When a big-budget film about the life of Johnny Cash was released in November, Eye Weekly film reviewer Jason Anderson was disappointed. “As a biopic, Walk the Line is riddled with familiar problems,” he wrote. “Director James Mangold’s movie is based largely on Cash’s own frank memoirs so the issue is not that Mangold whitewashes the story of the Man in Black. Instead, he relies on the hoariest kind of movie vocabulary to tell the tale. From the badly reductive pop psychology that roots our hero’s troubles in a childhood trauma (like Ray Charles, Cash lost a cherished brother at an early age) to the cheeseball montages that summarize career highlights for the hard of thinking, Walk the Line has got it all and a young Elvis (Tyler Hilton) drawling lines like ‘Want some chili fries?'” Anderson gave the film two out of five stars.

“But,” you said, “Why should I trust the opinion of just one man? He’s probably some tweed-wearing old curmudgeon who thinks movies have been going downhill ever since the old studio system collapsed.”

You cracked open your laptop and visited Rottentomatoes.com, the site that compiles scores from reviews across North America and gives each film an average rating. Walk the Line‘s score stood at 81 per cent.

You went to the film.

• • •

The arts critic traditionally plays one of two roles, according to Anderson, 33, who may have worn tweed patches on his jacket once when he was 17. The first is the consumer guide, who recommends or discourages the purchase of a product based on its commercial viability. But sites like Rottentomatoes.com and Metacritic.com, with their quantified, number-based reviews, along with ubiquitous culture blogs and message boards, may have rendered the professional arts critic obsolete. “You get arts journalists together these days,” says Doug McLennan, editor of ArtsJournal.com, in the Los Angeles Times, “and it’s what they talk about: their declining influence.”

Anderson doubts whether critics ever had much influence over popular taste in the first place. “There is a tendency to overrate a critic’s power to put bums in seats,” Anderson says. He cites New York punk foursome The Ramones as a classic example of the critically adored, but commercially unsuccessful rock band.

The second role an arts critic performs, the one that has a greater (if narrower) impact, is that of the cultural commentator. This longer, deeper form of criticism dissects and deconstructs the arts for readers, placing works in their broader cultural context. While usually associated with the high arts like theatre, ballet and classical music, writers like James Agee, Andrew Sarris and Pauline Kael brought the same approach to pop culture like rock ‘n’ roll and movies in the 1950s and 1960s.

“I don’t see us as a big herd of dinosaurs walking over a cliff,” says Toronto Star movie critic Peter Howell. The traditional arts critic, whose studied-yet-passionate opinions are backed by an extensive knowledge of the history and current trends of the art form, is more important than ever, he says. Anyone who can make some sense of the glut of movies, music, television shows, books and media surrounding us is doing a great service to readers.

But as Chris Jones, writing in the Chicago Tribune, points out, there are many barriers for journalists looking to do this kind of serious arts journalism in the mainstream media: “Penny-pinching publishers. Readers with short attention spans and diminishing interest in serious cultural criticism. Obfuscating TV networks and Hollywood studios. Actors with short fuses and long tentacles of clout…. Web-based reviews of everything from hotels to books.” But, he adds, “there still are publications that showcase reviews and readers who seek them out, read them, think about them and even act upon them.”

And, as it turns out, some of these publications come from the same place purported to be one of serious criticism’s principal assassins: the Internet.

• • •

“Our tagline should read ‘Reducing workplace productivity since 1999,'” says Sarah Bunting, co-editor-in-chief of Television Without Pity (TWoP), a website dedicated to lengthy recaps of the best and worst offerings on the idiot box. Bunting, 32, is talking from her New York apartment, where she spends most of her days editing recaps and monitoring the site’s heavily populated message boards. And, of course, watching TV.

TWoP, which was founded as MightyBigTv in 1999, receives over one million unique hits and over 50 million page views per month, mostly from female readers who are almost exclusively in the 18 to 34 demographic. The advertising revenue generated by TWoP’s licensing deal with Yahoo.com provides a steady income for both Bunting and her Toronto-based partner, Tara Ariano, though both maintain other websites and write freelance. They even manage to pay writers, but won’t disclose the rate.

The site currently monitors 27 TV shows, covering everything from lowest common denominator “reality” fare like Are You Hot? and The Simple Life to hoity-toity critical faves like Deadwood and The West Wing. Each episode is recapped, scene-by-scene, by writers with monikers like Miss Alli, M. Giant, Sars (Bunting), and Wing Chun (Ariano). “We don’t really review TV,” Bunting says, “we kind of explicate it.”

TWoP’s recaps are characterized by an acidic, irreverent tone, laced with cultural references of both the pop and academic variety. But while many who visit the site come looking for a laugh, they also get a hefty dose of cultural analysis and arts criticism. “We take the medium seriously,” says Bunting. “We come from a place of expecting TV to stand up to standards of artistic quality.”

TWoP’s recaps often run up to 20 pages. The length allows writers to delve deeply into the shows they’re writing about, with plenty of room for critical analysis of character, script, story arc and consistency.

Writing about the troubled fourth season of The Sopranos, recapper Aaron wrote: “Seriously – the hell? Meadow’s all depressed about Jackie Jr., there’s a big blow, she goes back to school and grows a social conscience, then she basically disappears except for a couple of drive-bys mid-season, and now… she’s back? With a boyfriend? And that’s it? That’s all we get? The show keeps doing that to us – giving characters big showcase episodes, then shuffling them to the bottom of the deck for weeks at a time – and I don’t think Season Four is nearly the bust a lot of critics do, but it’s got a couple of problems, and if I had to point to the biggest one, I’d point to that. The Sopranos has too many characters taking up too much airtime, and a lot of them just don’t merit the attention.”

Stuart Berman, senior editor and music critic at Eye Weekly, says space limitations and concerns about readers’ “short-attention spans” have led print publications toward smaller, bite-sized reviews. He credits online publications like the influential music site Pitchforkmedia.com for giving its writers the room to expound. “Some people see them as snobs,” Berman says, “but they’ll take 1,000 words to dissect an album, and that’s rare.”

Greig Dymond, senior producer of CBC Arts Online, doesn’t allow his writers to wax poetically about the “faces of Coltrane” for 12 pages à la Lester Bangs. Unlike newspapers and print magazines, online magazines have to be concerned about the dreaded “Back” button, the temptation to use Google while perusing stories, and the fact that reading off a computer can be hard on the eyes.

But they do wax. With stories like Andre Mayer’s “Hit the Road, Jaxx: Why Dance Music Doesn’t Move America,” Katrina Onstad’s “Girl Trouble: Fear and Self-loathing in Chick-lit,” and Matthew McKinnon’s “Kicking Up Dust: The Remarkable Hip-hop Odyssey of Toronto’s K’naan” appearing on the public broadcaster’s website, CBC Arts Online is providing the kind of in-depth arts coverage the Internet is supposedly killing.

Launched in January 2005 and averaging 3.3 million page views per month, Dymond and his team are making good on their promise “to explore Canada and the world through the fascinating prism of arts, media and entertainment. The culture surrounding us isn’t just about diversion – we think it’s more important than that.”

Take Onstad’s review of the Vin Diesel comedy, The Pacifier, written last March, which was entitled, “Fear of Diapers: The Male Mommy Movie.” She doesn’t merely recap the film and tell readers whether or not to spend 12 bucks on it (though it’s clear she feels they shouldn’t). Instead, she uses the film as a vehicle for a 1,700-word essay on masculinity and parenting, name-checking Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Neil Postman and Ben Affleck along the way. “The decline of the Atticus Finch-noble dad archetype in favour of the buffoon dad isn’t just about poking fun at that last pokeable social group, men,” she writes, “but it’s also about the rise of the child. These movies venerate youth as much as they mock fatherhood, and in doing so, tell moms to stop bitching; this parenting stuff’s a breeze.”

The mainstream press reaction to the Internet has been just that: reactionary. In the same way that the advent of televised sports did not kill the newspaper sports reporter, the proliferation of opinion on the Internet will not kill the professional arts critic. As TWoP and CBC Arts Online demonstrate, we’re seeing the beginning of what may well be a golden age of cultural debate.

“The Internet isn’t even close to its potential yet,” says Howell. “We’re still at the T-model Ford stage.”

“Have you used the Internet?” asks Michael Pereira. Of course I’ve used the Internet, but the question is not actually as odd as it seems. Pereira is a volunteer with Wireless Toronto, a non-profit group dedicated to bringing free wireless Internet access to the city. We’re sitting in the café at 401 Richmond, an arts and community centre in downtown Toronto. This café is the group’s most recent “hotspot,” and Pereira wants to know if I’ve tried out the free wireless yet.

I turn on my laptop and click on my web browser. The Wireless Toronto sign-in page pops up, instead of my usual homepage. I create a username and password, fill in my email address and that’s it. I’m online, and all it cost was a $1.25 cup of tea.

In Toronto, several cafés and restaurants offer wireless Internet access – for a price. Just across the street from 401 Richmond, at the Second Cup on the corner of Richmond and Spadina, I can check my email for $9 an hour. Or I can pop into Starbucks on the other side of the street, where it’s only $7.50 an hour.

