Last summer, Queen’s University’s The Journal ran a story on the renovation and rebranding of a money-losing campus pub. Two months later, the school’s student government pulled its ads—a large part of the paper’s revenue. The move was, according to co-editor-in-chief Alison Shouldice, “an extreme threat to the democracy of the student body on campus.”

It wasn’t the first time this has happened at a Canadian school. Earlier last year, University of Windsor’s The Lance ran a story about possible corruption in a student election. The school’s student union abruptly ordered the paper to shut down its print edition, though that decision was later overturned. And in 2010, The Opus, a paper out of Confederation College in Thunder Bay, Ontario, ran a cover story that jokingly asked its readers, “Is the Opus bigger than Jesus?” The Student Union of Confederation College Incorporated (SUCCI) was so unamused, it took control of the paper and drastically altered its format. An op-ed in Lakehead University’s The Argus called the now government-controlled paper a “mere newsletter for SUCCI, not existing as a service to students, but as a service to the union.” Within months, the Opuswas dead.

While guarantees of editorial autonomy—found in the bylaws and policy documents of student newspapers and governments—prevent campus politicians from directly interfering with editorial content, those politicians can exercise control through other means. These three instances aren’t the only examples of student unions trying to silence campus journalists, especially when the journalists publicize the unions’ sometimes-unflattering actions.

Across Canada, many student governments are pulling the purse strings of papers, either as major funders or the main advertisers. And as long as that’s the case, the independence of—and even survival of—campus publications will remain precarious.

Justin McElroy, a Vancouver-based journalist at Global News B.C., and alum of The Ubyssey, the University of British Columbia’s paper, says the power dynamic is untenable. “I always urge campus newspapers to find a way to become independent non-profits so they’re immune from this sort of bullying from their student union.”

Despite the obvious advantages, not all papers can pull off becoming truly financially independent. To understand why these publications stay under the thumbs of student governments, let’s start with the challenges.

Every year, if not every semester, campus papers can expect entirely new faces in the newsroom, from reporters to ad coordinators to editors. Who has time to fight for independence or restructure the business model while hunting down sources and keeping up with class assignments? “How can you make any kind of solid changes?” asks Sarah Horwath, editor-in-chief of the Lance. “It’s a constant revolving door.”

On top of the workload faced by their staff, student papers struggle with the reality of increasing deficits, which forces them to implement some difficult structural changes. According to an article in Maclean’s, the Journal ran a deficit of over $27,000 last year, forcing the paper down to one print issue per week. And as of last September, The McGill Daily—despite its name and history—cut back from two issues per week to one. In April 2013, the Lance had a deficit of approximately $30,000, 20 percent of its yearly budget, says Horwath.

Often, these deficits are linked to declining ad revenue. Many businesses that once advertised in campus publications now choose to spend ad dollars online, including on sites such as Facebook. Internet ad impressions, the logic goes, can be quantified, measured and tracked. Before it went bankrupt in June 2013, Campus Plus sold ads for dozens of student-run papers across Canada. Now publications are scrambling to find advertisers on their own in a grim market. “Everyone saw a severe decrease in ad revenues for the papers,” says Adam Young, who sits on the board of directors of Canadian University Press. “As much as we feel like we’re the demographic ad agencies want and are interested in, it’s still struggling to get that revenue up.” Often, student governments, or the organizations they fund, are the most prominent ad buyers.

There is a way for editors and reporters to operate freely, says McElroy. “It’s messy when you have to deal with it, but there is a solution. It just takes a little bit of nerve from the people involved.” The Ubyssey held a referendum in the mid-1990s that resulted in the student body agreeing to pay $5 a year to a new non-profit organization. The Ubyssey Publications Society bought the rights to the Ubyssey name from the student government and has published the paper independently ever since.

In 1970, journalists at Wilfrid Laurier realized there was strength in numbers and formed Wilfrid Laurier University Student Publications (WLUSP). The autonomous organization, which launched a campaign for a referendum to circumvent the student union when receiving fees, includes campus paper The Cord, a yearbook and a radio station. Bryn Ossington, WLUSP’s executive director, says the organization now receives fees from the university directly. He says being independent from the students union “frees us up from campus politics.”

