Updated January 23, 2010, 8:24 p.m.

Fenced in by wire and concrete, guarded by thousands of police officers dressed in riot gear with gas masks and shields, G20 leaders gathered inside the Metro Toronto Convention Centre at the end of June for their fourth summit. Police had already made 32 G20- related arrests in the week leading up to the meeting that began on June 26, 2010, but by the end of the weekend, after several protests, riots and acts of vandalism, the tally rocketed to more than 1,000. Although already astonished by the level of violence in the city and the rising number of arrests, there was one moment that clearly surprised CTV News Channel reporter Scott Laurie while on air: the arrest of his producer, Farzad Fatholahzadeh. The crew immediately turned to catch a shot of two police officers escorting their colleague away, his hands behind his back, secured by a plastic tie, his press pass in clear sight around his neck.

Fatholahzadeh wasn’t the only one representing the “legacy” media who was cuffed, roughed up or booked by police that unsettling weekend. Others included The Globe and Mail’s social media columnist Lisan Jutras; National Post photographers Brett Gundlock and Colin O’Connor as well as Post interns Liem Vu and Cory Ruf; The McGill Daily reporter Stephen Davis; and Torontolife.com freelancer Aaron Leaf.

Then there were the “alternative,” or “independent,” or even freelance journalists who were accorded similar treatment. One was Jesse Rosenfeld, a Canadian freelancer writing for the Guardian’s online Comment Is Free section. When Steve Paikin, host of tvo’s The Agenda, caught sight of Rosenfeld’s arrest, he took the news to his Twitter page, tweeting “the journalist identified himself as working for ‘the guardian.’ he talked too much and pissed the police off. two officers held him”; “a third punched him in the stomach. totally unnecessary. the man collapsed. then the third officer drove his elbow into the man’s back”; “no cameras recorded the assault. and it was an assault.” Police charged Rosenfeld with breach of the peace, though this was later dropped.

Others included Jesse Freeston, of the alt-media site The Real News Network; Adam MacIsaac, who was covering the summit for the Canadian Youth Climate Coalition; and Amy Miller, a Montreal-based freelance journalist who contributes to little-known monthly magazine The Dominion.

Naturally, Canadian media organizations were outraged. “When a major disturbance occurs in Canada’s largest city, the role of the journalist is to inform the public,” said Arnold Amber, president of Canadian Journalists for Free Expression, in a press release following the protests. “There is no reason for them to have been detained or attacked while doing their work.” The Canadian Association of Journalists president, Mary Agnes Welch, echoed Amber in a public statement: “This kind of behaviour by police toward the media is not acceptable in a democracy like Canada.”

The expressions of disapproval weren’t confined to Canada. On his organization’s website, Anthony Mills of the International Press Institute said, “We are concerned at the reports that journalists covering the G20 summit were arrested and allegedly assaulted by police.Journalists have a right to cover such events, including any protests that accompany them, without interference or harassment from police.”

Soon, though, the collective outrage over the treatment of their fellow journalists began to splinter. On Sunday, June 27, the G20 leaders and their entourages started heading home, but even as the security fences were coming down, the clash over who exactly constitutes “the media” was escalating.

Globe reporter and columnist Christie Blatchford touched off the first skirmish with her July 2 column. She was blunt: just because you’ve published your opinions on a website doesn’t make you a journalist. “First, journalism is not merely a collective of the self-anointed,” she declared. “For all that it may not be a regulated profession, neither is it just a coming together of people with cellphones, video cameras and blogs as receptacle [sic] for an apparently endless stream of unfiltered, unedited consciousness.” In regard to the various independent or alternative journalists who have complained about their treatment, she wrote, “[L]et us not pretend that these folks are working journalists or that they are the equivalent.”

Why? “Their work isn’t subject to editing or lawyering or the ethical code which binds, for example, the writers at the Globe. The websites on which they appear don’t belong, as do most reputable newspapers in this province, to the Ontario Press Council, a body which hears complaints against traditional journalists and publications.”

A few days later, Ira Basen, a columnist for CBC.ca who has worked for CBC Radio since 1984, published “The New Journalism and the G20,” exploring the same issue somewhat less acerbically. He welcomed the trend toward media democratization—“the ability of people who were previously denied a voice in the mainstream to now have their voices heard is undeniably a cause for celebration”—but pointed out that there is a definite downside: “When everyone is a journalist, no one is a journalist.”

Basen also noted, “Almost everyone in that crowd had some sort of camera-equipped mobile device, which meant that, in the minds of the police, almost everyone was a potential journalist.” Jennifer Hollett, a reporter with CBC NN’s news talk show Connect with Mark Kelley, was a case in point. On the Saturday of the G20, she was about to take a photo of a protester being arrested when a police officer advised her not to. “I’m with the CBC,” she said. “After a day like today,” he replied, “I don’t care.”

While most others working for traditional outlets had received bona fide passes, Hollett carried only her CBC ID. However, others denied “real” accreditation could seek help from the Alternative Media Centre, which was closely allied with the Toronto Media Co-op, “a network of member-supported, local, democratic news organizations across Canada.” The amc encouraged media makers to apply for passes via its website, and 80 to 100 did. But, as Fatholahzadeh’s and others’ experience showed, it didn’t really matter what, if any, kind of credentials anyone had, a confirmation of Basen’s point about the disappearing line between the professional and the amateur.

The Globe’s Lisan Jutras, for example, followed cyclist protesters as they rode around the city, not on official assignment and without G20 ID. She was detained for about five hours on the Sunday evening. Still, she doesn’t see the blurring of the line between “real” and “amateur” as a bad thing. The media, she believes, should not be given special treatment, as it creates a distance between a journalist’s view of the news event and what’s actually happening, which skews what gets reported. However, she thinks journalists should be able to do their job. As Basen says over the phone, “It’s useful to have a group of people who have been authorized by whomever, whether it be the government or the army, to get special access to be able to tell stories.”

In her column, Blatchford offered another take, saying that although media accreditation provides some privileges—“such as sports dressing rooms and backstage at concerts”—alternative journalists covering the protests ought not complain, because “the press pass doesn’t grant even traditional journalists carte blanche access everywhere.”

Many readers took issue with such statements, which suggested an obvious disdain for citizen journalists. One wrote to say Blatchford should “show some respect for alternative journalists who are not the privileged and coddled”; another countered, “Citizen journalism provides an alternative to the highly censored and manipulated ‘mainstream journalism’ you defend.” Her piece attracted more than 350 responses, many critical of her perspective. Kevin Wood, a Tokyobased Canadian journalist, offered perhaps the most detailed rebuttal. On July 13, he wrote a fired-up, lengthy response, breaking the column down into analyzable bits and taking issue with each point, frequently with a heavy dose of sarcasm. His conclusion: “Blatchford’s attempt to smear [independent journalists] as some sort of lying amateur wannabes just because they don’t work in her office is dishonest and dishonorable.”

However, for Dan Gillmor, a director of the journalism program at Arizona State University and a columnist for Salon.com, an online arts and culture magazine, the question is not “Who is a journalist?” but rather “What is journalism?” In his August 26, 2010, column, “Who’s a Journalist? Does that Matter?,” he noted, “As digital media
become ubiquitous and more and more of us communicate and collaborate online, every person is capable of doing something that has journalistic value.” Still, he struggles with what to call creators of new media, saying that the word “journalist” comes with some baggage, which creates an illusion of a higher role in the profession than a “columnist” or “reporter.”

One step toward closing the gap between old-school journalists and everyone else occurred in 2004, when political bloggers earned press credentials to cover the Democratic National Convention in Boston. Thomas McPhail, professor of media studies at the University of Missouri–St. Louis, disagreed with the move, arguing that they couldn’t cover issues as fairly or professionally as mainstream media. However, the decision was an acknowledgement that bloggers with large audiences—including Ana Marie Cox, founding editor of Washington gossip site Wonkette; Stephen Yellin, a then
16-year-old high school student writing for DailyKos; and Jeralyn Merritt of TalkLeft—were becoming influential disseminators of information with a different take on news from the one the “legacy”media delivered.

But while the bloggers were granted equal privileges, were they journalists? Not many, according to Alan Knight, professor of journalism at the University of Technology Sydney in Australia. In a 2008 article, “Who Is a Journalist?,” he suggests only people who employ “professional practices within recognized codes of ethics” are—a standard that he says filters out many bloggers.

Gillmor offers a more generous definition, arguing that citizens can produce content that has the potential to be just as valuable as traditional media: “Some things have a journalistic function and some things don’t; the nature of the medium has nothing to do with it.” In a 2003 Columbia Journalism Review article, he said that the new media have allowed journalism to evolve into a conversation between producers and consumers: “Our readers collectively know more than we do, and they don’t have to settle for half-baked coverage when they can come into the kitchen themselves.”

While CBC’s Hollett agrees that citizen journalists do have voices that need to be acknowledged and thinks the growth in new media is exciting, she stresses her preference for the term “citizen media” over “citizen journalists.” “I think, at the end of the day, there still is a difference between journalism and videotaping something on the street,” she says. “I think the two work together and I think the two are part of a puzzle.” While citizens creating media may contribute to the news, she notes, it is journalists who provide context.

Similarly, Basen doesn’t dispute the value of citizen journalism, admitting that during the G20, members of this group had a stronger understanding of the stories on the streets than many mainstream journalists did, and he says that working together could even improve the quality of journalism. For example, he says that although Rosenfeld might be a journalist, he is a different kind of journalist from those in mainstream media and he’s going to produce a different kind of story. As Basen wrote of Rosenfeld in his CBC.ca piece, “He blogs for a Guardian site called Comment is Free, where just about anyone can say just about anything they want.” Mainstream media follow a code of ethics and abide by policies and standards, and their work undergoes some sort of verification, whether it’s fact-checking or reporter-editor conversations; however, Basen points out verification of citizen journalism usually happens after something has been published. Within a few days, Rosenfeld complained to CBC that he had been misrepresented in Basen’s piece. In a letter, Kirk LaPointe, CBC ombudsman, responded. “In reviewing the column, I have concluded that it left some errant impressions, he wrote, saying that Comment is Free was just as “journalistically sound” as The Guardian and that Basen’s column failed to mention Rosenfeld’s contributions to other publications, including several from the Middle East. LaPointe cited the overlook to the changing definition of journalism and traditional news outlets seeking ways to work with citizen media. However, Basen believes that when it’s hard to distinguish between citizen and mainstream journalism, the reputation of mainstream media can suffer.”

While Basen supported CBC’s G20: Street Level Team blog, to which both staffers and private citizens posted summit coverage, he cites CNN’s online iReport, “where people take part in the news with CNN,” as straying too far from cnn’s news brand. Individuals can upload their own content, neither edited nor checked for accuracy. The result is content that ranges from a video clip of someone shot during a demonstration in Iran to a piece about a woman who feeds milk to a deer she calls “little girl.”

“I think CNN should have a greater degree of separation between what its mainstream outlet does and what its citizen journalism outlet does,” says Basen. In 2008, for example, iReport falsely claimed Apple cofounder and CEO Steve Jobs had suffered a heart attack. The rumour spread from the website to blogs to Twitter—former Globe communities editor Mathew Ingram even retweeted it—resulting in a dip in Apple’s share price. CNN brands itself as “The Most Trusted Name in News,” and as Basen points out, “That’s the kind of thing that takes years and years to build up and can be destroyed very quickly.”

The prospective danger when amateur and professional journalism meet can be greater than a scarred reputation. On August 23, 2008, gunmen kidnapped Amanda Lindhout, a self-described freelancer from Sylvan Lake, Alberta, just outside Mogadishu, Somalia. The then 27-year-old had spent time earlier in Iraq and Iran and published some columns in the Red Deer Advocate before heading to Mogadishu, but aside from that, her credentials were a little scant. At the time of her kidnapping, and during the 15 months she was held captive, the majority of news reports referred to her as a journalist or reporter.

Only after her release in November 2009 did her status become a point of debate. When Andrew Cohen, a columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and international affairs professor at Carleton University, wondered what Lindhout was doing in Somalia and why she was identified as a journalist, he articulated what some other mainstream journalists had been thinking. “She was said to be a model who considered becoming a beautician. Instead, she became a journalist, which may be close to the same thing at some levels of today’s celebrity culture,” he wrote, dismissing her as “an adventurer, a dilettante, a gutsy, friendly, chirpy naïf.”

The next day, National Post columnist Chris Selley defended Lindhout, arguing that she was in fact a real journalist and deeming her last piece for the Advocate just before her capture “an above-average piece of foreign correspondence.” He was shocked that anyone could make comments like Cohen’s about a colleague, adding, “She might be a foolish journalist, an almost totally unknown journalist, and a journalist who’s been an unwitting shill for the Iranian government. But it’s devastatingly obvious that she is, in fact, a journalist.”

It’s also devastatingly obvious the name-calling isn’t clearing the muddle. In a 2009 article in the British Journalism Review, “Them and Us: Is There a Difference?” Ivor Gaber, political journalism professor at the City University London, argued that drawing a line between the professional and citizen journalists isn’t what’s important. “Surely a
far better banner—for bloggers and journalists alike—to fight under would be: Let’s have some ethical standards.” As Gillmor suggests, maybe it’s the craft that’s evolving, not the creators, and it’s the act of journalism that matters, not who we call a “journalist.”

The distinction was certainly lost on those policing the G20 protests. Still, the confusion doesn’t excuse bad behaviour by the cops or bad decisions by editors and news producers. Since that weekend in June, there have been several first-person accounts about the way journalists were treated. But little was captured on tape. An exception is a Real News
video available on YouTube, which shows its reporter, Jesse Freeston, shooting footage when police began barging through a crowd of bystanders, ramming into him and shoving him aside. One officer swiped at his recording equipment and other officers jabbed him with a bike handle. Traditional media never aired that clip.

Correction: The original version of the article stated that Jesse Rosenfeld was a Canadian activist writing for the Guardian’s online Comment Is Free section. He was a Canadian freelancer writing for the Guardian’s online Comment is Free section. The Review regrets the error.

Correction: Within a few days after Basen’s CBC.ca article was published, Rosenfeld complained to CBC that he had been misrepresented in Basen’s piece. In a letter, Kirk LaPointe, CBC ombudsman, responded. “In reviewing the column, I have concluded that it left some errant impressions, he wrote, saying that Comment is Free was just as “journalistically sound” as The Guardian and that Basen’s column failed to mention Rosenfeld’s contributions to other publications, including several from the Middle East. LaPointe cited the overlook to the changing definition of journalism and traditional news outlets seeking ways to work with citizen media. This information was not included in the original article. The Review regrets the error

My heart thumps as I scramble out of bed and grab the phone. Anita Murray, my assignment editor at the Ottawa Citizen, tells me the police have pulled a body from the Rideau Canal. The third day of my internship had been reserved for training until police discovered the “floater” around dawn. I find nothing at the scene, but a photographer has already come and gone, so a brief item appears online with a photo of the body bag.