Wireless Toronto has set up 10 free “hotspots” across the city since Gabe Sawhney founded it in April. The mission of this fledging group is to provide free Internet access to build and strengthen communities. It’s a great idea, but whether it will become a viable activist tool – or merely Internet access for the thrifty – is open to question.

But no one can question the price. “The cost of public access to the Internet doesn’t have to be so high,” says Hanna Cho, who works with Wireless Toronto. According to Statistics Canada, almost 57 per cent of Canadian homes had Internet access as of 2003. While that figure has certainly grown in the last two years, Internet access still tends to be limited to only those Canadians who can afford it. There are still areas in the country that do not have Internet access readily available. Today, a computer without an Internet connection is not much more useful than an obsolete typewriter.

This is where community wireless networks come in. A single existing Internet connection can be used to provide access to several computers. Setting up these networks that provide free access to many, for a relatively low cost to the provider, raises awareness about the barriers to access and how they can be overcome.

Wireless Toronto’s communication infrastructures, known as community wireless networks, have been evolving since 1998, when WiFi (Wireless Fidelity) technology became available. Over the past five years, Seattle, New York and Austin have established highly successful community wireless networks.

In Canada, Montreal’s île Sans Fil (Wireless Island) now has more than 70 hotspots and 11,500 users across the city. Three years ago, Michael Lenczner and some friends founded the group as a way to get computer geeks involved in local community activism. They copied groups in the U.S., but wrote their own open source software, WifiDog, which was significantly cheaper than licensing pre-existing software. They set up a hotspot and computer at Café L’Utopik and invited fellow programmers to test their software. From there, it grew into île Sans Fil. Wireless Toronto was modeled on île Sans Fil, and uses the same Canadian software.

Access to Wireless Toronto’s hotspots is free because venue owners pay for the service. Each hotspot runs off the venue’s existing high-speed Internet connection. The owner pays for a $79 router, as well as an annual $50 membership fee. Volunteers with the group take care of installing the wireless network.

In exchange for the free access, owners hope customers will stick around to surf longer and perhaps buy more coffee and food. Generally, they’ve been open to paying the set-up charge because it’s not that expensive and it will help to lure in customers. At Lettieri, a café on Front Street and a Wireless Toronto hotspot, owners say they had wireless access installed as a service to customers who complained about the price of access at other cafés.

Of course, corporations have realized the potential of capitalizing on wireless access in public spaces. Bell and Rogers have teamed up with Inukshuk Internet to build a national wireless broadband network. The network will cover two-thirds of the Canadian population through 40 metropolitan area networks by 2008, says David Robinson, vice-president of business implementation at Rogers. The companies will be selling wireless access to current customers who live within the network areas. While the cost has not yet been made public, Robinson says the service will cost users an additional fee to what they pay for their Internet connection at home. Bell also has a contract to build a pilot hotspot in Nathan Philips Square.

Wireless Toronto is way ahead of Bell, as they have 10 virtual public squares up and running. Hotspots are location-based and limited, so they can be designed to cater to the local community. Rein Petersen, a Wireless Toronto volunteer, says he hopes that by setting up free WiFi hotspots across cities, grassroots organizations like his will make it difficult for companies to profit from selling the same access.

Creating community is an important goal for Wireless Toronto, as it was for île Sans Fil. “We wanted to use wireless to augment and support third places in Montreal,” said Lenczner, adding that the first place is where you live, the second is where you work and the third is where you gather. Now it’s up to the users to engage through the community networks.

But then, it seems contradictory to use an isolating technology to bring people together. When you turn on your laptop, it automatically creates a bubble around you. There is even a term for people who sit for hours tapping away at their keyboards, headphones plugged into the laptop, eyes glazed over, oblivious to their surroundings: WiFi Zombies.

Proponents of community wireless networks argue, however, that this is not necessarily what happens. “Every time I pull out my laptop, someone will come over and ask what I’m working on,” says Pereira. “I’ll have a conversation that I wouldn’t have otherwise. For me, it’s a way to get people communicating.”

Customers at the St. Lawrence Market certainly wouldn’t expect to be able to access the Internet while they roam through the aisles lined with butchers, fishmongers and bakeries. In October, Wireless Toronto launched its highest-profile hotspot here. Now, customers and tenants at the market, as well as residents in the community, can access the Internet both inside the market’s buildings and in the surrounding outdoor spaces.

If you log on at the St. Lawrence Market, you’re directed to the community portal page. The webpage features information about the market and community links, as well as event listings and photos of the market. Every hotspot has its own personalized portal page, with information about the venue and local community.

While two similar groups were established in Toronto in the past, and then folded, Wireless Toronto is optimistic. During the two afternoons spent at its hotspots, I didn’t see anyone using the free Internet access, but the number of users has slowly increased since the spring start-up. There are now approximately 600 Torontonians using the services. With every new hotspot, the group takes another baby step towards its goal of galvanizing communities with wireless Internet.

Wireless Toronto Hotspots
www.wirelesstoronto.ca

The 215 Centre for Social Innovation
215 Spadina Ave., Ste. 120
(Between Dundas and Queen)

401 Richmond Café
401 Richmond St. W.
(At Richmond and Spadina)
www.401richmond.net/tenants/cafe.cfm

The Fox and Fiddle Pub
280 Bloor St. W.
(Between St. George and Huron)
www.bloorfox.com

Lettieri Espresso Bar + Café
79 Front St. E
(Between Jarvis and Church)
www.lettiericafe.com/locations_stlawrence.htm

St. Lawrence Market
92 Front St. E.
(Between Jarvis and Church)
www.stlawrencemarket.com

Teriyaki Experience
Brampton
Airport Rd. and Hwy. 7

Teriyaki Experience
Meadowvale
6900 Financial Dr., Mississauga
(N. of Hwy. 401 and Mississauga Rd)

Teriyaki Experience
Oakville Town Centre
200-240 North Service Rd., Oakville

Teriyaki Experience
RioCan Marketplace
2081 Steeles Ave. W.
(S.W. corner of Steeles and Dufferin)

Teriyaki Experience
861 York Mills Rd.

Also, if you’re in Quebec or British Columbia, these groups offer free wireless:

île Sans Fil, Montreal
www.ilesansfil.org

British Columbia Wireless Network Society
www.bcwireless.net

Thank God for the union! These stalwart guardians of labour rights are often the only defense against The Man and his ruthless march towards higher profit and increased shareholder value. While it’s hard to imagine Canadian journalists as soot-stained workers streaming out of a coal mine or steel mill, they still have to deal with the harsh reality of reduced staff sizes and drastic cuts to salaries and full-time positions. “We’ve certainly had concerns about the massive reductions in newsrooms across the country over the past few years,” says Peter Murdoch, vice president of the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada (CEP), which represents over 25,000 people working in the nation’s media. “They’ve put a lot of people in the unemployment line, and sent a lot of people scrambling for freelance work.”
Corporate downsizings in other sectors usually result in a wave of contractors picking up the slack, with commensurate financial rewards for those contractors. Not so in Canadian journalism, especially in the magazine medium: freelance rates, which can average a dollar a word or less for writers regardless of their seniority, haven’t changed in decades. Couple this with a lack of job security and benefits, and it’s obvious that it’s not a Golden Age of opportunity for your typical freelance journalist.

It could be a function of modern labour economics: freelancers have always been a disparate and disorganized group, “literally thousands,” as Murdoch says, “working out of their kitchens and basements.” As such, media organizations have been able to keep rates low simply because they can. But the days of subterranean servitude may be numbered: in May 2004, the CEP voted to create the Canadian Freelance Union (CFU), a body intended to act as a cohesive bargaining unit that will defend the interests of freelance writers and journalists. “We see the way actors, directors, songwriters, even fishermen, have founded unions that help them with collective bargaining,” says Murdoch. “I see no reason why freelance writers shouldn’t have the same benefits.”

It’s unclear if a group as laissez-faire as freelancers can coalesce into a unified voice that speaks for the trade. If they can, it may bring much-needed stability to the freelance world. But it could also bring added instability to the Canadian publishing industry.

• • •

Ironically, the impetus for the CFU arose from the previously adversarial relationship between the union and freelancers. The policy of unions usually emphasized securing full-time positions, while companies tried to contract freelancers to get around hiring permanent staff. “We’ve always had a complex relationship,” says Gary Engler, union steward for the CEP and grassroots organizer for the nascent CFU. “During contract negotiations, we usually include language to make it tough for companies to use freelancers.” But it soon became clear that the relationship had negative implications for both sides. “Freelancers started perceiving the union as the enemy,” Engler says.

The strike at the Calgary Herald in 1999 was seminal in changing union attitudes towards freelancers – at first, for the worse. Freelancers, hired as scab labour by management, crossed picket lines and helped the then Conrad Black?owned Herald to crush the union. “The strike caused the CEP to self-reflect,” Engler recounts. “Did the union do anything to turn freelancers off of us? The answer, clearly, was yes. We could have been much more inclusive.”