Combining forces with other student groups or establishing non-profit organizations is just as possible today. In fact, social media and online petitions should make it easier, faster and cheaper to launch campaigns for truly free campus media, even on a national level.

Student publications could be more creative when soliciting advertising. An improved online presence would provide advertisers with the metrics they need and allow readers to share articles. Editors could be more innovative in their coverage, making their publications relevant to the surrounding communities and a wider pool of advertisers. For example, York University’s official student paper, Excalibur, could aim to cover Toronto’s Jane-Finch community, a neighbourhood mainstream journalism notoriously misrepresents or ignores altogether.

One way or another, these papers must find a way to end the bullying by student governments. Otherwise, colleges and universities will lose an essential voice for democracy and accountability on campus—and Canadian journalism will lose a crucial training ground for the next generation.

Steve Wadhams is editing and layering the voices for a CBC radio documentary about the persecution of Italian Jews during the Second World War for his show, Living Out Loud. His office in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in Toronto is small and the door is open. The foot traffic of radio colleagues out in the hall is a reminder of what’s happening in the here and now, particularly as Wadhams loses himself in the words and voices of people speaking to him from the colour-coded soundtracks on his computer screens.

There are not many like him left. He becomes wistful when asked why he is one of the last radio documentary makers. “It’s not valued somehow or other. Not enough anyway,” he says. “This can die, you know. Easily. Roman Empire died. British Empire died. Everything dies unless you nurture it.”

Although budgets are shrinking and audience numbers in radio have fallen over the years, Wadhams still believes radio docs matter because they take us to new places and connect us emotionally by letting us hear how people experience their lives. “The aim is to take the listener into somebody else’s world,” he says. “Let them spend some time in that world and begin to have some kind of understanding of what it’s like.”

According to Matthew Ehrlich, a journalism professor at the University of Illinois and author ofRadio Utopia: Postwar Audio Documentary in the Public Interest, radio lends itself to effective documentary storytelling. “Radio is a very intimate medium,” he says. “Even when it’s being broadcast to millions of people, it’s still experienced very much one-on-one.” In the 1970s, ’80s, and even into the ’90s, there was ample financial and technical support for radio documentaries at Canada’s national broadcaster. But the production budget for Wadhams’s weekly one-hour program is only $12,000 a year. Still, he has a lot of freedom to do what he wants. He’s paying a freelancer almost half of that budget to co-produce the episode he’s working on: “The Good Italian?” New documents have surfaced and he feels strongly that the story should be told.

Wadhams, who has a British accent even after living in Canada for 40 years, is a tall, lean man. In the mid-’70s, he worked on As It Happens with Barbara Frum and Mark Starowicz. Later, he was one of the original producers at Sunday Morning, a weekly three-hour program that he calls “documentary heaven.” It eventually morphed into The Sunday Edition. Wadhams then tried TV for three years, including two as a documentary producer at The Journal. In 1990, he went back to radio, eventually producing Outfront, a program of personal storytelling by ordinary people that ran until 2009. Living Out Loud incorporates similar elements, notably people telling their own stories. Carol Penner, whose account of helping a stranger through her kidney donation recently aired on the show, says, “He is such an inquiring person with such a kindness about him that he opens people up. I felt I could trust him to tell my story.”

Internationally recognized for his radio docs, Wadhams has received an array of awards, including the prestigious Prix Italia. Ken Puley, senior media librarian at CBC English Radio Archives, remembers being impressed by the sheer breadth of “Africa Week,” an award-winning series that ran for four hours a night for a week in 1980. (Wadhams worked in central Africa before coming to Canada.) “He’s got amazing energy,” Puley says. And Bernie Lucht, former executive producer of Ideas, a show Wadhams contributed to, says he brings a uniquely dramatic imagination to his documentaries. “I think he’s utterly brilliant.” Wadhams, who also gives radio storytelling workshops, emphasizes that stories are not information. They’re meant to make people feel something “below the neck,” he says. “Life is complex. It’s tragic. It’s funny,” says Randall Barnard, a former senior manager at CBC Radio. “And a great documentary tugs on those heartstrings.”

