Now Rwanda looms in the background. The mass murder of civilians that began three and a half years ago in Darfur, an area in western Sudan the size of France, has been described as “Rwanda in slow motion” and “the world’s worst humanitarian crisis” for the past two years.

Compared to the Rwandan genocide, the war in the Congo – or even the 21-year, north-south war in Sudan, in which two million died – the crisis in Darfur has grabbed the world’s attention.

But for all the coverage, people still don’t know much about the ongoing genocide. Atrocities approved by a brutal Sudanese government based in the capital, Khartoum, have elicited no concrete response from the West. Despite its many horrors, the tragedy of Darfur is just another African story – something about tribal warfare or civil war.

There are many good arguments for the lack of continued, insistent coverage, of course. They are the same reasons coverage was slow to start: cutbacks in foreign bureaus, the astronomical cost of having someone in every region of the world and the importance of other under-reported stories are all cited as explanations why no one focused on Darfur until 2004.

Committing enough coverage early on, in order to make the public aware that the implications are leading to genocide, is a numbers game. News outlets must justify spending tens of thousands of dollars on one region of the world over another. But at this point in the calamity, where systemic murders and rapes have become banal, it could be argued that western media have a responsibility to dig deeper to show the complexity of the crisis, so readers walk away with more than feelings of pity and hopelessness. After all, the West may have had a hand in fostering it.

• • •

For four years, Dr. Norman Epstein has been talking about Sudan to anyone willing to listen. Standing in a small classroom in late October, he prepares to speak to 12 volunteers at the Canadian Centre for Victims of Torture office in downtown Toronto. Epstein – along with Dr. Achol Dor, who is from southern Sudan – is co-founder of Canadians Against Slavery and Torture in Sudan. This is the second time he has come to talk about Darfur. A slender, middle-aged man, wearing grey slacks and a light blue shirt, Epstein draws a map of Sudan on the whiteboard and outlines Sudan’s colonial past.

Epstein starts in. The British, in collaboration with Egypt, gained control of Sudan in the 1890s. They favoured the north and marginalized western and southern tribes. As soon as they left in 1956, the north took power. In 2003, government militias, called janjaweed, were sent by the government to crush a rebellion in the west. But they did not seek out rebels. Instead, they systematically killed villagers and gang-raped women, under the direction of Khartoum. “The government knew the militias would rape and kill,” Epstein says.

In late 2003, refugees fleeing Darfur crossed the border into Chad. They told stories of attacks by Arab militias, villages burned to the ground, and murder and rape.

In spring 2004, Stephanie Nolen was the first Canadian journalist to reach the isolated area of Darfur. She slept in the dirt and reported on refugees in internally displaced persons camps. She reported on the end of the north-south war and the peace accord designed to distribute the south’s mineral wealth between Khartoum and the rebel Sudan People’s Liberation Movement in the south. But the deal ignored western Sudan.

Rebel groups in the west had also been fighting against the government, demanding to be included in the wealth-sharing arrangement. Many of the government’s soldiers were from Darfur and would not fight their kin. The regime then created a militia force, janjaweed, to suppress dissent in the west.

Epstein is frustrated with media coverage. Although he allows that it has been regular in the past two years, articles are often buried deep in the paper, and facts are not always updated. In March 2005, for example, Nolen reported more than 200,000 dead. The current figure is closer to 300,000, but the original number is repeatedly mentioned.

What is needed, Epstein argues, is relentless front-page coverage that would grab the attention of more politicians. “The media could be a moral catalyst for what could happen.”

The media could be, but they do not report exclusively on a single human rights issue. Any program consists of more than one issue per show, and Darfur could not and would not be covered every week. Rick MacInnes-Rae, senior correspondent/host for CBC’s Dispatches, says, “Media doesn’t prosecute a war,” so the most they can do is to “generate pressure, illuminate an issue.”

MacInnes-Rae says media has not a moral responsibility, but rather “an editorial responsibility” to provide continued coverage. Even with best efforts to fulfill that obligation, though, reporting from Darfur is more complicated than from Iraq or Afghanistan. Western Sudan is geographically remote, and government officials in Khartoum rein in journalists’ access with bureaucratic impediments.

• • •

In September 2004, United States Secretary of State Colin Powell announced that genocide was occurring in Darfur. The U.S. did not intervene, but its declaration got attention. “The word genocide caused the Sudanese government to get its back up,” says David McGuffin, a CBC journalist, “and made it more difficult for journalists to get in there and do their job.”

McGuffin traveled to Darfur in September 2006. He talked to women in refugee camps who told him they were raped as they ventured outside the camps to collect firewood. The suffering horrified him, but there was so much he wasn’t permitted to witness. “It’s almost impossible to see fighting,” he says. “The Sudanese military controls all your movement on the ground.”

CBC has been to Darfur seven times in the past two years – twice in the last five months. Brien Christie, foreign assignment editor, says it is a clear priority for CBC. “We’ve been shining a light on it,” he says. The first time, reporters slipped in through Chad for a short period as refugees were crossing from Darfur. Later they went through Khartoum, and again with then prime minister Paul Martin.

Securing a visa for Sudan takes weeks or months, according to McGuffin. Once he received access to Darfur, he had to report to a government office every day. While filming in El Fasher, McGuffin and his crew were arrested and detained for four hours. They were arrested again the next day, in the same place. Eventually they were let into the camps with a police escort, but they weren’t permitted to speak to anyone.

As the Sudanese government clamps down on journalists, it is even more difficult for them to get the truth out. McGuffin and his crew decided to stop dealing with them and instead embedded themselves within an African Union (AU) base. The five-year-old union of 53 African states promotes the socio-economic integration of the continent, but AU troops are under-funded and undermanned as they struggle to create security in the midst of violence. McGuffin’s crew was almost arrested again, but a member of the AU intervened.

There was “a looming sense that you were going to get arrested and kicked out” the entire time, McGuffin says, who also acknowledges that Darfur gets pushed off the editorial menu by other stories. In summer 2006, the news focused on the conflict and suffering in Lebanon, and Darfur slipped off the radar. “There was a chance this summer, but then Lebanon happened,” he says.

• • •

In August 2006, Allan Rock, Canada’s former ambassador to the United Nations, wrote an article in The Globe and Mail arguing, “Despite the current preoccupations in the Middle East, we must remember that urgent needs elsewhere have not gone away. Our influential voice should be raised now, in a renewed effort to save the many lives being lost each day in Darfur’s tragic conflict.”

There is a general understanding that the government of Sudan is responsible, but there hasn’t been much analysis of the regime itself or why nothing seems to change. James MacKinnon, a freelance journalist who reported from south Sudan in 2002, says, “Journalists haven’t exhaustively examined why the coverage isn’t having an impact.”

Gerry Caplan, author of Rwanda: The Preventable Genocide, believes we have to look at the West’s complicity in the Darfur crisis. He points to Sudanese President Omar al-Bashir’s predecessor, Jaafar al-Numeiri, saying he was a “vicious dictator” who waged war against the south and created the conditions for dissent. “Numeiri was armed by the West,” says Caplan.

Numeiri’s oppressive rule made it easy for a coalition of forces to overthrow him, and for Bashir to lead a coup and become president in 1989. “The reason we should intervene is because we helped create this crisis,” says Caplan.

But intervention is slow in coming. The dying continues and there are fewer witnesses from Darfur to share stories. Journalists struggle to get on the ground and witness the crisis, but it’s difficult to report what you can’t see. Andre Picard, who reported from Rwanda in July 1994, just after the genocide, wonders how much can be done. “Papers should be demanding Canada take a stand on Darfur,” he says. “But a Globe editorial isn’t going to stop a war.”

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The sun is still nestled well beneath the horizon in the early hours of June 29. Across Toronto, delivery trucks slip through the streets, stopping at clusters of newspaper boxes and filling them with still-warm stacks of the new day’s issue. Shawn Micallef, associate editor for Spacing magazine, walks eastward, towards downtown and home. He happens by a recently stocked National Post box. Straddling the cover fold is a teaser for the Urban Scrawl opinion piece on A9 — “Is it multicultural celebration or just hooliganism? World Cup fans are getting aggressive.” It piques Micallef’s interest; about 24 hours before, he’d written a piece on the same subject for Spacing Wire, the magazine’s blog. Dropping in his change, Micallef pulls out a copy and flips to the article. The headline reads, “Soccer fans play rough.” The byline? “Shawn Micallef.”

The article’s unauthorized appearance sets off an online hailstorm. Cries of “Shameful!” and “Scandal!” erupt across the blogosphere. Much of the criticism isn’t over the reprinting, but the fact that the article has been cut by about 50 per cent, including a contextually important passage from The Globe and Mail‘sToronto columnist, John Barber.

Despite all the anger, the issue resolves itself quickly. After Micallef and Spacing publisher Matthew Blackett cry foul, the Post prints an apology on A2 and pays Micallef $200 (which, he says, includes an extra $50 for “pain and suffering”).

“We all chalked it up to experience,” says Rob Roberts, the Post‘s Toronto editor, who admits he originally had no intention of paying Micallef for the piece. “Blogs are always linking to each other. I saw this as an extension of that. I recognize now, in retrospect, I don’t think I should’ve seen it that way.” Roberts also explains that a bad situation got worse when, after he signed off on the article, additional edits were made and attribution for the Spacing blog was moved from the top of the piece to the bottom.