Three years ago, the CEP examined the possibility of changing its policy. Instead of viewing freelancers as opponents hired to undercut union aims, Murdoch and Engler starting talking to them and fostering a more cooperative environment. “We had two goals,” recalls Engler. “One, to convince existing union members to include freelancers, and two, to convince freelancers that there’s something in it for them to belong to the union.” The logic was simple: united, we are stronger.

Beyond the mechanics of setting up a union – recruiting founding members, setting up bylaws, voting in an executive – Engler says the first step for union organizers is to develop a standard rate schedule to present during contract negotiations. “We want to set absolute minimums, so a freelancer can’t be paid less than what they do,” he says. The schedule will also take into account freelance overhead costs such as computer, car and home space, as well as the lack of benefits.

But a one-size-fits-all strategy may not work. David Hayes, a magazine contributor for 25 years, says it would be difficult to develop a single schedule to meet the needs of all freelance writers. “It’s easier to develop that sort of thing for industrial unions,” says the prolific writer for such publications as Toronto Life, Toro and Saturday Night. “You go into a mill, you have defined job descriptions and production levels.” The issue becomes more complex when taking into account the nature of freelance writing, which varies widely from print journalism to magazine features to corporate writing and PR.

Union negotiation involves more than just crunching numbers, however. Engler says the key is assessing favourable conditions for success – and that depends on how much leverage the CEP has at a particular media outlet. That means starting at publications like The Toronto Star, the Vancouver Sun, The Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Province, where unions have a direct impact on production. “We represent absolutely everybody at these places,” he says, “including the people who run the presses. By default, those are the ones where we have absolutely the most bargaining power.”

Even so, it’s not a given that the disparate members of the CEP – pressmen, writers and editors, ad sales reps – will do battle for freelance justice. Engler says no action will be taken without the full consent of the CEP union members at the media outlets in question. “The membership will be made to understand that freelance demands are a strike issue,” he says. “We certainly won’t take it forward at a company where membership did not feel that way – it’d be crazy to do so.”

If a contract settlement were reached at the first company, it would set a powerful precedent for the others. “Each set of negotiations has its own dynamics,” says Engler, “and each company has its own concerns. But if we can succeed at one Torstar or Quebecor or CanWest paper, we can use that case as a template for that whole company.”

• • •

The etymology of the word “freelance” is obvious; a knight without allegiance to anyone in particular would put his lance up for hire to the highest bidder. Freelance journalists, predictably, are a free-range lot, which poses significant challenges when applying the rules of modern labour economics. Nate Hendley, president of the Toronto chapter of the Periodical Writers Association of Canada (PWAC), believes the decentralized nature of the trade will make it difficult to organize them into a single cohesive bargaining unit. “This is just purely observational,” he says, “but trying to unionize freelancers is like trying to herd cats. They’re a notoriously independent breed.”

Another factor working against the union is the ever-increasing number of newcomers. Young writers generally work for anything they can because they’re trying to establish themselves. This seemingly unlimited pool of neophytes makes being an established freelancer less attractive. “Once a freelancer is more experienced and wants more money,” says Hayes, “the media organization moves on to a younger writer willing to work for a buck a word.” He pauses resignedly. “They won’t say it bluntly, but at the end of the day the freelancer has two choices: to argue with them, and, if they don’t budge, to move on.”

Which is why Engler says it’s important to get as many freelancers under the union flag as possible – the primary rationale behind the low initial membership rate of $25. Another step is creating strategic alliances with existing freelance organizations to leverage their membership. In October, Engler helped secure the support of PWAC at the national level by signing a joint letter of intent for agreement of cooperation, thus enlisting a potential 6,400 members into the fledgling union, along with their knowledge, opinions and expertise.

Hayes believes that the success of the CFU will depend on its ability to attract not only many members, but specifically big-name writers. “A magazine’s success is dependent on the quality of its editorial component,” he says. “You can’t have second-rate, non-union people doing all the work – especially cover-quality features.” He says that while the total pool of freelance writers may seem infinitely large, the actual number of established freelancers who can produce the goods is limited – and if they’re all CFU members, major publications will have no choice but to negotiate.

Hendley, however, is skeptical of this argument. “I can see established freelancers with a strong clientele willing to join as a point of principle, and that would help the union,” he says. But he also believes that the nature of freelancing means that capable writers can always be had – and media corporations would simply go with non-union writers as the economical option.

Giorgina Bigioni, vice president and group publisher of a stable of St. Joseph Media magazines that includes Fashion, WeddingBells, Wish and Gardening Life, says that even without a union, her editors already give plenty of writing opportunities to up-and-coming freelancers. “Would we be limited to using unionized freelancers only?” she asks. “If the main issue is freelance rates, perhaps there are alternatives to dealing with a union.”

However, Bigioni doesn’t rule out negotiating with the CFU. “If the union represented freelancers that we wanted to use,” she says, “then I suppose we would have to deal with them.” But there is a downside: “Canadian magazines will have a hard time coming up with dollars without making quality sacrifices in other areas. So magazines may suffer, as will their readers.” When it comes to smaller magazines, Hayes agrees: forcing them to pay union scale may put them in the red and ultimately drive them out of business.

But Engler says that putting magazines out of business is purely against the union’s interest. Small magazines will not be the primary target; the media companies the CFU has locked in its sights are financially well off, and thus have a lot of potential profit to lose from a prolonged strike. As well, a provision to create different contract tiers for different types of publications could be enacted to help protect the viability of smaller publications. “It’s obviously tricky,” he admits. “You want to encourage innovation in the media, but, on other hand, freelancers need to make a living.”

• • •

With a litany of questions and concerns – many of them cyclical and dependent on each other – the success of the Canadian Freelance Union is far from certain. “Everybody should be skeptical,” says Engler. “I’m all for skepticism – as long as it’s healthy.”

As passionate as Murdoch is about the union, even he has doubts. “It’s going to be a tough struggle,” he says. “It’s always tough to convince corporations to treat people fairly.”

Despite this, everyone involved is in favour of the venture – at least on the labour side of the equation. “I’d love to have some form of security and benefits,” says Hayes, who cites parallel positions in other industries as primary motivation for his support. “I look at pay levels in the advertising industry for senior level copywriters, who are the equivalent to my level in the journalism world,” he says. “Their typical salary is $85,000 to $100,000 a year.” He chuckles a little. “I’d have twice the salary I’m making right now if I was in advertising.”

Hendley agrees. “I certainly would enjoy getting better pay,” he says. “And it would be nice to have slightly greater feeling of security, as opposed to being at the whim of the editor – you can be sliced and diced quite easily. If things work, I’d be the first to sign up.”

But Engler says that success is dependent on freelancers actually picking up a pen, signing up and getting to work. “The effort needs to be driven by members,” he says. “That’s just the way a union works. Unions only fight for what members want. At the end of the day, they need to stand up and fight for it.”

An email went around the Saturday Night magazine offices on Tuesday, October 18, announcing that a meeting had been scheduled for Thursday. The email listed a time, but no agenda.

There was a mood of suspicion in the windowless boardroom on the morning of the 20th, as a dozen editorial and art staff mulled over the possibilities. Some had previously experienced the folding of a magazine – some with this very publication.

The agenda wasn’t long in coming. Senior executives at St. Joseph Media, which owns the magazine, were about to make public that Saturday Night was suspending publication and officially going into hiatus. Senior editor Cynthia Brouse – whose first job in the industry 25 years ago was at the magazine, as then editor Robert Fulford’s assistant – says the room was predictably glum, even as outgoing editor Gary Stephen Ross was warm and gracious as he went around the table. “But I burst into tears,” Brouse says. “I was sad for Gary and for the magazine.”

The announcement has reanimated the debate as to whether or not Canada can support a national general interest magazine. Industry insiders say the problem is economics, not an intellectual deficiency in the Canadian populace. Brouse puts it bluntly: “We can’t have a general interest magazine with ideas unless someone is willing to donate and lose the money.”

The Vancouver-based Geist magazine’s editor-in-chief Stephen Osborne concurs, saying, “The word ‘profit’ should be eliminated” from the conversation. “No quality magazine with limited circulation can survive without subsidies,” he says, “and it’s always been that way. Whether it’s borrowing money from family or operating out of a basement, you need subsidies over and above advertising.”

The first version of Saturday Night came about as a result of an 1887 libel suit and ensuing judgment against Toronto News editor Edmund E. Sheppard. He was fined $500 (which, adjusted for inflation, amounts to more than $10,000 today), but managed to elude another clause, the one that forbade him from gaining editorial control of any other Canadian daily newspapers, by starting up a weekly magazine.

Originally titled Toronto Saturday Night, Sheppard’s magazine began as a broadsheet that kept its readers up to date on current events, Toronto’s upper crust and what books to read.

But nothing survives nearly 120 years without some fine-tuning along the way. The publication changed hands a number of times, and its frequency has fluctuated from weekly to monthly to bimonthly. Throughout its history, it came to be seen as a prestige read. It boasted of having tapped the inkwells of, among others, Mordecai Richler, Margaret Atwood and Robertson Davies.

