that the products used in beauty stories aren’t always the ones the magazines claim they are. Jennifer Smith (a pseudonym), who has done makeup for Fashion, the short-lived Fashion 18, Weddingbells, Glow, and Canadian Living, among other titles, says that beauty editors have given her specific makeup to use, with the direction, “This is a major advertiser in this issue, so we need to cover their brand as best we can.” Particularly in the past, if the makeup supplied wasn’t right for a shoot, Smith might get the go-ahead to match the colour to something from her own kit. Whether the editor credited the product correctly had nothing to do with her, she believes. “I’ve definitely done shoots where they’ve credited who their major advertisers are [instead of] what I’ve used,” she says, although she notes that this is not happening as often as it used to. Ultimately, Smith says it comes down to advertising dollars, “but I can’t really answer as far as a magazine is concerned,” she says, “because after I’ve done my job, it’s up to them to credit accordingly.”

There’s a pressure to cover advertisers because “advertising has a certain credibility,” says Middleton, “but it isn’t as high as if somebody who is not commercially paid to endorse a product says it’s really good.” When a publicist for a major advertiser continually asks an editor to showcase its products, it can be particularly difficult for an editor to say no—especially when everything she needs to produce a quality story is laid out in front of her in a pretty package. Publicists—particularly those who represent top-tier brands with big budgets for public relations and advertising—offer editors access to interview subjects, beautiful photographs, possible story angles, and invitations to all-expenses-paid press trips where they introduce their products. It would be difficult for an editor to create a well-rounded story without these things, and publicists are well aware of this. “There are fantastic people working in that business, on the publicist side, who work really hard with you to come up with a great story and offer you something exclusive and something special,” says Marsh, “so you think, yeah, that’s great, I want to publish that. And then there are some people who aren’t so diplomatic, who kind of bully you.” As an editor-in-chief, you’re closer to the business side of your publication than anyone else on your editorial team, so you know how your magazine is doing, says Marsh. “If you care about your publication, it’s difficult not to be influenced by [pressure from advertisers and publicists] and to want your magazine to be financially robust.”

“I think everyone understands that there is a give and a take,” says Fraioli-Keogh. “I always looked at it as a partnership, that we needed each other.” As Virginie Mouzat, fashion critic for the French daily Le Figaro, said in an interview last year in Industrie magazine, “The moment the word ‘need’ comes into the equation, the argument becomes distorted.” Like Fraioli-Keogh, Mouzat thinks advertisers should be seen as partners, not demons. “From the moment they’re partners, you work with them,” she says, “but that doesn’t mean working for them. Working together is like being in a couple: you discuss things, you have arguments, you agree, you disagree, but you make your progress together.”

Marsh and Silvan see it the same way. In the fashion and beauty realm, knowing who your advertisers are and working to live up to their expectations are just part of the territory. Marsh says she doesn’t believe that what goes on is in any way nefarious, and that advertisers have every right to feel they should be covered. “They’ve got products coming out; they’ve got stories to tell,” she says. “The readers of a fashion magazine want to know that—they want to know what’s new. In a lot of ways, it’s as it should be.”

Regardless of advertiser demands, editors feel that they alone have the final say on what gets published. “You can try to push me in directions that you want me to go in,” says Fraioli-Keogh, “but at the end of the day, my creativity is going to find a way out of those boxes. I had to engineer a way to make a story that was credible and relatable, and that would make sense to the reader I was speaking to. I just think there’s a way to report even within the confines of an exclusive. I was told lots of times, ‘We want you to write a story about this product and these are the only pictures you can use,’ and it was my job to make that page and that story relatable and make sense to the reader I was talking to. I pushed back, and you have the ability to do that.

“I wasn’t shackled,” she says. “I didn’t allow myself to be shackled. For sure, there are moments when they push back at you and you feel the pressure, and that’s what makes a good editor—someone who can walk that line.”

Photograph of Ceri Marsh and Laura Fraioli-Keogh by Jessica Blaine Smith.

It’s a little after 11 a.m. when Cheryl Hickey enters the studio, all shiny blond hair and thick black eyelashes. Her petite, gracefully slender frame is wrapped in a knee-length, long-sleeved black dress that’s paired with opaque tights. She clicks onto the large, circular stage in black stilettos that are too big for her, she says, and assumes position. Staring into the camera, Hickey pats her long, tousled hair and awaits her cue.

A host on Entertainment Tonight Canada, Hickey is gearing up for another day of work at the show’s Toronto studio. The TelePrompTer rolls as she reads through the day’s headlines, called “links.” On this October morning, they include interviews with Orlando Bloom and Milla Jovovich for The Three Musketeers, Sandra Oh being inducted into Canada’s Walk of Fame, and, of course, the juice: the trial of Shania Twain’s stalker.

“What was he sentenced to, guys?” Hickey asks the crew when the cameras stop rolling. She looks around the room, waiting for a reply. Walls of little red lights twinkle behind her, and the freshly shined stage gleams beneath her feet. A crew member tells her that a sentence hasn’t been announced yet, but that Twain’s stalker has already pleaded guilty. “We should get a security expert to discuss what celebrities think is a big deal and what’s not,” she suggests.

“Five, four, three….”

“Demi Moore steps out alone!” Hickey says to the camera, her voice full of drama and intrigue.

•••

This is the heart of the beast, the backstage pass, the sparkle in our eye. The entertainment news show is our glimpse into the world of celebrity, from the glamourous lifestyles to the scandalous downfalls. The Canadian entertainment news show genre is still young, just a decade old this year: CTV’s etalk launched in 2002, and ET Canada (wide-eyed little sister to the American Entertainment Tonight) was created in 2005. Both have achieved varying levels of success, though, tapping into our seemingly insatiable appetite for celebrity gossip: etalkcurrently averages 601,000 viewers, with an audience of 1.9 million combined over CTV‘s three broadcasts per night; it can draw close to one million for special coverage, like the day after the Oscars. By comparison, CBC‘s The National averages 505,000 viewers per night. ET Canadawould not reveal the viewership for its main evening broadcast; it would only tell me that each episode gets about 500,000 viewers total, a statistic that combines the show’s five airings on three networks.

Until last September, that popularity was helped by the shows (along with Canadian dramas and documentaries) being designated as priority programming by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission. That meant broadcasters were required to air them during prime time. For the entertainment shows, it also meant they had to follow Canadian content regulations, devoting at least two-thirds of each episode to covering Canadian entertainment news. The CRTC eliminated priority programming altogether (a decision made in 2010 but implemented as of September 1, 2011), replacing it with strict spending requirements (a certain percentage of each broadcaster’s revenue has to be spent on Canadian shows). However, the CRTC did not implement a new Canadian content regulation for entertainment news shows, meaning nothing forces them to concentrate on Canada.

“The initial idea of allowing shows such as etalk and ET Canada to qualify as Canadian content was the notion that they could be used to promote a Canadian star system and help build audiences for other Canadian content,” says Globe and Mail cultural affairs writer Kate Taylor. Now these shows presumably feel they have accomplished that goal and can move past it—and the CRTC seems to agree.

“What [these shows and their broadcasters have] done now is say, I guess, ‘We don’t need that anymore. Give us the flexibility to do what’s best for us,'” says Phyllis Yaffe, former CEO of Alliance Atlantis. “And I’m sure somebody said, ‘People know our stars more, so a regulation about what percentage should be Canadians is kind of overkill.'”

“In the last 10 years, the world’s changed, with more people watching broadcasting on the internet and with on-demand programming, so the schedule and linear service is becoming less relevant, less important,” says Peter Foster, director general of television policy and applications at the CRTC. “The thinking was that imposing exhibition requirements for specific programming is becoming less and less effective in terms of Canadian programs.”

In regards to Canadian entertainment news shows, and the fact that there are now no regulations surrounding the amount of Canadian news they cover, Foster says it comes down to the fact that such a rule was very hard to administer. “I think with the e-magazine shows, that was an attempt to work out in English Canada—not Quebec, it’s fine there—the need to try to create a star system,” he says. “I think the jury is out on whether or not that was happening. Also, [the rule that] two-thirds of each episode had to be covering Canadian issues really was a very difficult provision to enforce.” So the CRTC no longer does.

“Tebowmania is officially over,” a Patriots fan yells to his friend during the second quarter. The Patriots are up by 14 and getting stronger. He’s loud enough for a group of Tebow fans at a nearby table to hear. “It’s like the Patriots are drenched in Tebow blood,” he bellows. “Like a gazelle.” Pigskin poetry.

At Shoeless Joe’s Sports Grill in downtown Toronto, the Denver Broncos–New England Patriots National Football League playoff game is on multiple screens throughout the bar. It’s mid-January and freezing, but fans have braved the weather to watch the game. The crowd is mostly male, mostly in their mid-20s and 30s, and mostly drunk.

With no more miracles from above, perennial good-boy quarterback Tim Tebow of the Broncos is being destroyed by beloved pretty-boy Tom Brady. It’s no longer a matter of which quarterback you like the best, but which you hate the least. Patriots and Broncos fans sit feet away from each other, passive-aggressively chanting their quarterback’s name.

Football is like church. The busty waitress cannot distract you, nor can the broad-shouldered bartender. The emails and texts on your cellphone are not important. You’re busy. You’ve been waiting for this all season, and you will never forgive yourself if you miss it. When it’s live, football is the most important thing in the world. This is the cult of the sports fan, the obsession that comes with being devoted to a team that you’re not actually a part of. They win; you win. And they’d better win because it’s the only thing you care about this weekend.