The newsroom buzzes when I arrive, or maybe that’s just my heart, fluttering away. Murray tells me to follow up with police. About an hour later, the cops say he was a “jumper,” but that’s just for my information since, the officer tells me, the paper doesn’t report suicides. I hang up, stroll over to Murray and Rob Bostelaar, another editor, and tell them the man killed himself. They tell me not to pursue it further. I move on to a story about a man trying to lure a child into his van near a public school. At least it means I can avoid writing about suicide.

But I am confused, ignorant of the accepted practice of not reporting suicides. Later, I learn the 19-year-old man hadn’t intentionally killed himself; he was coming home from a high school graduation party and stumbled off the bridge—police say alcohol may have been involved. That’s a story that also never got told. The spectre of the s-word scared the newsroom from digging any further.

I, too, am scared of covering suicide, though for a different reason. Still, reporters have a duty to cover all aspects of life, including death. Suicide avoidance is a throwback to journalism’s dark days, a time when editors and news producers could choose to ignore unpleasant matters. But the industry can no longer justify failing to cover a tragedy that will affect so many people, in one way or another, at some time in their lives.

I stare into the bathroom mirror. It is 3 a.m. on a warm September morning in 2005. I’ve never seen this man before. Rotten prunes take hold where his eyes should be; a gnarled nest wraps around his jaw and an uncombed mess of hair is tangled like seaweed on top of his head.

It’s my seventh consecutive sleepless night—one week since my second diagnosed episode of depression. My mind is usually quiet, clear and logical, but a depressed mind is anything but. Thoughts hover like a mass of mosquitoes dancing in all directions. I grab a can of Guinness and a host of pills and return to my room. No matter how many beers I drink, I can’t kill the mosquitoes. The pills promise permanent silence. Tempting me from my bookshelf are about 100 tablets of Zoloft, my anti-depressant medication, a month’s supply of trazodone, another anti-depressant that doubles as a potent sleeping pill, and about a dozen of my roommate’s Tylenol 3s, a codeine-based pain reliever.

I line up the bottles on my desk, sit down, crack open the beer and surf the internet. A search on suicide yields little, apart from how-to guides and distress-centre phone numbers. I’m killing time before downing the pills when I pick up a copy of A Confederacy of Dunces, a prize-winning novel by John Kennedy Toole. It’s supposed to be funny. I could use a laugh.

At first, I don’t make it past the foreword, in which Walker Percy tells the story of the manuscript. Toole, just 32, killed himself in 1969. His devastated mother worked tirelessly to get the book published. After many rejections, she found an ally in Percy, who helped get it published in 1980. I sit, tears slinking down my face, thinking of my mother and my father. The buzz in my brain softens enough to grab the pills and toss them in the bathroom. I read the 394-page book in one sitting.

There were 3,743 reported suicides in Canada in 2005; I was nearly number 3,744. The media cover murder-suicides, celebrity suicides and the odd “normal” suicide. But that’s just a fraction of them. Conversely, there were 658 murders that year, and all received coverage. More people kill themselves than die by motor vehicle collisions. Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in Canada and the second leading cause of death for people 15 to 24. A Harris-Decima poll released in late August revealed that 83 percent of Canadians didn’t know that.

Psychiatrists, police and editors cite the contagion effect as the principal reason to not report suicides. The theory is that extensive coverage of one suicide triggers other suicides, spreading like a virus. After Goethe’sThe Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about a man who shoots himself over a doomed love affair, came out in 1774, there was a reported increase in young men shooting themselves. That’s why some people refer to the contagion, or copycat, effect as the Werther Effect.

The Canadian Psychiatric Association (CPA) released updated suicide reporting guidelines for journalists in 2009. Jitender Sareen, a psychiatrist and professor at the University of Manitoba and one of the authors of the policy paper, believes there is a connection between sensationalized reporting and more suicides. Citing evidence that hyped media coverage leads to copycat suicides among those 24 and younger, the paper recommends journalists avoid running stories on the front page, never detail the method of suicide, never use the word suicide in headlines and avoid admiration of  the deceased. Otherwise, according to the CPA, it’s sensationalism.

But André Picard, a public health reporter with The Globe and Mail, is skeptical: “They cite this Austrian article in which a suicide was covered heavily and was followed by a rash of suicides—although I don’t think that was proof of copycats. They are people that were on that path before, and I really don’t think you can draw a conclusion one way or the other on that one.” Picard aside, few journalists have pushed the psychiatric community on the validity of the contagion effect. It’s like a relic bomb from the Second World War that no one wants to examine, even though it’s likely a dud. Stay away. Do not touch. Avoid.

The problem with the CPA’s new but outdated guidelines is that they do not govern the internet, where detailed information on individual suicides floods Facebook, Twitter and tribute websites, many of which glorify the dead. And the mainstream media are hypocritical, breaking their suicide silence if it involves a public figure, a murder-suicide or some other hook. A spate of gay teenagers killing themselves captured the media’s attention in the fall of 2010. The coverage made it seem like a new problem, but it isn’t. It just hadn’t been reported.

Men aged 35 to 54 are the most likely suicides in Canada, but it’s rare to read an article about a middle- aged man who shot his brains out, or a feature on a schizophrenic who hanged himself. The coverage, for whatever reason, skews young. Michel Gariepy, a University of Ottawa student, leaped from the 15th floor of his residence around 9 a.m. one Saturday in September 2009. The Citizen was on it two days later with a detailed account of the immediate aftermath. The paper didn’t identify Gariepy, but quoted other students as well as Rajiv Bhatla, chief psychiatrist with the Royal Ottawa Hospital Health Care Group, who stressed the need for sensitivity and balance when discussing suicide publicly. The Citizen’s coverage was the best of a poor lot. On Tuesday, CBC had reported the suicide on its website, using Gariepy’s name and the phrase “jumped to his death.” On Wednesday, an article in The Fulcrum, the university newspaper, named Gariepy, but referred to the suicide as an “incident” after several witnesses saw the man “fall to his death.” The story implied suicide—but good journalism isn’t about implying facts.

Shortly after writing a scathing column about the coverage of Gariepy’s death, Picard met with Sareen in Brandon, Manitoba, where the two were attending a conference hosted by the Canadian Association of Suicide Prevention. “Maybe by talking more openly about mental illness we can prevent suicides,” Picard had argued in his piece. “Burying our heads in the sand and self-censoring our stories certainly has not worked.” In person, he told the psychiatrist that if Prime Minister Stephen Harper killed himself, the media would report everything, including the method used, and it would run on the front page. That is suicide reporting 101—if it involves a prominent public figure, or occurs in a public place, that’s reason enough to cover it.

Fortunately, not all psychiatrists want to censor journalists. Sareen, for one, wants to work with them.

“Our perspective is responsible reporting,” he says. The psychiatrist and Picard agree that social media present new challenges, but Sareen notes there isn’t any research on the contagion effect with respect to social networking. Suicide forces its way into the public realm through new media. Good reporting would give itthe context that a Facebook tribute page or a memorial website cannot.

Sareen may be trying to make up for other psychiatrists who have simply told journalists how not to report a suicide. But he isn’t sure how to push forward with suicide reporting beyond what’s in the guidelines.He even stops at one point during our interview and asks, “What’s your sense? What do you think would be the next step?”

I can feel Marc Kajouji’s pain and anger—it radiates through the telephone as we discuss his sister’s sui- cide. “I guess I feel slightly fortunate because of the coverage, because I can speak about why it’s important for people to talk about it,” says the brother, now an ambassador for Your Life Counts, a charity promoting awareness of suicide among young people. “It’s not just an overnight decision. In my sister’s case, there were a lot of cries for help.”

Sadly, Nadia Kajouji, a Carleton University student, may be the most heavily reported suicide in recent memory. Two years later, her name continues to be in the news—in August 2010, NBC’s Dateline broadcast an updated version of a Gemini Award-winning fifth estate documentary, called “Death Online.” When the 18-year-old went missing in early March 2008, the media covered it heavily. Six weeks later, a boater discov- ered her body in the Rideau River. Articles about suicide, those mythical beasts, actually appeared in local newspapers. Reports then slowly filtered out about a bizarre internet chat between the teenager and William Melchert-Dinkel, a former nurse from Minnesota who later confessed to advising the teen to kill herself while he was posing as a woman (his lawyers now refute that confession and are building a defence based on their argument that he is mentally ill).

Kajouji’s doctor and counsellor documented her distress: she walked her residence halls clutching razor blades, and an ambulance picked her up at a restaurant when she threatened to harm herself—a 2007 incident reported after her suicide and connection to Melchert-Dinkel came to light. The intense newspaper coverage, including in the Toronto Star and Sun Media, was like a torrential rainfall in an otherwise dry desert. “Yes, I’d like to see the topic of suicide discussed more openly,” her brother says. “If the Canadian public knew the severity of the issue, they’d respond well.” Yet Bhatla, the Ottawa psychiatrist, criticized the reporting in an opinion piece for the Citizen. He trotted out the same reasons as the CPA policy paper, as if regurgitating it verbatim: “Excessive and detailed reporting of someone who commits suicide puts those contemplating sui- cide at risk and may also contribute to copycat suicides.” Curiously, he goes on to say that “in order to prevent suicide we must be able to recognize it, talk about it, and treat it.”

Bhatla believes in the association’s guidelines and speaks of “best practices” when we talk. Yet those are nothing more than rules and censorship. Moreover, not many reporters know about them. By focusing on old-fashioned reporting practices and chastising journalists, Bhatla missed an opportunity for advocacy and education.

As he pointed out in his piece, papers broke many CPA guidelines with the Kajouji case. So if psychiatrists are right, suicides should have spiked in Ottawa and Toronto. But when I ask if that happened, Bhatla says, “Well, I don’t think we have the data on that.” In fact, he admits, studying the contagion effect in Canada is nearly impossible because social media have changed the way people ingest and spread news. “Frankly,” he says finally, “I would agree that some of the guidelines are a bit dated.” When I point out that policies aimed at reducing the copycat effect have actually led to “copycat chill”—the mere idea that an article on suicide could lead to further suicides means newspapers simply avoid the subject—it’s news to Bhatla. In fact, he says, “That would be very unfortunate if we’re overly shying away from that public discourse.”

Gerry Nott came to the Citizen as editor-in-chief shortly before Bhatla’s op-ed piece ran. He believes newspapers have an antiquated approach to suicide reporting. “If riding Vespas was the second leading cause of death among young people, you know we’d be doing a story on it every time,” he says. “Why should suicide be any different?” But Nott cites another problem: older editors who think suicide is an extremely private issue. “I don’t think it’s the young journalists that carry the can for not poking these things; I think it’s their editors. It’s older journalists who categorically say that we don’t do suicides.” He says he wouldn’t have pulled my short-lived piece from the website’s homepage. “I might think hard, though, about the picture.”

In July, Nott didn’t think long about running a story on two teenagers who killed themselves a week apart in Perth, a small Ottawa Valley town. “It was a piece I insisted we pursue,” he says. “I said to my editors, ‘How can we not go up there?’” So the paper sent Chris Cobb, who returned with “A Young Life, A Senseless End,” a courageous 2,400-word feature about Jesse Graham, a 17-year-old who killed himself shortly after attending the wake of 18-year-old Nick Fisher. The piece included macabre yet important details, such as quotes from Graham’s suicide note and an explanation of how he killed himself, both no-nos in the CPA’s guidelines. It may be the best suicide piece ever published by a Canadian newspaper.

Still, most media remain leery of publishing anything with the word suicide in it, even though many cases are worth reporting. If, for example, journalists had avoided Kajouji’s personal correspondence with Melchert-Dinkel, the dark world of suicide voyeurs lurking online would have remained little known. Despite the backlash from some in the medical community, the Citizen forged on, covering the assisted-suicide case as it made its way through the Minnesota courts, and eventually sending Cobb to Perth.

Near the end of my conversation with Marc Kajouji, he reflected on the challenge of shining a light on suicide. “You gotta take it a little bit by a little bit, like chopping down a big oak tree. And you gotta take a couple of big swings and, eventually, it will topple over.”

In 2008, a watershed Globe series on mental health called Breakdown included in-depth features, with video and slide shows, putting a face to diseases such as bipolar disorder, depression and schizophrenia. The stories were personal and the subjects open and honest. Erin Anderssen’s article about Peter O’Neill, who lives with bipolar disorder and unrelenting suicidal thoughts, included a vivid reconstruction of how he dis- appeared to kill himself. The piece also focused on his family and the police, who had to find him, arrest him and take him to a hospital. In 2009, the paper followed that series with a second called Breaking Through.

Despite such small advances, there still isn’t a full-time mental-health beat reporter in the country. The Star divides health coverage among three reporters. The Globe separates health stories into policy and medical reporting, and most other papers follow a similar approach. But mental illness affects all Canadians: it afflicts one in five and has an enormous economic impact. A recent study estimates mental health cost Canada $51 billion in 2003.

From April 2008 to April 2010, the Star published a blog by Sandy Naiman called Coming Out Crazy. She’d worked at the Toronto Sun for 30 years while living with a mood disorder known as hypomania, which leaves her manic but not depressed. When dealing with mental health issues, she says, the language itself is a minefield. “Do not use the term ‘commit suicide,’ because that goes back to the time, legally, when suicide was a crime,” Naiman tells me. She also questions my wording when I tell her I have suffered from depression. “Don’t say ‘suffering with.’ I never say ‘suffering with.’ You don’t look like you’re suffering—you’re ador-

able, you’re married, you’re in school—are you suffering?” “No,” I answer, feeling flattered.

“Do you suffer?” Naiman asks.

“You’re right; I get stuck using these euphemisms,” I say. Well, in the midst of a deep depression, there is genuine suffering—but the problem is that we don’t distinguish degrees, which either trivializes or overdramatizes people’s pain.

“Because everybody uses them,” she says. “The media are so powerful; it’s frightening. And the media don’t know a fucking thing. The media know what they saw and what they hear and what they hear is often wrong. Doctors repeat old truths.”

When journalists do want to cover a suicide, they run into another barrier: the cops. “If you’re brand new, I’ll tell you three things we won’t talk about,” says Constable Jean Paul Vincelette, a media relations officer with the Ottawa police. “Children’s sexual assault, domestic assaults and suicides.” I contacted him to follow up on the body pulled from the canal two years prior. “Our policy is that we do not comment on suicides to prevent further victimization. I could not therefore provide you with any further details,” he says. “Today, we had a gentleman who hung himself. Well, we simply don’t put it out there at all.” Vincelette is happy with the way Ottawa journalists approach suicide. “It’s a taboo subject. How many bad things happen in the world? Let’s not talk about all these people who jump off buildings or end their lives.”