Suzanne Bowness, whose thesis covered the first 20 years of the publication, wrote that after the Second World War, under the editorial leadership of Arnold Edinborough and then Fulford, Saturday Night began “moving towards the magazine we know today, with a reputation for intriguing in-depth stories that continue to dig where the nightly news and daily papers leave off.”

Saturday Night has never been consistently profitable and this stoppage, the fourth in its history, wasn’t entirely unexpected. Still, through all the financial woes its venerable status remained more or less intact, so it was disconcerting news. “Whenever a magazine that old folds,” says Masthead editor Bill Shields, “it’s a bit jarring.”

“Technology conspires against magazines,” says Matthew Church, Ross’s predecessor at the helm of the magazine. Blogs and online news have created a significant ripple in the magazine, newspaper and publishing industries, just as television did two generations ago. To combat this, newspapers have been offering more features and less hard news, encroaching on the magazine’s traditional journalistic territory.

The move to a 24-hour news cycle has fragmented the magazine industry, which has become a cauldron of specialty niches. Identifiable demographics, not generalities, are what attract advertising dollars now. Even with a circulation of 197,000, a general interest magazine like Saturday Night can’t offer an advertiser the same density of potential customers as a specialty magazine with one-tenth the distribution. “The way we use media is different,” Church says. “Print is no longer a primary source, so advertisers are not interested in a thoughtful general interest magazine of national scope.”

Advertising departments and agencies spend between five to seven per cent of their budgets on magazine ads now, estimates The Walrus‘s publisher and editorial director, Ken Alexander. (It was announced on November 22 that his publication was awarded charitable tax status by the Canada Revenue Agency. It will now be run by the Walrus Foundation.) Saturday Night‘s big mistake, according to Alexander, was to move to a controlled circulation model. Most of its print run was distributed inside copies of the National Post, which made it difficult to gauge the mood of readers. “You’re diminishing its value,” he says, “making it impossible to create demand and an active readership.”

Relying on controlled circulation also means relying exclusively on advertising for revenue. In the October 20 press release, St. Joseph Media president Donna Clark says, “Advertising support, although favourable, has not reached projected levels.” Data from Leading National Advertisers (Canada) reveal a 32 per cent increase in ad sales for the first three quarters of 2005 over the same period the previous year, but the magazine was still losing money. Brouse says St. Joseph was unwilling to lose more.

Compounding the problem is that government grants, once a steady source of revenue for many magazines, are not as reliable as they once were. “The government has been turning off the spigot for the last five years,” says Shields. According to Statistics Canada, in 2003-04, federal funding for book and periodical publishers declined 11.6 per cent to $162.1 million. And, with less than 50 per cent paid circulation, Saturday Night was ineligible for government handouts.

In other words, Saturday Night was cut off from every revenue stream but advertising and its owner’s deep pockets. The company says that its investment since acquiring the publication in 2001 has been “comparable to a new magazine launch” – roughly $1 million a year for a publication of that size, Shields estimates. Derek Webster, editor and publisher of the Montreal general interest magazine Maisonneuve, says Saturday Night‘s reputation for an intellectual bent was at odds with the credo of the mass market, thereby pitting the journalism against its need to sell ads. “Until we have a magazine with tons of U.S. readers, there won’t be a level playing field,” he says, regarding economies of scale. “Toronto has been emulating the model laid out by New York. It will become more celebrity-oriented because it makes more money.”

Bowness sifted through documents in the old Saturday Night‘s office back in 2001 – after its third death and before St. Joseph revived it yet again – for transfer to official archives at McMaster University. She calls the magazine “a rare glimpse into the challenges we’ve encountered over the decades… a collective memory, perhaps,” and echoes the sentiment that something must change in the Canadian magazine industry for a publication like Saturday Night to survive.

Despite Alexander’s successful push to secure charitable status – and hence a more realistic chance for secure funding – the debate is far from over. Church, for example, doesn’t think anybody in an industry dominated by profit-motivated corporations should qualify for charitable subsidies. Rather, breaks on expenses like postage or tariffs should be doled out. But Osborne, who’s been pushing for Geist’s charitable status for years, says, “The sensible approach to subsidies should consider advertising a subsidy.”

Shields says the Saturday Night brand will definitely attract interest, but it will require repositioning, paid circulation and a more defined demographic for another resurrection to be successful. As for the other players, Webster and Osborne, after the Walrus decision, will redouble their efforts on behalf of Maisonneuve and Geist to secure charitable status. “We’re going to dust off our applications and send them to Revenue Canada as soon as we can,” says Osborne.

I’m giggling to the Howard Stern Show on 92.9 JACK FM during my Tuesday morning drive to the School of Journalism at Ryerson University in downtown Toronto. It’s one of Stern’s last programs on the Buffalo station, just before he makes his much-publicized jump to Sirius Satellite Radio. That’s when Canadians living near the U.S. border will no longer be able pick up his show for free. Today’s topic is: Guess the weight of High Pitch Eric’s excrement.

High Pitch Eric is a large, balding man – think Mike Tyson without the muscle tone – whose voice hits frequencies only a dog can discern. While High Pitch’s vocal cords are normally the focus, today it’s his bowel movement. When I first tune in, I think they’re guessing the weight of an elephant’s dung droppings. But no, it’s a real person’s. A large person’s.

Stern’s crew has set up its equipment – and a makeshift toilet in the middle of High Pitch’s apartment – to document the contest on-air. Back in the studio, Stern and co-host Robin Quivers wait eagerly for High Pitch’s business to cease and the weigh-in to begin. They’ve placed their wagers. Stern confidently holds the under bet – $500 on 3.5 pounds or less – because he interviewed a zoo employee and was told that the amount of feces large animals produce is surprisingly low.

At one point, amidst Stern and the gang haggling over their bets and the vivid descriptions of High Pitch’s activity, they receive a warning. Tom Chiusano, general manager for WXRK, Infinity Broadcasting’s rock station in New York, tells them they’re violating Federal Communications Commission (FCC) obscenity guidelines. Again. As usual, they’re warned if they don’t tone it down they’ll be censored.

That’s when Stern’s lament begins. He’s tired of the censorship. He thinks it hurts his credibility. Beginning January 1, 2006, he’ll unlock the FCC’s shackles and enter the promised land of satellite radio. Of course, it helps that Sirius is paying him $500 million over five years to break those chains.

Satellite radio is being touted as the new, free-form environment south of the border, but increasingly it looks as if this will not be the case in Canada. “It won’t be the wild, wild west that it purports to be in the States,” says Jeff Marek, AM 640’s director of sports programming. “Shows like Stern’s won’t be made available in Canada because it doesn’t meet CRTC regulations.”

CRTC stands for Canadian Radio Telecommunications Commission, a regulatory body that, since 1968, has been responsible for determining what Canadians listen to and watch. It decided in November 2001 that Stern was too offensive for Canadian sensibilities. Despite good ratings, the show was pulled from the Corus Radio?owned CILQ FM – better known as Q107 Toronto’s Classic Rock – because of complaints from the public that it was offensive.

But in this new era of 500 TV channels, the Internet and satellite radio, some people wonder if the CRTC hasn’t become a meddlesome regulatory body that has outlived its usefulness. Two large, intensely competitive American corporations, Sirius and XM Satellite Radio – as well as a Canadian consortium of CHUM Ltd. and Astral Media – have been trying to get past CRTC objections and pry open the Canadian market, but it’s been a slow process.

All three companies were approved for a license June 16, 2005, and then the decision was appealed. There were misgivings about the stations not being compelled to provide enough Canadian content, particularly French-language programming. To avoid further delays, the trio of entrants voluntarily modified their CRTC license applications to include eight Canadian channels – four English and four French – with three of the four French-language channels offering music.

The CRTC allowed the public to voice its comments regarding the amended licenses until November 4, 2005. There is speculation that satellite radio stations will go to air in December 2005, but CRTC officer Maria DaSilva says, “That’s what the news reporters are saying, but don’t forget we have this process. It might be that by December we have our decision, but it might be that we don’t.” XM technical producer Aron Papernick, for one, believes they will, but says, “Companies may miss their original December 1 deadline because they were sidetracked in September and October by backbench, no-name Liberal policy wonks.”

The issue of Canadian content has been, and continues to be, at the forefront of the satellite debate in this country. As it stands XM, Sirius and CHUM-Astral must provide 20 per cent Canadian content, while traditional, or terrestrial, radio must provide 35 per cent – a 43 per cent drop in CanCon commitments.

This differential worries Jim Thompson, media representative for the Friends of Canadian Broadcasting lobby group. He’s concerned satellite radio might dilute the mount of Canadian content on both satellite and terrestrial radio. “Commercial radio stations have already called out for relief from the obligation they currently have to play Canadian artists,” he says, “on the grounds that satellite radio has a much lighter obligation when it comes to playing Canadian music. That will be a very powerful argument with commercial radio operations when they come before the CRTC to have their licenses renewed.”