All wrongdoing aside, a bigger issue remains. As Masthead noted in an online article, “It was the first time a blog entry had received such treatment.” With city-oriented blogs in major centers like Toronto gaining increasing credibility, readers in search of their local news fix have embraced the outlets as a raw, fresh take on their towns. But even now, in the midst of an online revolution that’s putting media in the hands of the Everyman, it may be too early to completely abandon the black and white pages of a paper for the bright lights of the city blog.

Unlike at newspapers, city blog content is mainly generated through observation. If a staffer sees something unusual, hears about an interesting event, or notices a rant-worthy issue, it becomes a post. There’s no agenda, no news for the sake of news. “We can narrowcast what we write about,” says Ron Nurwisah, editor of the Torontoist blog. “[Newspapers] have a hard time because they have to cover that big mayoral announcement or that big conference — it’s in their mandate. We know that these things are going on, but we don’t need to cover them all because you could get it from the Toronto Star.”

City blogs also benefit from the communal nature of citizen journalism. Readers often act as reporters, and bloggers usually share content with each other freely, creating a huge network of eyes on the city. This past January, for instance, a Toronto photographer captured a street fight between a littering motorist and an eco-friendly bike messenger. The pictures and the story were all over Toronto’s city blogs the next day, but it wasn’t until the following week that the Star picked up the story and put the photographs on their cover (albeit without permission, though the photographer was credited). “Blogs are on the street a lot more — they’re closer to what’s happening,” says Micallef. “The major dailies kind of float like motherships above the city, and reporters get dropped down and then they go back up and report.”

One of those motherships sits high above Toronto in the Don Mills suburb, where the National Post has their headquarters. Needless to say, the view’s different from up here. For one thing, their Toronto editor doesn’t exactly embrace the narrowcasting that blogs champion. “Blogs tend to give you what you already think you want,” Roberts contends. “But there’s something to be said for reading stuff that you might not think you’re interested in.”

There’s also the issue of accuracy. Blog contributors generally publish their work directly, without any editorial review beforehand. “We try to be accurate — it’s not like we go out of our way to be inaccurate,” says Nurwisah. But he also admits that outlets like the Star and CBC provide a level of authority and trustworthiness that his blog can’t match. “I wouldn’t get my election results from us. I wouldn’t trust it.”

Despite their different priorities, Roberts is quick to admit that blogs are worthy media outlets. “There’s value in an unvarnished voice,” he says. “I think that you read a blog knowing that it’s a different approach to journalism and you forgive some of its failings because of that.” Even before he and the Post improperly tapped Micallef’s article, it was clear that they and the other dailies knew city blogs were onto something good. Since April 2006, the Post has run a feature called Blogtown about once a week. The spread compiles notable blog posts and responses from across Toronto, all clearly attributed and transparently edited (if at all). The Star took things a step further, setting up their own city blog, Paved.ca. The site, run single-handedly by Marc Weisblott, was intended to be a sort of blog hub for Toronto. According to Chris Carter, senior editor of TheStar.com, they wanted to bring together bloggers and readers from across Toronto to generate one big online discussion, fueled by Weisblott’s posts on the city. But the site met with limited success and closed shop after only a year. “We didn’t see the take-up on the reader side. We didn’t see the participation rate that we’d hoped for,” says Carter. “We had to make a decision on whether it would be a long term thing or to end it as an experiment, and we chose to end it as an experiment.”

A subtler and less risky recognition of the city blog’s value is that dailies often use them as a tip service. It’s not uncommon to see a full, fleshed-out story in the paper a day or two after a smaller blog piece on the very same subject. “Quite frankly, I’ve stolen a lot of ideas from these blogs,” says Roberts. “With full attribution — I make a point of almost always somewhere in that story either giving direct or indirect credit to whatever blog it came from.” Over at The Globe and Mail‘s downtown building, Toronto editor Gregory Boyd Bell also admits to having occasionally tapped blogs as a tip service in the past, but says their usefulness peaked more than a year ago. “It may be a cyclical thing, where you get these waves of enough people doing a little bit of original material that you get a fairly steady supply of something original every day,” he says. “But I don’t see that happening right now.”

While Micaleff admits that this situation helps bring important issues overlooked by the mainstream media to a wider audience, he also says it creates some tension with newspapers. “There’s this kind of David and Goliath feeling,” he admits. “None of us are paid, or are paid a pittance. We dedicate a lot of time to this stuff and it gets sucked up into the major media by reporters who are paid and have benefits and all that stuff.”

Roberts thinks that similar concerns with financial imbalance will eventually upset the culture of sharing that blogs currently enjoy. As ad revenue for blogs grows with popularity, he suggests, so will competition for that cash; blogs will become increasingly protective of their content, and the ones that don’t hit ad gold right away won’t be looking to lend a hand to their better-funded ex-allies.

Blogs can’t be all that upset with the dailies, however, as they provide a substantial amount of content for their sites — either through a blogger’s response to a news story or a daily breakdown of notable pieces from their pages. “In the morning, we often do a round-up of public space-type articles that we see in the papers,” says Micallef; another Toronto site, blogTO, compiles a similar list with a wider range of stories. “There are a lot of people who don’t read the dailies every day but might read blogs, so we throw people back to traditional media who have the resources to cover these things deeper, and then maybe add our own take on it.”

Only with that balance can readers truly benefit from city blogs, though. In a way, newspapers provide the hard news for blogs to comment on and pass along to their readers, while blogs provide the papers with inspiration for more community-minded stories — and everyone’s material reaches a bigger audience in one way or another. Through it all, readers simply get better local coverage, via either an original and opinionated take on their city from blogs or a more attuned approach from the dailies.

Roberts sums it up with a tale from the Post‘s launch in 1998, when the word “blog” would’ve sounded like an insult — and when soft, community news was still a distinctly different beast than the day’s hard, top news. “In the first week, one of the stories was about where to get good eggs in Toronto,” he recalls. “And I was like, ‘Whaaaat?’ But you know, I’ve lived here for eight years, and I’m more interested in where to get good eggs in Toronto than I am in a lot of the serious news and crime stories. The most important story of the day isn’t necessarily the most interesting story of the day.”

In spite of the rain, the Word on the Street festival site in Toronto buzzes with local readers and writers looking for a good deal on magazine subscriptions, someone to publish their opuses or perhaps an autograph from a favourite CBC personality. On the eastern curve of the Queen’s Park roundabout, where the festival is held on the last Sunday in September, Shameless magazine attracts a steady stream of interested browsers. One flips through back issues of the magazine, her meticulously applied nail polish sparkling against black and white pages. She flashes a furtive smile to the women watching from behind the table and drifts on, mom in her wake. Others hang around laughing loudly at ironies, pinning Shameless buttons onto jackets already clacking with political identifiers and stuffing back issues of the feminist magazine “for girls who get it” into their backpacks. Several women volunteer to write for the magazine.

Nicole Cohen, one of two co-editors, has just come back from her apartment where back issues are stored, and is replenishing supplies of the briskly moving stock. She’s annoyed. In fact, the 26-year-old student, enrolled in the Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities, is way too annoyed for anyone to mention the rumour that Shameless might not be around much longer. She makes it very clear she’s too busy to chat, but is able to comment on her definition of success: “For me,Shameless has been an absolute success in terms of fulfilling its mandate, winning awards and recognition, and being able to touch the lives of young women. We’ve been able to make important contributions to discussions of feminism and alternative media, as well as counter mainstream notions of what it means to be a teenage girl.”

Since Cohen and Melinda Mattos launched Shameless in Summer 2004, it has garnered international attention and a subscription base of nearly 700 – not bad for a mag with few ads, no grants and a volunteer-run production staff operating out of their homes. A small stack of awards and nominations from the indie press boosted Shameless into the spotlight in its first year. Last year it won an Utne Magazine award for Best Personal Life Writing and was noticed in almost every major Canadian mainstream and alternative newspaper.

But now, with the second anniversary issue on newsstands, industry observers seemed to have stopped noticing its good work. Doug Bennet , publisher of Masthead magazine, is glad to hear the magazine is still publishing but says he doesn’t know Shameless well enough to comment on content. He’s more interested in how publications running on volunteer-power stay in business. “You have to have a sugar daddy or an angel or family money or government grants to keep it going,” he says. His colleagues at the industry watchdog were equally unfamiliar with the magazine.

Judy Rebick, feminist scholar and publisher of the political website rabble.ca likes Shameless for its “third-wave feminist sensibility,” but admits she doesn’t really read magazines.

In Shameless, readers of Bitch magazine will find a comfortable familiarity. Like its American counterpart, the three-times-yearly publication offers a feminist perspective on popular culture in its features, with topics like an analysis of the motives behind the Dove soap “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a day in the life of a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and how community radio is giving girls a voice. But where Bitch spreads its “feminist response to pop culture” throughout its pages, Shameless launches into any arena where women tread. Features also cover women in global political life (“Skirting the Issue,” “Pretty in Parliament”), vaginal reconstruction surgery (“Making the Cut” ) and virginity myths (“Saint or Slut?” ).

Sections like Geek Chic, Sporting Goods and DIY offer reviews, profiles and directions for cool websites, girls in sport and instructions on how to makes bowls out of old LP records, respectively.

In the current issue, Summer 2006, DJ Morales, a “five-foot-tall slam poet” from Ottawa, is the subject of “She’s Shameless,” a regular feature of a model Shameless girl or woman. It offers a refreshingly positive parallel to similar profiles like “Miss Seventeen” in Seventeen magazine. Morales offers “props to girls who get it: the girls who are reading book who are spending more time at activist rallies than concerts. People will try to stop you because that’s not what girls are supposed to do. But don’t let anybody stop you.”