That doesn’t make sense to Picard. “I object to police releasing information selectively based on their biases and value judgements. I think there has to be a recognition that their job is not censorship—their job is policing and serving the community.” And Jan Wong, a former Globe columnist and reporter who has battled depression, firmly believes an uninformed public cannot help. “The problem is when you don’t report it, people don’t even know there is a problem.”

Mark Bonokoski, national editorial writer for Sun Media and veteran Sun columnist, knew that teenage bullying could lead to suicide. Believing the subject deserved a public discussion, he interviewed the family of Greg Doucette, a 15-year-old Brampton, Ontario, boy who killed himself after being bullied about his acne. The story ran in May 2006 and turned into a four-part series, which was eventually used in schools as a teaching tool to show the tragic consequences of bullying. Bonokoski also wrote a powerful series last spring about the mental health perils of policing. It included a story about Eddie Adamson, a Toronto Police Service sergeant who lived with a work-related post-traumatic stress disorder and killed himself in 2005.

In November 2009, the Sun’s access-to-information request forced the Toronto Transit Commission to release statistics on the number of suicides on its property. Most Toronto dailies ran with the story: 150 subway suicides between 1998 and 2007. Shortly after, the TTC announced its intention to install suicide barriers on subway platforms, though it said that would require municipal and provincial funding. (Rachel Giese wrote about the suicides in Toronto Life’s August 2010 issue. Her article, “Priority One,” described two TTC subway operators—husband and wife, actually—who’d each run over separate subway jumpers. While it was an excellent piece, it would have been stronger had it included the pain of suicide from the family’s perspective.) Still, Kajouji, the grieving brother, wonders why the TTC had to be forced to release those numbers. “Why isn’t that an annual statistic? I think that we need to stop hiding behind a tough topic. We need to know these numbers so we can better understand why it’s happening. It’s the biggest horseshit in the world.” And my thought was that a full-time mental-health reporter might have pursued this story years ago.

I sometimes watch Oprah with my wife. Once, during commercials, Judy Dunn from Winnipeg spoke about the loss of her son to suicide. She was promoting the fourth annual race in memory of her son Andrew to raise awareness of depression and its most tragic risks. But she knows that convincing journalists to cover even the preventative aspect of suicide, including awareness programs, is difficult. “We have to make this real so people will take it seriously if they see their child going through a dark spell,” she says. “Talking about it won’t cause suicide. Ignoring it will.”

I am alive because I didn’t ignore depression—fortunately, I learned about it in school. I studied biology and psychology at Queen’s University, and then worked for Eli Lilly and Co., the pharmaceutical giant that makes Prozac. What if I’d had to rely on the media for information? I might be dead. In 2005, I scoured the internet for an informed article on suicide and depression. It was difficult back then—I routinely came across various do-it-yourself recipes. I lost trust in my brain but knew I needed help. My empathetic physician pre- scribed antidepressants and talked me through several low points. My psychologist taught me cognitive be- havioural therapy in order to systematically work through negative thoughts. My family and friends listened to me. And my future wife may have given me the best medicine: she treated me like a normal man.

Five years later, I am alive and happy. A beautiful woman actually married me, my dog rushes to the door when I return home and people laugh at my jokes. Yet I live in fear that those goddamn mosquitoes will return to terrorize my brain. And I am still wary of discussing my history, mostly because of the stigma. Will it damage my career because an employer has preconceived notions about depression? On the other hand, I ask sources to open up on a variety of issues because it makes every story stronger, so I would be a hypocrite if I didn’t follow my own advice.

Fortunately, the stigma that surrounds all mental-health afflictions is slowly fading. Depression is much better understood, which I attribute to deeper and more informed coverage. But other afflictions, such as schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, remain under-reported. Suicide is still a dirty word, but maybe that’s starting to change. In November, the Globe ran a front-page story about Daron Richardson’s suicide. Of course, it was a story only because her father is Luke Richardson, a former NHL defenceman and now as- sistant coach with the Ottawa Senators. The following day, a Globe editorial claimed suicide “is no longer the taboo it has been.” If that’s true, the paper must continue to cover it.

I thought I was chasing the front page when I reported on that body in the canal. The article had strong billing on the website for a few hours before the police erroneously informed me the death was a suicide and the s-word scared my editors off. But a powerful story exists every time someone kills himself. One such story could have been my own. I’m grateful it wasn’t—and in my professional life, I’d like to act in a way that might inspire others to write a more hopeful narrative for themselves. It’s the least I can do, because, sometimes, you gotta take a couple of big swings. Eventually, it will topple over.

To read more stories from our ebook anthology: RRJ in Review: 30 Years of Watching the Watchdogs.
 It can be purchased online here. 

I pissed off Jay Rosen. The New York University professor is a celebrity in the online journalism world—he has over45,000 followers on Twitter and is renowned for his 2001 book on public journalism, What Are Journalists For? and I’d been trying to reach him for months. The guy’s a leading expert on hyperlocal and collaborative journalism, and I wanted to ask him about OpenFile, a Toronto based start-up promising exactly that. He finally responded to my interview request, suggesting a Gmail chat—fitting, I suppose, for an online expert. But one question turned him against me: “What about the (to use the buzzword) hyperlocal element? Is that the way online journalism is going? (when this launched, there was a lot of talk about a ‘news revolution’).”

I asked that because when OpenFile went live in May, it inspired over-the-top headlines such as the National Post’s“Toronto’s OpenFile.ca Launches, Hopes to Redefine Online Journalism” and The Globe and Mail’s “A Globetrotting Canuck Journo Aims to Revolutionize Online News.”Not surprisingly, the buzz quickly died down, and as far as I could tell, without much revolution or even redefinition.

An open-source news website, OpenFile puts citizens on the assignment desk to suggest local stories, especially about neighbourhood issues, and then hires freelance journalists to investigate and report. It’s crowd-sourcing meets community board meets online news. But, frankly, some of the site’s news stories lack news: the article that detailed the ingredients of gelato, for example, or the one about how mice migrate indoors when it’s cold, or the revelation that Margaret Atwood has her own coffee blend. When I mention the site to friends and colleagues, many still say, “What’s that?”

I figured if anyone could put the site’s effect on journalism in context, it was Rosen. He replied almost instantly. “What do you mean when you say talk of a ‘news revolution’? Whose talk was this?”

My cursor flashed. I told him about the newspaper headlines, trying to suss out if his terse reply was just a product of the cyber interview. It wasn’t. “Is that what OpenFile said it was doing?” Rosen asked.

“No, those were not their words. I’m just asking if you think there will be more hyperlocal coverage,” I typed, trying to get back on track.

“I think you should look at the way you did that little thing with the hype,” he responded. “To me that is very interesting. Journalists originate overblown claims, then other journalists come along and ask if the site can live up to those claims.”

Rosen had a point. Perhaps my question wasn’t fair, especially since the site is still in beta mode. But as a newbie reporter boarding this supposedly sinking ship, I have a substantial stake in knowing where my career path leads. Don’t I have the right to know if journalism is bound to be more collaborative and localized?

Only months in, the site holds plenty of promise. Its creators actually get that news has fundamentally changed, and rather than feeling threatened, they welcome the challenge. While mainstream media pat themselves on the back when they link to a YouTube video, OpenFile has built its entire system around the idea that people have the tools to suggest, make and break news. Furthermore, it’s helping to fill the void left by continuing cuts to local coverage by mainstream outlets. But if it’s going to survive, it must battle newspaper websites for attention, compete against blogs and community papers and—oh, yeah—address that whole problem of a viable online business model. Still, its biggest challenge may be living up to the hype. As the industry undergoes an identity crisis, sky-high expectations accompany any idea that might incite a “news revolution.” The problem is, there’s no such thing.

The empty white walls of a west Toronto office are a tame backdrop for Wilf Dinnick. The 40-year-old broadcast journalist once reported from the cityscapes of Abu Dhabi, an earthquake-ravaged county in China and a Manhattan forever altered by 9/11. After years working in Canadian television, the Toronto native became ABC’s Middle East correspondent, then an international correspondent for CNN, where he reported from Afghanistan, Pakistan, the Middle East and Africa. For nearly a decade, his office was all over the world.

On this May morning, though, OpenFile’s CEO is happy to be back working in his hometown. He looks sharp in a crisp pink-collared shirt, frequently tousling his silver-streaked hair. It’s hard to tell he’s at the end of an exhausting first week—one several years in the making. The site’s origins are humble: casual dinnertime discussions with his wife, Globe journalist Sonia Verma, about launching a local news site led to advice seeking calls to fellow journalists and talks with venture capitalists. Dinnick set off to find funding when the couple came back to Toronto, and six months later he struck online gold: over a million dollars from an anonymous investor (believed to be financial holdings company Fairfax, though Dinnick will not confirm this), enough to keep the site afloat for about three years and fund expansion to other cities.

Shortly after 10 a.m., editor-in-chief Kathy Vey—one of just a handful of employees—strolls in wearing jeans and Chuck Taylors. She begins sifting through new pitches and reads one aloud. “‘Is there a Thai community in Toronto, and if so, what do they think about the political unrest in their home country?’” she says. “Well, that’s an excellent question.” Readers submit story ideas by opening a file (hence the site’s overly clinical name). Any member—registering takes little more than a name and an e-mail address—can open a file or add to another.

Dinnick shies away from defining OpenFile as hyperlocal since it reports on city-wide topics, such as Toronto’s bicycle rental program, transit issues and, especially, the Toronto’s municipal election (he even hired former Star and Globe reporter Jane Armstrong specifically for campaign coverage). But many stories concern the corner grocery store, the local daycare or how a municipal issue affects one community. All are geo-tagged so readers can plug in a postal code and get news tailored to their neighbourhood. According to Robert Washburn, professor of e-journalism at Loyalist College in Belleville, Ontario, such online tools, combined with the dramatically lower cost of web publishing, have prompted a move away from the globalization trend of the ’80s and ’90s and toward communities.

Vey gets several story suggestions a day, either from readers or journalists. If she accepts an idea, she posts it on the site for readers to comment on or to add photos, web links or video. She puts up at least one new article each weekday, more during special events such as the election. Decades of experience at newspapers have moulded her basic news judgement. “Is this something that no one else is doing? What can we bring to it that’s fresh? Often, that’s the citizen’s perspective.”

Social media have turned the news from a lecture to a conversation. And tired of the top-down approach of editors deciding what’s news, Dinnick wants readers to be in on the digital story meeting. “The gatekeepers of information are not the few big newspapers and media companies anymore,” he says. “It’s everyone.”

But it’s far from everyone journalism. The site has recruited several dozen freelancers to verify and investigate readers’ ideas (or pitch their own). OpenFile pays $200 per story, asking reporters to keep articles under 700 words and encouraging devices such as bullet points. “Instead of struggling over a wonderfully crafted piece,” Dinnick tells writers, “use the time to dig or find an angle no one else might have on the story.” The site’s creed says a story is never finished, so freelancers update files with new information or multimedia, respond to comments, and keep track of feedback on Twitter and Facebook. Bethany Horne posted additional information, whether it was a new interview, a comment or photo, to every story she wrote last summer. Although it was a new way of reporting for her, she says, “The story is going to evolve, so get it out quickly and then keep working on it.”

Among the biggest supporters of OpenFile’s “pro-am” approach is Kevin Newman, former Global Nationalanchor and OpenFile board member. “The thing I like most,” he says, “is that there are still professional journalists and their ethics pursuing stories that are dug up by everyday people.” But not everyone thinks the concept of collaborative local news is original. Citizens have always called in tips to hotlines—and they are often duds. Sure enough, OpenFile’s “growing files” include less-than-noteworthy ideas such as food banks requiring more diapers (which is more public service announcement than journalism). But members have suggested plenty of creative and relevant ideas, including “When Will Car Sharing Reach the ’Burbs” and“The Butts Don’t Stop Here,” about fines for cigarette litter. Dinnick believes people are passionate about where they live and work, so they have a good understanding of the stories that need to be told—something most newsrooms haven’t fully figured out.

Sometimes citizens are helpful simply by being in the right place at the right time. People snap photos and shoot videos of riots, fires and sleeping public employees for mainstream media outlets. But Dinnick thinks such initiatives just placate the readers, and only exist because news organizations have been forced to compete. CNN.com has a user-generated site called iReport, but he thinks his former employers “hate it.” He argues that if the Twin Towers fell today, people would go to YouTube. “What does that say? The most trusted source of news is worried about YouTube? The writing’s on the wall there.”

Meanwhile, BlogTO, Torontoist and similar sites have solicited content from readers since they launched. “One of our big generators of stories is readers who have their eyes on the street for us,” says Torontoisteditor David Topping. Same goes for BlogTO publisher Tim Shore. “You can try to do it all yourself,” he says, “but you’ll never be as successful as if you tap into the readership that you serve.” While he welcomes new local sites, he doesn’t understand all the hype over OpenFile. “I wish them the best of success, we’ll all be better off. But I don’t view it as original. It’s been a bit of buzz.”

Just three weeks after Dinnick launched the site, an emotional battle between disability rights advocates and heritage property conservationists erupted over 204 Beech Avenue, a home in Toronto’s Beaches neighbourhood. It was a textbook hyperlocal story, and OpenFile jumped on it early and stayed with it.

In late May, user “jonlax” opened a file that simply said, “Councillor Sandra Bussin wants to stop a family from building an accessible home,” and linked to a Post story. The owners of a century-old house were planning to raze it to build a wheelchair-accessible one. An outraged neighbor contacted the city councillor, who then attempted to designate the home a heritage property.

Freelance writer Josh O’Kane interviewed the owners and wrote “204 Beech: A House or a Home?” The first of many readers to comment was the president of the Architectural Conservancy of Ontario, who explained the heritage review process. Vey piped up a few times to clarify points or provide links to further reading, including a letter from Bussin about the pending heritage designation.

Four days later, O’Kane posted an update that included an interview with Bussin and an audio slideshow created by Vey. As readers continued to weigh in, the dialogue contained little partisan politics or name-calling—odd for anyone used to the scum on mainstream media comments—though Vey did have to respond to one antagonistic post by saying, “I’m disturbed by your mention of ‘wishing cancer on their opponents’ in your most recent comment. No such sentiment has been expressed in this forum.” For O’Kane, the reader feedback became an integral part of the reporting process: “The story developed and it became a living document simply because people were able to contribute and point out questions that hadn’t been asked—questions that weren’t necessarily based on the angle that I took for the story in the first place.” He updated the story after an intense community meeting a week later, then a final time late in June, when the owner received a demolition permit.