There won’t be any arguments about lowering Canadian content, DaSilva vows, when it comes time for stations to renew their licenses with the CRTC. “Don’t make the comparison to the other regulations,” she says. “It’s two types of service. It’s the same thing for television – different regulations for different services. That’s why they’re not called commercial radio stations. They’re subscription radio stations.”

Concern for the amount of American influence satellite radio will have on Canadian audiences is one thing. Another is convincing consumers to spend money on something they currently get for free. Satellite receivers range in price from $130 to $300, and the monthly subscription rate is $12.99. For that kind of investment, Marek says, radio personnel have to be reminded of the adage: Content is king.

Marek likens satellite radio’s chances of success to the introduction of bottled water. Fifteen years ago, he argues, people were happy to use the water fountain. Now they’ll gladly pay two dollars a bottle, because it is perceived as a premium product. The onus, in other words, is on satellite radio executives to convince listeners they aren’t getting premium content on terrestrial radio.

And they may have a case. Satellite radio now boasts of carrying premium content like Martha Stewart, New York Times Radio, National Public Radio and Stern. “It’s up to the Siriuses and the XMs to present different voices, sounds, opinions, attitudes and ideas,” Marek says, “or they’ll just try to out-Nickleback each other.”

Even the vigilant Thompson is not convinced it will be successful. So far, XM and Sirius haven’t been able to attract enough subscribers in the U.S., and he suspects they may have to merge to turn a profit. “XM radio has about 5 million subscribers and Sirius has somewhere in the 3 million range,” he says. “My understanding is that either needs about 7.5 million subscribers to make money.”

While the CRTC seems intent on impeding the freewheeling Sterns of the world, what might happen on satellite radio in Canada – at least initially – is a lot of simulcasting. Sirius radio is already dabbling in it, striking a deal with the television show The Score to simulcast its sports updates. “Let’s not forget,” says Marek, “satellite radio has to get content from somewhere.”

This kind of synergy is at best a timid use of satellite radio, but ultimately it could offer terrestrial radio a chance to rethink itself – something it hasn’t done in decades. At first, radio listeners didn’t have much choice and listened to whatever was available on the AM dial. When FM came along in the 1960s, it took a while for senior radio personnel to figure out how to program it. Now we’re at the beginning of this process again. “It’s another evolution in the technology,” says Marek, “which is going to engender a revolution in programming.”

The revolution will remain unprovoked for a while, according to Papernick, who says this transitional period has created a “curious vibe” in the industry. “They still see it as radio,” he says. “They don’t see it as new format.”

Barely a month after its relaunch in September, Frank magazine was hit with its first libel suit. A “monstrous libel” suit, in fact, according to claimant Pamela Wallin. Many publishers might break into a cold sweat at such a thought, but not Frank publisher Michael Bate. “It’s just like the old days,” he says. “Now it’s official. We’re back.”

Frank folded last December after 15 years of spreading rumour, gossip and satire about politicians and journalists alike. Circulation had been dropping steadily for years, and it accelerated when Bate, who had been with Frank since 1989, sold it to former ROB reporter Fabrice Taylor in 2003. Taylor’s attempts to reduce this trend only succeeded in killing Frank in just over a year.

Bate initially resurrected the magazine online as eFrank, a subscriber-only publication, but now plans to launch a print edition as soon as he can. “It’ll be the lowest grade paper possible,” Bate says. “You’ll get splinters when you turn pages.” Starting from scratch is no easy task, especially for a magazine that doesn’t believe in marketing or advertising, and one whose readership abandoned it in its last incarnation. Bate doesn’t quite know how to pull it off. “If anybody’s got any ideas, I’m all ears.”

Still, Bate is almost thankful the magazine bombed under Taylor. “He paved the way for it to come back,” Bate says. “It would have been great if he had pulled it off, but then I wouldn’t be here now doing what I really enjoy.” Taylor also showed Bate how not to run Frank.

Bate and Taylor initially attempted to work together, but Bate split a few weeks after the first issue. Not only did they disagree in terms of magazine content, which Taylor attempted to change, but they differed in management styles as well. “I was trying to explain to him why I work from home,” Bate says, “and he wanted to get a web cam for me to make sure people were at their desks. I don’t care where they are, so long as they’re delivering.”

Frank had built its reputation on providing unverified, un-sourced political and journalistic gossip from Ottawa. At its best, Frank served as a watchdog, printing stories mainstream media could not. If it had something particularly juicy, other media would run with it, sometimes with great success. It was Frank, for example, that first revealed former defence minister Art Eggleton issued a government contract to a former girlfriend. Taylor reduced this element in favour of more humour and double-sourced articles with greater emphasis on Bay Street.

Taylor didn’t return calls for this article, which is unfortunate because it’s hard to find anyone with anything nice to say about his tenure. At worst, he produced a “steaming turd” of a magazine. At best, he was merely “unfunny,” says Steve Collins.

Collins worked for Frank on and off since 1996, including a stint under Taylor before being fired last year – or “gratefully thrown clear,” as he claims. Taylor’s biggest mistake, Collins says, was trying to turn Frank into a more credible publication. Stories were to be more balanced, facts double-sourced, and there was to be less reliance on anonymous sources – standard practice for most publications, but not Frank. It’s nearly impossible to verify the kind of salacious rumours it runs, and to have sources speak on the record. After all, who would want to admit to tipping off Frank about some of our elected officials’ liberal consumption of alcohol?

Any Frank editor will say getting information wrong is an unavoidable hazard of this kind of journalism. So while its articles may have become more credible under Taylor, they became less interesting for readers. Circulation was around 7,500 when Taylor bought it in August 2003; by November 2004, it had plummeted to 2,500. It got to the point where, Collin says, “We’d pretty much given up on trying to do anything good.”

Among those who stopped reading was Ottawa Citizen columnist David Ljunggren, even though he believes Taylor was on to something in terms of verification. “Frank‘s reliability is always diluted by this question of, ‘Is it true or not?'” he says. “If they took a little more care to verify the stuff that’s coming in, it could be much more useful.”

But Bate watched Taylor crash and burn, and isn’t about to tinker with Frank‘s traditional style too much. Anonymous sources and byline-less articles abound in the online version. Another highly criticized element, the magazine’s penchant for tasteless, frat-boy humour, is still a part of Bate’s Frank. There’s even a new venue for it: Frank TV, which features short, satirical videos. Currently, the site is playing up “There’s Something About Belinda,” in which Ken and Barbie dolls representing Bill Clinton and Belinda Stronach engage in anatomically incorrect sex.

Re-jigging Frank‘s content wasn’t a priority for Bate – figuring out how to launch online was enough of a problem. Bate made a rookie mistake by assuming Frank could publish only once a week, but he quickly realized the rapid pace of Internet news made it necessary to switch to a daily model. It’s more work, more hectic, and the pace allows for less perspective on stories. “We may be as dumb as the dailies now,” Collins jokes, who returned to Frank when it re-launched.

Former Frank staffer Glen McGregor, now at the Ottawa Citizen, thinks that while Frank may run interesting stories, the articles lack immediacy online. “When it was in print form, it didn’t seem to matter so much when you read it. But on the Internet, you want things that are instantaneous, and I don’t think it really lends itself too well to that.”

However, going daily means Frank employees no longer have to live in fear for a week wondering if they’ll be scooped by a daily newspaper – if they have stories worthy of scooping, that is. Ljunggren, at the Citizen, hasn’t heard anyone talk about stories from Frank. Neither has Toronto Star Ottawa bureau chief Susan Delacourt. So far, aside from Wallin’s libel suit and a blurb in the Star from an upset National Hockey League representative grumbling about a video piece satirizing an NHL commercial, Frank has been pretty quiet since its return.

Part of the problem is simply getting the word out. Weeks after launching, Bate has had friends ask him when Frank is coming back. The old print edition, while never a huge newsstand success, was highly circulated from person to person, both within newsrooms and the halls of Parliament. The online subscription model makes this much more difficult. Bate isn’t worried it will affect the magazine, confident that those interested enough will pay. In fact, the site was designed to make it difficult to cut and paste stories, limiting how widely they can spread online. “This is not an altruistic endeavour,” Bate says. “I want to prove this is a sound business model, and will not lose money like every other magazine in Canada.”

Frank currently has 800 subscribers paying $9.95 a month, and needs 2,500 to break even. Simply subscribing presents its own concerns for readers. Because of its reputation, many potential readers are worried about being seen with the magazine for fear of being pegged as an informant. Buying it on the newsstand was tricky enough, Ljunggren says. “I remember going to the store, looking around suspiciously, buying Frank and stuffing it in my pocket and running back to the office to see if I’d been featured in it,” he says.

Online subscription doesn’t allow that anonymity. “I probably share other people’s reservations that if you subscribe to Frank, they’ll probably print the list of subscribers at some point,” says Susan Delacourt. Frank had to include a disclaimer in the old print edition stating it would not sell its subscriber list, and Bate insists he would never reveal the list for the website.