This is the market Sportsnet has been targeting for years with its sports television and radio programming. And last fall, it added another prong to its brand: a biweekly sports magazine of the same name. Sportsnet magazine launched on October 17, 2011, becoming the only publication to cover sports exclusively in the Canadian market.

Sportsnet is published by its parent company, Rogers Communications, which owns dozens of magazines, including Maclean’s, Chatelaine, and Hello! Canada. The company announced last August that Steve Maich, former editor of the Rogers-owned Canadian Business, would lead the team as Sportsnet‘s editor-in-chief and publisher.

There are at least 10 Canadian magazines aimed at women. There are magazines about alcoholand magazines about pets. There’s even a magazine dedicated to cowboys. But Sportsnet is the only general sports magazine in the country; it sits on newsstands with American sports publications such as ESPN the Magazine and Sports Illustrated, but Maich insists they’re not in competition. “People are going to draw comparisons and ask, ‘Is it going to be like SI for Canadians?’ or ‘Will it be the Maclean’s of sports?'” Maich told Sportsnet.ca. “I keep saying, ‘Neither.'”

From a business point of view, Maich might be right about Sports Illustrated. The venerable institution has published sports news and features for nearly six decades, but it wasn’t incubated from the type of corporate structure that coddles Sportsnet. ESPN the Magazine, however, was created 14 years ago by the media conglomerate ESPN. Similarly, Sportsnet has rich parents who seem willing to foot the bill to raise what surely is an unprofitable (so far) print baby, so long as it benefits the brand in the long run. Rogers sits where ESPN was years ago, playing the long game, hoping ball possession in TV, radio, digital, and magazines is the key to building a successful Canadian sports media brand.

•••

Sportsnet is a typical sports network, and its website, Sportsnet.ca, is a hectic, click-happy portal with shaving-gear ads and clever headlines. “Phaneuf the Faker?” asks the headline on Michael Grange’s column, and “Still Stinging at 70” says Stephen Brunt’s—two writers who appear in nearly every issue of Sportsnet magazine. The network is playful and aggressive, similar to its television personalities. (This is, after all, the same company that employs hotheaded radio host Bob McCown.)

The magazine’s features editor, Gare Joyce, is anemic by comparison. In person, he is quiet but physically restless, ripping the sleeve from his tea into small pieces and dashing out the door to feed the parking meter during his lunch break. Before joining Sportsnet last summer as an editor and writer, Joyce was a freelance writer for ESPN the Magazine and ESPN.com. When he heard Rogers was launching a sports magazine, he reached his former editor at Saturday Night, Dianna Symonds, Sportsnet’s current editor-at-large, to find out whom to contact. “I went to [Maich] and I thought we were going to talk about freelance assignments,” Joyce says. He was actually interviewing for a staff position. After the July meeting, he was hired as features editor.

The magazine has already acquired some big names in Canadian sports journalism. Rogers brought Brunt, a Globe and Mail sports columnist, onboard, and he eventually won the premium back-of-book location. The front section includes one-page pieces by Sportsnet radio personalities such as McCown, Greg Brady and Jim Lang from Sportsnet The FAN 590, and Scott Feschuk from Maclean’s.

So far, reception has been positive, but the excitement might be for its very existence. “It’s one of the best attempts at a general interest sports magazine the country has seen in a long time, from pretty professional operators,” says Doug Bennet, publisher of Masthead magazine. “They have a lot of resources at their disposal.”

Toronto Star sports columnist Cathal Kelly agrees. He says the editorial aspirations have been high so far. Sportsnet is obviously spending money, sending writers to travel for days or weeks to cover a story. “I was impressed with the way they leveraged their radio guys,” he says. “For a start, this is tremendous.”

Ad sales have been strong as well. “The first thing I looked for was the ads,” Kelly says. “Lots of ads. Somebody’s interested.” Although it has yet to release figures, Bennet estimates the magazine has met its initial target circulation of 100,000. (Until February, Rogers offered free trial issues and a discounted subscription rate. In March, the newsstand price bumped up $2 to $6.95.) He also believes no penny has been spared. “The launch costs are in the single-digit millions,” he estimates, adding that editors such as Maich and Joyce would likely cost between $150,000 and $200,000 each. “The biggest costs are going to be staffing and print production, including mailing.”

On the design side, to the untrained eye, Sportsnet looks like the average sports magazine. If you don’t care about sports, its cover is a mess of masculine colours, screaming headlines, and faces of well-known players. If you do care, the cover showcases almost every major sport and uses every buzzword or flashy image to pull you in, touting a ranking of the best and worst CFL franchises or splashing an action shot of Sidney Crosby across the page. The first few issues banked on hockey. Canadians have an obsession with the game, which the magazine capitalized on for its initial three covers—Crosby, the Winnipeg Jets, and Don Cherry. Editors have since shifted to showcasing football, basketball, and surfing.

The front section is dedicated to a photo gallery of two-page spreads that encapsulate the past two weeks in sports, along with a graphic-heavy section called Pregame, prepping readers for the coming fortnight, and The Show, which details “the past two weeks in sports. In a blender.”

A lively mass of black blazers and BlackBerrys spills into the University of Toronto’s Innis Town Hall. It’s September 15, 2011, and the group of reporters, bankers, and PR representatives has convened for the Canadian Journalism Foundation‘s forum on the state of financial journalism. The conference falls on the anniversary of the collapse of Lehman Brothers—the largest bankruptcy filing in American history; three years later to the day, smoke still lingers from the corporation’s implosion and the aftershock that led to a near-topple of the global economy. Earlier this afternoon, CNN reported that the U.S. unemployment rate was up to 9.1 percent and first-time unemployment claims had surged to 428,000 in the past week. There was a 33 percent spike in home foreclosures between July and August, the biggest one-month increase in four years. But most ominous were the updates on the spread of the debt crisis contagion through Europe.

The chatter fades as the forum’s three panelists take their seats. CBC News’s senior business correspondent, Amanda Lang, sits among them, looking as though she just tumbled out of a Holt Renfrew fall catalogue, in a navy blue blazer, form-fitting white dress, and beige patent heels. She’s moderating the discussion, and is no stranger to the role; as co-host of The Lang and O’Leary Exchange with acid-tongued multi-millionaire and Dragon’s Den judge Kevin O’Leary, she often plays arbitrator when he spits fire at a guest.

Robin Walsh of the Canadian Bankers Association takes the microphone, arguing that at the beginning of the economic crisis, stories about Canada’s banks were left underreported.

Lang pounces. “Robin, I think it’s funny if you’re complaining about how long it took for Canadian banks to be well treated, because this is the sort of golden era for Canadian banks. Enjoy it while it lasts, my friend. It will pass.”

“I’m not complaining,” Walsh counters.

“I’m surprised you don’t all have broken arms from patting yourselves on the back, that’s all,” says Lang, to laughter and applause from the audience.

Almost a decade of business banter with O’Leary—the pair also hosted six seasons ofSqueezePlay on Business News Network from 2003 to 2009—has made Lang a master of snuffing out self-indulgent tangents. She punctuates the evening with the same brand of ego-deflating comebacks that draw more than 700,000 viewers each week to the Exchange.

Lang was relatively obscure as a CNN reporter on the stock exchange prior to joining CBC News in 2009, but her current roles as the network’s senior business correspondent and O’Leary’s foil have made her one of Canada’s biggest names in financial reportage. In her smooth cadence, Lang opened the forum with the analogy of a nature video she saw at age 10, likening the role of the journalist to the cameraman who filmed a lion eating a gazelle—an invisible watchdog on the sidelines. But Lang’s own brand of journalism is neither invisible nor on the sidelines: it’s equal parts real business and show business.

•••

Raised first in Ottawa, then Winnipeg, Lang and her seven siblings soaked in political banter around the dinner table. Her father, Otto Lang, was a Rhodes scholar and famed Liberal politician, and her stepfather, Donald Macdonald, a former member of Trudeau’s cabinet. “It was definitely a fun but challenging environment to grow up in,” says Lang’s twin sister, Adrian, a partner of litigation at Stikeman Elliott in Toronto. Earning a university degree, or two, was a non-negotiable expectation. While two brothers traced their father’s political career path, Lang enrolled in architecture at the University of Manitoba.

But the future journalist quickly realized architecture wasn’t her passion. Adrian remembers coming home to find her sister painting the kitchen cabinets rather than studying. Instead of pursuing a master’s after graduation, as planned, Lang ventured to Toronto and landed an administrative assistant position at The Globe and Mail (she describes her role as the newsroom’s “girl Friday”). It wasn’t long before she became curious about journalism. Steve Petherbridge, then editor of the Globe‘s Classroom Edition, told her to skip schooling and dive in.

“The first time I stayed up late working on a story, a light bulb went off,” says Lang, now 41. “It felt so different than when I used to work hard on design projects at school. I thought, ‘This is how it feels to do something you’re good at.'”

•••

Lang was soon ensnared in the business beat by a 1995 Globe and Mail Report on Business magazine story about transportation manufacturer Bombardier. Although the mega-corporation specialized in flashy, state-of-the-art aircraft and trains, its margin of profitability was still highest in a little snowmobile division in Valcourt, Quebec. That detail prompted Lang to pitch her first business profile to ROB magazine. “It taught me that if you aren’t afraid of the numbers—because they aren’t nearly as complicated as they seem—they actually will lead you to stories,” she says.