With its multimedia gallery, numerous updates and over 100 reader comments, OpenFile’s journalism was the strongest coverage, ultimately showing the site’s potential to excel at local, collaborative reporting. The Globepublished just one story about the family and its plans a few weeks before the dispute broke out; the Postfollowed up with a single story after its initial article; and the Toronto Sun ran a column about the community meeting, mentioning the 204 Beech dispute only at the end. The Star published two news articles and a feature, but its site allowed comments on only one story and offered no videos or audio. Online, the Torontoistoffered a short blurb in a daily roundup, linking to OpenFile’s coverage; BlogTO also linked to the OpenFilestory, then ran a short post in late June, after the owners won the battle.

For Dinnick, 204 Beech showed how a hyperlocal story can be universal: “A narrative about somebody with a problem on one street is going to speak to somebody three blocks away, six blocks away, in another city, in another country.” But mainstream outlets often don’t have the resources to provide coverage by the block, especially when local news tends to take the brunt of budget cuts—Citytv’s decision to cut its local 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. newscasts outside Toronto is just the latest example. On top of that, larger corporations are buying up community newspapers and merging them. Sun Media, for example, recently purchased two community dailies and one weekly in Northumberland County, Ontario, and combined them into one regional publication called Northumberland Today. So while people are eager to know about where they live, work and raise their families, they can’t always get that information.

American sites such as Spot.Us and EveryBlock.com launched in response to this need, offering variations on hyperlocal reporting and financing. As its name suggests, EveryBlock.com carries news by the block with geo-tagged stories—and was successful enough that MSNBC bought it—while Spot.Us features “community-funded reporting,” producing both neighbourhood and municipal stories financed by donation. Patch.com specializes in local news in communities and cities with populations between 15,000 and 100,000, while Washington, D.C.’s TBD.com, a website and online TV station, features a combination of local news and community collaboration.

In Canada, hyperlocal journalism began with blogs and expanded to news sites. Two journalists living in Prince Edward County in eastern Ontario, for example, launched countylive.ca this spring, offering news the area’s approximately 25,000 residents aren’t getting elsewhere. And when Brandon, Manitoba’s CTV station closed in October 2009, Glenn Tinley set up itvBrandon.com, an online TV station. He’s since opened three stations in Saskatchewan, with two more launching in northern Manitoba this spring. “People want to know what’s going on in their community,” he says. “Sure, we want to know what’s going on with the oil spill or Haiti, but those don’t have a direct impact on a person in Humboldt.”

Before any police cars blazed in Toronto’s streets, Bethany Horne caught wind of a big G20 summit story. Ontario’s provincial cabinet had quietly passed a temporary regulation that seemed to grant police the power to search and arrest people within five metres of the security fence (in truth, it was only valid inside the fence). The law, in effect from June 21 to 28, didn’t become public knowledge until June 24, after police used it to arrest a curious passerby. Horne jumped on the story and posted it that night on OpenFile. The story was in newspapers the next day.

But in a June 30 article, the Star took credit for breaking the story. Upset and looking to set the record straight, Horne complained on Twitter. “I have a beef with you @Star_G8G20 You claim in the Star today that *you* broke a story on Fri., which *I* broke on Thurs.,” she wrote, linking to her original story. Whether she meant to or not, Horne’s beef raised a tough question: Does a story break if only a few people read it?

Even when it got the big story, OpenFile’s work went underappreciated. And that won’t be the last time as long as it operates in a media saturated city with four major newspapers, a number of local TV stations, and various blogs and community papers. But Dinnick admits OpenFile can’t compete—and it isn’t trying to. He says Toronto is a real neighbourhood city, but community newspapers are “flyers,” blogs don’t run enough news and the papers aren’t built to provide hyperlocal coverage. “They don’t do what we do,” he insists. “We can scale really small. We hope that someone will call us and say a tree has fallen in their yard and the city hasn’t come to do it in three days. That’s a story for us.”

Whatever else their merits, news sites have a hard time making money,but many hyperlocal start-ups are aiming to take advantage of their small,distinct readership. Dinnick hopes local grocery stores and day cares will recognize the concentrated audience and buy ads. “We’re trying to do a different kind of advertising, so we’ve said for a small fraction, join us,”he says. He also believes companies will begin to realize that journalism is a public service, one they’ll help fund, so he plans to bring in wha the calls the “PBS model”—as in, “This story has been generously brought to you by….”

Rosen and I keep chatting despite our rough start, though not before he rails on me for calling hyperlocal a buzzword (“I think the view of it as all hype or a buzzword is a product of journalists who simply don’t want to take the time to understand it”). At the time, he had recently returned from co-hosting Block by Block, a conference in Chicago for local online  news sites, including OpenFile, and learned a lot. “Many of the founders of these sites are struggling. The work is hard; they have passion but also a lot of problems,” he says. That’s quite evident in a recent survey of small-scale news start-ups funded by the Knight Foundation,an American digital and community journalism non-profit organization. Before he became CBC ombudsman, Kirk LaPointe concluded on his media blog, themediamanager.com, that the survey’s summary“isn’t terribly pretty: The business model depends on grants, the most sustainable models are extensions of someone’s personal commitment,and training the public to be citizen contributors is a high-churn, low return concept.”

Despite the uncertainty, Dinnick has hired editors for the Ottawa and Vancouver affiliates—both launched in November—and is looking to expand into other cities. The site was a finalist in the best news coverage and best article categories at the 2010 Canadian Online Publishing Awards. Most importantly, people are reading and participating. Although they had only a few hundred members at the end of the first week, that number tripled by the fifth month. Even if OpenFile survives, though, itwon’t herald a news revolution. The site isn’tthe solution, because there won’t be just one fix to the industry’s woes. “We don’t have the answer for a new model of journalism,“ says Dinnick. “But we’ve been given the opportunity to help figure it out.”

Which brings me back to Rosen. Before we signed off our Gmail chat, he made one last point. “All talk about hyperlocal as “the future” comes from people who don’t know much about it or how hard it is. ‘Can hyperlocal live up to the hype?’ is really itself hype. I wish you would consider this.”

I guess that goes for everyone else, too.

With only 10 minutes left in Metro Morning’s live outdoor broadcast, the show’s host has disappeared. At 8:20 a.m., the table where he and his colleagues have been sitting is completely abandoned in Toronto’s Simcoe Park, above which the Canadian Broadcasting Centre looms, and yet Matt Galloway’s voice continues to resonate over large speakers. It’s Bike to Work Day, and he’s stepped away from his chair, taking the discussion to the listeners who have been strolling—and riding—through the park all morning. Galloway, wearing a bright blue T-shirt with a white bicycle symbol, is barely visible amid the 20 people clustered around him.

He asks one of them what she thinks would help drivers, cyclists and pedestrians get along better. “Signaling would be my key thing,” says Erika Steffer, who is perched on her bike, helmet still strapped on. “The number of people that do not signal drives me around the twist.” Galloway enjoys a quick chuckle and casually places his other hand in his pocket. He gets it—he rides his bike to work every morning around four.

Nick Paparella is famous for sinking his teeth into his stories. He declares the winning rib recipe at Ribfest, barbeque sauce dripping down his chin, and digs his spoon into his bowl at the annual charity chili cook-off. Today, he’s taking a bite out of one of farmer Bill Millar’s first red strawberries of the season. The nearly 30-year veteran knows most of the people he’ll interview for his story on the early summer heat. Millar greets Paparella with a tanned, weathered hand, and they stand in the dusty strawberry patch, chatting about their kids and wives. Later, a pool cleaner tells him their sons play soccer on the same team, and at Wally World Water Park, a pack of shrieking teenage girls crowds around Paparella. For these residents of London, Ontario, the A News reporter is a reason to get excited about local news. Unfortunately, Paparella is one of the few journalists left in the city who generates community spirit.

The station first flashed into living rooms as CFPL in 1953, and earned a reputation for reflecting life in London and southwestern Ontario. By focusing on important community matters—the six-month delay of the green-bin program, the appointment of a new police chief, the arrest of a local doctor charged in a terrorism plot, as well as the everyday pulse of weather, traffic and events—A connects Londoners to one another and their city. During the spring of 2010, A News at 6 p.m. attracted over 120,000 viewers, making it more popular in the city than any Global, CBC or CTV national newscast. But under CTVglobemedia Inc. ownership since 2007, A must live with corporate decisions that seem indifferent to local needs. In total, the A stations have lost $98 million in three years. So, the popular morning show was slashed, investigative reporting has diminished, and news is a little more than a bare-bones hour at 6 p.m. and just 35 minutes at 11 p.m.

What’s happening in London exemplifies how local TV news is losing airtime to out-of-town executives who decide which stations stay and which go. After five rounds of layoffs over the past five years, some staff are apprehensive about the future. So are viewers, who, having seen Rogers TV London kill the daily half-hourFirst Local news show in October, dread a future without their own newscast.

After catching his first glimpse of a TV in 1949, local media mogul Walter Blackburn established CFPL on November 28, 1953. A fire at a local industrial building was the highlight of its first broadcast day. The station was a logical addition to Blackburn’s growing media empire, which included the London Free Press and CFPL radio (now AM980). CFPL was the largest privately owned affiliate of CBC television. Its weather reports were crucial to the agricultural region, and the medical coverage was meaningful to those employed by area hospitals and involved in research at the University of Western Ontario. CFPL also closely followed municipal politics. “Our main competition was with the London Free Press,” says George Clark, a former news director of CFPL. “I used to ask our folks each day to make sure, at six, we would have three-quarters of the news that would be in tomorrow’s front page. And if we could do that every day, we’d do well.”

Local news flourished until satellite and cable companies invaded with specialty channels. In 1988, the Blackburn Group Inc. took full control of the station from the CBC, hoping for a brighter future as an independent. But unable to cement a partnership with other broadcasters, which was necessary to maintain strong prime-time programming, Blackburn sold CFPL to Baton Broadcasting Inc. in 1993, and the once-profitable television station began its slide. Several rebrandings ensued: CHUM Ltd. purchased the station from Baton in 1997; then CTVglobemedia acquired the assets of CHUM in 2007, changing A Channel to simply A in 2008.

In March 2009, CTV slashed the chain’s budget, shed 118 staff, closed Wingham and threatened to close Windsor. That left the survivors to cover more territory with fewer resources. London is responsible for mid-western Ontario via one-man Wingham bureau Scott Miller, for example. And although Windsor kept its newscasts at 6 p.m. and 11 p.m., its production control room is still in London, 190 kilometres northeast. Meanwhile, London itself is down to eight full-time reporters covering an average of four stories each evening; the rest of the newscast comes from regional, national and international footage.

Cal Johnstone, news director at A London, still drives his team of reporters to compete with the front page of the Free Press, as Clark did in the old days. The station has continued a tradition of award-winning journalism: it won the RTNDA Bert Cannings Award in 2006 for best newscast in a medium market for its coverage of the Bandidos mass murders, and in 2007, it was a finalist for the Canadian Association of Broadcasters’ Gold Ribbon Community Service Award. But Johnstone says the network doesn’t focus a lot on investigative journalism because of its restricted budget. “It’s a question of priorities every single day,” he says. When a big story breaks in London—as the Bandidos murder trial and Tori Stafford’s abduction both did in 2009—A leads the co-operative effort of CTV national and regional affiliates. And when CTV requests local stories for national coverage, if A can’t spare extra cameras or reporters, CTV covers additional costs. Losing out on local reports can be disheartening. In August 2009, for example, when a source leaked documents regarding an apparent breach in the provincial government’s policy for hiring contract consultants at London Health Sciences Centre, the A reporter on the story, Derek Rogers, had taken Thursday and Friday off because he was working that weekend as an anchor. The Free Press broke the story, part of the largereHealth scandal, which led to the resignation of the hospital’s vice president, Diane Beattie. Johnstone regrets not being able to move faster: “I wished that I would’ve been able to have a reporter during those 48 hours to cover it.”

What’s happened to A has occurred in other parts of the country. CKCK-TV, now CTV Regina, also had glory days. In the late 1980s, the newsroom hummed with dozens of staff, and its nightly newscast attracted over 80,000 viewers. But in the ’90s, chain ownership drove a wedge between the station and the people. “Where there were independently owned local voices reporting on matters of concern to communities, now they are branch plants owned by huge corporations,” Concordia University journalism professor James S. McLean observed in his 2005 case study, “When Head Office Was Upstairs: How Corporate Concentration Changed a Television Newsroom.” The viewers and special-interest groups in Regina struggled to have their voices heard, and according to McLean, this was a problem they’d never had when the station was in local hands.

Meanwhile, in 2004, Rogers TV London recruited George Clark, who’d finished his career at A in 2001, to run the newsroom and start First Local, the half-hour news show. He had only six paid staff, supplemented by volunteers from the community and co-op students from the University of Western Ontario and Fanshawe College, but he was committed to producing journalism that was comparable to, and sometimes better than, its crosstown rival. Rather than just cover events and spot news, Rogers TV London also wanted to report on community issues such as the absentee rate among London firefighters. Clark says the show wasn’t shooting 90-second stories; instead, First Local shot over-two-minute items with more sources. “I run into people every day in the street who tell me how much they miss First Local news and how sorry they were to see it gone.”

Bob Smith, the newscast’s former anchor, is obviously disappointed as well. But he’s seen worse. He once anchored A Morning, which CTV cut in March 2009. Over 400 people joined the “Save Bob Smith!” Facebook group. Yet the death of First Local went down more smoothly with the public, Smith says, partly because no jobs were lost, so viewers’ favourite personalities will continue to appear on Rogers TV. “They like the idea that people did not get laid off, because they get to know these people,” he says. “You become like a part of the family.” Smith, for example, will still anchor a Thursday-night newsmakers discussion panel and Inside London, which focuses entirely on news from city hall.

Phil McLeod has spent the last 22 years in London working various journalism jobs, including editor-in-chief of the Free Press. In fall 2010, when McLeod ran for city council, Rogers broadcast debates featuring candidates from all wards and those running for mayor. On the other hand, A only featured reports on the 15 mayoral candidates, and the station devoted a large portion of its coverage to Joe Fontana’s attempt to unseat Mayor Anne Marie DeCicco-Best. “We focused on larger issues during the campaign,” says Johnstone, “and devoted most of our attention to the mayor’s race.” It surprised McLeod, as he knocked on doors during his campaign, how uninformed people were. And when he was recognized at all, some recalled his stint on Rogers TV. “We are seeing a disconnect, not only with the media, but also with their citizenship in their community,” he says. “One of the things you hear often from people is that they don’t know what’s going on. They don’t understand what’s going on.”

McLeod lost on election night, but Rogers dominated the TV coverage. Smith hosted a show that went on the air at 8 p.m., lasted until 1 a.m. and was simulcast on local radio AM980. The next morning, Smith tweeted, “Best election coverage I’ve ever been a part of. Kudos to the team!”