Interested in the stories people tell when they’re in extreme situations, Wadhams creates a sense of place by following people around and recording the sounds as they happen. To understand him, you have to know how he feels about music. “That defines how he hears radio,” says Alan Guettel, former colleague and senior producer of Dispatches, which CBC cancelled in 2012. Wadhams, who at one point wanted to be a professional French horn player, sings in a choir. In his documentaries, he finds music in the real-life scenes he records. And he applies musical concepts such as cadence, rhythm, pacing and pitch, infusing the productions with a dramatic feeling. Indeed, he is much like a composer when he edits and layers the various elements of voice and actuality.

Barnard, who also started at CBC Radio in the mid-’70s, recalls the early days: “We were blessed, Steve and I, when we came into the organization at that time,” he says. Programs were available for some great long-form radio productions. This was supported by a management structure that understood how important it was to have those programs. But some years later, when Barnard joined the radio management team in Toronto, he says, “We had a 40 percent cut to staff and it was brutal. Absolutely brutal.” He had to go across the country, he says, and “deliver the message to way too many people.”

Documentaries are expensive to produce and, management, looking to be competitive in the marketplace, wanted a larger audience and broader demographic. But, as Guettel points out, since its inception in 1936, CBC’s mandate has been to bring Canadians together by offering them stories about people from all regions and all walks of life. Radio documentaries did just that.

Feature radio documentary “doesn’t have to die,” Wadhams says. The resources are in place so it’s just a question of redirecting a bit of money. He’d like to see the art form continue and pass on his skills. “Mentoring a few people, big deal. It’s not really expensive at all.”

But at the beginning of this year, Living Out Loud went on hiatus. Wadhams hopes it will start up again in the fall. In the meantime, he is taking existing documentary material and recycling it for In the Field, a show without a budget. “He’s not appreciated,” says Guettel. “Otherwise, they’d give him money and give him a real show.”

“If something seems too good to be true, it probably is,” cautioned National Post baseball writer John Lott in November 2012, as fans whipped themselves into a frenzy over the Toronto Blue Jays. With everyone in baseball talking about the team—which had just completed a massive deal with the Miami Marlins for two starting pitchers and an all-star shortstop—Lott wasn’t prophesying defeat; he was simply applying some sober second thought. “In this business,” he says, “you have to try to maintain some kind of equilibrium and not get swept up.”

Lott may have been the only one not predicting how the Jays would do. The team was, after all, the story of last year’s off-season. It garnered unprecedented coverage during spring training and beat reporters foresaw great things. The Globe and Mail’s baseball writers—Jeff Blair, Tom Maloney and Robert MacLeod—each predicted the Jays would finish first or second in their division. Richard Griffin of the Toronto Star, who has covered the team since 1995, predicted it would make the World Series, but lose to Atlanta.

Of course, Toronto did not win the World Series. Not even close. The Jays finished last in their division, with a record only marginally better than the year before. Local baseball writers admit that pre-season predictions are just a bit of fun—not the kind of thing anyone hangs his hat on. While advanced statistics have the potential to make forecasts more reliable, this past Jays season showed once again that there are limits to using the past to predict the future.

Predictions have long been a staple of sports coverage. On the eve of the 1908 season, a New York Times baseball correspondent wrote, “With a fair share of luck coming their way, the Yankees have as good a chance of winning the pennant as any other club.” They finished last in the American League, but that didn’t matter, just as last year’s faulty predictions haven’t hurt anyone’s reputation. “That’s part of the beauty of it, how wrong we are,” says Shi Davidi, who covers the Blue Jays for Sportsnet and co-wrote a book with Lott about the 2013 season. “If the outcomes were so predictable, who cares? Why would you watch?” Sports forecasts are good fodder for talk radio and social media—“a talker, more than anything,” says Maloney, who is now the editor of the Globe’s automotive section.

It’s not just fun, though; baseball writers say their guesses are more than gut feelings. “It’s statistical analysis,” says Maloney, “but it’s also knowing the players.” With the 2013 Blue Jays, the thinking was, “On paper, if everyone has an average year, a couple of guys have great years and—big, big, big asterisk—everyone stays healthy, then they ought to have been able to compete.” That asterisk is a constant wrinkle in forecasting.

Lott, who doesn’t make predictions and doesn’t consider himself an expert, says those who do should start with the pitching rotation and the understanding that “one or two of these guys you know is gonna get hurt for two to five weeks in the season, maybe longer.” Injuries turned out to be one of the biggest factors in the disappointing showing, with many Jays players—including ones acquired in the off-season spending spree—sidelined for weeks at a time.