Lang became an editorial associate at the Globe, then a freelancer for ROB magazine. After that, she transitioned to a job as junior reporter for the Financial Post, then a standalone paper. Tim Pritchard, former editorial director of the Post, interviewed Lang for the position and recalls that in his entire career as an editor, she was the only person to actually tell him in an interview, “I want your job.”

By 1998, Lang had climbed to the paper’s New York bureau, but the Financial Post had thinned down to a section in Conrad Black’s new National Post. Lang heard journalist-turned-producer Jack Fleischmann was looking for a reporter for the new Report on Business TV in 1999. A few phone calls and one “atrocious” TelePrompTer screen test later, Fleischmann suggested Lang have a conversation about business with a colleague in front of the cameras. Smitten with Lang’s Wall Street-smarts, he made her the network’s New York correspondent.

Lang’s switch from print to TV prompted her launchpad, the Globe, to run headlines like “Babes in Businessland” and “Closing Belle: How Does TV Get Viewers to Stick with the Stocks-and-Bonds News? With Babes, the Oldest Trick in the Business” (a 29-year-old Lang is quoted in the former story as calling this take on her on-air role “parochial garbage”). She spent the next three years eschewing the money-honey label by covering the stock exchange for ROBTV before moving to its higher-profile American counterpart, CNN. The tight-knit CNN business team had their doubts: she was a rookie compared to most of their correspondents. “I was expecting to do some heavy lifting, but it was one of those ‘wow’ moments,” says Ali Velshi, CNN’s chief business correspondent, who is now a close friend of Lang’s. “She was a duck to water to TV. I was a smarter journalist when I worked with her.”

Two years later, Business News Network (formerly ROBTV) made Lang an offer that she snapped up. It’s a rule of the stock exchange that if a bond or stock is a hot commodity, it will quickly be overvalued. But a decade after she was traded, past co-workers still speak about her in superlatives: BNN anchor Howard Green? “It’s like she was born to it.” Petherbridge? “A first-class brain.” Dave Chilton, the Wealthy Barber and O’Leary’s stand-in on the Exchange? “Sharp as a tack.”

•••

On a rainy Friday morning one month after the  Canadian Journalism Foundation event, Lang weaves her way through the CBC business unit—rows of cubicles that could be home to a telemarketing company—and strides into a closet-sized meeting room. “Glamourous, isn’t it?” she jokes. O’Leary has just caused yet another on-air stink when he called Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Chris Hedges a “left-wing nutbar” in a segment about the Occupy movement. Lang shrugs off the incident—she’s used to her co-host’s antics, and believes he gave Hedges an ample amount of airtime to have his say.

With a playful grin, she introduces me to a producer. “This is Chelsey. She’s writing a story about left-wing nutbars.”

The producer shakes his head wearily before shaking my hand.

Lang has spent the past two days chasing a story on the unprecedented boom of Canada’s luxury retailers in the wake of the credit crisis. With household debt on the rise and U.S. consumer confidence at its lowest level since May 1980, Lang is investigating how high-end brands are managing to eclipse their more affordable counterparts. Cameras follow her bright red umbrella down one of the country’s most expensive streets, Toronto’s “Mink Mile” on Bloor Street West, where she stops into Holt Renfrew to talk numbers with president Mark Derbyshire. After experiencing one of the best-selling years in the history of the company in 2010, Holt has seen a 25 percent increase in handbag sales alone over the past year, and stores are struggling to keep pricey labels such as Tom Ford in stock.

Derbyshire gestures to a purple fox fur jacket by the designer, telling Lang that it retails for $33,000.

“Thirty-three thousand dollars?”

“Yes, well, isn’t it spectacular, though? It’s absolutely spectacular.” He strokes the skinned Muppet.

“It would have to be,” says Lang, amused. “I paid less for my car.”

She may not flaunt her success like the entrepreneurial tycoon with whom she shares the screen, but Lang is no pauper. Twenty years in the business and a husband in the gold mining industry (Vince Borg, former VP of corporate communications for Barrick Gold) have earned her a spot in the upper class, and she blends in nicely—the Forest Hill home, the immaculate wardrobe, the Louis Vuitton wallet tossed casually onto the table beside her.

But those closest to her say she is anything but a diva. When she was nominated for a Gemini Award in 2010, her sister Adrian remembers Lang had to be all but dragged down to the gala, convinced she wouldn’t win. But she did, and accepted her award—composed and effortlessly eloquent. “I literally go on Twitter once a year, and I went on to tweet that she had won,” says Adrian. “It was a really special moment.”

•••

On a December evening in the CBC studios, Lang and O’Leary are bickering like an old married couple while taping a segment for the Exchange. Today’s debate is on Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto Protocol climate-change agreement. O’Leary argues that it would be more financially sound for Canada to wait for other countries to re-sign the agreement, but Lang isn’t buying his economy-over-environment tirade.

“I’m speaking for all Canadians when I say we’re not signing until everybody else signs the same deal,” says O’Leary.

“Okay, I guarantee you with 1,000 percent certainty that you don’t speak for all Canadians. I can think of one or two that you don’t speak for,” Lang counters. “Me, for instance.”

“Come behind me, join me in this chorus, because I’m right. We’re not signing anything until everybody signs the same deal.”

“That’s certainly the Canadian approach. Meanwhile, though, it sort of becomes a bit of a smokescreen for putting environmental concerns on the back burner. If you’re wrong, and we actually do need to be taking faster action on climate change, every day that we hesitate is a day that’s pretty meaningful.”

“I’m right, and you don’t have to worry about it anymore.”

“I don’t have to worry about climate change?”

“I’ve solved it for you. The key is to put another pipeline to the West Coast and sell more oil to China.”

Lang shoots him a mocking smirk. “You know, what I’d like is an apartment inside your brain. Because it must be so cozy in there.”

It’s hard to see any shred of the “classic introvert” Lang calls herself while she’s bulldozing the Merchant of Truth (O’Leary’s self-appointed nickname). Their glass island can become a boxing ring of business jargon. When he was developing the show in 2009, it was what former executive producer Michael Kearns wanted to preserve from their SqueezePlay days: the same chemistry with higher production values, faster pacing, and a wider scope.

“We needed a much bigger and more high-profile push toward business content,” says Kearns.

The push came at the right time for the network and for Lang, who was enticed by the idea of a more business-centric CBC. Producers wanted to broaden the target audience, and created a template that would appeal equally to number-savvy investors and the less financially literate public. General manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News Jennifer McGuire homed in on Lang’s ability to dilute Wall Street vernacular into plainspeak, and Lang’s onscreen appeal was exactly what McGuire wanted for the “new CBC.”

Since then, the Lang brand has expanded. She cheers on the business beat in commercials forThe National, her face is splashed onto website banners, and her blown-up headshot, though dwarfed by a godlike, floor-to-ceiling Peter Mansbridge, beams down from the wall of the Front Street headquarters. She views this attention as a commitment to business coverage, which was the reason she saw a long-term home for herself in the network.

“I think people in general have an anti-business bent, which is surprising to me,” she says. “Everything is driven by business—all of our employers, all of our prospects, everything we have to be optimistic about is driven by somebody taking the trouble to create it for us. I have a great respect for the people that go out and make things and build things and create.”

•••

Back at the forum, the conversation has drifted to educating aspiring business journalists, and ideas bounce around the room, including mandatory business courses for journalism students and enrolling in the Canadian Securities Course.

“Or watch Amanda’s program on CBC,” offers panelist David Moorcroft.

“Oh, yes, watch my program on CBC!” she says, banging a fist on the desk like a mock gavel.

Everyone in the room knows exactly who Lang is, but Canadian Journalism Foundation chair Robert Lewis tacks a list of her achievements onto his thank-yous.

“We were going to have Kevin O’Leary here tonight, but he’d be far too politically correct,” says Lewis with a grin. “Thank God, Amanda, you’re here.”

Lang offers up a half-smile. She’s heard that one before.

Photograph of Amanda Lang by Shannon Ross. Photographs of Amanda Lang with Adrian Lang and Morgan Freeman courtesy of Amanda Lang.

Toronto Star columnist Catherine Porter  first met the little girl who would pit her journalist’s instincts against her most human impulses on January 24, 2010, almost two weeks after the earthquake that devastated Haiti. The frail two-year-old, who had been pulled from the rubble after nearly a week, was being cared for at a makeshift medical clinic. Porter couldn’t get the child out of her mind , and returned to the clinic three times that week to visit the “little girl with the white tank top, fuzzy braided hair and too-big pink corduroy skirt that keeps slipping down her backside.” Today, she says, “In retrospect, I always had this kind of maternalistic sense of responsibility.”

Three months later, when the Starsent Porter back  to Haiti, she found that a miracle had happened: the toddler, Lovely Avelus, had been reunited with her extended family, including her mother, father, and one-year-old brother.

But while Lovely was one of the lucky ones by post-earthquake standards, life for her and her family was still hard. The nine of them lived in a leaky metal shed roughly the size of a janitor’s closet, and it wasn’t uncommon for them to go more than a day without a full meal. Porter, the mother of a girl and boy, then three and one, saw something of herself in Lovely’s mother, Rosemene Meristil. “I could put myself in her shoes,” she says. “I could say to myself, I know what it is to have kids who won’t go to sleep, and my kids sleep in beds, not on the floor of a hut. I know how often my kids want to eat.”