Shameless is a feminist delivery system of advice. In its guidelines for writers, the publication seeks “fresh, witty writing that engages and entertains. Frenzied ranting is strongly discouraged. So are over-the-top attempts at sounding young and hip. (Hint: Shameless is not Seventeen and “omigawd” is not a word.) Remember, you’re the reader’s trusted co-conspirator, not her cooler older sister. Let your natural voice come through.” But the biggest strengths of the magazine – passion, conviction, talent – may also contribute to its weakness. Ironically, in the vision of what it is to “get it” espoused by Shameless, some readers sense that the depiction of women is too narrow and confining. “It tells girls they have to be a certain way and not at all a girly-girl,” says Charidy Johnston. The 27 year old says when she reads magazine she prefers titles like In Style because she wants to relax and not be scolded that she’s not doing enough to change the world.

Perhaps it’s harder to change women when they’re age 27 than when they’re impressionable teenagers. Twenty-five-year-old contributor Thea Lim thinks Shameless does a good job appealing to young women and older girls. The die-hard volunteer says the magazine tries to “provide literary space, but neutral space and to be supportive of teenagers.”

That is, supportive of a certain kind of female. Rather than appealing to teenagers broadly, as both Lim and Cohen claim, Shameless targets that one girl in your high school class. You know the one – smart, informed and involved in everything. Teachers love and hate her because while she raises the bar on class discussions of A Tale of Two Cities by remarking on the objectionable labour practices in Dickens’ England and notices the sexist perspective of the narrator, her word is usually the last. Classmates who may have thought about mentioning how the title is like, a metaphor or something, or that they loved Chapter 10, wait for the bell instead. But from those girls across Canada that do “get it,” the Letters section regularly runs exclamatory thanks such as “Super-duper!” and “Life-altering.”

Although the magazine doesn’t appeal to all young females, newsstand sales of the magazine in Toronto bookstores are consistently high for a teen magazine. Book City, Toronto Women’s Bookstore and Another Story Bookshop all report selling at least half, often closer to three-quarters of the copies they receive. While that means just four or five copies at Another Story, both Book City and TWB receive 45 or more copies of each issue. Alex MacFadyen , a buyer for TWB, says Shameless was “extremely popular as soon as it came out and now has sales comparable to Bitch and Bust“. At his store, the magazine sells 25 or 30 copies each issue. He compares its success to the rise in zine culture and finds that Shameless contains certain identifiable elements of the zine – photos arranged in an overlapping, pasted-on fashion, the logo designed to look hand-inked – and the community it creates. “Doing actual work and outreach, going to where people are and selling your stuff is very like zine culture,” he says.

“Community building” is a big part of the Shameless newsstand business model. The magazine depends on newsstand sales, subscriptions and fundraising events for almost all the money it needs to keep the magazine going. Bennet says the model is “fraught with peril” because low revenue means a volunteer-powered publication, “which is great but not sustainable.”

Without the usual major advertisers like Procter & Gamble and L’Oreal that aim their products at young women, the magazine’s message is unfettered and uncompromising, but also chronically short of funding. When asked what she might do if approached by a conglomerate, Cohen dismisses the question outright. “We’re not a magazine conceived to deliver a mass audience to advertisers,” she advises, “so we haven’t had large companies that use questionable images of women in their advertising knocking at our door.”

Back at the Shameless booth at Word on the Street, über-volunteer Lim spends the afternoon selling promotional buttons and back issues, trying to keep dry whenever the blustery day turns rainy. Lim writes for both the print and online versions of the magazine. She likes the positive working environment and the sense of community she receives. It’s certainly not for the money. When asked about the lack of payment, she’s unconcerned about the optics of providing free labour to an organization that cares about feminist social justice. She beams, “I really believe in Shameless so I’m happy to contribute.” Then she adds, “Of course, I won’t be able to do it forever.”

Forever is a long time, especially when you’re worried about tomorrow. When she’s finally asked to comment on the rumour that the magazine might fold after publishing two more issues, Cohen writes back in an email, “Publishing an independent magazine run by volunteer power alone is a challenging (but rewarding!) experience that always comes with a degree of uncertainty. Our plan and goals for Shameless have always been to publish the best magazine we could, filled with interesting, engaging content you can’t find anywhere else, and get the message out to as many young women as possible. It is a process that is constantly in flux, as we have a high turnover of volunteers and our own lives are continually changing. At the moment, we are taking things one issue at a time.”

On the night of Tuesday, September 19, Toronto Sun city hall reporter Rob Granatstein heard something that upset him. Please say it isn’t so, wrote Granatstein in an email to Jim Jennings.

Right now, I’m still your editor-in-chief, replied Jennings. Wait until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. Then we’ll talk.

At 10 a.m. the next morning out it came: Jennings had resigned. “It was like a funeral in there,” says Granatstein. Jennings was a respected editor. He fought for the newsroom. “You don’t want to see someone like Jim Jennings leave.”

The news spread quickly and hit most people hard. One person had even heard about Jennings’s resignation before they got to work and called in “sick.” Granatstein says, “It was not good.”

Sun Media Corp., which owns the Sun, was quick to deny any connection between the top editor’s resignation and rumoured layoffs. “His resignation was his choice, and we respect that,” said publisher Kin-Man Lee in several articles, “and had nothing to do with a cost reduction or restructuring exercise that we have here at the Sun.”

Jennings stood for certain kinds of newspaper values. “Our goal is to produce a useful, relevant and compelling newspaper which closely matches your—our readers— needs and that champions our community with pride and passion,” he wrote in the Sun on December 2, 2005. As one former employee says, “Jennings is not the kind of guy who would do a hatchet job.”

But Jennings’s values have faded into the background in the time since that declaration, and he has left a troubled newspaper, an anxious newsroom and a corporate parent fearful that unless the Sun adapts to the aggressive force of the Internet, its papers might not survive.

Just four months after Jennings laid out his goals for the paper in print, his ultimate boss, Quebecor Inc. president and CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau told the Canadian Media Directors’ Council, “Everyone in this room would agree that newspapers are not, and cannot remain what they used to be—the newspaper formula must change.” This is the same Pierre Karl Péladeau who more recently told a Report on Business magazine reporter: “My daughter is on the Internet already. Will she one day read newspapers? There’s a good probability she won’t.” The problem with Quebecor’s latest solutions for change at the tabloid newspaper chain it owns – more cuts, more rationalization of resources and more consolidation of editorial sections – is they may do more than fight the Internet’s pull, they may accelerate Sun Media’s decline.

Quebecor’s call for a new formula to retain eyeballs is a familiar refrain. Change for Sun Media in the 21^stcentury has meant substantial cutbacks more than once. In 2001, Quebecor – which purchased the group of tabloids in 1998 – eliminated 302 positions across the chain. Last June, there was another round of layoffs at Sun Media that meant another 120 jobs lost, including 30 at the Sun in Toronto. This move alone will save the company $4.6 million a year. Now there are worries of yet more layoffs across the board. “I was told it’s a fact,” says a former staffer. “The rumours are about when and who.” Many employees are already looking for work elsewhere.

“Right now we’re waiting for the second shoe to drop,” says Maryanna Lewyckyj, unit chair and associate business editor at the Sun. She says it’s like a hockey game: it’s harder to score when you’ve got fewer players. “We’ve already been trying to play catch up.”

After the June 20 layoffs, 137 unionized editorial staff members remained at the Sun. While the paper has never had as many editorial employees as its cross-town rivals – The Globe and Mail currently has about 350 and The Toronto Star has about 400 editorial staff – fewer reporters and editors, fewer sections and a greater advertising-to-editorial ratio all suggest the reductions are now affecting the Sun newsroom’s ability to compete effectively with the other paid dailies.

However, Quebecor believes these cuts will actually help the Sun. They’re applying the money saved towards a $7 million restructuring plan “to improve the quality of content in its newspaper operations as part of a plan to introduce new technologies and streamline production of newsgathering,” according to a press release from June 20. But Lewyckyj is unsure this is the best way to achieve journalistic integrity. She says critical coverage of the Sun in 2002 questioned the paper’s ability to bounce back from reduced circulation numbers and devastating layoffs. “It hasn’t gotten any better,” she says.

When the Sun began in 1971, it had one goal. “Surviving,” says founding editor Peter Worthington. “We were going to be Toronto’s other voice.” But the tabloid upstart has passed through the hands of five owners since inception, and the emphasis is bound to change over time. Now, with Quebecor at the helm, Worthington says its main goal is not so much to be the other voice, but to make money. “Which is valid,” he adds.

Luc Lavoie, executive vice-president of corporate affairs at Quebecor, wouldn’t disagree with Worthington’s assessment. He says the problems at Sun Media newspapers are not unique to the chain, but rather industry wide. “Our philosophy is that we want to win the game,” he says. “The solution is not in nostalgia – it’s in the future.”

For Lavoie, the future means new products and new ideas. One of those new ideas is Sun Media’s “Centres of Excellence.” According to Lewyckyj, the model was created when the chain combined all of its individual circulation customer service call centres at one central location in Kanata, near Ottawa. The goal was to serve people better, but Lewyckyj says too many calls were left on hold or simply dropped. The thinking is that these centres will now be adapted to editorial environments. On October 12, Sun Media announced the appointment of Glenn Garnett to a newly created position of executive editor-in-chief for Sun Media’s English papers, with the task of consolidating the chain’s resources. Each of Sun Media’s papers would be responsible for providing content in particular departments on particular days, then sharing its content with the sister papers. The life section has already been consolidated. Production of Lifestyle pages are shared by the chain, and then reproduced across the chain – and it shows. On Monday, October 9, a story called “Tie the knot or hit the pub?” appeared in the Lifestyle section of the Toronto Sun. That Sunday, the same article popped up in the Ottawa Sun. Even on the Toronto Sun’s website many Lifestyle stories are linked to a Lifewise section hosted by Quebecor’s nationwide Canoe Network.