Over at A, full coverage didn’t start until 10 p.m., once Mike & Molly was over. During the broadcast, which ran to just after 12:30 a.m, A showed results from across southwestern Ontario. London’s deputy mayor Tom Gosnell offered analysis, while Bryan Bicknell reported from the DiCicco-Best headquarters and Nick Paparella checked in from Fontana’s. Just after midnight, Paparella told Fontana on the air he was elected the city’s new mayor. A’s coverage wasn’t enough for some viewers, though. At 9:22 p.m., David Langford, sports editor of the Free Press, tweeted, “Great race for mayor in London. Tune in to A Channel. Oops, no election on that station. How cheap can they be?”

After an expensive, glossy upgrade, Rogers TV became HD compatible in October 2010, but it is still broadcasting in standard definition. A wants to refurbish its scuffed, retro newsroom and go HD too, but no one’s sure when it will. Producing news is expensive, of course; the 6 p.m. and 11 p.m. shows cost millions annually. “You get this weird irony,” Don Mumford, general manager and vice president of A London, says, “that the number-one watched station in the market, with the number-one watched show, can’t make a profit.”

Created in 2008, the CRTC’s Local Programming Improvement Fund has alleviated some of the financial pressures local stations face by requiring cable and satellite companies to pay a percentage of their broadcast revenue to the CRTC. That money is then passed on to support local television programming in non-metropolitan areas.

Even though nightly newscasts are no longer mandatory viewing, clearly there is still an appetite for information. “Probably what has changed as much as anything,” says McLeod, “is people get their news in many ways.” Rogers TV London wants to take full advantage of this by offering local television on its Rogers On Demand website. There is limited content online now, but more will be added in the future. A News posts stories to its website a few days after they first air, and occasionally does a live-blog during 6 p.m. newscasts. Michael Geist, Canada Research Chair in internet and e-commerce law at the University of Ottawa, suggests local news stations are held back by a “dizzying array of regulations,” which have prevented the local broadcast industry from moving forward. In his 2007 report, “Canadian Broadcasting Policy for a World of Abundance,” Geist notes that American broadcasters are better off because they can profit from selling their local content to services such as iTunes and Hulu.

The staff at A are over the fear factor. As Janice Mills, the graphics director who started there 11 years ago, says, “Most people have accepted they are not going to be working here forever.” In September, she enrolled in Fanshawe’s corporate communication and public relations program because she figures she’s unlikely to retire at A. “When I started here this whole newsroom was full of desks. People were here, it was active.” She snaps her fingers. “There was a buzz. Now you come in and you could shoot a cannon through the place.” She’s sad when she thinks the newsroom could fall completely silent one day.

Clark believes that gloomy outlook is legitimate. “The trouble is when one company—CTV, in this case—owns Windsor, London, Kitchener and Barrie; that’s a lot of stations very close together. The question is: where do they bring their costs in line? They’ve already told the commission they do not intend to continue seeing losses as they are,” he says. “I hope, for London’s sake, they maintain a strong operation here.” If A’s newscasts go the way of First Local, the citizens of London will lose a valued tradition and sense of their identity. As McLeod says, “We will lose a daily local newscast that at least had some modicum of local flavour to it, whether it was our local weather forecast, or local sports, entertainment.”

After devouring the strawberry, Paparella heads back to the station to edit his story on the early summer heat. At a red light, the driver in the car next to him honks and waves. He gets this all the time, but he still enthusiastically rolls down his window and hollers, “Hot enough for ya?” Even though his human interest stories don’t always involve weighty issues, complicated policies or hard-fought political campaigns, he is a treasured city figure. Paparella says London values its local journalists. “It’s a community where people do know you and care about each other,” he says. “When you are out and about in the community, they treat you well.” It is irreplaceable. As McLeod says, “Anytime you lose something in a community that is local, a piece of you disappears with it.”

Alyssa Friesen worked as a volunteer at Rogers TV London in the summer of 2008.

Hmm…she looks good.” CityNews producer Amar Sodhi watches former anchor Anne Mroczkowski in a promo for Global Toronto News Hour on a flat-screen TV, one of two above his computer showing rival networks. It’s 6:30 p.m., halfway through Citytv’s suppercast on a hot May evening. His station is throwing to a commercial break, but Sodhi’s eyes are on Mroczkowski, who he worked with for about eight years until City abruptly let her go four months earlier.

It’s a clever ad, a spin on The Mary Tyler Moore Show intro: Mroczkowski, in a red trench coat, a dress and beige heels, with a big smile and glowing skin, parades around the city—at a coffee shop, along the street, on a bus—and everybody claps for her. “We’re glad to see Anne again, too!” the voice-over says. “Leslie Roberts and Anne Mroczkowski, the new Global Toronto News Hour team.”

And why wouldn’t she look good? She moved from a station forsaking much of what made it popular and distinct to a competitor that jumped at the opportunity to land her. From 1985 until January 18, 2010, Mroczkowski co-anchored the news with Gord Martineau. The day after her dismissal, over 30 others atCityNews lost their jobs—including prominent reporters, camera operators, editors and writers. The cutting didn’t stop there. Over the next few months, the station shed news programming. CityNews at Noon: gone.CityNews at Five: dropped. CityNews International: dumped. CityNews Weekend: booted. CityOnline: adios. Also lost: journalists representing Toronto’s diversity, and a reputation for producing a unique newscast oozing edgy street cred and unexpected approaches to presenting stories.

When Citytv first went on the air in 1972, it was different: low-powered, low-cost local TV with high energy, high style and high tech. Co-founder, former president and executive producer Moses Znaimer executed a distinct vision. “We sing in a different voice and tempo from the rest of the guys,” he said in 1987. “I’ve always said nobody needs another Global or CBC. Style is not a dirty word here.”

Back when Citytv began, Znaimer was all about innovation and embracing what was fresh and new, contrary to what the news operation has become. Mroczkowski says the station is “no longer in the news game.” AsThe Globe and Mail’s TV columnist John Doyle wrote one week after the dismissals, “[O]ne of the continent’s most recognizable news brands has been destroyed,” arguing that corporate powerhouse Rogers Media had “disemboweled” what once made City special. Peter Murdoch, vice president, media, of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada, says it’s “shameful” that the CRTC and the Harper government have been “alarmingly tight lipped” about the “drastic cut in local coverage” and feels there should have been a hearing about the situation. “While the Tories absent themselves from Parliament, big lobbyists like Rogers are given free rein to duck their promises to Canadians,” he says. “And it appears the CRTC, Canada’s broadcast regulator, has been told to go on vacation as well.”

The suspects in the killing of City’s pioneering brand of local TV news include Rogers Media, a faltering economy, changes in the ways people get their local news, consolidation in media ownership and CRTC decisions. Everyone has his or her favourite villain, but no one sees a hero who’ll do something as visionary as Znaimer did almost 40 years ago.

City was the first Canadian station to have a microwave unit that enabled it to broadcast live from the field and was one of the earliest all-videotape stations when most others were still using film. And reporters were more than just reporters—they put themselves in stories, following the Moses commandment of presenting “the news as soap opera,” with the journalists as recurring characters, and the streets, buildings and parks of Toronto as sets. When J.D. Roberts covered a large apartment fire in 1988, he helped tenants back to their powerless units using the camera’s light to navigate the halls. “It really was guerilla journalism—you went out there with a camera and very few resources and you did whatever you were capable of doing,” Roberts told CBC’s Jian Ghomeshi in 2009. John Roberts, as he’s now known, went on to become a star anchor at CBS and then CNN, and believes he can do things cheaper, faster and leaner now because of his background at Citytv.

Znaimer had a particular passion for reflecting Toronto’s increasing diversity, which made for smart newscasting and smart marketing, building reputation and business. He attracted viewers from variouscommunities often ignored or misrepresented by established stations with their traditional approach. “He invented multicultural television,”said Roberts. “Not just here in Toronto, but around the world. He believed that a television station should reflect its community, and the only way to have a television station reflect its community was to achieve diversity.”

In 1978, one of Znaimer’s “on-air personalities,” Jojo Chintoh, with his thick Ghanaian accent, became the first black reporter at City. His unique cadence, according to Doyle, reminded viewers this was “Toronna,” notsome ordinary city with TV news “concocted by some consulting firm.” Colin Vaughan, a former municipal politician and architect, was another example. “Look at him,” Znaimer said in 1987. “That white hair, that look: Colin is an archetypal personality who lives and breathes politics. I can’t fabricate Colin. I can only find him and put him on television.” And, in 1984, David C. Onley, now lieutenant-governor of Ontario, became one of Canada’s first senior newscasters with a visible disability. Znaimer spotted him hosting an event with two astronauts at the Ontario Science Centre and was determined to sign him. “It was only after he had hired me that he asked about my disability,” Onley said in his 2007 installation speech. “Obviously, what he did was important for my career. But more importantly, it sent a message to TV viewers everywhere that my physical shortcomings were irrelevant.”

The boss was also a great champion of pushing for more women on camera. In 1980, Znaimer persuaded reporter, anchor and talk show host Dini Petty to film the birth of her second child for a documentary. Laura Di Battista worked as an anchor and health specialist from 1983 until January 2010, when she too got the axe. She combined articulate questions with a disarming sense of humour and fair play, and raised awareness of issues such as childhood disability. “She had a way of putting children and families at ease so she could pull compelling human stories from them,” recalls Louise Kinross, communications manager at Toronto’s Holland Bloorview Kids Rehabilitation Hospital. In 2002, Jee-Yun Lee joined as a reporter and became a consumer specialist known for strong investigative reporting on subjects such as life insurance and used-car scams. She’s now at CP24, the local all-news channel.

“It used to be old white men sitting in chairs 30 years ago. So, City was all about really trying to embrace a city that we undeniably had an affection for,” says Stephen Hurlbut, former vice president of news, adding that the station strived for a different vibe, look and feel and that a distinct personality was critical to the station’s success. Denise Donlon, former vice president of MuchMusic, which was a City sister station, and now general manager at CBC Radio, said showing the process of reporting the news was all part of the vision. “It was okay to see the microphones and that somebody working at the desk was right behind you and you could open the door out into the street and let the sound of the blaring streetcars and horns come in,” she recalled in a CBC Life and Times documentary about Znaimer. “This was revolutionary stuff.”

The decline of City dates to the turn of this century, a period that saw the expansion of the Moses vision to specialty channels, a chain of small and large stations and a 24-hour news channel in Toronto. But being a maverick wasn’t enough to stop the easing out of Znaimer in 2003. To keep it all going required money—lots of it—which led to a succession of financial deals over several years. Citytv stations fell into the hands of CTV, then Rogers. All the while, an economic storm was gathering and technological advances were about to dramatically reshape the media landscape.

One of Citytv’s notable “personalities,” Peter Silverman, experienced it all. Now, two years after his dismissal, he sits in a small, blanket-covered chair in his pale yellow living room cluttered with African décor. His loud voice fills with excitement as he talks about the golden days. “We were Toronto’s television. Yes, we weren’t number one in the marketplace, but if you talk to anybody out there about what a local newscast was, it would be us,” he says. “We were a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, blessed bunch of people…and it was a pretty good place to work.”

After working for Global, Silverman became a CityPulse reporter in 1981. Eight years later, he started hostingSilverman Helps, advocating for consumers by getting money back from a scam or making sure a contract was upheld. It featured both many happy endings and some dramatic refusals by those he confronted (his camera crew catching every heated word and picking up every flushed, angry face).

The show was still running when Rogers took over in 2007. The economy was diving at the time, but Citytv employees hoped the new owners would increase funding for the station. And they did get new headquarters overlooking Yonge-Dundas Square. Mroczkowski also believed Rogers, having eliminated roughly 900 people across its operations by the end of 2009, had already finished gutting its major personnel at City. “To do all of that, and then a few months later, to decimate the newsroom to the extent that they did just seemed very odd,” she says of the January cuts of an additional 30 people.

The City losses actually began much earlier. In June 2008, Jamie Haggarty, vice president of financial operations for Rogers Media, told Silverman that Silverman Helps was dead and he was out of a job. “I remember asking, ‘What about the 12,000 requests for help we have so far?’” he says. His voice gets significantly quieter. “And Jamie said, ‘Forget them. Just forget them.’” The segment had become too expensive. Advertising goals weren’t being met, resources were too costly and the economy was rough. However, Silverman says the significance of the loss was greater than just financial. “The community lost something when Silverman Helps shut down.”

Today, 79-year-old Silverman is a two-time Gemini nominee, 2005 winner of the Radio Television Digital News Association’s Edward R. Murrow award, 2009 winner of an RTDNA Lifetime Achievement award and recipient of the Order of Ontario. Although he’s no longer in broadcasting, he’s writing a book about his experiences at Silverman Helps and he still has opinions about TV. “Local television is not finished,” he says. “But it’s facing huge competition: Facebook, YouTube and so on. They’ve fragmented the market to hell.”

About a half-hour before Global airs its promotion spot for Mroczkowski on that hot evening in May, her former co-anchor, Martineau, sits in his cubicle getting ready for the evening’s newscast. He’s been hosting the show for 33 years. The smell of coffee fills the air and a distinctive scent of new furniture lingers from the September move. More than half the newsroom’s desks are empty. His feet propped on his desk, he turns on his TV and flicks back and forth between CNN and a tennis match. A man who calls him “Gordie” brings him his opening lines. Martineau quickly reads them over in his head while glancing at the match. Tonight’s news lineup is heavy, so a story has to go. On the schedule: a small plane crash northeast of Toronto, charges dropped against former Attorney General Michael Bryant in the death of a cyclist and the premiere of Sex and the City 2. A piece on immigrant awards doesn’t make the cut. The station was built upon stories like this—ones that were appropriate for the multicultural metropolis the station serves, so it seemed an unexpected choice to kill.

Or maybe not so unexpected. A study conducted earlier this year by DiverseCity, a project funded by a not-for-profit organization, looked at Toronto’s newspapers, suppertime newscasts and the newsroom decision makers. It found that Citytv ranked low for diversity among evening news broadcasters. “Citytv trailed everyone in terms of reporters,” says John Miller, who designed and assisted with the study. The station had one visible minority on air—Dwight Drummond, CityNews’s former crime specialist who has since moved on to anchor the supperhour news on CBC Toronto.

Wendy Cukier, founder of the Diversity Institute in Management & Technology at Ryerson University and chair of the DiverseCity report, was surprised by the findings. “If you do an analysis of the content, there wasn’t a huge difference among the television station news programs, even though I expected there to be because of City’s reputation.”

That the station is no longer a leader in representing diverse communities is just one more example of how a once clearly identifiable brand has gone fuzzy. Predictably, Rogers has a different perspective. “In a weird way it’s almost like the ’80s and ’90s were Citytv’s rebellious teenage years, and now we’ve kind of grown up a little bit,” says Rogers’s Jamie Haggarty. “We got rid of the movies, and no more Ed the Sock. Those were fun, racy things that were appropriate at the time, and they were really innovative, but that was when there was no YouTube, there was no internet, there were not 500 channels on the dial.” He says Citytv’s Great Movies, SexTV and Fashion Television were once unique, but they’ve lost their lustre.