So when Meristil told Porter how she’d always dreamed of sending Lovely to school but had lost her savings in the earthquake, Porter immediately offered to pay the $300 annual tuition. “I didn’t think through the ramifications of what it would mean, what my role as a journalist was. It seemed like there were a million tragedies around me, and here was one easy thing I could help with.”

Sue Montgomery, a justice reporter with The Gazette in Montreal who arrived in Haiti days after the quake, was also moved by the million tragedies. As she later wrote for J-Source, “[T]he stories were never ones that I could keep at arm’s length, as I would in Montreal. I became known in my newsroom back home as a one-woman humanitarian organization. I bought food for the orphanage. I counselled new moms with their newborns, soliciting help from my midwife sister in Toronto…. While at a ‘clinic’ in one of the tent cities…I set down my pen and notepad and helped a woman in labour, helped stitch up a gaping wound in a man’s head, fed what little food I had to an elderly man laid out flat with back and leg fractures.” Now, she says of her involvement, “I just felt like it was the least I could do while I was there.”

•••

Journalists have traditionally been instructed to turn their own emotions off and avoid getting personally involved with the story they’re covering, no matter what tragedies they witness. For example, the Canadian Association of Journalists’ ethics guidelines call for  journalists to be “fair and impartial observers,” while in the U.S. the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethical code mandates  that reporters “be free of obligation to any interest other than the public’s right to know.”

The rationale for this disinterested approach is that if reporters get too emotionally invested, it gets harder to report without bias. You’re supposed to gather the facts, write the story, and move on. As Brussels-based Csilla Szabó, staff director of the Center for International Media Ethics (CIME) , says in an email regarding Porter’s taking on Lovely’s school fees, “One might argue that it would have been more appropriate for the journalist to refer the Haitian family to a relevant organisation that provides assistance in funding education in these specific kinds of circumstances.” By getting directly involved, Szabó warns, a journalist “might make their reporting on the issue subjective and their article less credible.”

And this makes sense, at least in theory. The notion is that by disconnecting themselves from their emotions, journalists can focus on delivering the most truthful, effective story possible. Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel argue in their book The Elements of Journalism, “[I]t is vital to maintain some personal distance in order to see things clearly and make independent judgements.”

But try as they might to be perfectly objective, journalists are human beings. What if their sense of humanity outstrips their journalistic training? What if sometimes it’s impossible not to step in and help?

•••

After a bit of thought, Porter told Lovely’s mother she would pay Lovely’s tuition for two and a half years, as well as that of her cousin and a neighbour. She also pledged to give the family $100 each month for six months to help cover living expenses. In total, this aid was the equivalent of a few mortgage payments, but a life-changing amount for Lovely’s family.

Upon returning to Toronto, Porter wasn’t even sure that she’d write about helping the family. After all, it was a decision she’d made as a mother and a human being, not as a representative of the Star. Before Lovely, the Star was simply reporting on the earthquake in Haiti, but Porter kept thinking about Lovely’s story. Finally, her editor, Alison Uncles, urged her to write the piece. “You’re a columnist,” Uncles told her. “You can write about what you like.”

•••

It’s obviously a conflict of interest when a reporter is influenced by a wealthy, powerful source, or directly offers money for an interview. But in a case like Porter’s, where the person she helped was an impoverished toddler, is there really a risk of bias?

Tracy Rosenberg, California-based executive director of watchdog group Media Alliance, says in an email that dealing with less powerful sources carries less risk, but when befriending any source, “there can be conflicts between the requirements to tell the story and what might be acts of friendship.”

Jeffrey Dvorkin, former National Public Radio ombudsman and vice president of news, and director of the University of Toronto Scarborough’s journalism program, is less by-the-book. “Their first obligation is to get the story,” he says of reporters who find themselves in a crisis, “but there are obviously moments when a journalist will find himself in a situation where journalism is secondary to his instincts to do the right thing. Journalists need to be able to exercise their conscience, and if they can do that and not interfere with this obligation, that opportunity should be sought out and acted on.” Stephen Ward, director of the Center for Journalism Ethics for the University of Wisconsin in Madison and the author of Global Journalism Ethics, agrees: “If, at the same time [as reporting a story], without compromising their impartiality, a journalist could also help someone in trouble, then I think that’s perfectly okay.”

Of course, sometimes reporting on a crisis may be more effective in the long run than directly intervening. Paul Chapman, senior news editor of Vancouver’s The Province, says in an email that while journalists should step in when someone is in immediate danger or pain, focusing their efforts on reporting can be more helpful when it comes to long-term humanitarian issues. “If you were covering a war and saw a citizen get shot and they needed help, I think it’s your duty as a human to help out the victim. If you’re covering the aftermath of an earthquake and you are to tell the story, then I think you deal with the story and not with helping clear wreckage.”

American war journalist David Axe is someone for whom the shooting example is not hypothetical. In 2008, while covering a conflict in Chad, he watched a man involved in the clash get shot. Axe chose to film him as he lay dying, then fled when the shooting began again, though he did consider helping the injured. Still, he says, “That’s not what I do. At what point would I cease being a journalist and start being a humanitarian?” Axe adds, “One can be a journalist and a humanitarian, but sometimes not at the same moment.” With no first-aid expertise and shots being fired around him, Axe saw helping as a futile suicide mission, and he felt documenting the man’s death would be for the greater good. His justification: “I accept that what I can do about this is to do my job. I do work for the good of mankind. I do an important job. That job is at least as important as stopping to help.”

Fred Brown, vice chair of the Society of Professional Journalists’ ethics committee, thinks extreme detachment is abhorrent. “If you are in the position to save someone’s life and you don’t do it, it’s terrible. That’s absolutely not only a crime against humanity, it’s using what I call the journalistic excuse to maybe not put yourself at risk.”

In Haiti, Montgomery was puzzled to observe fellow reporters shying away from involvement. “I just couldn’t believe it. I mean, they were upset about the situation, I think, but for them it was a clear line. They were there as a journalist and that was it, they weren’t going to help.”

Szabó of CIME seems less taken aback: “If the journalist is genuinely concerned about the livelihood of [a] source, the best option might be to alert relevant authorities or organisations who can offer an appropriate form of assistance, so that the journalist can focus solely on reporting.”

But in Haiti, there was no one to turn to. Few aid agencies were able to get into the country soon after the earthquake, and people were in dire circumstances. “It wasn’t like an emergency would be here, where you would have ambulances and police responding,” Montgomery says. “Anybody who had all their limbs and wasn’t injured had to pitch in.”

And just as Porter and Montgomery stepped in in the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake, reporters were seen breaching customary journalistic boundaries after Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Chris Merrifield, promotions producer of New Orleans’ WWL-TV, pulled a driver out of a sinking car, for example, while NBC reporter Kerry Sanders gave food to a sick, elderly man who’d been staying on the floor at the airport. A CBS news crew’s boat rescued a man marooned in the middle of the water on an inflatable mattress, and ABC’s Bob Woodruff passed out water and food.

Despite their departure from the model of journalistic detachment, the public response to Porter’s and Montgomery’s actions was largely supportive. One blogger wrote that Porter’s coverage “reminds us once again of the power we all have to make this world a slightly better place;” responding to Montgomery’s J-Source piece, a reader wrote, “[I]t was courageous of you to help out on the spot, be fearless and just do what was right in your heart.”

At one time, Politico White House editor Rachel Smolkin would not have been among those praising Porter and Montgomery. In a 2006 piece  for the American Journalism Review, she wrote about participating in a journalism ethics symposium and being appalled by those who said they’d help deliver food to starving people while on the job. But after speaking with journalists who had helped out during Hurricane Katrina, Smolkin reconsidered her black-and-white approach to ethics, concluding that “your humanity—your ability to empathize with pain and suffering, and your desire to prevent it—does not conflict with your professional standards.”

This suggests journalists are less likely to be criticized for helping victims of natural forces than for engaging in advocacy. Nearly every news organization still frowns upon reporters taking political sides. Ward advises journalists to be cautious when “you identify with a group very much so, and your reporting takes on the appearance of advocacy,” while the CBC code of conduct states that those reporting on elections “are restricted from engaging in political activity or from taking public positions on matters of public concern or controversy.”

•••

With Lovely in school and her column published, it seemed Porter’s role as pseudo aid worker had come to an end. But then the emails began pouring in. Within an hour, Porter had heard from close to 100 readers wanting to give her money to help Haiti. Next came the cheques.

“At first I kept refusing and saying, ‘I don’t do this. Check out this NGO,'” she says. “But people were saying, ‘No, I want you to do exactly what you did, and I want you to do it for me.'” Before long, Porter had $30,000 of readers’ money and no idea what to do with it. As a columnist, once or twice she’d forwarded letters and donations from readers to the people she’d written. Now readers were requesting that she actively change the story.

So Porter sat down with her editors to figure out a plan for the money. The group decided that instead of just reporting on aid and change in Haiti, they’d integrate involvement with it into the paper’s coverage. Porter would use the readers’ donations to fund scholarships for Haitian students, documenting the process in the Star. She would also write more columns about Lovely, for what became a long series of articles and videos called “Lovely’s Haiti.” “In a way, I think it was brilliant,” Porter says, “because as a journalist you feel like you’re exploiting people when you use their stories.”

•••

From Tracy Rosenberg’s perspective, Porter and her editors did the right thing in being open about Porter’s involvement with Lovely and her family. The Media Alliance executive director says that journalists who intervene in people’s lives while reporting “must write about it, or they are not being honest with their public about what they experienced in this crisis zone and what set of experiences are forming their report of what was happening.” Ross Howard, journalism teacher at Langara College in Vancouver and chairman of Media & Democracy Group , a Canadian non-profit that trains international journalists, criticizes news crews that “intervene and disclose simply for personal or corporate promotion.”