Producing homogenous content across the Sun Media chain might be thrifty, but the strategy could accelerate the death of local news coverage. With Toronto’s demographics – more than 200 ethnicities speaking about 125 languages – a paper without a sense of community just won’t cut it, especially since its chief competitor, the Star, announced in September that it intends to expand its GTA section. “That doesn’t bode well for the future of the Sun‘s circulation in a big city like Toronto,” says one observer.

Lewyckyj calls it “cookie-cutter journalism.” The same information will appear in all Sun Media papers, with a smattering of local news from each individual community. “It’s a really boring read because there is no local news,” says a former Sun staffer. The consolidation of news is demoralizing editorial staffers who feel they’re losing ownership of their own newspaper. As section after section is taken away from them, editorial staff feel less and less connected to the paper.

According to one source, morale is already low in the newsroom. “People complain openly,” says a formerSun employee. Staff are frustrated by Sun Media’s changing philosophies and about the persistent rumours of another round of layoffs. According to Pat Currie, president of the London City Press Club, Sun Media’s cuts and consolidations are driven by one motive: profit. “It only benefits the suits at Quebecor,” he says.

In the belly of the red sandstone Munk Centre at the University of Toronto, down two flights of stairs and hallways that twist and turn, computer hacking meets political activism at Citizen Lab. The hum of 20 computers reverberates against the clickety-clacking of fingers on keyboards as Nart Villeneuve, the lab’s director of technical research, opens a virtual world that is not as free as you might think. Hunching in one corner of the basement research facility, Che Guevara mug at his side and Zapatista T-shirt on his back, the 32-year-old displays on his computer monitor the difference between Google searches here and in China: a request for “Falun Gong” on google.com renders over three million pages; its Chinese counterpart fetches under 75,000. Searches for “democracy,” “overthrow” and “freedom” return similar fractured results.

“The Internet is not an open, unrestricted environment,” says Professor Ronald Deibert, known as “hacker prof” around campus. “It’s a network of filters and choke points.” The 42-year-old father of four was interested in “how power is exercised on the Internet,” and wanted to examine web surveillance and filtering on an international scale. So he started Citizen Lab in 2000. Villeneuve, one of Deibert’s former students, caught the prof’s attention with an essay he wrote on censorship in China and Saudi Arabia. Now, with books, 11 major country reports, research projects, and even one U.S. congressional testimony behind them, the two are known as the foremost Net censorship experts in the world.

Here in Canada, the proliferation of the Internet has meant easy access to information. We navigate cyberspace without hindrance. However, in countries that want to repress political discourse and social change, getting around on the Net isn’t as easy. Web content is filtered and blocked, and the open spirit of the web is threatened. “We need, as citizens worldwide, to protect the Net if we want to preserve it as a means for information and space for communication,” says Deibert. His 10 employees and volunteers fight to unlock the Internet.

Amid suspended motherboards and black and white Soviet spy satellite photos at the subterranean hideout, Villeneuve visits a website for SmartFilter, the filtering software libraries use to shield children from provocative sites. Now, nations such as Tunisia – a repressive dictatorship – use the software to block citizens from web content. “First, they start out blocking porn,” says Villeneuve. “Then they make their own categories,” blocking human rights sites, opposition groups and international media.

Filtering is a necessary part of the cyber experience – it keeps spam out and search engines use it to bring us the most relevant results. The problem arises, Villeneuve says, “when the filtering process is not transparent.” Thailand, for example, implemented filtering to deal with sex tourism. The country had an initial list to block of sites that enabled this exploitive practice. “Now, sites not on the list are blocked too,” says Villeneuve. Similarly, blocked sites on the Internet in China look like regular error pages. This secretive filtering and blocking jeopardizes the openness of the Internet, and Villeneuve argues, democracy, free speech and human rights.

Another unintended yet critical outcome of the filtering process, Villeneuve says, is that systems like SmartFilter shut out perfectly acceptable sites. He types teenpregnancy.org in a web address checker that shows how sites on this system are categorized. The site is classified correctly as a health resource. Then he checks an individual page on teenpregnacy.org and it falls into the sex and pornography category. “That’s just dumb-ass,” he says.

One of the lab’s most publicized projects is the OpenNet Initiative (ONI) in partnership with Cambridge,Oxford and Harvard universities. ONI explores and challenges Net censorship practices in about 40 countries by connecting with volunteers and computer servers in the nations in question. Through applications developed in the lab, they run a series of tests on the Internet there. First, they test general categories, then country-specific categories. In the places that ONI monitors, pornography is the most blocked category on the Internet, followed by gambling, anonymizers, provocative attire and humour.

To combat net censorship, Villeneuve, Deibert and others at the lab developed a computer program called Psiphon. Slated for release in December, the program turns home computers in uncensored countries into servers that display websites to people in censored places. So journalists, activists and bloggers in unblocked countries can install Psiphon for free and then create a “network of trust”—friends and counterparts in censored countries—who can log in and check out sites they normally wouldn’t be able to access. Psiphon, he says, is targeted at Chinese- and Iranian-Canadians, or those who are living here with connections in net-censored nations.

Villeneuve is vocal about safe play on the net. “Journalists need to know how to protect themselves online,” he says, “how to communicate securely.” For this, he contributed to the Handbook for Bloggers and Cyber-dissidents by Reporters without Borders. The introduction of the booklet says, “Bloggers are often the only real journalists in countries where the mainstream media is censored or under pressure.” Villeneuve’s section examines circumvention technologies, which allow people to get around net censorship and surveillance, and the advantages and disadvantages of each. According to the handbook, Iran’s filtering systems “block access to hundreds of thousands of websites?. The regime is capable of the worst censorship and also set a record in 2005 by throwing nearly 20 bloggers in prison over the preceding 10 months. Three of them were still there on August 1, 2005.”

A 10-minute walk west of Citizen Lab, at the Tik Talk Cafe, Iranian-born blogger Hossein Derakhshandiscusses the choked-up web in his country. “You can’t really use the Internet,” he says, “except for maybe email.” Like Saudi Arabia, China and Kazakhstan, the Iranian regime blocks and filters the Internet. The 31-year-old Canadian citizen realized this when he returned home and searched for his blog online. He was led to a red and blue page that said the site was forbidden. “It’s really suffocating,” he says.

Derakhshan, a website designer and freelance journalist, began blogging about technology, pop culture and Iran when he moved to Toronto from Tehran six years ago. Before he knew it, his English and Farsi blog posts on Editor: Myself consistently grabbed the attention of over 7,000 daily visitors, along with 12,000 people on his mailing list. Then, with the emergence of Internet filtering back home, where many of Derakhshan’s readers reside, his readership was abruptly cut in half. Despite these limitations, the self-described outsider is credited with igniting the blog movement in Iran with his guide to blogging, published on the site November, 5 2001. Now, there are at least 70,000 active Persian blogs – more than the number of blogs in Spanish, Chinese, Italian, German or Russian. “It’s mainstream there,” he says.

Derakhshan uses three metaphors to describe how blogging changed Iran: windows, bridges and cafés. Blogging facilitated a window effect, inviting outsiders to look in, and vice versa. Bridges connected communities that never communicated, like men reading women’s points of view. And then the café effect: blogs started debate that was otherwise absent in Iran “because of the government’s monopoly on the public sphere,” he says.

The even-tempered agitator acknowledges the pressures on Iranian bloggers, and he says most know the lines they cannot cross. For instance, they can’t insult the Supreme Leader; for this, Derakhshan was detained and questioned by an intelligence ministry official on his last Tehran trip, then banned from leaving the country until he wrote an apology. But the blogger is careful to underscore that the Iranian government isn’t as harsh as westerners may think: he says most of the 20 Iranian bloggers were arrested for other things – they just happened to have blogs.

More than politics, Persians tend to write about their daily experiences. “Because the government wants to control your life as much as it can,” Derakhshan says, “anything you do that challenges that authority is political. Even if it’s not really about politics.” For the star blogger, that’s good enough. He thinks journalism is something people should do on the side, like blogging. With the December release of Psiphon, perhaps we’ll hear more voices rise over state-controlled media and web censorship in the new form of journalism: the blog.

It’s mid-morning. Tu Thanh Ha is at work writing a story about a Canadian astronaut’s spacewalk. He’s been up since 4 a.m. covering the event and expects to head home soon from The Globe and Mail‘s four-person bureau in Montreal.

As Ha types, The Toronto Star‘s news editor Alan Christie arrives at 1 Yonge Street on Toronto’s waterfront. He sits behind his large desk and watches the news broadcast from a nearby television. Both Christie and Ha have no idea what kind of day they’re in for.

Over in the National Post‘s newsroom in Don Mills, editors throw story ideas around at their morning meeting. Meanwhile, Post nighttime news editor Scott Stinson has been up for hours and will head into work soon. Back downtown, Stephen Hui, one of the Toronto Sun‘s editors, prepares for work as his colleagues begin piecing tomorrow’s paper together.

Chris Carter, the Star‘s online editor, weaves through the mass of desks, ringing phones and chatting people in the newsroom. He’s touching base with the other editors of Star PM, the new afternoon online paper. Though it’s only 1 p.m. and the first edition of Star PM doesn’t go online until 3:30 p.m., the front page is already laid out and almost set to go.