Haggarty is comfortable talking about the successes of City’s entertainment programming. On news, he’s much vaguer, stressing that great things are still to come. But Amber MacArthur has her doubts. She joined Citytv in 2006 and soon had her own technology show, Webnation. In January 2008, after much talk about expanding it, Rogers cancelled the program. Like Znaimer, MacArthur wanted to innovate. She turned down a job as a news reporter and quit the station because she was so unimpressed with the news format. “It can be a lot more rich, a lot more interesting—I just felt it was so formulaic.” After BlogTO picked up her departure, a reader commented, “Your decision to terminate Webnation is a realization of precisely what was widely feared, that you will turn the innovation at City into a hollow mediocrity.”

In a 2008 Toronto Life article, journalist David Macfarlane remembers standing on the sidewalk in the late ’90s at around 2 a.m., watching dancers in the windows of the City building on Queen Street West. “It dawned on me that Znaimer had actually achieved something remarkable: he had changed Toronto.” But the irony is, he realized, the station was now becoming “more ordinary, less idiosyncratic and (no doubt) more profitable,” as it slid into mainstream broadcasting.

Jump forward to a present-day newscast. It’s Thanksgiving Monday and CityNews at Six begins, as usual, with the charming Martineau standing on the fifth-floor rooftop patio of the new building. “Live from Yonge and Dundas,” he says in his deep, friendly voice. “This is Toronto’s news.” He wears a Harry Rosen black jacket with a collared shirt and striped tie. The top story: dognapper on the loose in suburban Vaughan. Reporter Pam Seatle reports on a puppy stolen over the weekend, the second such crime in the past three months. The news continues with Martineau looking surprisingly pale, compared to his usual bronze appearance. He throws to reporter Andrea Piunno for a story about helping out in homeless shelters over Thanksgiving weekend. Then, meteorologist Michael Kuss, dressed in a casual Lacoste brown-and-blue striped long-sleeved shirt, enthusiastically says, “The rain’s a comin’!” He gets so excited about the weather that his voice tends to go up mid-sentence. Reporter and occasional anchor Roger Petersen covers traffic and crime at the assignment desk. Two teens were shot dead on Saturday night. One thing about Citytv’s news—it has never been afraid to get up close and personal with crime stories. “I’ll party hardy when they tear Regent Park down,” says a former female tenant. “I’m tired of the murders here.”

At 6:15, Martineau does a three-minute international news segment called “The Nation,” featuring Canadian Press videos. Then the news becomes a jumble. Business, weather with Kuss, a heart-warming story or two, sports with Hugh Burrill, entertainment with Martineau, and weather with Kuss, again.

There are still fragments of the glory days. Martineau anchors outside, so ambulances and the hustle and bustle of the city are audible. But, still, no female anchor; in fact, on this Monday night, it was all middle-aged, white male presenters. No health reporter, no consumer reporter, no entertainment reporter, no technology reporter. Mroczkowski cringes at the thought of what CityNews has become. “To walk into that huge newsroom and see all those empty desks, and to not see all those people that used to bring such a vibrancy and energy to the newsroom, it must be awful,” she says. “I think Ted Rogers would have been rolling around in his grave, seeing what this company had done to the brand of Citytv.”

Znaimer won’t talk. But fans of what he created—the old brand that has been eviscerated—hope for a new Moses with an exciting new journalistic vision for local TV news.

It could be a long wait.

In London, Ontario, A News at 6 p.m. is more popular than Global, CBC or CTV’s national newscast. But the station is losing millions of dollars each year and has to deal with corporate decisions that seem indifferent to local needs. Alyssa Friesen speaks with A reporter Nick Paparella on why local news matters to London and what would be lost if the station went off the air.

It’s early April, and Tomek Kniat stares at his computer screen in the basement of his Scarborough, Ontario, home. His usual desktop image of a polar bear with gentle eyes is covered by a graph that zigs sharply higher and higher, reaching peaks that were foreign to Kniat only three or four days earlier. Is this really happening? he asks himself. He’d been checking Google Analytics a few times a day since he launched the English-language section ofGazetaGazeta.com five months earlier, and he expected traffic to go up 20 or 30 percent with a big story like this—not more than five times its typical views. If the traffic keeps going up like this, he worries, we will be in trouble.

Normally, a huge spike in web traffic is a gift, not a curse. But given the modest resources of Gazeta Gazeta, one of the most successful Polish language newspapers published in Canada, this sudden surge might have been too much of a good thing. Certainly, it was more than Malgorzata Bonikowska, the publisher and web editor, and Kniat, the advertising agent, webmaster and bookkeeper, could have anticipated when they began posting English-language news about Poland in November 2009. But in April, after Polish President Lech Kaczynski’s plane crashed in Smolensk, Russia, traffic on the site went up approximately 600 percent in three days.

While Kniat refused to release page view stats for GazetaGazeta.com, the increase was so significant that he was afraid the server would not be able to handle the jump in traffic. “The last thing I want,” he says, “is for people to come to the website and they won’t be able to read it.” So he moved the articles to a separate server to prevent a meltdown. The English-language portal Polonium.GazetaGazeta.com debuted on April 22, 2010.

That was 22 years after Zbigniew Belz started Gazeta, as the paper was originally called (Bonikowska insistsGazeta Gazeta is a completely new publication even though the revisions were slight). A year after he came to Canada as a political refugee, he realized the new wave of Polish immigrants after the fall of communism needed a way to get news about Canada in their mother tongue. In Poland, Belz had been a prominent leader in the Solidarity movement and founder of the underground newspaper Feniks (Phoenix), which still exists today. In Canada, he published Gazeta three times per week from 1988 to 1992, then increased the frequency to daily. The name changed to Gazeta Gazeta in July 2010, and the publication now has an average per-issue circulation of roughly 4,000, though it reverted to its original three-times-a-week schedule in 2008. With the advent of the internet, an increase in Polish-language programming choices in Canada and the dominance of mainstream English-language media, Belz felt that readers no longer needed a daily.

Gazeta Gazeta may have switched its frequency over the years, but what remains constant is its place as a pioneer in the Canadian Polish language press. The web portal is not its first progressive move. In 1998, it was the first Polish paper to have a Toronto section, and in 2003, it became one of the first with a website that featured daily polish language news articles. Although mainstream newspapers had websites well before then, many Polish publications in Canada still do not, and if they do, many don’t have links and aren’t interactive. Circulation figures for some leading Polish-language newspapers show that Gazeta Gazeta must be doing something right—with its total 12,500 weekly copies, Gazeta Gazeta’s distribution exceeds that ofGlos Polski (Polish Voice), at 5,000 per week, Zwiazkowiec (The Alliancer), at 8,000 per week and Nowy Kurier (New Courier), at 10,000 every two weeks.

In addition to winning the circulation battle, Gazeta Gazeta is at the forefront of Canada’s Polish-language papers when it comes to pursuing a dialogue with the Jewish community. “Bonikowska really thinks that Polish-Jewish topics are very important for the Polish community,” says Peter Jassem, chair of the Toronto chapter of the Polish-Jewish Heritage Foundation of Canada. This is rare in a community that has a history of anti-Semitism. Witold Liliental, who writes a weekly column for the paper agrees: “Sometimes I wonder how Bonikowska, who has no Jewish roots, understands some of the feelings that people of Jewish descent go through.”

And now, Gazeta Gazeta is one of the first ethnic newspapers in Canada to boast an English-language portal—a site that features news about Poland from international sources. It’s an attempt to solve the age-old problem of appealing to second- and third-generation readers. With each passing generation, immigrant families assimilate further into Canadian society and gravitate toward English-language media. If successful,Polonium could provide a model for other ethnic papers. Otherwise, it will demonstrate once again how difficult it is to make hyphenated Canadians interested in consuming news about their ancestors’ country of origin.

It’s a humid day in July, and Kniat sits with his laptop in the back room of the new Gazeta store in the heart of Toronto’s Polish district, in the city’s west end. The 50-year-old, who has been involved with the paper since the 1990s, is working from the store temporarily while helping unpack and organize the new space. He clicks on his Google News tab and looks intently at a screen filled with today’s wire stories. Kniat subscribes to a number of RSS feeds, including Wyborcza.pl, a Polish wire service, and eight news agencies, including Reuters and Fox.

One by one he considers each option. Kniat rests his cursor on a Bloomberg BusinessWeek story about how one of Poland’s biggest banks has been shortlisted by Allied Irish Banks, which is looking to make another major investment in the country. “I think it’s too business-specific for our readers,” he says, “so I will skip this.” He turns his attention to an article about how Spain is a favourite going into the European Football Championship, which will be held in the Ukraine and Polandin 2012. He skips it as well—articles, he says, should actually talk about Poland. He scrolls further and stops at another BusinessWeek story, which came in two hours ago and is entitled “Poland May Lack Budget Cuts for EU Deadline.” He likes this one. To avoid copyright infringement, he copies only the title and a small portion of the beginning of the story and pastes that on the site. If readers are interested in reading the full article,they can click on the link to the original story.

Polonium is a portal, also known as a news aggregator, a website that collects information on a specific topic or theme from multiple sources.The fundamental idea of news aggregation, according to Craig Silverman,a Montreal-based columnist for the Columbia Journalism Review, is that “we’ll seek out the best and present it to you in one place rather than having you go look for it yourself.”

Kniat, who updates the English portal daily, says that he devotes 20 minutes to it in the morning and maybe another 40 minutes in the evening. Bonikowska is responsible for the original Polish-language content on GazetaGazeta.com, and she spends about two hours a day on the site. It takes her husband, Belz, around seven hours to put Gazeta Gazeta’s print newspaper together by himself. Although he is not involved with the English portal, he supports it and hopes that Canadians of Polish descent will be inspired to learn more about Poland and actually visit the country—a land he thinks they will fall in love with. But is the portal the best way to accomplish this goal?

Don’t underestimate the language barrier, cautions Vladimir Turovsky, publisher of the Russian-language publication Nasha Canada. He’s found that nobody can translate Russian articles into English. “It’s jokes. It’s a lot of literature, play with words,” he says. “It’s a very big problem for translators.” So while English news about Poland relays the facts, it can’t replicate native sentiment. Culture involves nuance and shared symbols. Without those, it’s just news about a country you happen to have ancestors from.

The second problem is the risk of losing Polish-language readers by catering too much to Anglophones. Panos Andronidis, editor and publisher of the Hellenic Hamilton News, says that his paper rarely has English editorial content and he would like to “keep it Greek.” Conversely, Bora Dragasevich, former publisher, editor and, currently, an editorial board member of the Voice of Canadian Serbs, says his paper has been bilingual since it debuted in 1934. Two-thirds of the articles are in Cyrillic Serbian and one-third are in English, an attempt to appeal to younger generations. “We want them to know their history and culture in the language they understand better,” says Dragasevich. But the paper has no plans to create a website. “Our readers are of the older generation,” he says, “and they do not operate on computers, including yours truly.”

Which brings up the third problem: technology. Polonium is a solid but rather simple news aggregator. On one hand, it might not be glitzy enough to entice tech-savvy young people, and on the other, it could be too sophisticated for the older generation. Meanwhile, Krzysztof Bednarczyk, publisher of the weekly Polish-language newspaper Wiadomosci, doesn’t have immediate plans to create a website. He doesn’t think an English portal with news about Poland can be successful because young, English-speaking Poles wouldn’t be interested. “I don’t believe,”says Bednarczyk, “there is a community big enough to sustain it.”

Judging how many young Canadians are interested in news about Poland is difficult. The most widespread Polish student organization in Canada, Polska Inicjatywa Studentow w Kanadzie (the Polish Students’ Initiative of Canada), or PISK, has over 500 fans on Facebook and 150 registered members. Still, Kniatbelieves there is an audience for the portal. “There’s a part of the Polish community that assimilates into Canadian society and they just move on,” he says. He believes that not appealing to such people is short-sighted. But what if Polonium isn’t appealing to this particular demographic?

Bonikowska says that she and Kniat got the idea to post English language articles on the site after hearing Polish immigrants often say that they wanted their children to learn about their ancestral homeland. But Zoe Tupling, a 20-year-old university student from Ottawa whose mother is Polish and father is Canadian, says she’d visit the site only for news of a big event. Even though she considers herself Polish, she says she is Canadian above all else: “Since Poland is not my home, it’s not that I have an incredible linkage to it.” Others more strongly identify with their heritage. “I would like to keep myself updated about what is happening in what I consider my country and my people,” says Monika Staruszkiewicz, a 20-year-old University of Toronto student who was born in Canada. However, even though English is her first language, she’d prefer to read the news in Polish so she can practise the language. She believes that the portal would be “absolutely ideal” if it provided a translation option.

Polonium may be ahead of its competitors, but that may not be enough to attract young, wired Polish-Canadians. Every day, Kniat puts the most-read article from the portal on a Facebook group called Gazeta inEnglish. He hopes that it will serve as a teaser to get people interested in checking out what’s on the portal. The year-old Facebook page has almost 250 fans, suggesting some interest in Polonium. And almost 250fans is excellent compared to the seven that Polish News, a bilingual Polish-American portal, has. On the other hand, Global Voices’ English portal has over 9,000 fans.

The difference between Polonium and Global Voices, a not-for-profit initiative with over 300 volunteer contributors, or The Huffington Post,which has over 160,000 fans on Facebook, is that those sites offer a mix of reportage and original analysis. Perhaps this is why nobody commented on any of Polonium’s postings for the past six months. “When you look at getting a younger audience interested, it’s more than just trying to getthem to consume,” explains Silverman. “It’s about using information as a means to get them involved, to share, to participate.”

Polonium’s July 3 posting of an article from U.K.-based Polish recruitment agency Skills Provision, about how Poles are not welcoming to immigrants from Russia and Ukraine, is a case in point. It might have appealed more to readers if it included a personal story from a Pole living in Ukraine or a Ukrainian living in Poland about how isolated she feels being a minority in a foreign country. “You have to create something for people to get engaged about,” says Silverman.

When used properly, Facebook and Twitter can be great assets. Butdialogue and conversation are essential for social media to be, well,social. The Huffington Post, Global Voices and naharnet, an English-languageLebanese portal, allow readers to follow the sites through various social media links, which are readily available on the front page. Naharnet has over 2,000 followers on Twitter. The ability to share Poloniumstories through Facebook, Twitter and other sites doesn’t mean much if people aren’t reading. At this point, it is up to Polonium to initiate a two way conversation, since the portal’s Twitter account, @poloniumgazeta,currently has only four followers, one of whom is Kniat.