This cynical practice seems to be a growing phenomenon. With traditional news consumption faltering and public social consciousness on the rise, some news outlets are allowing their journalists to help sources in order to build their own reputation as a caring organization, and news audiences are increasingly demanding this sort of coverage. U of T’s Jeffrey Dvorkin shares Howard’s distaste with this development. He points to Anderson Cooper’s Haiti coverage, in which Cooper was seen intervening. “I’m sure he felt a great instinct to help these people,” Dvorkin says, “but it made for great television. Sometimes gestures are simply that, just gestures.”

So journalistic ethics have grown murkier as reporters try to balance their profession’s demand for objectivity with the desires of the public and the pangs of their own consciences. Rosenberg thinks that more conversation about the issue is needed. “Some of the ‘objectivity’ conversation is becoming more nuanced than it used to be, and that is a good thing,” she says. “Journalists are rarely robots, and the presumption that they should act [like them] does not offer a good model for what people experience [when] reporting.”

Dvorkin urges newsrooms to discuss the issue of obligations before journalists are sent out to cover humanitarian crises. “There hasn’t been enough clarity in the past, and they have to have some clarity in their own minds about how best to respond and feel free to talk about it in their news organizations.”

Porter is still mulling over her own views on journalistic detachment. All she knows for sure is that over two years after the earthquake, she still thinks about Lovely every single day. A picture of the little girl sits on her bedside table.

“She’s not just a story for me anymore.”

Photographs of Lovely Avelus by Lucas Oleniuk. Photograph of Sue Montgomery by Phil Carpenter, Montreal Gazette.

It’s 1985, and you’re writing an article about the one-year anniversary of Marc Garneau‘s first trip into space. You start your research by talking to a librarian in the morgue, who assures you that Garneau has his own file in the biography section. He is also included in the space-flight subject file, and there are three files of pictures devoted to him in case you need some visuals.

Armed with this knowledge, you head to the six-foot-high Lektreiver, a kind of mechanized file cabinet. You flip a switch on the side to turn it on, then check the handwritten list next to the number pad to see which code corresponds with the Gs: 08. You punch the numbers in, and the machine starts to clunk and turn. The shelves appear from the top of the machine and drop down out of sight, stopping once the correct shelf is at waist level.

You pull out the two-foot-long drawer marked “GAR” and flip through the 100 or more files until you spy “Garneau, Marc.” To make sure it’s the right file, you pull out the clips from the mustard-yellow envelope and give them a once-over, careful to keep the clippings in chronological order. You need the whole file, and luckily your newspaper’s library allows you to sign out. So you put all the clips in an envelope and leave the original file, now empty, at the front with a librarian.

At your desk, you check each article carefully. As you move from the July 1984 stories about Garneau’s training and get closer to October, the headlines get bigger and the articles get longer. Finally, your eyes rest on page A1 from October 4, 1984, which bears the five-column-wide headline you need: “First Canadian in Space: For Our First Shuttle Crewman, ‘It’s Just a Job,’ Dad Says.”

Back in the morgue, several women sit elbow to elbow at a wooden desk, diligently clipping articles from the newspapers spread before them. Each page has been carefully marked up by the head librarian, who has circled key words in red pen—a full-time task. “It physically took one person a day to do the marking-up,” remembers former Globe and Mail head librarian Amanda Valpy, who started at the paper in 1968. Every article was clipped from several copies of the day’s paper with scissors or even, at the Globe, using a slat from a venetian blind and a wooden dowel. “They could do six pages at a time,” Valpy says in the soft-spoken manner of someone who spent 35 years in a library. The clips will be sorted alphabetically, then these librarians, or maybe the overnight shift, will spend an hour or more filing them. At big papers, the morgue operates until 2 a.m., or sometimes even 24 hours a day, and can have more than a dozen staff.

The walls are lined with shelves holding dictionaries and encyclopedias, plus stacks of newspapers and files full of journals and magazines. The great, revolving Lektriever sits on the other side of the room, its hundreds of skinny drawers jam-packed with files of old newspaper articles and microfiche, while tall metal filing drawers hold rolls of microfilm, likely dating to the very first issue of the paper.

Reporters stream in and out of the morgue, many racing to do some research before heading to their assignments. Some stop to ask questions, inquire about a certain clip file, or sign a file out. Some head straight to the bookshelves. Outside the library, the newsroom hums. Reporters speak quickly, phones ring shrilly, typewriters clack noisily. But inside the morgue, the noises are muffled. It is a separate peace, where the sound dims and the research begins.

The morgue is both the first stop and the final resting place for every story in the paper.

•••

“You couldn’t really tackle anything without the background,” Don Obe recalls. “And that’s what the morgue was. It was background information.” In the 1960s, he worked first at The Vancouver Sun and later the Toronto Telegram, and he always needed clips to get started on assignments. “It was the nerve centre of the whole reporting process. It was absolutely indispensable to general reporters,” he says. “The morgue was your lifeline. I don’t know how you would have prepared yourself quickly enough to carry out an assignment without that background knowledge, and that’s what it was there for.”

Like most reporters, John Saunders, former business reporter at the Toronto Star, always checked the clips first. “I can recall many times being sent out on a story and running back to the library, grabbing the clips to take a quick look to at least have some idea what I was facing,” Saunders says. “It might just be a matter of those few minutes in the library before you ran downstairs to grab a cab to go to wherever you were supposed to go.”

“Looking back at it now, it’s like the Stone Age,” says Don Gibb, from 1968 to ’88 a reporter and later city editor at the London Free Press. “But it worked! It worked at the time because you didn’t know any different.”

It certainly worked for Kirk Makin, now Globe justice reporter, who started at the paper in 1979. In an email, he calls the old morgue his “lifeblood”: “I’m sure there were very few days when I didn’t use it. It was the only way to see what had been written before on a topic. Often, I would sit at the table in there and hand write information from the articles I was examining. It was a capital offence to remove the envelopes or articles from the library, so the only other alternative was to use the photocopier. But since it was often in disrepair or there was a lineup of people waiting for it, handwritten notes were often the best alternative.”

That alternative didn’t exist at papers where reporters were allowed to take files out of the morgue, then didn’t return them. “Our desks were total shambles, and everything was a mess. You’d grab a file and forget to take it back,” confesses Gibb. Tracking down the missing files was a challenge. “We couldn’t send an email to see who in the newsroom has this clipping file,” says Joanne Madden, who was a librarian at the Star for 30 years. Instead, morgue staff sent out a note or called the newsroom desk by desk.

Keeping files in order was a further chore. “One librarian would spend hours putting clipping files in date order. And it really took hours!” says Madden. Saunders recalls how “every once in a while you would find yourself cursing an unknown colleague who had put them all back in a jumble. There was hardly anything you could do except sit down, go through them, and put them in a stack in date order.”

Obe remembers another difficulty: “You relied on that file. If a reporter had spelled a name wrong, you would go on that spelling and it would perpetuate the error.”

Despite these drawbacks, some veteran journalists become nostalgic remembering the old system. Makin is one. “Sometimes, I’d open one clip file that had clearly not been opened in years,” he says. “This was a particular pleasure. It was like opening a vault; an ancient pyramid; Al Capone’s safe!” Louise Brown, now education reporter at the Star, started there in 1976, and she used clipping files frequently. She recalls the physical sensation: “They were so soft because they were so well handled. Everything was very well worn because everybody was using them. They were soft and inky and a little bit musky.”

“I like clippings because I like to touch things,” says Catherine Dunphy, who worked at the Starfor 25 years. “I’m very old fashioned. I like paper.” There was another benefit to clips besides the tactile experience, according to Brown: “When you unfold a huge, screaming front-page story, you physically see the layout of it, you see the size of the headline. Having the physical paper clipping, you could see how big a deal it was just by the size of the headline. And it was right there in your hand.” John Honderich, chair of the Torstar board and former publisher of the Star, also likes the physical aspect of clippings. “I love seeing it on the original paper and how it actually appeared,” he says. Today, every story looks the same in a digital database. As Brown says, “The end of the world is the same as today’s recipe.”

There’s no such lingering affection for the microfiche records morgues also hold. Starting roughly in the 1950s, once a file was too big or its contents too fragile, the clips would be pasted onto a black board. “They started to get old and yellow and rotting because we had clippings from the 1920s,” explains Madden. The boards were filmed, and the film sheets would take the clippings’ place in the file. Eight boards fit on one microfiche sheet—Makin describes the result as a “giant crossword puzzle-like format.” Using a microfiche reader—a device like a sort of View-Master—is extremely hard on the eyes, and if the reader couldn’t print, reporters would have to painstakingly take notes. Not surprisingly, librarians often heard complaints about the format. “I would try explaining that we’re doing this to preserve them. But that didn’t matter to the reporters,” says Madden.

Makin remembers, “I hated them because, while they were somewhat faster to deal with, they were impersonal and lacked the textured beauty of a simple, yellowed newspaper clipping.”

•••

There are no clippings anymore at The Vancouver Sun and The Province. By 1997, the papers had transferred all of their clips to microfiche. The Globe’s three Lektrievers still harbour roughly 230,400 clip files dating from 1936 to 1985, although their fate is unclear. Celia Donnelly, the head librarian and one of eight morgue staff, says, “I have to make a good case if we want to keep the old clips when the Globe moves in a few years.”