Suddenly, the newsroom bustle increases to a frenzied pace. The televisions tuned to CNN and Newsworld blurt words like “shooting,” “Montreal” and “students.” Twenty minutes earlier, at 12:41 p.m., the first bullet sliced through the air at Montreal’s Dawson College. By the time word reaches Toronto newsrooms, two lives have ended.

Ha’s phone rings in Montreal. His colleague Ingrid Peritz calls from home.

“Have you heard?”

“Yes.”

“I’m coming down.”

Ha hangs up and heads to the subway – he’s 15 minutes from the scene.

In Toronto, Carter and his staff prepare for the chase.

“This is going to be a big story,” he thinks.

If Carter tracks down the shooter’s name he’ll scoop his competition – but he won’t be the only one searching.

While editors overhaul Star PM‘s front page, Scott Stinson arrives at Post headquarters. He walks into a newsroom scrambling for the most recent information. Someone calls up the Post‘s business reporter in Montreal and tells him to stop whatever he is doing. Soon, two more Post reporters in Montreal are contacted, including one on maternity leave. They’re all sent for the story.

Minutes before the Montreal subway is shut down, Ha steps off a train and finds the Dawson College exit closed. He’s swept into the tide of bodies exiting into the nearby mall. There, an even larger crowd anxiously walks out of the mall: there may be a gunman on the loose and the mall is being evacuated. As Ha walks, he interviews people.

Back on King Street in downtown Toronto, Hui arrives at the Sun offices to the same newsroom flurry: “Three shooters,” “16 injured,” “two gunmen dead,” “12 hospitalized.” Stinson watches a CBC live broadcast on a television in the Post newsroom: “We can now confirm four people are dead,” the report states.

“Be careful here,” Carter tells his Star staff, “the information is changing so quickly.” At 3 p.m., half an hour before Star PM‘s first edition goes online, its staff meets. Because Star PM is only weeks old, Ram Mohabir, project manager on the technical side, sits in. Currently, the system allows for two updates. Carter, turning to Mohabir, says, “We’re going to be wanting to update this thing beyond five o’clock.” Mohabir puts in a call to extend the deadline, and soon the system is operational until 9 p.m.

By evening, the details become clearer. Montreal police chief Yvan Delorme explains that police in the Dawson College vicinity on unrelated business heard gunshots at 12:41 p.m. The gunman, armed with three firearms, ran into the college and began shooting randomly. At least 20 people were injured. One female student died at the scene. Police shot and killed the suspect.

Reporters stand outside Montreal’s General Hospital and recite numbers to the cameras: nearly a dozen ambulances, eight people in critical condition, three undergoing operations. There is still no word on the gunman’s name.

Carter leaves the newsroom at 7 p.m., an hour and a half later than usual. Star PM has published five versions throughout the afternoon, rather than its usual two. Slowly, the night crew has started to arrive. Christie isn’t going anywhere. He settles in for the second half of what has turned into a double shift.

On most nights, Hui would be leaving the Sun‘s offices and heading home too, but tonight he remains at his desk. He emails and phones back and forth with editors of Journal de Montreal, a Sun Media sister paper. All afternoon they’ve been providing updates to the Sun. Managing editor Gord Walsh prepares for the Sun‘s copy deadline at 9 p.m. He tells his news team, “Let’s get everything else out of the way so we can concentrate on Dawson.” He needs that name.

Ha sips on another cola in his Montreal cubicle: the adrenaline from the day has worn off. He spent several hours interviewing distraught students and now he and Peritz settle in to write. They’ve just gotten off the phone with Globe national editor Noreen Rasbach in Toronto and the plan is to piece together a reconstruction. It is unusual for a national paper to cover municipal crime, so Ha and his colleagues don’t have police sources to contact. Instead, Peritz zips chunks of writing Ha’s way via email from the next cubicle. Ha pieces the facts together and prepares a final copy as his 18-hour day draws to a close.

As the first editions of the Sun and the Post run off the presses, Christie sits in the middle of the newsroom amidst about 20 staff. They swirl around him, writing, rewriting and watching the wires. It’s 10:25 p.m., 20 minutes to first edition deadline.

A phone rings. It’s for Christie. The voice on the other end of the line utters the words he wants to hear. “We got it,” Christie thinks. The voice belongs to someone at La Presse. The Star and La Presse have been in contact throughout the day, mostly sharing pictures.

The air changes and Christie is excited. “It’s Gill Kimveer,” he tells his staff. They won’t make the first deadline, but they have an hour and a half to rewrite the paper.

Thirty minutes later, as the first edition of the Star prints, with the identical front page picture the Globe uses, the phone rings again. “We got it backwards,” the same voice tells Christie. “It’s Kimveer Gill.”

Furious fingers work the keyboards. It takes mere minutes to find a website called VampireFreaks.com and the pictures that put a face to the name.

At almost the same moment the phone rings in the Sun and Hui picks up. It’s someone from La Journal. “Great, let me know when you confirm it as soon as you can.” He doesn’t have a name yet, but something almost as good: a promise it’s coming.

Christie and Hui share similar thoughts as the clock ticks beyond 11 p.m. They both picture a new front page, and they both think they have an exclusive.

At the Post, Stinson would normally be leaving, but tonight he stays behind, scouring Montreal area websites for something, anything.

The next morning Stinson leafs through the Post that gets delivered to his door. Most days he checks the other papers online, but today he doesn’t want to see them. He knows there is a good chance somebody else got the gunman’s name.

It isn’t until Stinson walks through a mall on his way to work that he sees the first two words in the Star‘s headline: Kimveer Gill. Below is a picture of a young man wearing a leather jacket, proudly holding a gun. A moment later, he reads on the front page that La Presse identified the killer late the night before, and relaxes a little. He figures that’s how the Star got it, through its relationship with La Presse.

The Sun also displays a picture of the shooter, as he aims a gun into the reader’s face. The headline begins with the word “exclusive.”

As Stinson continues to work he shrugs it off – there’s nothing he and his staff could have done differently.

MONTREAL — The woman to my left probably wants me removed from the premises. Ten people have already tried to steal my seat and I’m not even grateful for the view. I’m drawing whales and giraffes in my notebook, pausing only to yawn and to check that no one’s swiped my bag. I gave up on listening 15 minutes ago when the French soprano inexplicably began eating spaghetti onstage. Unfortunately for me, that particular debacle marked the start of the night, and there’s a good two hours left.

Meanwhile, the woman couldn’t be more attentive. She’s decked out in Michael Ignatieff buttons and wears an earpiece that translates French into English. She’s beside me in the first place because she simply shrugged it off when told that her chair was reserved for someone else. “You gave me the courage to do that, when I saw you sitting here by yourself,” she leaned in and told me.

I’m at the Liberal leadership convention in Montreal, enduring tonight’s tribute to former prime minister Paul Martin. There’s an Ignatieff delegate beside me, three frat-boy type Gerard Kennedy supporters behind, and a man in a Team Brison jacket is crouching on the floor in front. Nevertheless, I’m hoping, vainly, to find a kindred spirit among the thousands in this main hall. Someone who’s here because she has to be. Someone who balks at descriptions of Martin as hero, outstanding Canadian and close personal friend to worldleaders. Most importantly, someone whose idea of a good time doesn’t involve listening to Colin James.

But tonight, just as every other day at the Palais des Congrès, I’m overwhelmed by the sheer mass of overenthusiastic Liberals. They’re everywhere. Trying to get around the Palais at any given moment is like walking down a New York City street — the noise is excessive and my hands are shoved full of papers and promotional flyers in mere minutes.
 Of course, there’s good reason to be excited. These delegates and supporters have come from all over Canada to choose a new leader for the Liberal Party, something they’ve lacked since Martin stepped down in February. The date and rules for this convention were announced one month later, leading to the prolonged but civil campaign. By the time the Convention officially began on November 28, stories about the eight candidates still in the running — Stéphane Dion, Michael Ignatieff, Bob Rae, Gerard Kennedy, Ken Dryden, Joe Volpe, Scott Brison and Martha Hall Findlay — had been all but exhausted. “People have been trying for months to make it interesting,” says Murray Campbell, Queen’s Park columnist for The Globe and Mail. “The party gets more press out of this than a whole year’s worth of Question Periods.”

Luckily, I don’t have to look for a good story in all the empty sign-wavings, speeches and organized delegate marches. I’m here to see how other journalists do it.

• • •

“Essentially, this is close to our Olympic Games. It’s the place to be for us,” says CBC/RDI assignment editor Denis Ferland, who has reported on leadership conventions since Brian Mulroney’s win in 1983. “Physically it’s demanding. You have to be prepared.”

And the reporters here are. Television crews stay up all night, people blog past midnight and it looks like some journalists have spent all weekend in the media room. “We tag-team and share a lot of information,” says Toronto Life writer Philip Preville. “It’s crazy because you don’t know who will win and there’s different stories everywhere. You have to try to keep your tentacles out at all times.”

Oddly, the one I expected to be the most stressed is the one calmly perched on the edge of her desk in the media room. As the Ottawa Citizen’s invariably busy Juliet O’Neill feverishly types one row over, Toronto Starcolumnist Chantal Hébert says, “I have zero pressure.” Hébert, along with the National Post’s Andrew Coyne, are part of a regular team for Peter Mansbridge’s CBC roundtable discussions throughout the convention. But as for her next file deadline, she says, “My next story is about who the next leader is. I don’t have to worry about who’s saying what.”

Naturally, though, most reporters are keen to find out that very thing. Not only will it determine who comes out the victor in this convention, it will also likely mean a new prime minister and dealing with the new rules regarding media access that he will presumably implement.