If not for a tragedy in Russia, Polonium might never have existed. What happened in Smolensk was a huge international news story—97 people died when a plane crashed. It was carrying the Polish president, the first lady and high-ranking government officials, who were on their way to the 70th anniversary of the Katyn massacre. The last big Polish event that garnered similar international attention was the death of Pope John Paul II  in 2005. But the portal can’t rely solely on aggregated news stories forever. Since Poland is a country that is rarely front and centre on the world stage, people with no connection to it aren’t likely to seek out news about it or a site like Polonium. But the portal’s target demographic—young Polish-Canadians—might be.

Still, it’s hard to believe that this group is really interested in a dry, obscure story about Poland planning to privatize major companies to offset the deficit. For many second- and third-generation Canadians, Poland is a foreign land, and the country’s minor political and economic dealings are of little concern. If the portal continues to post news stories without either critical analysis or some type of opinion and commentary, it will likely continue to maintain a Twitter following that can be counted on one hand.

If the portal is to be successful, it has to do more than copying, pasting and posting and find a way to speak to the Polish-Canadian experience, or even the human experience. Readers must relate to the content and feel a sense of community. To do this, Polonium has to ask its readers what they want to know about Poland, rather than simply telling them. In the near future, Kniat and Bonikowska want to make the portal more interactive by adding a magazine section, which they say will include more critical analysis and original content. This idea has potential, but without a greater effort to reach out to young Canadians, it won’t work. And so far Bonikowska and Kniat have spoken with only one youth organization about the intended revamp. What Polonium needs more than anything is English-language content that sparks a conversation, not a monologue. Without that conversation, too much will be lost in translation—a different kind of tragedy, and one that is entirely avoidable.

Shelley Youngblut had a problem. How can I get people like me to feel they can do home improvement? She was working on art ideas for a cover story titled “What’s the Worst That Can Happen?” So, when the Swerve editor-in-chief saw someone dressed as Mike Holmes at a Halloween party, she thought, Wouldn’t it be funny to put him on the cover? She found a local impersonator. Perfect! But she didn’t stop there. What if Mike Holmes had a terrible disaster? What if he ended up with a nail in his head?

When the art came in, she got really excited. But after seeing the cover photo, her staff was shocked and laughed hysterically. They thought she’d gone too far, but she was too carried away by the wit of the idea to pay attention. The cover showed the Holmes look-alike with a nail sticking out of an oozing hole in his head, blood dripping down his face onto his white T-shirt and orange overalls, his eyes rolled up and arms crossed in annoyance. Small children all over Calgary, including her own, ran screaming from the magazine. She looks at it now and thinks, What the hell was I thinking? Of course this was a terrible idea!

Youngblut isn’t afraid to take risks and can admit when she’s made a mistake. She learned two things from the “nail-in-the-head” incident—now a common reference the Swerveteam uses to rein her in. Lesson number one: She has to create an environment where her staff feel comfortable enough to tell her when she’s crazy. Lesson number two: If they tell her she’s crazy, she has to listen.

Her ability to learn from experience has helped her create one of the most successful magazines in Canada. Youngblut won the Lifetime Achievement Award at the Western Magazine Awards in 2009, and her Calgary Herald insert was one of the top five winners at the 2010 National Magazine Awards. “Swerve really feels like the side of Calgary that I know,” says Chris Turner, who’s won five gold National Magazine Awards and used to contribute to the magazine regularly. “It’s smart, witty, culturally sophisticated and interesting.” Youngblut hasn’t just given local writers an outlet to do some of their best work; she’s created a city magazine that could serve as a model for editors and publishers in other urban centres.

Youngblut was a dreamy child. At nine, while camping with her family, she wandered deep into the woods. The trees were green and lush. The air was cool and warm at the same time. It was both scary and comforting. Maybe even magical. She lay down and placed her cheek against the grass. She heard her mother calling. Maybe I’ll never go back, she thought. She changed her mind, but decided to take a little piece of that place with her. Whenever she has moments of confusion or self-doubt, she puts herself back there and feels in tune. That’s where her inspiration comes from. Even at a young age, she could see beneath the surface. In magazines, it helps to be able to see the hidden side of people and stories.

A tall, skinny, bespectacled, brace-faced keener, she sat on her hands in class so she wouldn’t put them up constantly. As a teenager, she read Playboy (her dad’s) and Cosmopolitan (her mom’s) and dreamed of working in New York City. In 1983, while studying English at the University of Calgary, she created Vox, an alternative music magazine. After graduation, she headed east and worked as the production editor atToronto, then managing editor of T.O., both of which are now defunct. In 1989, she left for Vancouver to work as senior editor, and later managing editor, at West.

After attending the Stanford Publishing Course for Professionals in 1991, she co-created a magazine calledJane for women in their 20s and 30s. It never launched—though, later, another magazine of the same name did—but Youngblut made contacts in New York. She won a green card in the lottery and sent Gary Hoenig, editor of a proposed ESPN magazine, an e-mail with the top 10 reasons he should hire her. He did. Hearst Corporation executives weren’t ready to spend $75 million to launch the magazine, but they also didn’t want to let it go, so they just kept the team in limbo making test magazines—for four years.

In the very first year, an executive told Hoenig, “You’re dead. Send them all home.” It’s a passing thing, he thought. When they escort them out of the building, that’s when I’ll tell them. He let everyone keep working until Hearst changed its mind. In Swerve’s earliest days, when most people thought it would fail, Youngblut remembered her mentor and kept fighting.

Not that she’s never failed. Youngblut has been fired twice. At T.O., she was still green and didn’t understand that the managing editor’s job was to support the editor, not be the editor. Then, as Seventeen’s executive editor in 1994, she and editor-in-chief Caroline Miller didn’t see eye-to-eye. Youngblut had a strong vision for the magazine, and it clashed with what her boss had in mind. After a year, Miller sat her down and said, “This isn’t working.” Youngblut knew it was true. She couldn’t stand being number two, and she couldn’t be herself. Before her departure, she led Seventeen’s 50th anniversary edition, which meant rummaging through 50 years worth of issues. For the girl who once sat in the Toronto Reference Library, poring over magazines for hours and memorizing bylines, it was a dream job. After that, she went back to ESPN The Magazine, which eventually launched in 1998.

Two years later, when Youngblut was 38, she thought, I’m never going to have children. I’m never going to find love. I will be a workaholic for the rest of my life. Then she met Michael Kelly, associate controller for Fairchild Publications and eight years her junior, at a party. Five months later she was pregnant—with identical twins. But at 16 weeks they weren’t growing. The doctors at Mount Sinai Medical Center thought it was twin-to-twin transfusion, a syndrome with an extremely high mortality rate, and they wanted her to abort both babies. But when Youngblut hears no, she figures out a way to get to yes. She started researching at Barnes & Noble. Then she called different doctors across the country until she realized she might not have twin-to-twin transfusion after all. She took her findings back to the hospital and promised she wouldn’t sue the doctors. A month after marrying Kelly, she had an emergency C-section: the baby girls were tiny, but alive.

Youngblut had stopped working when she found out there were problems with the pregnancy. She stayed home with the babies for two years. Then Kelly lost his job, so Youngblut called Hoenig. “I need to come back to work,” she said. “Whatever you want,” he replied. “How much money do you need?” He agreed to let her work part-time from home. One day, she had a photographer on the phone, discussing a recent photoshoot with Lance Armstrong. She was breastfeeding both babies at the same time and thinking, Oh, if only you knew what I’m doing right now.

She was in over her head. The job was too much to handle and she decided to move back to Calgary to be near her family. While preparing to move, she started writing an arts and culture column for the Herald. Soon after, Malcolm Kirk, then the paper’s editor-in-chief, asked Youngblut to develop a prototype of a dynamic, thought-provoking events guide. She had brainstormed ideas with him, but she decided to add her own spin—not exactly what Kirk asked for but something she was driven to see work. Kirk went for it. Swerve began publishing in November 2004, in part with the money the paper would have spent on a travel budget forhockey reporters if the NHL hadn’t locked out its players.

Youngblut never thought Kirk would make her the editor-in-chief. And even if he did, she wasn’t sure she’d want it. She had two small babies and was burnt out from ESPN. But she really wanted to be part of the conversation about Calgary, making it a better city and creating a relevant magazine. She’s also not very good at saying no.

Square-shaped like an old rotogravure, Swerve has elements of the past. Rotogravures (also called supplements or rotos, the name comes from the printing process) were newspaper inserts that emerged in the Canadian market in 1905 with The Montreal Standard. The original rotos were aesthetically pleasing for their time (they were about 18 pages, printed on newsprint, with an emphasis on photographs). Weekend Picture Magazine, which launched in 1951, combined components from rotogravures and magazines. It had a cleaner layout and a new emphasis on feature stories, in addition to high-quality colour photography and black-and-white illustrations, though the paper quality remained low. By the 1960s, Weekend’s national circulation had reached two million through 41 dailies.

The 1965 launch of The Canadian Magazine (which later became The Canadian), a collaboration between the Toronto Star and the Southam newspaper chain, initiated a feisty editorial roto war with Weekend. The new journalism movement was underway in the U.S. and Canada, and writers and editors broke conventions, focusing on narrative techniques. Don Obe took over as editor-in-chief of The Canadian in 1974 and had staff writers such as Roy MacGregor, Earl McRae and Tom Alderman. He encouraged them to write with a voice and point of view.

Swerve’s imaginative long-form journalism and top visual quality on so-so stock is a throwback to the rotos. The magazine’s layout is clean and mostly uncluttered. Readers can expect an in-depth cover story, typically around six to ten pages long (though its longest, “The Unbelievable Story of the Most Famous Indian in the World,” ran 14 pages). One week, the cover is jolly and service-friendly: “32 Ways to Solve Your Gift-Giving Dilemmas,” beside an illustration of an animated Christmas tree. Two weeks later, the cover—dark and controversial, with a female hand holding an old picture of a young boy—sells a story about a transgendered woman. The sans-serif body font keeps it fresh, yet there are sporadic dabs of Santa Fe LET, a swirly type that hints at Swerve’s (and Youngblut’s) positive energy.

The front of book, which takes up half the magazine, is a light and service-focused events guide. Staying In discusses TV shows and movies; Going Out details arts and culture events, such as theatre productions, comedy shows and concerts; and Living and Eats + Drinks appear on alternate weeks. The last page, called Our Town, emphasizes Swerve’s role as a city magazine. It features a colourful image and a short description of a random and sometimes obscure person, place or event—a hockey puck–marked garage door in suburban Evergreen, the elevator at the Epcor Centre or Calgary’s first automobile accident in 1912.

Swerve’s cover stories are heavily researched and commonly relay a specific point of view. The departments are often about the personal experiences of the writers. Cynthia Cushing related the trials and tribulations of a trip to Paris with her three sisters. Bretton Davie wrote a blunt piece about unemployment and how, instead of finding herself, as many people claimed she would, she lost herself. Each story features the strong voice of the writer rather than the omniscient voice of the magazine. Writers never pretend to be objective. They’re honest. They’re quirky. But all the different voices flow together like a conversation. While other Calgary publications may feel the need to defend the city’s honour, Swerve treats the city like a modern, cosmopolitan place, not some parochial cow town that needs boosterism or coddling.

The magazine is a chip off the old block: like Youngblut, it’s funny, smart, colourful, unpredictable and open. “I hate magazines that make you feel that if you don’t have the right haircut or eat at the right restaurant or you don’t know the right people, your life is shit,” she says. “We can appeal to the best in people by celebrating everybody.” That’s also how she treats her contributors. Maybe it’s the fact that she thinks she’s a bad writer, or that she considers writing the hardest thing to do, but contributors see Youngblut as a writer’s editor.

With just $4,000 to dole out to freelancers each issue, Swerve can’t pay much. Rather than shell out on a per-word basis, as most magazines do, Youngblut comes up with a number based on how much work will be involved. And there’s no special treatment. Marc Rimmer, a recent Alberta College of Art and Design graduate, gets the same for his photos as George Webber, winner of numerous National Magazine Awards, including gold in 2010. A 20-year-old writer gets the same as a veteran: usually $1,400 for a cover story. Youngblut wishes she could give more, but tries to make up for it by letting contributors work on what they want—even things that may not be published elsewhere.

It’s a simple strategy: seek out great writers, photographers and illustrators, and let them pursue their interests. “One of the things I believe in strongly is the get-out-of-jail-free idea,” says Youngblut. “Everybody I work with is allowed one idea, even if I hate it, even if everybody else hates it. If you feel passionately about this one idea, you should have it published.” Tyee Bridge wrote a piece, “The End Is Here,” about the apocalypse and Antarctica, and he had trouble selling it to other publications, including The Walrus. The article was a perfect fit for Swerve. Youngblut valued the quality of writing and Bridge’s passion for the subject, and she thought her readers were capable of appreciating a meaty story. Though Swerve’s readership is primarily women, after the piece ran, she received an unexpected number of calls and e-mails from men in their 40s to 60s who loved it. “Swerve is the place that publishes the stories that nobody else will publish,” she says. “And it’s not because the stories are bad, it’s because everybody else’s definition of a magazine is too narrow.”

An orchestra conductor doesn’t teach musicians how to play their instruments, and Youngblut takes the same approach with her contributors—she merely leads them in the right direction. Trust is an important part of that relationship. A hard-copy query isn’t necessary; she prefers a five-minute phone conversation. When frequent writers have trouble articulating a story idea, she often stops them and says, “The answer is yes.”

She also stands behind her contributors. Two years ago, Canwest told all of its editors to have freelancers sign a contract that waived their copyrights, including moral rights. Youngblut couldn’t do this. She feels her writers and photographers should have a sense of ownership over their contributions; she thinks that’s an integral part of what makes her magazine unique within Postmedia Network Inc., formerly Canwest. Her bosses let it go.

While she prides herself on using budding local talent, Youngblut still sometimes seeks outside help. This irks Kevin Brooker, a Herald columnist and regular Swerve contributor. “When I see Steve Burgess getting Calgary dollars, I’m not too crazy about it—because that guy lives in Vancouver. He doesn’t really know how we live,” he says, adding that each time an out-of-town writer gets a prime listen-to-me article, there’s one fewer Calgarian learning the genre and becoming an important voice in the community. Youngblut responds, “If there’s a writer in Calgary who’s great for Swerve, I would use them over a writer in Vancouver or Toronto.” But she’s picky. “I want the best writers,” she says. “If they come from the States, but their stories resonate in Calgary, then that’s great.” The stories aren’t necessarily geographical, but rather about social trends or a particular point of view. “We’re not going to limit the talent pool based on location,” she says. “A generic story isn’t going to fly. Our standards are higher.”

The office is anything but glamorous. “I’m somewhat embarrassed by the Swerve offices. Just be kind when you walk in (some freelancers are horrified),” Youngblut admitted in an e-mail. The turf-like grey carpet spans approximately 2,000 square feet of space, which is way too big for the five full-time employees who work in the back left corner. Youngblut’s desk, separated from the rest in the front of the room, is twice the size of her colleagues’ and covered with papers and past issues. The magazine’s archives are an organized disaster of back issues piled in chronological order on tables and in bookcases. The drop ceiling has a crack where the staff hung a disco ball last year. A scantily clad mannequin wearing a silver Santa hat stands in the middle of the room. Named Zelda, she was naked until passersby, who could see her through the window, complained.