A visit to the library in early November revealed three-quarters-empty bookshelves and two huge recycling bins. Old maps, encyclopedias, parliamentary handbooks, and back issues of magazines were on their way to the dump. There was no traffic during the hour that I was there. “Most of these periodicals are online, and the newsroom, all the reporters, have access to them at their desks,” Donnelly says.

An important role remains for librarians, though. Astrid Lange, supervisor of the library and research services department at the Star, points out that reporters don’t have time to do complicated background searches. “They’re busy doing other things. They’re on the street, or they’re calling people to talk to, or they’re at scenes reporting,” she says. Donnelly succinctly describes the role of the newspaper librarian today: “We tend to guide reporters and we help with more complicated research.” She has a rule of thumb: “If you haven’t found it in 10 minutes, then call us. Because we can find something in two minutes that’s going to take a reporter a half-hour, just because we know the resources so well.” As the Star’s Louise Brown says, “It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to pull out the Who’s Who. But there’s an art to retrieving information from the past.” Nowadays, if she has problems with a complicated online search, she’ll stop by the library on her way to the cafeteria. “They’re always magicians.”

A librarian can often conjure a single detail from a sea of information with a few clicks of her mouse. Still, Makin fondly recalls an earlier time: “I never felt emotionally and viscerally closer to my trade than I did when I could see and smell the newsprint as I leafed through those envelopes.”

Illustration by Gérard DuBois. Photographs by Tibor Kolley, The Globe and Mail.

Eighty-five-year-old Johnny Lombardi takes the stage to open the 35th CHIN International Picnic at Toronto’s Exhibition Place on June 30, 2001. Wearing his usual picnic attire—a CHIN Picnic T-shirt and baseball cap that conceals his baldness—the founder of CHIN multicultural radio greets the crowd in Cantonese: “Nei ho ma” (How are you?).

With a big smile on his face, Lombardi gestures animatedly, nailing his well-rehearsed punchlines. He tells the crowd that the Italians and Chinese are similar because both groups like to eat a lot, and jokes that his radio stations’ call signs are for the Chinese, since CHIN is one letter short of China. And he says he appreciates the Chinese for producing pasta, recounting how when Marco Polo went to China he saw people eating noodles and dumplings. When Polo returned home, Lombardi says, he recreated the dishes, thus inventing pasta. The audience loves him, laughing and applauding his tale, though for many in the crowd, English is a second language.

Lombardi then crouches in front of a vividly coloured lion head and uses a paintbrush to dab in its eyes, so as to awaken its spirit. He leaves the stage to the sound of a drum pounding, so the lion can start its dance. Accompanied by a photographer, he scoots to the next stage in a golf cart—he’s had some trouble walking these past few years.

That would be the last time Johnny Lombardi, “the mayor of Little Italy,” would rouse the lion: on March 18, 2002, he died from complications of pneumonia.

The tributes flowed. Mel Lastman, then mayor of Toronto, said, “I don’t know of anybody that had the spirit and enthusiasm that he had.” Former Ontario premier Bill Davis spoke of Lombardi as “a great Canadian.” An Italian immigrant whom Lombardi had befriended, Angelo Varrecchia, declared, “For everybody, he was a father figure.” And Joe Pantalone, then a city councillor, stated, “He stands as tall as the CN Tower in terms of what he gave to this city. He was one of the first to show that being different has value, to make it popular.”

But perhaps the best articulation of Lombardi’s contribution came in a Toronto Star editorial:

“Long before multiculturalism was a policy—or even a well-known word—the ebullient entrepreneur…was peddling a vision of Toronto as a mini-United Nations.

“The meeting place for the city’s ever-changing blend of voices and cultures was Lombardi’s radio station CHIN, founded in 1966, when languages other than English were rarely heard on Toronto’s airwaves.

“But CHIN was more than a broadcast outlet. It was an affirmation that the music and laughter and conversation of the city’s many ethnic communities belonged together. It was a noisy, high-spirited experiment in ethnic diversity….This city will miss him. Its heart is bigger because of him.”

•••

The city’s heart was definitely smaller when Lombardi was born on December 4, 1915, the first child of Leonardo, a labourer, and Teresa, a homemaker, who had moved to Toronto from Italy in 1912. Like many children of the poor immigrants who crowded into substandard housing in the core of the city, Lombardi spent much of his early years hustling for money, first shining shoes outside the now-closed Shea’s Theatre downtown, and later folding and addressing the weekly La Tribuna Italo-Canadese for $2 a week. By the time of the Depression, still a teenager, he was playing in big bands, including his own, Johnny Lombardi & His Orchestra.

The music stopped in 1942, when Lombardi enlisted in the army, seeing action as a sergeant in the 7th Canadian Infantry in France, Holland, Belgium, and Germany, but not, to his relief, Italy (he didn’t want to fight against his own blood). On D-Day—June 6, 1944—he was part of the Canadian forces that landed on Juno Beach; years later, he would be immortalized in a Heritage Minute that depicts Lombardi playing Ruth Lowe’s “I’ll Never Smile Again” on a cornet amid the chaos on shore.

Significantly, after the war ended, Lombardi was stationed in Zutphen, Holland, where he organized entertainment for soldiers waiting to be discharged. Back in Toronto in 1946, he was pressured by his parents to settle down and do something more stable than being a musician. So using his savings and veteran’s allowance, he opened a grocery  store with two partners on the corner of Dundas Street West and Bellwoods Avenue, in the midst of the growing Italian community. Later he would confess, “Boy, we had a rough time. Things were still rationed. We couldn’t import anything from Italy, and besides, I didn’t know anything about the grocery business.”

But Lombardi knew how to promote. In 1948, an advertising representative from CHUM radio approached him about advertising the store. Business was slow, but ad time was too expensive. Instead, Lombardi convinced CHUM to sell him an airtime slot every Sunday, then plugged his own store on a show billed as “Music, Mirth, Melody, from far-off Sunny Italy.” By the mid-1950s, it was airing daily.

By that time the grocery store had relocated to 637 College Street, and Lombardi had married Lena Crisologo and had two children: Theresa, born in 1950, and Leonardo (Lenny) in 1952. (The caboose, Donina, would be born in 1966.) They lived around the corner from the College Street store—the flagship in what was at one point five locations—in a modest house on Clinton Street.

Despite speaking self-described “atrocious” Italian, Lombardi was becoming a community figure. Newcomers would visit the store for advice about life in Canada and he would stand behind his cheese counter, listening and offering solutions, introducing them to bank managers if they wanted to buy a house, or connecting them with the right people to find a job. As Lenny recounts, his father would also sometimes intervene with authorities, like the time when three crying women came knocking at the Lombardis’ door, their husbands having been arrested for loitering. Many immigrants were living in small apartments—often shared with other families to save money—with no room to socialize. So groups of Italian men congregated on the sidewalks, something they were accustomed to doing in Italy. Lombardi went down to the local police station and explained that this was just how Italians relaxed. The men were let out.

Lombardi wasn’t just solidifying his reputation as unofficial mayor at this time. From an office in his supermarket, the walls covered with photographs of him with officials and celebrities, he operated his many business ventures: in addition to the grocery chain, he also owned the Italo-Canadian Advertising service, which sold space on his radio show, and was a shareholder in Bravo Records and Music Publishing, a distributor of Italian music.

And he returned to his postwar role as impresario, bringing in big names from Italy—Aurelio Fierro, Angela de Parde, Sergio Franchi—to perform at venues such as Massey Hall and Maple Leaf Gardens. His businesses, though seemingly unrelated, were all intertwined. He publicized concerts on his radio program, directing listeners to his grocery store to buy tickets. Typical of his genius for cross-promotion is a 1957 pre-Christmas advertisement in the Star that touts both food specials—large panettone for $2.59—and a Renato Carosone concert. But Lombardi was starting to think of an even bigger venture.

•••

It’s another picnic. This one, on the Labour Day weekend, 1966, is not as well documented as the 2001 event, nor as well attended. In contrast to the estimated 200,000 who attended that event at the Exhibition, 5,000 or 6,000 people, predominately Italian, have taken the ferry to Centre Island for the one-day spaghetti-eating contest.

“The crowd didn’t know what to make of it, seeing this spaghetti being cooked in big pots out in the open,” Lombardi would remember of the contest. “I hate to say it, but it looked terrible. In order to get anyone to enter, I had to sit down and try the spaghetti myself. I would taste it, then turn the other way and spit it out when no one was looking. Eventually, we got 50 people to join in. The winner made away with a much-deserved refrigerator.” Lombardi has planned this gathering in part to celebrate the June 6 debut of CHIN 1540, “Music of the World.” But he has another motive, too. “He realized that it would answer the skeptics and show that he had listeners,” says his daughter Theresa.

Proving listenership is not the only obstacle he’s faced. If he’d had his way, his station’s call letters would have been CHOW—reminiscent of ciao. However, it turned out CHOW was taken.”But I didn’t mind,” he would tell reporters gamely. “After all, in Europe, chin-chin is a familiar drinking salutation.”

There’s also the matter of airtime. CHIN can only broadcast from 6:30 a.m. until sunset—during the rest of day, the slot is taken by an American frequency. And during its hours of activity, by federal law, the station can devote just 15 percent of its time to programming in languages other than English or French, which translates to two slots on the weekends: 12:30 p.m. to dusk on Saturday, noon to dusk on Sunday. Into these times Lombardi packs shows in Italian, Yiddish, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Portuguese.