“Stephen Harper really has hostility towards the media. It’s always been difficult, but he’s made it more difficult,” says Madelaine Drohan, The Economist’s Ottawa correspondent. “The Liberals don’t look on us as the enemy, but it’s worth noting that all opposition parties have a better relationship with the media. A mutual partnership develops out of the common interest in taking on the government. And then once they get in power, they’re the ones the media are taking on.”

Most of the journalists I talk to enjoy covering conventions, but gathering delegates together from across the country under one roof for a weekend convention is the old-fashioned, expensive way of electing a leader. Most other parties, the Conservatives included, now conduct their leadership contests via the ‘one-member, one-vote’ system. In this method, a leader is elected through individual votes as opposed to a big assembly. When Harper was elected leader of his party in 2004, about 250,000 registered party members voted and the convention that followed was simply a congratulatory one. When the decision to decide whether or not to adopt this new method came before the Liberal delegates here, though, they went for the status quo over the high-tech.

This is disappointing for Hébert, who favours the one-member, one-vote system. She believes it makes the candidate work harder for individual votes, thus strengthening the entire party. But, she says, “I’ll still be sorry when we stop doing this, and this one is less of a dog-and-pony show than the other conventions I’ve been to.”
CPAC reporter Ken Rockburn also says that a convention makes for a more exciting weekend. We’re in the middle of a conversation in the Palais lobby when he gets a call on his BlackBerry — young Dion delegate Annie Donolo, whose progress he is following, has just voted in the second round and is at the top of the big escalator. Does he want to come and find her for an interview? It takes us a few minutes to locate his cameraman and boom mike operator in the throng of people surrounding us. It takes about the same amount of time for Rockburn to ask Donolo his questions, none of which he had written down beforehand. “The best convention story is finding delegates who will be honest with you, and not just say their lines over and over,” he says. Donolo says she’ll phone him again for another interview later in the day.

• • •

Unfortunately, even this dedicated mass of reporters can’t keep pace with the rapidity of events on the final day. Jan Davis, a Dion delegate from Montreal, says that’s why he doesn’t trust the newspapers. “If you read this morning’s paper,” he says, “it’s out of date by 10 a.m.” He’s right. A Saturday Toronto Star headline reads “Leadership is still up for grabs: Rae best positioned to catch Ignatieff in today’s voting,” but Rae was knocked out of the race shortly after 3 p.m. when Davis picked up his copy of the paper. He held it up high above his head to a roomful of delegates. “Everyone laughed because he’d just been eliminated,” Davis said.

But up on the fourth floor sit a dozen people who are never behind on the news. They’re the official bloggers of the convention, the first to be accorded this status at a leadership convention. When I arrive at their headquarters, they’re watching Rick Mercer’s interview with Rae on CBC and discussing whether or not Belinda Stronach’s newly dyed hair makes her more attractive (yes). I count 11 men and one woman, but am told that no one really knows how many bloggers are working this convention — they come and go, spend some time on the floor, come back, and go again. CPAC’s Rockburn says the blogging room is “more intense than being at any of the speeches.”

 Each blogger is a registered member of Liblogs and is invited here because of his or her work on the blog network. Ignatieff delegate Devin Maxwell comes from Halifax and upkeepsMaxwell’s House, a blog that received between 250-300 hits a day during the convention. To his right is Miranda Hussey, a second-year forensic science student at Trent University. She sports bright green Dion gear and maintainsA View From The Left. “People like reading blogs,” she says, “because they know where our biases are. If you read a newspaper you’re always trying to find the writer’s bias, but we make no attempt at neutrality.”

They’re a close-knit, friendly group who often posted comments on each other’s blogs before meeting for the first time at the convention. “We have fun,” Hussey says. “We sit around and watch the news, and then we all argue about what it means.”

Indeed, in the hour or so that I spend with them, they fall silent only when the second poll results are about to be announced. At 11:34 a.m., Maxwell readies his blog by typing in each candidate’s name. The results are broadcast at 11:51 a.m., and Maxwell hurriedly inputs the figures. Three minutes later, he pushes his chair back. “All right, I’m going to eat.”

But Hussey is still hunched over the table, punching numbers into her calculator. She compares these results to the first round figures, which were announced shortly after midnight, following the candidates’ speeches. “It looks like, from these numbers, that Iggy and Kennedy have basically stalled,” she writes, posting at noon. She updates the blog five minutes later to write that Dryden has moved to Rae’s camp (“What the HELL is Rae offering people?”), and she throws her green Dion baseball cap at the keyboard in frustration.
For a few moments it looks like Kennedy won’t be giving up his position, despite his dismal fourth-place finish in the second poll. Hussey is still angry. I ask her what it’s like to have to blog about such an upsetting event that she has a vested interest in, but she doesn’t look away from the footage of Kennedy mincing across the floor. I don’t think she heard my question. “I can’t… I can’t believe he’s not dropping,” is all she says.

But then he does. At 12:17 p.m., when Kennedy throws his support to Dion, Hussey jumps from her chair to clap and post a short entry filled with exclamation marks about the good news. She abruptly shuts down her laptop two minutes later. “We need all the Kennedy supporters we can get,” Hussey says. She grabs the only two Dion scarves she has left. “I’m going to hand these out on the floor.” She’s already given one to me.

• • •

Down in the media room, Toronto Life’s Preville is nervously eyeing the latest figures on CBC. “If Dion wins, I don’t have a story,” he says. “I came here looking for a story that is pertinent to Toronto Life. I had a bet that with six out of the eight candidates coming from the Toronto area, they could pull it off.”

He had the stories already outlined. If the former NDP Premier of Ontario won, Preville planned to write about the relationship that would unfold in Parliament between Rae and NDP leader Jack Layton. If Kennedy won, the article would have focused on how the Liberal party was so weak that it needed a former minister from Queen’s Park to come in and take over. “I knew what the story would be with Rae, Ignatieff, and Kennedy,” says Preville. “Not Dion.”

Dion wins a few hours later, besting Ignatieff by 437 votes. Fireworks explode in the room and I narrowly avoid accidental bludgeoning by ecstatic Dion sign-wavers. Journalists start making their way back to the media room, and I follow them to find the same scene — the scrum around the television, O’Neill rapidly typing away, and reporters settling in behind their own laptops for what will likely be a long night.

Nobody ever said that covering an event of Olympic proportions would be easy. Nor is observing it. After spending two and a half days at this convention, with its packed halls, sloganeering and speech after speech of what will undoubtedly become empty promises, the life of a political-issues reporter has never seemed less appealing. But at least, in the words of CBC-TV Montreal reporter Dan Halton, “It beats doing a cold-weather story outside.”

Number 29 bends so low the photographer’s camera lens is centred with the crack of cleavage between her breasts – and he’s crouching on the floor nearly six inches below the makeshift stage. The blonde then sucks in her small belly and, impossibly, she’s thinner. Slow and exact, her hands rove over the tight fabric of her shameless black dress, lingering on X-spots.

Five camera flashes, 20 seconds and it’s over.

I could have been No. 45. Instead, I retreat back to the mix of media and male gawkers after seeing the photographer encourage No. 33 to inch up her shirt.

Tucked into a corner of swanky Toronto club This Is London, the softly-lit stage was originally set for celebrity guests – like wrestler Big Deal – at the mid-September launch of Canada’s newest women’s magazine, Bobbi. No one actually asked the bombshells to get on stage. Creative director Stephanie Martino says she was lucky that model applications from UMM – the Canadian men’s magazine that created Bobbi – were handy, because centre-spread hopefuls wouldn’t stop asking for them.

These impromptu photo shoots started a week earlier at the magazine’s Ottawa launch and are part ofBobbi‘s mandate to turn the lady’s world of fashion and beauty magazines upside down. But, as I see No. 37 joined by two buff men, I wonder if there’s more to Bobbi than making would-be readers into Miss UMM.

Like Masthead magazine editor Bill Shields says, if UMM is publisher Abbis Mahmoud’s Canadian G-rated Playboy – he’s known to admire Hugh Hefner – then Bobbi is his Playgirl.

Actually dubbed the “girlfriend” magazine to UMM (Urban Male Monthly) by editor Jen Hooey, Bobbi is tagged as “everything a modern girl needs.” And that’s not, Hooey says, 80 pages of advertising on fashion and beauty followed by 40 pages of editorial on the same. While Bobbi will tell its readers what Paris Hilton is wearing, she says, it will also fill in the gaps other women’s magazines ignore: electronics, video games, cars, motorcycles, poker and world issues.

And if that sounds eerily close to a men’s magazine, thats’ because it’s supposed to.

Bobbi sells itself as the magazine for young, hip women who like gadgets more than cooking and motorcycles as much as lipstick, betting there are a lot of young, hip women out there who want their own kind of women’s magazine. But it’s also the magazine for women who aspire to be “babes of the month” for UMM.

Managing editor Chris Tessaro says that women in their readership target – 18 to 34 year olds – still aren’t recognized as powerful consumers in what have been traditionally male markets, like trendy electronics and sleek automobiles. “Thirty years ago,” he says, “the ideal was put forth that women had to wait for marriage to think about those things, but that’s no longer the case.”

So, in its premiere issue, Bobbi offered women advice on things like how to buy a stylish hard drive and learn to ride a Harley. “I find that fascinating – almost revolutionary,” says Lisa Rundle, co-editor of Turbo Chicks, an anthology of feminist writing. “How sad is that?”