The severity of injuries is nearly impossible to predict, but the statistics era is starting to reduce the number of unknowns in forecasting. New ways of measuring performance have made it easier to crunch the numbers and produce objective predictions for individual players. These somewhat obscure statistics include NASA-like acronyms like VORP (how many runs a hitter gets, compared to a low-cost substitute) and PECOTA (a complicated calculation that projects overall performance). One Baseball Prospectus writer has even tried to quantify the risk of injury.

Derek Carty, a fantasy baseball analyst who has worked for stats websites like The Hardball Times and Baseball Prospectus, thinks these advanced statistics can help old-school commentators look beyond batting averages or earned runs. There are just too many things that affect a player’s performance, and “the human mind can’t comprehend all those factors,” he says. The stats revolution is most prominent in baseball, but other professional sports are catching up, with advanced metrics such as Corsi (shot attempts) and PDO (save percentage plus shooting percentage) cropping up more in NHL coverage. One possible reason for the rise in popularity of these new measures is the fact that, as Gabriel Desjardins explains on his hockey statistics website Behind the Net, more traditional criteria “don’t tell us very much about a player’s true value.”

But Carty admits there are limits to what the numbers can tell a scout, bookie or writer. “The stats tell you the ‘what’ and the scouting can tell you the ‘why,’” he says. Data points don’t explain, for example, why a player has a banner year and whether he’ll have another, “whereas the scouting maybe can.” Scouting also has the advantage of being more current. As the Blue Jays showed last year, stats from past performance are not necessarily predictive: the team that hit the turf at the Rogers Centre did not play like the roster assembled on paper.

This is part of why sportswriters have travelled to the team’s training facility in Dunedin, Florida: to see how the Blue Jays look and ask them how they feel about the season. “Baseball beat writers spend anywhere from four to six weeks at spring training, and by the end of that time, you’ve had a great many conversations with managers and general managers and players,” Maloney says. So when it comes time to make predictions, “It’s not just looking on paper.”

The 2014 Blue Jays look a lot like last year’s team, with a few exceptions: small acquisitions and rumours that a couple of minor-league pitchers may be on their way up. But the hopeful predictions that crept into last year’s coverage, when the words “World Series” were nearly synonymous with “Toronto,” have been absent so far. With opening day just over a month away, the focus has been more on what the team lacks than on what it might be—and maybe that’s not a bad thing.

In the city of Metropolis, one building stands out from the rest. It’s a beacon of hope and a symbol of enduring truth—and it’s entirely fictitious. But the Daily Planet headquarters, where Clark Kent works as a reporter, is nevertheless a powerful reminder of all that newspaper buildings used to be. Crowned with an enormous globe, it’s the only true landmark in the skyline, symbolizing the paper’s cultural prominence. Legend has it that Superman co-creator Joe Shuster based its design on the former Toronto Daily Star headquarters, an imposing art deco structure that served as a constant reminder of the Fourth Estate’s presence in the city.

The functions of newspaper buildings, both symbolic and practical, have changed since theStar’s old building was razed in 1972. Where once they were monuments to the permanency and prestige of the papers they represented, today they project a humbler architectural image—one that reflects the state of an industry adjusting to a new, virtual reality. In 2016, The Globe and Mail will move several blocks east to a new building designed by the prestigious architecture firm Diamond Schmitt. And, just as old newspaper buildings tell us where the industry has been, new buildings like this one show us where it’s at, and where it’s headed.

In the 19th and early 20th centuries, the placement of newspaper buildings was partly practical—they were usually close to city hall and big business. The Chicago Tribune was near the river for newsprint shipping purposes; The New York Times was by the subway so newsboys could collect bundles of papers from the basement printing press and take them uptown as quickly as possible. With every publication keen to be near the action, the buildings often formed “newspaper rows,” including London’s famous Fleet Street and Park Row in New York.