Still, Bate took all of this into consideration during the past few weeks and decided it would be wise to run a print edition again. “I’m not concerned about the medium of Frank. We want it to go out to as many people as possible,” Bate says. The plan is publish biweekly, compiling the best articles from the website. Bate doesn’t know what kind of circulation Frank will have in its initial run, and isn’t planning a marketing campaign for its release either. “We’ll probably just show up on the newsstand one day,” Collins says.

Although Ljunggren has been featured in Frank, once for something he says he didn’t do (throwing a hissy fit after being improperly credited for his articles), he’s still looking forward to Frank‘s return to print. “Ottawa has suffered from the lack of Frank because no one really knows what’s going on across government,” he says. “So I’ll happily – and anonymously – buy the first issue.”

James Craig, a balding middle-aged man in a blue sweater and thick, black-framed glasses, peers furtively through venetian blinds. He motions for me to come closer. “See that yellowish building?” He’s pointing down busy West Broadway in the trendy South Granville district just outside downtown Vancouver. “Right next to that is going to be their new offices.”

Craig is referring to the Georgia Straight, his former employer and the oldest and largest of Vancouver’s many weeklies. The irony that their headquarters will soon be within eyesight of his second-floor workplace is not lost on him.

Craig toiled at the Straight for over seven years, beginning in the mid-1990s and ending with his termination, which he won’t discuss, in 2002. He worked with Straight publisher Dan McLeod on sales and marketing strategies. Some of these, including the Best of Vancouver special section and the Golden Plate Awards, have become annual staples. Craig is now trying to replicate his success as the publisher of the WestEnder, Vancouver’s newest urban weekly.

Until recently, the WestEnder was a community newspaper that served Vancouver’s downtown. It covered neighbourhood politics and events, or, as Craig puts it, “stuff happening at City Hall and break-ins.” Over the last 10 years, however, it has been slowly evolving into something that resembles an alternative weekly.

Craig has accelerated this process in the the six months since he arrived. Along with the like-minded new editor Michael White, 80 per cent of the paper’s editorial has been transformed into a weekly alternative they hope will reflect the city as a whole. This includes beefed-up entertainment coverage, more in-depth feature articles and items such as the Matt Groening comic, Life in Hell, which used to be published in the Straight.

Laura Moore, responsible for arts advertising in the Straight, shrugs off questions about the WestEnder, boasting, “We’re Canada’s largest urban weekly.” She says her paper is even bigger than Toronto-based giant Now Magazine. “We’re an alternative weekly like the Village Voice.” The WestEnder, she sniffs, “is a community paper” that “belongs to an extensive community paper network.”

The Straight has a circulation of 125,000. According to Ipsos Reid, it has over 340,000 readers per week. In contrast, the WestEnder‘s circulation stands at 55,000, up 6,000 from last year. Craig says, “When you increase circulation by 10 per cent in one year, when other newspapers are decreasing circulation or holding, it means you’ve got a voice that people are finding interesting.”

But Moore says the Straight‘s circulation is also growing, something she attributes to the steady decline in readership numbers of Vancouver’s dailies. Print media in the city are dominated by CanWest Global Communications Corp., she says, and people are turning to the weeklies for diversity.

There is no lack of alternative sources. Vancouver’s smaller print outlets include the Straight, the WestEnder, The Asian Post and the on-again, off-again Only magazine as well as a large number of community and neighbourhood newspapers. The third most visible weekly, Terminal City, announced last week that it had stopped publishing.

One of the surprising successes is not a newspaper at all. TheTyee.ca is the brainchild of David Beers, former editor of Mother Jones and a contributor to, among other publications, Harper’s magazine. Beers’s site contains a mixture of original hard news reporting, arts coverage and political discussion, and includes numerous columns and blogs.

The Tyee, named for a type of salmon, started making waves last May during the British Columbia provincial election. It broke one of the largest stories of the campaign – allegations of improper fundraising on the part of the B.C. Liberal Party – which was picked up by numerous news outlets, including CBC.

According to statistics kept by the site, in October alone the Tyee received over 130,000 unique visitors who made 400,000 visits and looked at roughly one million pages.

Like Moore, Beers believes that the rise in alternative media consumption is a reaction against CanWest’s near monopoly of Vancouver newpapers. It owns both major dailies, the Vancouver Sun and The Province, the National Post as well as the city’s largest community paper, The Vancouver Courier. This is bad enough, according to Beers, but then CanWest also has an obvious “pro-business bias. People here are underserved in getting alternative viewpoints.” He believes the success of the Tyee stems from its ability to expose the corporate media slant.

Craig couldn’t agree more with Beers. For him, transforming the WestEnder into an alternative weekly means he gets to “uncover things the mainstream press won’t write about.” He wants his stories to reflect the issues “the mainstream press cannot write about because they’re tied in with politics and potential advertisers.”

Craig’s aspirations annoy Dan McLeod, the founder, owner and publisher of the Georgia Straight. On the telephone, the sixty-something McLeod sounds indignant. The WestEnder, he says, “is what I call a faux alternative.” He points out that its owner, Black Press, headed by David Black, has offered to buy the Straight numerous times. McLeod asks how the WestEnder can possibly represent an alternative viewpoint when it’s run by “a large media consortium, which is 20 per cent owned by Torstar?”

According to McLeod, Black is known to involve himself directly in the editorial decision-making process at his community papers, something MacLeod claims he doesn’t do at the Straight. Craig says Black Press has shown nothing but support for his changes, and insists that at the WestEnder he has real autonomy.

The WestEnder‘s recent changes are an attempt by Black Press, says McLeod, to “play a smoke and mirrors game. If they happen to produce some good journalism it’s entirely by accident.” He attributes any newfound success to the WestEnder’s “mimicking” of the Straight.

“There’s no question, it’s a slam dunk,” McLeod continues. “They’re using the business model we use.” Just look at the paper, he says. “They’ve even gone to the extent of copying our redesign.”

It is striking, the aggressive new visibility of the WestEnder around town, compared to just a year ago. People who have never read it before are now picking it up, including my own mother, a loyal Straight reader for the past 10 years. The similarities between the two papers, such as content and look, are archetypal of North American alternative weeklies, but there is one thing that seems a little too close to be an accident – the street boxes.

McLeod is especially angered by the WestEnder‘s boxes: their overall black colour, their white logo and their close proximity to the Straight‘s boxes. He says his boxes have been white on black for 25 years.

Peering out the venetian blinds at the enemy, Craig says senior personnel at the Straight are running scared. “They have an obsession with everything we’re doing,” he chuckles, even taking “steps to stop our advance.”

Craig won’t mention what steps exactly, except to hint that some of his writers have been approached to write for his former employer. Grinning with satisfaction, he says, “This tells me that it’s working.”

“Is there a Mrs. Anti-Gay Crusader in your life?” The reporter sitting across from Palm Beach congressional candidate Ed Heeney seems determined to get her question answered. Heeney, his tropical shirt drenched in sweat, raises his eyebrows. The slender reporter, dirty blonde hair neatly tucked behind her head, a light pink shirt peeking through a traditional black blazer, doesn’t blink. Is she serious? Fortunately for the audience at home, and unfortunately for Heeney, the reporter is The Daily Show‘s Samantha Bee and this is not the news – honest, she swears.

• • •

“Flag size doesn’t matter? Only someone with a really small flag would say that.”

• • •

“All right, let me take a few deep breaths. C’mon Samantha, remember what we learned in theatre.” Bee is in the process of trying to sit her six-months-pregnant frame down in her office at The Daily Show’s studios in New York City. It’s only noon, but Bee has already attended two story meetings and edited part of her field report. With a few spare minutes, Bee sneaks a bite of her spinach salad.

“Every day over here is different,” says Bee in between quick munches. “Sometimes I don’t get outside at all, and just sit in here all day. I’m like a very boring accountant.”

The Toronto-born Bee, 35, is joking. She has to – it’s practically in her contract. She’s one of the “fake correspondents” for the comedy-news television program The Daily Show. Hosted by Jon Stewart, the show uses news footage, interviews and on-the-spot field coverage to satirize American news, pop culture and media. And just for kicks, the show lampoons the Christian right, gun-mongers and Arnold Schwarzenegger.

“We’ll do anything here to make a joke. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t,” admits Bee, who, using one of her familiar reporting techniques, once mocked an interview subject by crying like a baby, complaining she had “crapped my pants, and now I’m covered in poo.”

Despite the occasional feces joke, the show, broadcast on the U.S. network Comedy Central and simulcast in Canada on both CTV and the Comedy Network, is a rabid success. As of last year, the show attracted over 1.2 million viewers nightly in the U.S., double the audience of more traditional cable news fare like CNN’s Crossfire. In Canada, an average of 300,000 viewers watch the show every night, regularly trouncing Leno and Letterman.

“Never, not in my wildest dreams, could I have imagined I’d end up here,” says Bee, taking a break from thinking of ways to make Dick Cheney seem even more of a… well, dick. “This all feels a bit too perfect.”