So, when the geek in me drools over Bobbi‘s review of video game Dreamfall – the lead female character’s breasts are actually smaller than my head – I have to admit they have a point. I would never find this in Canada’s feminist magazine, Herizons, or in its largest selling monthly, Chatelaine. Shields calls Bobbi a “novel” idea for that reason. The magazine will fill a market void, he says, and there really isn’t a magazine like it in English-speaking Canada.

Canadian women’s magazines today are big on puff. Flare, Fashion, Lou Lou, Elle Canada and Glow all focus on traditional female staples like home, fashion, beauty and shopping. Even Chatelaine has distanced itself from the relevancy it gained during the Doris Anderson days and moved into a world of tortes and flambés. And, as Rundle says, it’s not that women don’t like reading about trendy clothes and tasty recipes – they do – it’s that they want more. “I don’t object to what’s in there,” Rundle says, “but to what’s not in there.”

Back at the Toronto launch, there isn’t much that isn’t there. Across the room from No. 29, a poker table is crowded with men and women oblivious to the incessant beat of club music. A film of smoke covers them even though nobody’s smoking. The game is sponsored by online site fullcontactpoker.com, and users have “full contact” with poker guru Daniel Negreanu. I’ve never heard of him, but I take a free visor.

In line with the table is a live bodypiercing set-up. A brunette teeters into the leather chair and passes her drink to one of two friends. The other pulls out a camera and clicks a play-by-play of the nose piercing. Those heading to the washroom stop to watch. The inch-long needle hangs suspended in the girl’s nose before the piercer grabs the stud. One Q-Tip, two, three turn red as he blots the blood. And I was always told you shouldn’t drink before being pierced.

The delicate balance between macho men and modern women seems to have had its first blush of success. Tessaro says Bobbi‘s premiere issue had a sell-through of 18 per cent in its first week – normally premiere issues average one point less than that in a month. He says Bobbi gained its unique outlook because publisher Mahmoud went to the “grassroots” – a strange term to use for a magazine that has Matthew McConaughey plastered on its front cover. Tessaro explains his use of the term, saying that for three years prior to the launch Mahmoud asked every woman he met what Canadian magazines were missing for them. It turned out to be the basics of UMM – cars, gadgets, games and music – mixed in with women’s beauty and fashion.

And I’m not entirely against the UMM man. I did go all prickly when singer Jarvis Church brushed against me at the launch. And when Bobbi‘s male models smiled at me, I smiled back. But when Bobbi asks me to admit I sometimes trip across a guy that makes [my] tongue roll out of [my] mouth. Not because he’s smart, or funny, or thoughtful, but simply because he’s tasty, I revolt. Like Rundle, I just want something more.

Bobbi tries. Hooey says the Global Vision section of the magazine is designed to “open people’s eyes to women’s issues around the world.” While the attempt is laudable, the tone, which is designed to be conversational, is as cheesy as No. 29’s moves. For instance, a line in the opening for Bobbi’s spread on sex trafficking, female genital mutilation and female education: “As a woman living in a developed nation you are the sole decider of what does, and more importantly, does NOT happen to your body.”

Excuse me? Combined with the constant use of the phrase, “As a western woman,” the “Us vs. Them” positioning does much to bolster the middle-class white woman, but nothing to remind her that rape, abortion rights, prostitution and physical abuse are close to her in Canada. Former Homemaker’s editor Dianne Rinehart says Canada is composed of people from all over the world, and it’s naive to think that everything that is happening overseas is not happening here. “There’s a suggestion in that attitude,” she says, “that women aren’t capable of reading international issues in an intelligent way.”

I’m informed and intelligent enough to be aware of female genital mutilation in Mali. I don’t need a “Hey, this is what’s up” from Bobbi. I need a report that speaks to these women, that fills me with their helplessness, that sends the pain of having my clitoris cut off by scissors through me, and that makes me feel the sweat bloom on my forehead as metal connects to skin.

But then, Tessaro will remind me, “We’re not the Times, we’re not Maclean’s. We don’t want to be that. We’ll never, never be that.”

Julie Montpetit is preparing for her close-up. The camera pans from her black platform pumps to the nut-coloured leather belt cinched high on her waist. She’s perfectly composed until you meet her eyes, which are tearing up with fright, pink and wet under the spotlights.

It’s a Friday morning in downtown Montreal, and any other day of the week this low-ceilinged room in the basement of the city’s CBC building on René-Lévesque Boulevard East would be an unassuming rehearsal space. Today, contestants pace in front of mirrors memorizing lines while a local evening news crew lurks in the hallway preparing to report on the scene. As for Montpetit, she’s standing in front of a backdrop with theFashion File logo splashed over it, staring at the camera, getting ready to introduce herself. She’s a Montreal school teacher and loves fashion. Like so many people from Vancouver to Halifax, she wants to be the next host of CBC Newsworld’s Fashion File.

Fashion File has been on Newsworld for 17 years. In that time, the program has become an international export, airing in more than 75 countries. For every one of those years, Tim Blanks delivered weekly fashion news from the world’s runways. But the well-known host resigned earlier this year to take a position at Condé Nast’s Style.com. “TV is a lot different now than when Tim started,” says producer Chris Chilco. “We’ve been on the air with the same host for 17 years. That doesn’t happen anymore.” Banks’s departure necessitated a revamp, but Chilco thinks it was probably about time anyway. The first step is recruiting a new host, and Fashion File‘s methods certainly show just how different TV has become.

On September 27, countrywide auditions began for a reality series called Fashion File Host Hunt. The prize will have more real-world cache than any other reality game show. The winner of the 10-episode series becomes Fashion File‘s new host and a monthly columnist for Fashion magazine (St. Joseph Media, which publishes Fashion, is the show’s production partner).

The Host Hunt website suggests star-struck mall-shoppers need not apply. Among other qualities, candidates must have strong reporting skills for both TV and print, good interviewing skills and a solid knowledge of the fashion industry. These resume items may give Host Hunt an aura of seriousness atypical of reality fare, but the question remains why CBC decided to indulge in the genre just one year after publicly balking at the thought. And the country’s top fashion editors complain that introducing the values of reality TV to fashion journalism diminishes the quality of their work.

• • •

In the Montreal studio, each candidate receives the same drill. There is a question about why they should be the new host, and a question about their personal style. There’s a stand-up, and a chance to record some farewell niceties for Tim Blanks. There’s plenty of enthusiasm and enough designer style to fill 50 Holt’s bags, but it’s difficult to tell whether anyone has any skill outside of the dressing room. For on-site producer Corinna Lehr, the real test comes later. “This is just an audition, absolutely,” she says. “The show will be the more legitimate job interview.”

In the Host Hunt waiting room, in the basement of the Montreal CBC building, there are plenty of journalists – from those who’ve covered the Middle East to the latest season of Project Runway – and there are also publicists, designers, lawyers, ex-models, actors and a tour guide.

Whatever the motivation, glamour is a long way off, even by reality-audition standards. By the 9 a.m. sign-in time, only nine hopefuls are in line. By the end of the sign-in period (which, for stragglers, is extended past its noon deadline) not quite 30 have passed through. Lehr says they had approximately 40 in Halifax two days prior.

Hopefuls are led downstairs to a low-ceilinged rehearsal space that could pass for an old church basement. Not much can be heard above the buzz of fluorescent bulbs but nervous whispers and small talk. Two would-be fashionistas at the casting director’s desk ham it up for the behind-the-scenes camera by staging a faux interview.

The pace is slow, much to the relief of those waiting. Michael Sinnott and Brent Madigan are next up. “I thought I saw a lot of heads outside and was like ?Oh no!'” says Sinnott. “But when I got here at eight there weren’t that many people.” Madigan adds, “I thought it would be more Canadian Idol style, but no. It’s got me more excited.”

• • •

Last October, CBC president Robert Rabinovitch was quoted at a meeting of Parliament’s Heritage Committee saying, “?We do not do reality programming. If we just were chasing audiences, or just were chasing rating points, we could do reality programming.” Since then, CBC has not only developed reality shows like the upcoming Host Hunt, it has also launched a new corporate department – dubbed the Factual Entertainment Division – dedicated to the cultivation of similar programming. “Another way to say reality,” says Chilco.

Rabinovitch was grilled at a meeting of the Heritage Committee, held on September 27, 2005. New Democratic Party heritage critic Charlie Angus asked him: “I’m wondering, did something change dramatically in the six or seven months between deciding on that show and when we were told that we would not have reality TV?” Rabinovitch told Angus his remarks from 2005 were ambiguous, that the CBC would broadcast a different style of reality TV and that the Factual Entertainment Division would avoid “shows that stress plastic surgery, sex and humiliation [and the] eating of insects.”

Chilco echoes Rabinovitch, saying Host Hunt aims to be more sophisticated than typical reality TV fare. “The genre isn’t going anywhere but there’s plenty of room to make it smarter.” But reality TV, especially of the reality search variety, can also be nothing more than a sophisticated marketing exercise. Chilco doesn’t denyHost Hunt is an ideal promo for the launch of a rebranded Fashion File. “It works nicely with promotion,” says Chilco, “but I don’t think it was thought up as a promotion.”

With the departure of a high-profile host like Blanks, there might also be the suspicion that Host Hunt was dreamt up out of desperation. Not so, says Cathie James, the Factual Entertainment Division executive in charge of the program. James says the program’s development has nothing to do with failing numbers. “It’s not a matter of ?Ohmigod, the numbers are going down! We’ve got to fix it!’ says James. “It’s more the CBC really needs to grow and improve something.” Although Newsworld does not make audience figures public, James says, “Fashion File is one of the most successful CBC television shows of the last 20 years.”