Though the staff like to laugh, the financial side of the magazine is no joke. An upside to inserts is the built-in readership, but Swerve actually helped keep the Herald’s Friday numbers above 110,000. TVtimes, the previous insert, had been a circulation and advertising gold mine, but soon there were too many channels for listings, and the information was available on the internet and TV screens anyway. Like other papers, theHerald dropped its television guide and Friday readership fell. The paper hoped that Swerve would help solve the problem. And it did.

But not even Youngblut could anticipate how big the impact would be. This year, the magazine sold more than $2 million in ads—20 percent higher than the year before. “Our advertising revenue has consistently gone up at a time when all other newspaper revenue has gone down,” Youngblut says. Starting in October 2009, 5,000 free copies of Swerve went rogue from the paper each week and became available around the city. The pickup rate at stands located in high-traffic areas is always above 80 percent and reached a high of 94 percent last September. Fears that this would cause the Herald’s Friday circulation to go down have proved unfounded, she says. “People who wouldn’t otherwise read the paper, but would read Swerve, now have an opportunity to do that.”

Like Youngblut, Kirk believes Swerve is a model that could work in other cities. “It certainly has been on the radar as one of the possibilities,” says Kirk, who is currently executive vice president of digital media at Postmedia. “There are elements of the magazine that could travel quite nicely between markets,” he says. “But you would also need to make sure that you have the same kind of resource commitment that we currently have here in Calgary.” Profitability takes a while, but he notes that Swerve actually helped theHerald through tough times by securing advertisers for a younger market.

If a magazine supplement seems too financially daunting, Swerve’s new website might offer an alternative model. The magazine’s old site consisted of a list of links to the week’s articles, without a photo or format of any kind in sight. Just text. It was more like a digital archive of the articles than a website. But Guy Huntingford green lit the new venture not even two weeks after joining the Herald as publisher in August. It was scheduled to launch in December—six years after Swerve’s inaugural issue. “Unlike other media that have had to pull back and give people less, somehow, every year, we have tried to give people more,” says Youngblut. “And I think the website is, in some ways, even more groundbreaking than Swerve the magazine.”

Two months before the launch, though, Youngblut wondered whether she could do it. She had known what it would take to launch a magazine, but a website was a scary new experience. “For the first time in a long while, I’m flying blind,” she said. “It’s like I’ve been trying to get pregnant for six years, and then all of a sudden, somebody comes up to me and says, ‘You’re seven months pregnant. And you’re having octuplets.’” Not to worry, though. She’s overcome so much in the past that a little fear mixed with some unknown territory should be easy.

Andrew Westoll was on a mission. His motorboat, loaded with food and supplies, pushed upriver. Along the banks of the Sipaliwini River the foliage was dense, the layers of varying shades of greens and browns occasionally reverberating with bird cries. He was deep in the neotropical jungle of southern Suriname, the least-travelled country in South America. But as he and his crew wound their way up the river, his mind was on something even more rare.

Westoll was searching for the okopipi, an unusual frog species known for the potency of its poison and its blue colour. Once traded on the exotic species market, the okopipi is now endangered. During his four-day journey to the home of these frogs, Westoll realized that he had the makings of a non-fiction book.

After glimpsing the elusive amphibian, Westoll’s initial search was complete. Still, another had just begun. While on that river in the remote jungle he had evolved from a freelance journalist into a non-fiction author. He’d now have to embark on the mission of writing his book and getting it published.

Westoll is far from alone; the worlds of journalism and publishing have long collided in Canada. But his quest to make a career out of writing books would prove as rewarding and perilous as his adventures in the rainforest.

With fewer and fewer publications in this country willing or able to publish literary journalism, more and more writers are turning to nonfiction books. But the magazine and book-publishing industries are two separate businesses with different editorial standards and expectations of success. The apparent freedom of writing books comes with new challenges. And certain stories can end up homeless, unable to find a place in magazines or books, which is bad for writers and their readers.

From the late 1960s to the mid-1990s, literary journalism flourished in this country. Saturday Night published stories as long as 10,000 words, and Toronto Life, Chatelaine, Maclean’s and others ran pieces that were 5,000 words or more. Today, the space for feature writing is shrinking. Fewer publications are willing to run long-form writing, and when they do, the pieces have much lower word counts than 20 years ago. While 6,000- and 7,000-word stories still appear, they are the exception rather than the norm. So the non-fictionbook is increasingly the dominant place for this type of journalism.

However, as Westoll discovered when he returned from the jungle, a book contract does not mean financial security. His book, The Riverbones: Stumbling After Eden in the Jungles of Suriname, garnered good reviewswhen it came out in 2008, but he’d been able to translate his Suriname adventures into prose only by living rent-free at his sister’s condo for four months and cobbling together an income by writing for explore, The Walrus and The Globe and Mail. Westoll describes the space for long form in Canada as small. “It’s always been a pretty narrow landscape, and from what I see,it’s probably shrinking,” he says. “I don’t think you’ll find anyone who says it’s not really tough right now.”

As Westoll discovered, unless a writer is well established, it is virtually impossible to earn a living writing books only; advances are insubstantial,usually between $20,000 and $40,000. And writers generally get a third of their advance up front, another third when they hand in the first draft and the rest on publication. Even if the advance is sizable, when divided into chunks it means journalists live in poverty unless they are able tosupplement this income. “The only reason I am able to spend two years of my life right now writing this one book and focusing solely on it is because I sold the book in the U.S.,” says Westoll of his current book, abouta family of chimpanzees in an animal sanctuary outside Montreal. “I made enough money to stop freelancing and focus solely on the book. But I didn’t go out and buy a mansion.”

Certainly, few writers begin a non-fiction book with expectations of a big payday. Richard Poplak trained as a filmmaker but switched to freelance journalism in 2005 and since then has written three books.“You have to readjust what it is you think middle-class life should be if you want to be a professional writer,” says Poplak, whose South African origins are evident in his speech. “It’s not going to be about $75,000 every year, year in and year out.” He’s written for This Magazine and Toronto Life, but acknowledges that at a national level “the only game in town really is The Walrus.”

Books afford him more control over his work: he doesn’t have to take on as many pieces he dislikes and isn’t forced to constantly pitch stories. He is careful to note, though, that writing books definitely has disadvantages. “They are just not lucrative. They take up a lot of energy, they suck a lot of time, they half-kill you. And then there is the publicity.” He pauses before continuing and fingers the stubble on his jaw. “At the same time, they increase my brain—they’re very exciting projects. When you are working on a journalism book on a topic you’re in love with, there is just no greater thrill in the world, and that’s worth a lot of money for me.”

Money does matter, though, and writing non-fiction in this country is a very different experience from in the United States. The American market is huge in comparison so there are more publishing houses and more money for advances. “A book that could command a healthy advance of 20 grand in Canada will command three or four times that,” says Westoll. But American publishing houses are more interested in American writers than authors from north of the border. Most journalists in this country who choose to write non-fiction books will be published first here and earn a Canadian advance. “If you want to do interesting stuff, you need to have a backup skill set that you can make money with,” says Poplak. And this is exactly what most non-fiction authors do: make their money elsewhere. Journalists who write books also frequently teach, freelance for newspapers and magazines or have full-time jobs.

Katherine Ashenburg agrees that writing a non-fiction book is an act of love. A CBC Radio producer before becoming the editor of the Globe’s arts and books sections in 1989, she remained at the paper for a decade, during which time she wrote a book on the architecture of southern Ontario towns. But Ashenburg quit the job to write about the rituals of mourning. While she had found it possible to write her architecture book whenever she had spare time, she couldn’t do the in-depth look at grieving practices required for her second book in the evenings and on weekends. Then the publication of her third book changed her perspective on what she was willing to undertake. “I don’t ever want to write another long non-fiction book that takes me four years to research and write.”

That book was an examination of the history of cleanliness. The Dirt on Clean was a literary success that proved to be a money-losing proposition for its author. Ashenburg received $40,000 from Knopf as an advance, a good sum by Canadian standards. However, the costs of writing and research piled up. Frustrated when she realized that she’d lost hundreds of thousands of dollars in the four years it took to write Dirt, she tallied up her expenses and produced something truly rare: a detailed summary of how much it costs an author to write a book. At a Banff Literary Journalism lecture in 2008, Ashenburg took the audience through all the numbers, from advances to travel expenses to translation services and trips to New York City to meet her publishers. She then compared the years of research and writing to her income at the Globe. “I made $269,000 less,” says Ashenburg, whose salary at the paper had been $90,000 a year. “It cost me $269,000 to write the book, and this was a book that was sold in 12 countries and won prizes. Except financially, it was a very successful book—it got wonderful reviews, tons of publicity.” She cites a 2008 Quill &Quire survey that put the annual salary of a typical senior editor at a major publishing house at $46,000, more money than Ashenburg’s advance, which had to last four years. “I’m really glad I wrote Dirt on Clean and The Mourner’s Dance,” she says. “But I did that and I don’t want to do it again.”

Yet Philip Marchand, a book columnist at the Toronto Star for 19 years, understands the pull. “There is nothing like the challenge of a book,” says Marchand, who has written five. “If it does break through, if it becomes one of those works that, for whatever reason, people start to talk about and it becomes a bestseller or even if it just creates a stir, then you feel you’ve done something.”

Researching and writing a long piece of literary journalism may take weeks or months, but writing a book often takes years. A subject that once seemed promising and compelling has ample time to reveal plenty of snags or even prove fruitless. “If a magazine article doesn’t work out, you get, if you’re lucky, a kill fee and hopefully you wouldn’t have done too much work on it,” says Marchand. “But what happens if you’re two-thirds of the way through a book and the key source has not yet opened up to you? It’s sleepless nights.”

Still, he says writing a book can be a smart decision. He wrote one about Marshall McLuhan in the late 1980s, when he was feeling dissatisfied with magazines and sought wider recognition for his work. “You can have a hundred magazine articles, a thousand magazine articles, to your credit, people still don’t know who you are because they almost always don’t notice the byline,” he says. “You build up a reputation in the business, but for the most part people don’t know who you are.” While acknowledging that if he broke down his earnings for the McLuhan project into an hourly wage, he would have been making a pittance, he points to the long-term benefits. “The book changed my life. I don’t think I would have gotten the job at the Star if I hadn’t done it because it gave me intellectual literary credentials in addition to my journalistic background,” he says. “It really was important for me and I’m still getting the benefit. I can’t overestimate the fact that that book emotionally, intellectually and ultimately financially is something that made me feel like a substantial writer.”

Anne Collins’s spacious office is like a menagerie, only the animals are books. There are so many of them: they line the walls in bookshelves and sit piled on top of cabinets. Beside her laptop on her wide, wooden desk are jars of pencils and pens and an old-fashioned Rolodex; a small carved stone elephant sits off to one side.

Like Marchand, Collins has straddled the worlds of magazines and books. She came to Random House of Canada in 1998, where she is now the vice president, after 20 years as an editor and freelancer for magazines. She also wrote two non-fiction books. Having seen many different sides of literary journalism, she’s blunt in her assessment of the current state of long-form: “There just aren’t very many places to practise it.” But she doesn’t see books as a viable medium to fill the void left by a shrinking periodical market. “You just can’t transfer what used to be done in magazines into book form and think we’re going to have a wonderful culture in which people get to know what they need to know. If I did a hard-hitting investigative piece that was published in Toronto Life, I knew that it would go out to 100,000 people; if I did the same thing in book form, a wild non-fiction bestseller in Canada sells about 30,000 in hardcover.”

In addition, the book and magazine industries get their revenues in very different ways. “With magazines,” she says, “your money doesn’t come from the actual thing itself; it comes from selling ads.” Because these publications do not have to worry about pleasing every reader, they have the freedom to tackle difficult and controversial material and take on subjects that haven’t been written about before. Magazines can afford to take more risks because buyers will pick up an issue for one or two stories, but with books, readers have to be interested in that one topic. “When you’re doing long-form journalism in book form,” says Collins, “people have to want to pay money for them or they won’t exist. There are some stories that really need the canvas of a book in order to get them told, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that anybody will buy them.”

Increasingly, authors and publishing houses are finding that their choice of retailers to buy these books is also limited. Independent bookshops are often responsible for fostering lesser-known authors, and they’ve been closing at an alarming rate. Don Sedgwick, president of Transatlantic Literary Agency, says there are now fewer mid-list books because there are fewer small bookstores, and big chains no longer devote as much shelf space to books unlikely to become bestsellers. There are also fewer opportunities to promote books or even get reviews in newspapers. The Globe, for example, killed its stand-alone book section in 2009. “Now, with this concentration on bestsellers and a diminished media, it means that publishers and booksellers are taking fewer chances on authors that are unproven, so you are not getting those middle-selling books anymore,” says Sedgwick. “It has almost become an all-or-nothing show out there.”

Additionally, not all feature ideas, or finished features, translate into viable non-fiction books. Some stories that could have made good magazine pieces won’t be published because they don’t work as books. “There are all kinds of subjects in this country that never get in magazines because we have one national magazine and that’s it,” says Ashenburg. “I’m sure there are all kinds of stories that never get told.” And some authors will write a book even when it’s not the ideal format for that particular subject matter. As a member of the 2010 jury for British Columbia’s National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction, at $40,000, it’s the largest prize in the country for non-fiction, Marchand read roughly 150 books. “You think, why did the publisher decide to do this?” he says. “Why are these books published? About half shouldn’t have been books.”

The business side of publishing also determines whether an editor can buy a book. “You can’t do a book only because it is important,” says Collins. “You can only do it if it’s important and people will want to read it, want to know about it.” On top of the bookshelf across from her desk, she has three 2004 books propped up so their covers are on display: The Trouble with Islam, by Irshad Manji, Shake Hands with the Devil, by Roméo Dallaire and The Story of Jane Doe, by Jane Doe. While Manji’s and Dallaire’s works did well, Doe’s didn’t sell, despite winning several awards. Collins walks over to the bookshelf, reaches up and adjusts its jacket. “It was an important book. That’s why we did it,” she says. “But not many people want to read about rape.”

Far from the jungles of Suriname, Andrew Westoll is working on his second book. “I’m not down on the non-fiction book idea at all,” he says. “Long-form journalism is a tough thing to pull off as a sustainable career, but if you couple that with books, I think it’s doable.” Practising literary journalism as a career has never been easy; however, books, despite all the challenges they present, will still come out because people who truly want to write long will continue to do so. “The thing about books,” says Collins, “is that, even more than long-form feature journalism, they come out of the passion of the writer.”