Though Bee is often dumbfounded by her success, The Daily Show is the only place on television where she can get away with her distinctive style of comedy: a potent mix of jackass-meets-cynic sarcasm, casual profanity, fearlessness and an affinity for bodily fluid jokes. It’s not that Bee enjoys making people like Heeney feel uncomfortable on camera; she’s just too damn good at it to do anything else. Best of all, she gets to do it in the name of news – but don’t tell her that.

• • •

“With a tolerant society, low crime rate and free health care, Canada is hell on earth.”

• • •

Growing up in downtown Toronto, the teenage Bee was a self-described “hellcat” who woke up one day and decided to attend the University of Ottawa. After a few semesters spent pursuing a general arts degree, Bee signed up for an acting class as a bird course, and immediately took to performing. Still, she had trouble understanding the basics.

“I didn’t know you had to read the entire script through, so I just read my part,” admits Bee, recalling her first production. “When we were watching the dress rehearsal, I was completely gripped because I honestly didn’t know how the play was going to end.”

After graduating, Bee moved back to Toronto and stumbled through the life of an actress/waitress until discovering the city’s comedy scene. After the all-female troupe The Atomic Fireballs lost a member, Bee joined the cast.

“Sammy had a car, which made her an absolutely essential member of the group,” says Allana Harkin, one of the three other Fireball members. “But she also took writing very seriously. She’s dark and very quick on her feet.”

The group left its mark in Toronto, performing skits where Bee would come out of a change room with massive bushes of pubic hair pasted to her bikini-clad crotch. Between sketch work, Bee filmed a few commercials and worked with her husband, actor-comedian Jason Jones (now a Daily Show correspondent himself). In 2003, The Daily Show held auditions in the city, and soon enough Bee was on her way to cable television glory.

“I remember the great thing about her audition was she wasn’t trying to imitate or play a news anchor,” recalls Kahane Corn, co-executive producer of the show. “She wasn’t mimicking any style. Instead, she spoke with the authority of a real journalist, but still with the comedic sensibility we have to maintain on the show. She nailed it.”

Bee bought a closet-sized apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen area of New York City and learned to live without her husband, who was stuck in Canada without a green card. Her first big story, a fan favourite about gay penguins, went over so well she quickly became a regular member of the show’s eyebrow-cocked cynics.

“Sam has the ability to disarm her subjects until the very moment they fall in love with her. And that’s when she eats their throats,” says fellow correspondent Rob Corddry. “Sometimes when I’m doing an interview and get lost I think, ‘WWSBD?’ And then I eat someone’s throat.”

Though she remains the only woman in the cast, Bee dismisses any comments that she brings any unique perspectives to the show.

“People keep on saying I bring a brilliant woman’s perspective to the show, or a unique Canadian spin, but I really don’t,” says Bee. “I have some back bacon in my fridge, but that’s it. I just try and make with the funny.”

Instead, Bee is more concerned people think she’s a real journalist with actual insight into the news, rather than the uninformed fan of poop jokes she is.

“Before the show, Sam knew as much about politics as me, and I learned everything from The Daily Show,” admits Harkin, who isn’t the only one confusing the program’s brand of satire with hard journalism.

• • •

“And who would you have voted for if you were on your medication?”

• • •

For the first part of its existence, The Daily Show was just a half hour of bizarre news clips and celebrity interviews that filled the time between Saturday Night Live repeats. All that changed in 1999, when the politically-charged Stewart replaced Craig Kilborn as host and the show developed a much-needed satirical edge.

“Our first priority is to be funny, though it’s true the show has evolved into other things in people’s minds,” says Corn. “If we’re managing irony or pointing out hypocrisy, we’re always trying to do it in a comedic way. After all, we’re on Comedy Central.”

Media critic and columnist Antonia Zerbisias of The Toronto Star disagrees, saying the show has gone beyond satire and transformed itself into a legitimate news source.

“Though it does satirize the media, it’s actually doing the job of the media, pointing out the bullshit and providing skepticism of the official line,” says Zerbisias. “They can do this because they’re not part of the machinery like CNN, they don’t have to worry about losing White House access.”

Still, Bee says that she only acts like she knows what she’s talking about. “At our best, we’re just having fun. If we make a point along the way, that’s great too.”

Despite the critical praise, Emmy awards and magazine features, Bee would rather just eat her salad and talk about her new queen-sized bed. She doesn’t speculate on the show’s future, or how Stewart’s contract is up in 2008. Instead, she rambles on about Manhattan’s restaurants and how her new home is so “au courant.”

“Please don’t say that I said those words… ugh,” says Bee, before launching into a suspiciously well-rehearsed rant about New York. “Toronto is a fast-paced urban centre, but compared to New York, it’s almost pastoral. It’s so intense here all the time, plus…”

She pauses, trying to hold it in.

“…the whole city smells like pee.”

I recognize David Collier’s face immediately. The self-portrait illustrations in his comic books are remarkably accurate, although the three-dimensional version standing before me is taller and better built than I expected. After shaking hands, we head outside to the rainy streets of Hamilton.

The short walk from the bus terminal to Collier’s home studio unfolds like a comic strip. A stranger snaps our photo in front of the downtown skyline. In Jackson Square, a grey-haired gentleman rails against the arrogance of Torontonians. At the farmers’ market, Collier buys a bunch of carrots the size of cucumbers. He buys me one too. Back outside, Collier points out several new art galleries that have opened this past year. We take a tour of the Print Studio, a new artist workshop in town, and, a couple of buildings down, we watch a video installation of Detroit and Barcelona downtown street intersections at the Hamilton Artists Inc. gallery. With Collier acting as a guide, Hamilton’s streets are a story in the making.

Collier is one of Canada’s best-known comics, or graphic, journalists. His illustrated essays include stories about David Milgaard, Grey Owl and Dr. Humphrey Osmond, the man who gave Aldous Huxley, author of Brave New World and The Doors of Perception, his first dose of mescaline. He’s also done considerable illustration and comic strip work for various newspapers and magazines across Canada and the United States. His career emphasizes the acceptance of comics journalism and the growing desire of Canada’s print media to add it to their pages.

Comics journalism, and comics in general, are rooted in the tradition of political cartooning. In the mid-19th century, new publications like Canadian Illustrated News and Grip began using cartoons to satirize Canadian political events such as the Pacific Scandal that embroiled Prime Minister John A. Macdonald in 1872-3. Eventually, single-panel cartoons were expanded and the first comic strip was published in 1895 in the New York World. The first strips moved away from politics and used humour to attract readers. The “funnies” were born. The Depression brought a need for escapism and led to the adventures of Dick Tracy and Tarzan. In 1938, the first issue of Action Comics heralded the arrival of Superman. A flood of superhero comics followed, with two companies – DC, the home of Superman and Batman, and Marvel, the house of Spider-Man and The Fantastic Four – dominating the genre over the next 30 years.

But by the late 1960s, comics had drawn itself into a corner. Well past middle age, the exploits of superheroes and themes of adventure had left its readers stuck in adolescence. An underground movement – which included the early works of Robert Crumb – began producing self-published comics for adults that chronicled the events of everyday life. Stories about work, relationships and family were standard themes of underground cartoons. Subject matter continued to evolve and become more sophisticated to the point where, in 1986, Art Speigelman’s graphic memoir of the Holocaust, Maus, won the Pulitzer Prize. The underground adult comic had finally reached the mainstream.

A decade later, Joe Sacco produced a seminal work, Palestine, about his experience during a two-month visit to the occupied territories in Israel. The deliberate subjectivity, a cornerstone of comics storytelling, gave Sacco’s work an emotive quality that drew readers in and connected them to a story more often told with sterile neutrality.

During this time, Collier established himself as a professional cartoonist. In 1986, he published his first strip in the Crumb-edited Weirdo magazine, but it wasn’t until he left the Canadian military that he began his trade in earnest. Most of his material was published in comic book journals, including the fledgling Drawn & Quarterly, which emerged in 1990. Chris Oliveros, its first and only editor, was committed to long-form comics narratives and gave Collier room to experiment with his unique blend of storytelling.

The reportage method of Sacco and Collier is akin to Tom Wolfe’s New Journalism. They use scenes, details and dialogue to tell their stories, and almost always provide a point of view. Comics journalism rarely enters the realm of daily news. When combined with research and reporting, the labour of drawing and writing a comics narrative doesn’t lend itself to the immediacy of current affairs.

On the heels of Sacco’s success, magazines like The New Yorker, GQ and Details were suddenly covering political conventions, awards shows and criminal trials through illustrated narratives.

In 1995, the Saskatoon Star Phoenix began running one of Collier’s comic strips, titled Saskatoon Sketches, which documented life on the Prairies. It ran for six months until Collier, hoping to syndicate south of the border, suggested changes to the serial. The paper’s editors weren’t enthused, and the comic was dropped.

Despite the odd setback, interest in the form continues to grow. The graphic novel has become hip, and Canadian cartoonists like Seth and Chester Brown have become minor celebrities. Recently, the Art Gallery of Ontario featured a collection called Present Tense: Seth. More than ever, editors and art directors are anxious to get involved.