• • •

It’s Saturday morning, the second day of auditions in Montreal, and the energy in the waiting room is high. Field director Richard Yearwood has just chased the first group of 10 from the lobby to the waiting room. He’s laughing and jumping from interview to interview. His bobbing camera gets a chuckle from a woman in Jackie O glasses and stilettos who’s been avoiding his probing lens. An hour and a half later, he’s revving up group cheer sessions for the camera.

Clusters of hopefuls file into the basement 10 by 10, teetering on this season’s must-have high-heeled boots and pulling demo reels from oversized purses. Some have been waiting upstairs since 8 a.m. Others, like one former fashion model, are casual visitors lured in by today’s CBC building open house who’ve been culled by casting volunteers. This suddenly quickened pace is definitely truer to the genre’s form.

Whether or not CBC will succeed with Host Hunt won’t be known until the series airs in February. While we await the verdict – flop or hit – reality TV’s tacky reputation makes industry professionals such as Flare editor-in-chief Lisa Tant nervous. “I work my ass off,” she says, and the same goes, she says, of colleagues such as Blanks, whom she regularly sees when covering catwalks. “If you go in there and you’ve got what it takes and they’re putting you next to somebody who just has a perky attitude and just looks good on TV, frankly, I think it’s insulting.”

Jeanne Beker, host of Fashion Television – Fashion File‘s flashier competition – has a similarly critical view. “Can’t imagine that a bonafide, experienced, credible journalist would want to subject him/herself to a reality show competition of this nature,” she writes from her BlackBerry. “But then again, maybe they’re not looking for a bonafide, credible, experienced type.”

• • •

Back on Friday, the first day of try-outs, Paris Mansouri is beaming as she leaves the audition room. Petite, with sleek black hair and wide, excited dark eyes, she has a tendency to burst into quick repartee. “I went to J-school for Jeanne Beker,” Mansouri says, and indeed, she bears more than a little resemblance to the fashion journalism icon. Mansouri does casual work for CBC Montreal’s radio news. She has reported from the Middle East and was a senior editor for the Egyptian fashion magazine, Enigma. Fashion File, however, is her dream gig, as it has been since she was a kid tuning into Fashion File and Fashion Television every week. “That’s what I knew of journalism,? she says. Mansouri found out about Host Hunt through her work at CBC and doesn’t have any qualms about doing a reality show for the spot instead of a simple, internal job interview. “It’s TV 101 to attract viewership,” she says. “Maybe people would feel that a show to get the new Peter Mansbridge would be wrong, but it doesn’t discredit this program.”

The Host Hunt team says the show is conceived as a contest, but that only the most serious, qualified person stands a chance of winning. Fashion editor-in-chief Ceri Marsh, who will play a yet-to-be-defined role in the show, says, “Anyone has a shot, but they’re not the one who wins – obviously the most skilled person will succeed.”

Another contestant, Guy Gerbal, knows this. Covering fashion, like covering the news, takes dedicated reporting. Today he’s just one applicant in a room, but from 2000 to 2004 he was a member of the Fashion File team, assembling reports for its French-language counterpart, Griffe. Gerbal left Griffe when the show stopped, but now he’s jumping at the chance to rejoin the team again – this time as host.

With his arms crossed tightly across his chest, Gerbal appears nervous. His eyes dart around the room as he sizes up the competition. He points out a couple of local fashion insiders kiss-kissing across the room. “It’s difficult,? he says. “I don’t know, maybe some people are just coming for fun, dreaming of being on TV.”

Gerbal’s gaze continues to flit back and forth until casting director Larissa Mair catches his attention. “You’re up,” she says. Gerbal exhales loudly. He brushes off his slacks, takes a script from Mair and prepares to audition. It’s time to face reality.

On Wednesday, September 13, the calm of a rainy early afternoon at Montreal’s Dawson College was broken by gunfire. Kimveer Gill entered the campus carrying a semi-automatic Beretta and began shooting like a child at a midway game. He fired 60 shots, wounding 20 people and killing one before turning the gun on himself.

Three days later, another kind of shot was fired, this time by veteran reporter Jan Wong of The Globe and Mail. Wong’s long, compelling investigation of what happened at Dawson that day, as seen through the eyes of one faculty member, entitled “‘Get Under the Desk’,” was published in the National News section of the Saturday, September 16 edition of the Globe. In the article, she speculated that Quebec’s pure laine language policy might partly be to blame for the shootings because it had fostered isolation and racism towards English-speaking Quebecers. Irate readers, including Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Quebec Premier Jean Charest, sent in letters of protest. Numerous journalists also weighed in — mostly against Wong and her damning cultural assertion — on the Canadian Association of Journalists listserv.

But, buried underneath the rubble of whether or not Wong’s comments constituted a form of discrimination against French-speaking Quebecers lay an important journalistic question: Should a reporter be allowed to editorialize within a news feature?

Anthony Westell struggled with this exact issue while riding on John Diefenbaker’s train when covering the 1965 federal election campaign. At the time, he was the Globe‘s Ottawa bureau chief. “I had noted during the campaign Diefenbaker saying things that I knew to be incorrect,” he says. While other journalists reported Diefenbaker’s argument plainly and then got the other side, Westell tried a different approach. Instead, he corrected Diefenbaker’s errors by constantly undercutting his argument, dotting contradictory facts throughout the article in parentheses. “I had certain anxieties about what I was doing,” he says, “since I didn’t know what my editor would think, or whether my article could be published.”

Westell reported to then-editor-in-chief Dic Doyle, who praised the piece and only cut for length. While that particular story ran in the commentary section, Westell says he put his own brand of editorial analysis into his reporting from then on.

Wong’s article began with the story of Pina Salvaggio, a mother who teaches at Dawson, searching for her son, a student. So far, so good — this part of the story was generally well received. However, about 500 words into her 3,000-word-plus feature, she linked the Gill rampage to previous Montreal shooting sprees, one by Marc Lepine at Ecole Polytechnique in 1989, and another by Valery Fabrikant at Concordia University in 1992. Wong then wondered if all three shootings weren’t the result of a language policy that discriminates against English Quebecers. She wrote: “What many outsiders don’t realize is how alienating the decades-long linguistic struggle has been in the once-cosmopolitan city. It hasn’t just taken a toll on long-time anglophones, it’s affected immigrants, too. To be sure, the shootings in all three cases were carried out by mentally disturbed individuals. But what is also true is that in all three cases, the perpetrator was not pure laine, the argot for a ‘pure’ francophone. Elsewhere, to talk of racial ‘purity’ is repugnant. Not in Quebec.”

This paragraph provoked both the Prime Minister’s Office and the Quebec Premier’s office into action, and the leaders wrote letters to the editor. An incensed Harper wrote, “[Wong’s] argument is patently absurd and without foundation. It is not only grossly irresponsible on her part, it is also completely prejudiced to lay blame on Quebec society in this manner.”

Globe editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon responded in his column the following Saturday, September 23. He defended the first part of Wong’s story and noted that the reaction to it was disproportionate, but concluded by saying, “[The offending] paragraphs were clearly opinion and not reporting and should have been removed from that story. To the extent they may have been used, they should have been put into a separate piece clearly marked opinion.”

But Westell often editorialized in his news reporting throughout his long career, and other high profile journalists such as Peter C. Newman combined reporting and opinion, with his stories often appearing on the cover of The Toronto Star. Westell believes that Wong’s article is appropriate in a newspaper. “This was not a straight news piece,” he says. “She was offering analysis and reasoning for why something happened the way it did, and is perfectly entitled to her own opinion.”

Readers are certainly entitled to disagree with the writer’s opinion. Jeffrey Dvorkin, executive director of the Committee of Concerned Journalists and ex-ombudsman for National Public Radio, says Wong’s opinion was unsupported and didn’t illuminate the story. Rather, it served to aggravate relations between French and English Canadians. “Expressing a personal opinion is not the same as news analysis,” he says. “There is a role for news analysis, but it has to be based on factual reporting. In the end, her opinion was based on an expression of her personal vanity and not an expression of knowledge.”

Barbara Kay agrees. The National Post columnist knows what it’s like to be in the crosshairs of Quebec’s public feedback. She, too, once raised Charest’s ire after suggesting that Quebec could become a breeding ground for Islamic terrorism in her article, “The Rise of Quebecistan,” last August. However, she says Wong often crosses the line between opinion and news for the sake of controversy. She blames negligent editing for the quarrel around Wong’s article. “They know what she is,” Kay says, “and she has said many stupid things in the past.”

Andrew McIntosh, a former colleague of Wong’s who now works at The Sacramento Bee, disagrees. “Her dual role as a columnist and feature writer puts her in a confusing spot to begin with. Is she a columnist, or feature writer, or both?” he asks. “Line editors of marquee writers and columnists are not properly instructed on how to deal with situations where a writer does both jobs, so the copy doesn’t get edited specific to both roles.”

Bill Dunphy, who works the poverty beat for The Hamilton Spectator, thinks the solution is better labeling. “Whenever I read a Jan Wong story, I know exactly what I’m getting. I think probably not all newspaper readers pay that much attention. So it’s up to us to label things for them.”

The New York Times created a committee for specifically that purpose. The News/Opinion Divide Committee worked for nine months to create a system to distinguish between columns, reviews and straight-news pieces using labels and layout. The changes went into effect September 27.

But even if the Globe story lacked sufficient labeling, Dunphy still defends the reporter. “When you send someone like Jan Wong, you’re really looking to hear her voice. She’s largely fearless — you get opinions that other people may have that they don’t have the guts to say out loud, and that I find useful to have in a newspaper. The Globe backed away from that. “