Despite the obstacles, Lombardi would later say that “1966 was the year everything came together.” By 1968, he would also have an FM station, CHIN-FM, which could broadcast 24 hours a day.

Typically, Lombardi located his studios above his College Street store. Outside, a blinking neon sign displayed Lombardi’s name above the station’s call letters. The approximately 20 employees had to enter though a doorway beside the grocery entrance that led to a narrow stairway permeated by the smell of Italian meats and cheeses. “We were in such closed, cramped areas,” Lenny remembers. “There was no air, no windows—just skylights.”

CHIN-AM was not an immediate success. Early in 1967, McDonald Research released a report saying not a single person was tuning into the station before 8:30 a.m. The announcer for the show that started at 6 a.m. was essentially talking to himself. (A column by Barbara Frum said that Lombardi responded by saying “He knows for a fact that there are at least 200 devoted listeners. That’s how many relatives he has, and apparently every last one of them wouldn’t dare listen to anything else.”)

Listenership was also an issue for CHIN-FM. In 1967, FM radios were not very common in homes, and most cars on the road picked up only AM frequencies. Lombardi’s entrepreneurial sense kicked in, and he began selling small FM radios at his supermarket for around $30.

If 1966 was the year that things came together for Lombardi, 1969 was when they seemed to start falling apart. First there came a failed bid for a city alderman. The Liberal Party nominated him to run for a seat in his ward. However, after being accused of double-crossing another Italian candidate, he chose to run as an independent in a nearby area, and lost after his last-minute switch.

Then came a bitter blowup in 1970 with his partners in the station, James Service and Johnny Longo. Service thought the station should concentrate on English programming, to promote immigrants’ integration. (Service also accused Lombardi of “using the company to pay for very private bills, private photographs, private airplane travel.”) Lombardi wanted to uphold the original multicultural vision. After the CRTC renewed CHIN-AM’s licence only to the end of the year, it ultimately ruled it would “maintain the policy that this frequency should be used for programs serving the needs of the diverse language groups.” With his win, Lombardi was able to gain full control of CHIN-AM, but not before another licence-threatening incident involving a Serbian announcer who suggested that the Yugoslav consul should be assassinated. Lombardi would recall this time as “the hardest of my life.”

“[Johnny] was very flamboyant, his personality was show biz-like,” says Zelda Young, host and producer of CHIN’s Jewish show. “He was larger than life.”

Even when describing his impoverished background—”We were looked at as kids that couldn’t afford shoes”—Lombardi was still on. A 2002 documentary on his beloved College Street, Portrait of a Street, shows him talking about life during the Depression, using his hands to enhance stories. “At 14 years old, I had my first taste of sirloin steak. And I lost my virginity! By eating steak,” he starts laughing. “It was a wonderful taste I’ll never forget.” Though he’s in his 80s, he giggles like a teenager at his own jokes.

“At 70 years old he acted like he was 50,” says Lenny. “He had presence in every sense of the word. He would go flat out all the time.” Whether he was at the station or one of the affairs he attended almost every night, Lombardi was always schmoozing, always greeting everyone with a big smile on his face. “He had a bad joke for every occasion,” said Citytv chief Moses Znaimer after Lombardi’s death. Evenings, his children would accompany him to events—often three or four in a night. His only break from work would be going home to change clothes. He attended political rallies, grand openings of businesses, fundraisers. “You name it, he was front and centre,” says Lenny.

Instinctively media savvy, if he thought he would be photographed, he’d wear his signature CHIN baseball cap—even paired with a tuxedo. At the station, he exhibited “gentleman’s style”—always in shirts and ties on weekdays, and “smart casual” when making rounds on weekends. But he cared about more than just his appearance. Carmela Laurignano, now vice president of Evanov Communications Inc., who spent roughly a decade at CHIN, says he was always available to people, not just his employees, and “usually more reachable than some of us.” He would return phone calls within the hour, and she remembers him sitting on a bench outside the grocery store giving advice to people who sought him out.

“He was a people person,” says Lenny. He remembers one of the times he accompanied his father to a funeral home to pay respects to an Italian family. The two arrived to find there were three funerals that day, with three Italian families, so they went to see all three. “He always had time for everybody,” says Lenny. Especially his employees. “It was really a family and he was the father,” says Laurignano. “We liked the job, but we worked there because we loved him.” She adds, “He knew everything about everyone.” Though some staff only came in for their programs, Lombardi would often address them by name.

The downside of his style was his tendency to micromanage. Lombardi was a delegator, but still wanted to be involved in every aspect of the program, including song selection. He also had a tendency to relish a politically incorrect stance. Almost from the start, the annual CHIN picnic featured a bikini contest. In the 1990s, feminists targeted the antediluvian event, but Lombardi was unrepentant, protesting, “There’s nothing wrong with a bikini contest.” It stayed.

Still, perhaps Lombardi’s greatest gift was recognizing talent, according to Laurignano. “The station was a breeding ground for lots of people,” she says. She was one of them, starting as a part-time receptionist during university and eventually becoming vice president, sales, marketing and promotion, before leaving in 1993. “I’m an ethnic woman and I became the VP of a company,” says Laurignano. “There are not a lot of women executives these days. Imagine it back then.”

Johnny Lombardi’s idea of multiculturalism was validated when the government of Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau signed the Multiculturalism Policy of Canada in 1971, which encouraged citizens to maintain their own cultural traditions. “Johnny Lombardi was the father of multiculturalism. But there was no name for it before Trudeau,” says Zelda Young.

•••

Lombardi had a personal impact on all the staff at CHIN, but his influence extended further. There was the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission’s ethnic broadcasting policy of 1985, for example. Before this, licences for ethnic broadcasters were evaluated on a case-by-case basis, forcing applicants to jump through hoops. The policy created a clearer framework for new applications.

Another sign of Lombardi’s success is CHIN’s current home: a six-storey complex at 622 College Street, into which the station moved in 1991. Reportedly costing as much as $18 million, the building contains stores, professional offices, and, on the top three floors, the headquarters for CHIN Radio/Television International (CHIN produces eight hours a week of ethnic programming for Citytv). An atrium brings in natural light; it’s very different from the cramped, windowless offices above the grocery store. “We quickly got used to it,” says Lenny. “But not my dad.” Everyone from the old station, including the security guard, moved across the street, but Lombardi wasn’t ready to leave. His office walls were covered with photos of famous friends. He told his children that he wouldn’t move until his pictures did. Over a weekend, they mapped out the pictures in his office, moving them to the walls in his new one. By Monday, his new space was set and Lombardi finally made the move, leaving behind his original studio for good.

Last November, Thailand was suffering through its worst flooding in 50 years. While Thai citizens are no strangers to high water levels, the heavy monsoon rains had left more than 800 dead and thousands displaced. As a result, television news crews from around the world were on the ground to put a human face to the natural disaster. In the midst of it all, Hungarian-born freelance reporter and Carleton University alumnus Tibor Krausz ventured from his home in Bangkok into the flooded streets of the city to take some photographs.

It was just after 7 a.m. when he arrived right outside of the city’s Chinatown, a neighbourhood east of the overflowing Chao Phraya River. Krausz was surprised at what he saw. “Even though the water was basically knee deep, or even deeper,” he says, “people just tried to go about their lives.” A similar scene greeted him near the Grand Palace, where street vendors continued selling food. Some children were even swimming in the knee-deep water, enjoying an impromptu pool party.

But in one section of the street, Krausz saw a small group of  Thais standing on sandbags surrounded by water, looking at their feet, hesitant to cross. A British television reporter stood nearby, explaining to the camera that the people were burdened with the question of whether to cross the harrowing street. Just off camera, meanwhile, the children continued frolicking in the water.

Once he was finished recording, the reporter thanked the locals, who stepped back into the flooded street without hesitation and continued on their way. Krausz approached the crew, identified himself as a fellow journalist, and asked why they had staged the report. Upset at being questioned, the reporter replied, “Well, have you done any television journalism?” Krausz took that to mean that such staging was a common occurrence.

Five minutes later, while wandering through a small market, he saw just how common it was. A Thai camera crew had asked a group of soldiers to stack sandbags and was filming the scene, at one point telling the men to stop and start over. Apparently, the crew felt one of the soldiers was smiling too much. It took two more takes until the reporters were satisfied.

Krausz wrote about the two staging incidents for The Christian Science Monitor, admitting it felt strange to report on fellow journalists. “I think a lot of journalists, they have this sort of omertà, you know, like the Italian Mafia’s code of silence, that you would not actually speak about other journalists,” he says. “And even myself, I didn’t feel good about this. But I think sometimes you have to speak up.”

As to when you should speak up, however, it’s not always clear. For Krausz, the motivation was simple: in staging scenes for their cameras, the journalists were needlessly distorting the reality of what was actually happening on the ground in Thailand.

But what about the far more widespread practice of shooting B-roll—or sequencing shots—for news reports, when the journalist asks the subject to pretend to answer a phone call or walk down a hallway for the camera, for example? Such innocuous, generic scenes are regularly spliced into news reports, but they’re no more real than the footage of Thais feigning fear in the flooded streets of Bangkok.

While most television journalists have no problem with the staging of generic footage for news reports, there are detractors. Their argument? By allowing the creation of such everyday scenes, broadcasters are leaving the door open for reporters to push the boundaries of what is acceptable—and in the process, diminish the credibility of television journalism.