“I would love to have a whole feature as a comic,” says Antonio Deluca, creative director at The Walrus. One of his biggest challenges is to figure out how to present it without alienating a readership that expects an emphasis on the written word. “A lot of people look at it and don’t get it,” he says. The Walrus‘s section will consist of two pages to start. It’s not enough for a lengthy feature, but in a culture where, increasingly, knowledge is interpreted visually, Deluca believes the genre will eventually get the space to grow.

Serialization is often the solution to running longer comics narratives within the limited confines of magazine and newspaper layouts. But, Toro editor Derek Finkle notes, running a serial can be risky business. “It can make an editor nervous,” he says, “because you don’t know what you’re getting.”

It can be successful though. This past year, the Edmonton Journal serialized illustrated stories about David Eamer, North America’s first paraplegic truck driver, and former Edmonton Oilers hockey star Paul Coffey. Co-writers David Staples and Jill Stanton plan on doing more illustrated stories as newspapers continue to push the boundaries of back-page comic strip tradition.

And, in the Saturday, Oct. 22 edition of the National Post, The Financial Post section leads, on the front page above the fold, with a comics journalism feature called “David Brown: Man of the World.” The story, illustrated by Mike Faille and Kagan McLeod, portrays the excessive use of expense claims by Brown, the former Ontario Securities Commission chair. Brown spent over $600,000 on world travel during his seven-year tenure as provincial securities watchdog.

At the Montreal Mirror, Rupert Bottenberg recently commissioned an illustrated report on the International Comics Festival in Angoul?me, France. A music editor for the alternative weekly as well as a cartoonist, Bottenberg believes the value of comics journalism is found in cultural and entertainment reporting and criticism.

In 2001, Bottenberg interviewed DJ Mr. Scruff in comics format. His character, a cassette tape man, asked Mr. Scruff’s illustrated character a series of questions. Bottenberg was allotted the same amount of space as for a written review, which only highlighted the physical limitations of comics journalism. “It struck me that the amount of text available to me would be minimal,” he says. “The interview would be reduced to about a dozen sentences.” As a result, the interview as presented lacked depth, but many readers nevertheless told Bottenberg that it was one of the funniest interviews they’d read. “Not because it was a particularly good interview, but because it was completely distinctive from anything they had read before.”

Bottenberg says cartoonists tend to lead a hermit-like existence, but the opportunity to report on far-off events doesn’t present itself that often either. Collier recently reenlisted in the army reserves to become a member of the Canadian Forces Artist Program. He was scheduled to go to Afghanistan this past year, but couldn’t get insurance to travel to the country, so the trip was cancelled. Instead, he spent time on the HMCS Toronto and his illustrated diary was published in the CBC.ca Arts section.

Canadian magazines and newspapers are reluctant to commission expensive assignments, and few cartoonists have the loose change to pay their own way. Getting the opportunity is often just a matter of being in the right place at the right time. Pyongyang, Guy Delisle’s journal about North Korea, came about when the animation company he worked for moved its South Korean operations to the capital of North Korea.

Brown, author of a graphic Louis Riel biography, thinks the challenges all but ensure that comics journalism will remain an anomaly. “It’s not going to replace any other form of journalism,” he says. “It’s too much work. I just don’t see many cartoonists doing it for long.”

Collier doesn’t plan on giving up. There were two things he wanted to do while growing up – draw and work for a newspaper – and comics journalism allows him to do both. He remains committed to the duality of illustration and reporting despite the time it takes to construct a story. The expanding interest of Canada’s print media in comics journalism should provide Collier with plenty of opportunity to continue living his childhood dreams.

The rain has stopped by the time we reach Collier’s home. The walls of the studio are covered in posters and newspaper cutouts of illustrations and comic strips. An overflow of paper clippings is fastened by clothes-pegs to clotheslines crisscrossing the room. Skis bundled like kindling are harnessed to the ceiling above the desk. After a few more questions, it’s time to go. We shake hands for the second time today and I walk back into town. Without Collier beside me, the streets are unrecognizable.

On John Corcelli’s first day back in the CBC Broadcast Centre, the atmosphere was different from two months ago. Employees had begun the day with a victory parade around the building, complete with bagpipes, banjos and congratulations from union leaders. Corcelli missed the parade, but walked inside with a heavy feeling in his stomach. “I was kind of nervous,” he says. “It was a bit weird.”

Lower-level managers were welcoming as workers walked in, shaking hands and hugging, but there was a feeling of change. In the hallways, Corcelli ran into colleagues he’d met for the first time on the picket line, and more hellos ensued. Employees were glad to be back, but the mood was also cool and sober. It was hard to figure out where to start after being away so long. There was an internal email announcement from Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president, CBC Television, in Corcelli’s inbox, which he immediately deleted without reading.
I first meet Corcelli, a researcher for cbc.ca archives, on the Toronto picket line September 26. As federal New Democratic Party leader Jack Layton is addressing a mass of CBC workers and supporters on Parliament Hill – including 400 Toronto employees bused to Ottawa the previous night – Corcelli is out walking in Toronto with a surprising number of his colleagues. Too many to be counted, even though it’s raining and the numbers are thin compared to most Mondays. In Ottawa, Minister of Labour and Housing Joe Fontana is threatening to lock union and management teams in his office. Meanwhile, in Toronto, reporters, producers, technicians, archivists and marketing staff sport CBC-logo-adorned hats and T-shirts underneath hoods and raincoats. Some carry CBC-patterned umbrellas as they circle the massive, silent fortress.

People need their lockout pay and like to get their picketing duties over with early in the week, but those I meet today are among the most dedicated. Staff members, unaffected by negotiations focused on contract workers, are here to support their colleagues. They’re angry at the treatment these co-workers are receiving and say they’ll be out as long as it takes – though they don’t think it will take much longer. Bob MacGregor, who says he’s “well over 65” and a permanent part-time radio news host, hobbles around the building with a cane. He’s been here 12 hours – since midnight last night – and he’s still grinning and eager to talk about his love of the CBC. Lillian Hunkeler from news archives doesn’t mind picketing: “It’s almost like a small price to pay to ensure steady staff work for generations to come.”

“I’m not sure with the people we have out here that it can get depressing,” Pat Senson of Quirks & Quarks tells me. “This is very much a very educated picket line. People here are creative, full of energy and ideas. This is what we do for a living, it’s create, so when you’ve got people like that, we’re finding ways to prevent it being depressing.” Ways like a lockout bake-off, aerobics and rock concerts in the grass of Simcoe Park, a picket line burlesque show and a costume contest, which Senson won for a revealing “lockout” getup made of chains and not much else.

It’s a far cry from the shock and anger present at the start of the dispute, when union and management teams refused to speak and workers picketed knowing little progress was being made. “Aw man, it was awful, the rage, the rage on the line,” Corcelli says. “The astounded looks everybody had on their faces the first two weeks was brutal.”

But as the lockout dragged on, workers became certain of victory. A sense of calm, acceptance and cautious optimism sprung up. The general feeling was that senior management couldn’t survive without them – they didn’t have the broadcast experience and they didn’t know how to run the CBC anyway. Some locked-out workers bonded by creating a rogue CBC, with pirate radio shows, online news, podcasts and blogs. Most cemented their resolve with a perpetual mingling on the picket line. Staff from opposite departments met for the first time and plotted new ways of working together. It’s the type of integration management has always called for at the CBC, but has never been able to enforce.

Perhaps most telling about this new camaraderie is the attitude of CBC technicians. Before joining the Canadian Media Guild, technicians were represented by the Communications, Energy and Paperworkers Union of Canada and the film technicians union NABET 700. The technical workers have been involved in numerous labour disputes with the CBC in recent years, and frustrated by numerous lockouts. In 2001, they were left outside the building in the snow.

This time it’s different, because the technical workers aren’t isolated from their colleagues. Doug, who works in props and staging, points out how amazing it’s been. “This is the first time everyone’s been out all together,” he says, “so it’s not like other coworkers are going by you and you really feel ostracized.”

Like their journalist colleagues, technicians and members of other departments are passionate about the future of the CBC. Doug speaks adamantly about how essential public broadcasting is to Canadians. I meet a sales and marketing employee who would support CBC television going commercial-free – even if it meant losing his job. He thinks such a move would improve the service. And Corcelli, tired out yet positive, thinks the lockout is a chance to give the CBC the redesign it’s needed for years through a performance review by the auditor general of Canada. He says the reconfiguration should involve the election of a president and board of directors by CBC employees.

Corcelli doesn’t know if he has the stomach to take on such a crusade by himself, but he spoke at the Toronto ratification meeting about the topic. There was some interest from colleagues, but no one jumped up to volunteer. Publicbroadcasting.ca, a website intended to keep up the discussion about the CBC’s future, has been launched by Justin Beach, a casual worker in Toronto who blogged the lockout. But many lockout blogs are disappearing and, though workers plan to enforce their new deal by watching management closely, settling back in at work is the priority.

Whatever happens, Corcelli believes change at the CBC will be slow. “The wounds are going to be very deep and they’re going to take an awful long time to heal. It will not be the same. We will no longer be able to trust management, because they’ve betrayed that trust. It could take months, years for management to regain the trust of the people.”