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Anybody who stages always has excuses, okay? And they’re all bullshit.” So proclaims Wolfgang  Achtner during a lively cross-Atlantic Skype conversation. The Italy-based journalist has worked for networks such as ABC and CNN over the course of his 30-year career, but he says he’s never resorted to staging—and never will. “I have been told by some colleagues that I’m a hard-ass and that my position is unnecessarily rigid, but I don’t agree,” he says. “I’ve always done a great job and beaten anyone at any aspect of journalism, whether it was as a photographer or writer or video journalist.”

Achtner, who has taught journalism in universities across Italy, believes there must be a clear separation between fiction and journalism. In fiction, he says, you can film whatever you want, as many times as you want, to achieve the desired footage; when you’re shooting news, however, you’re shooting events as they happen. “Staging something would put us into the fiction camp. It’s taboo for me—a line I will not ever cross.”

Predictably, Achtner’s stance has led to conflicts with other journalists, especially since he’s reproached colleagues in the field over what he considers unethical behaviour. The way he sees it, reporters stage due to sloppiness or laziness—sloppiness meaning they missed something because they weren’t paying attention, and laziness because they weren’t willing to spend the time to find something occurring naturally.

“When people say, ‘Well, I can’t wait for three hours in a place to get one person walking in front of an archway,’ well, then don’t do it and go get something else that you believe is more important,” Achtner says. What you can’t do, he argues, is ask someone to walk in front of the archway in order to create the footage you envisioned. If it doesn’t happen spontaneously, he says, tough luck. “You do without that shot. Period.”

Certainly, there are examples supporting Achtner’s contention that staging is unnecessary. Take the case of OMNI News’s South Asian Edition reporter Aadel Haleem and camera operator Gary Chow. Last November, around the same time journalists were fabricating scenes in the flooded streets of Bangkok, the pair was in Toronto preparing a piece on immigration. As Haleem chatted with a lawyer in a downtown boardroom, Chow quietly recorded the exchange, spending the next 10 minutes manoeuvring around the long boardroom table in order to take a variety of different shots to serve as B-roll for the report.

After Haleem completed the formal interview, the pair packed up and headed back to their Toronto studio, carrying with them plenty of footage for their report—all without a single instance of staging.

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Unlike Achtner, not all journalists think the television industry is suffering from an ethical blind spot over the staging of commonplace scenes. Trisha Doyle, who has taught journalism at the University of British Columbia, argues that asking someone to do something for the camera that is a normal part of their day may be acceptable. “Is having somebody walk down a hall staging? I don’t know. I imagine if the person walks down a hall on a daily basis, then it’s kind of a way to help the editing process,” she says. An Emmy Award-winning journalist who has worked for the like of ABC and CBS, Doyle believes viewers at home are not idiots; they can tell when a subject is doing something at the request of the reporter. “I think audiences are pretty sophisticated and know when we have somebody walk down the hallway, that’s just an editing tool that is used,” she says.

According to Doyle, the ethical boundary is breached when a journalist invents a scene for their report or requests their subject to do something he or she would not normally do over the course of their day. “For me, staging is when you put something on a car engine to make it blow up,” she explains. “You know, when otherwise it wouldn’t.”

Paul Adams, an associate professor of journalism at Ottawa’s Carleton University, holds a similar point of view to Doyle. He argues that the term “staging” should not be used to describe the practice of asking subjects to perform normal tasks such as walking down a hallway or typing on a keyboard for the camera. “I think every television reporter in my time, and I presume now, would say that you are absolutely not allowed to stage,” explains

Adams, who has worked both in broadcast and print as a reporter for The Globe and Mail and CBC’s The National. “But what we would mean by staging would be if people had been throwing rocks at cars, and you show up a minute or two late and say, ‘Could somebody just throw a rock at the car so I could get a picture of it?'” he contends.

Adams says that the mere presence of a television crew with a camera will affect how people act—they will either play to the camera or try to ignore it. Either way, he argues, they won’t be acting naturally. “Does what you present to the viewer distort reality or create a perception other than a truthful one?” he asks. In the case of a television reporter asking a subject to do run-of-the-mill actions such as walking down a hallway for the camera, at least, his answer is definitely no. Says Adams: “I don’t think the viewer is in any way misled by seeing an economist sitting at his computer for a couple shots.”

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Journalists do not need to navigate this to-stage-or-not-to-stage ethical minefield alone, as many media organizations offer guidelines on the practice. Unfortunately, they don’t always agree on where to draw the line—or even draw the line, for that matter.

John Long is the chairman of the ethics and standards committee of the U.S.-based National Press Photographers Association (NPPA). In order to protect the dwindling credibility of television news, he says, his organization has spoken out on many issues, including staging. In its code of ethics, the NPPA directs photographers and videographers not to “intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events” while shooting their subjects.

Long says this guideline is key to ethical behaviour. “Our job is to record the reality in front of us so that we can present it to the reader or the viewer and say, ‘This is what I saw,'” he says. “We are not supposed to, in journalism, become a participant.” Long concedes, however, that television has different needs than print. “Video is after storytelling in temporal progression,” he says. Still, he says he would like to see far fewer staged shots used to tell the story. “I think it hurts us in the long run,” he observes. “How they’re going to get away from that, I don’t know.”

Unlike that of the NPPA, CBC/Radio-Canada’s code of ethics does not specifically spell out what is unacceptable in regards to staging. Instead, the broadcaster merely provides this guideline for shooting B-roll: “Generic scenes are commonly used in audiovisual production. These are often everyday actions like walking, answering the phone, looking at a document, closing a door. These scenes clearly serve as general illustration and in no way pretend to describe real facts precisely.”

Although the guideline provides examples, it remains subjective as to what exactly constitutes a generic scene. If the only precondition for directing subjects is that they must perform “everyday actions” to provide “general illustration,” arguably almost anything could be termed a generic scene. For some people, sitting at a desk and typing on a keyboard is an everyday scene. For others, it could very well be throwing rocks at riot police.

Then there’s the Association of Electronic Journalists, or RTDNA Canada, which provides the code of ethics used by the Canadian Broadcast Standards Council. Here’s how the organization tackles the practice of staging: “Electronic journalists will present news and information without distortion…. Electronic journalists will not present news that is rehearsed or re-enacted without informing the audience.”

This seems cut and dried, but RTDNA Canada’s president, Andy LeBlanc, says there must be a balance between providing such rules to prevent unethical behaviour and giving reporters freedom to report. LeBlanc, a television journalism instructor at New Brunswick Community College, says this grey area allows for open discussion and engagement in a newsroom: “I don’t know that we would want to have this massive code of ethics with 40,000 pages of absolute specifics, because that in itself might be restricting to the freedom of journalism by doing that. So I guess it’s a question of just how far should the rules go; you want to be sure that the principles are upheld.”

The key, says LeBlanc, is to support the ideals of truth, honesty, and authenticity, which are essential to ethics. “Circumstances change,” he says, “but the principles really don’t.”

•••

During his 40-year career as a videographer, Darrell Barton has seen first-hand how different newsrooms have handled staging, and he’s not optimistic about the way things are heading. Handy with a still camera since he was 14, Barton grew up with dreams of becoming a Life magazine photographer. While that never came to pass, he did become somewhat of a legend in the TV industry, earning around 60 awards for television photography and production. Among the honours? The NPPA’s Television News Cameraman of the Year Award, which he won in 1974 and again in 1981.

In 1984, Barton struck out on his own and started freelancing, often for CBS. It was there his philosophy on staging began to form, after reading the network’s code of ethics. “It said that if you stage something, you will be fired,” he says. “If you see somebody working for CBS and [they stage] anything and you don’t report them, you will be fired.”

For Barton, the edict made things simple: “You don’t ask anybody to step back. You don’t ask anybody to wait. You don’t ask anybody to ‘Let’s take a walk on the beach.’ You don’t do that. Period.” So no matter what a producer told him to shoot, he had this rule supporting him, saying he didn’t have to do it if it crossed the line.

How tightly did CBS regulate staging? In the 1971 edition of its operating standards, the network states the following: “There shall be no re-creation, no staging, no production technique which would give the viewer an impression of any fact other than the actual fact, no matter how minor or seemingly inconsequential…anything which gives the viewer an impression of time, place, event or person other than the actual fact as it is being recorded and broadcast cannot be tolerated.” The statement then goes on to read: “I recognize that strict application of this policy will result in higher costs or a less technically perfect or interesting ‘show’ in certain instances. But our field is journalism, not show business.”

As Barton describes it, this time at CBS was the golden age of journalism, when ethics ruled. But it did not last. He says that in 1999, he received an updated version of the standards and practices. At first glance, it read the same as the previous version—staging was not to be tolerated, and those caught doing so, or witnessing it and not reporting it, would be fired. But he says there was a small addition, allowing for the recording of “certain actions for production purposes.” (CBS News declined an interview.)

In effect, this meant CBS journalists were now able to set up scenes, if they fell under the blurry definition of “certain actions for production purposes.” For Barton, the new guideline changed everything. “I sent it back to them and said, ‘My standards are higher than this.'” He did not work for CBS often after that.

Now retired, Barton thinks TV news has stopped caring about credibility, and viewers are all too aware of this. A self-described “constructive pessimist,” he thinks staging is here to stay and will only hurt the industry in the long run. When the viewer believes everything is set up, he says, they will stop trusting the reports. His downbeat conclusion: “People aren’t taking news seriously anymore.”

Photograph of Wolfgang Achtner courtesy of Wolfgang Achtner. Illustration by Dan Page.