The bustling downtown locations allowed newspapers to interact with readers. “If there was a race, or if there was an election—if you wanted to know right away—you hung around outside the newspaper buildings,” says Kathryn Holliday, an architecture professor at the University of Texas at Arlington. The building was the public face of the brand, and its architecture a form of marketing. Each rival paper wanted to “have a bigger and better and fancier skyscraper than the next guy,” explains New York University architectural history professor Carol Krinsky. Newspapers wanted to evince prestige, authority and, most importantly, newness. They wanted to capture the zeitgeist of the age, and their buildings to become cultural icons. Even the famous New Year’s Eve ball drop in Times Square was a marketing exercise—a way for Timespublisher Adolph Ochs to draw New Yorkers away from their traditional Wall Street gathering to his paper’s headquarters.

Canadian newspapers had similar ambitions. In 1938, the Globe moved into an art moderne building that was only a short walk from city hall. The streamlined structure, demolished in 1974, was adorned with bas-relief carvings; they depicted scenes from classical mythology, but were rendered in clean, art deco lines, symbolizing the paper’s vaunted history and bright future. The Toronto Star’s current home, built in 1971, features stark brutalist architecture, which was in vogue at the time. More tellingly: it stands at 1 Yonge Street, the start of the city’s most famous thoroughfare.

Today, Canadian newspaper buildings are remarkably varied in location and architectural style. The Gazette, in Montreal, is housed in an impressive Beaux-Arts building (designed by the Ross & Macdonald firm of Maple Leaf Gardens fame) on Saint Catherine Street, one of the city’s main downtown arteries. The Calgary Herald, which began in a tent at the junction of the Bow and Elbow rivers, and later occupied a downtown office building, is now located in a nondescript low-rise in a Calgary industrial park. The National Post (another Postmedia publication), moved out of its three-storey Don Mills location last month to take up five floors of a modernist office tower on Bloor Street East. It’s part of a cost-cutting plan that involves the Post selling its former headquarters to pay down its debt. The floors are not all contiguous—lengthy elevator rides between department floors are the cost of survival.

The Globe, meanwhile, is now located just west of downtown, in a three-floor building formerly home to the Toronto Telegram. The once-modern office seems dull today—such are the vicissitudes of taste—and some employees, including architecture critic Alex Bozikovic, who is looking forward to the move, say, “It’s not a particularly inspiring place to work.” Although the new building won’t project the old-world grandeur of The Gazette’s current home, it isn’t as stultifyingly bland as the Herald’s.

University of Toronto architecture professor Larry Wayne Richards says the Globe’s future home “seems to be nothing more than a generic office building in a not-very-special location.” (Indeed, the design was not conceived with the Globe in mind; the paper will have naming rights to the building but will occupy only the top five floors.) But according to Michael McClelland, principle of Toronto-based ERA Architects, it’s significant that the paper is staying downtown. Hard times have sent some papers to the suburbs, but the Globe still wants to interact with the surrounding city. “They want to communicate with Queen’s Park,” McClelland says. “They want to communicate with city hall; they want to communicate with business and industry”—and the building’s physical presence in the city will allow the paper to do that.

As in the old days, the new home presents a modern architectural branding opportunity, albeit a less tangible one. There are no carvings here, nor any gigantic globes rising above the cityscape. Instead, the design is environmentally friendly, and going green, says Krinsky, is a way for flagging newspapers to show they’ve adapted to life in the 21st century—that they’re still relevant. “If the building looks up-to-date and modern and progressive, it’s as if you’re alert to everything that’s happening in the world,” she says. “That sort of thing is meant to show that a newspaper is still part of a citizen’s life.”

Inside, staircases within the newsroom will make collaboration and moving between departments easier—an architectural expression of an industry that requires more from fewer employees. Outside, the Globe’s name will be at the top, 17 storeys up and towering over the shorter structures that surround it, ensuring that the paper’s presence will be felt in the city. Even in the digital age, newspaper buildings are a welcome sight in the urban landscape. “I think it’s really valuable that people commit to the city,” says McClelland. “This idea that we can do anything from anywhere—that it doesn’t matter where you are—is a problem.”

A retired Pennsylvania State University academic is “mad as hell” at journalists for getting the story so wrong during January’s record-breaking chilly temperatures. “The broadcasters and bloggers who introduced ‘polar vortex’ into the discussion of Arctic outbreaks this January made a giant, unscientific leap,” former lecturer and forecaster Lee Grenci wrote on a Penn State meteorology website. “I have a really tough time making a direct link between the polar vortex and Arctic air masses.”

The explanations that a displaced polar vortex caused the frigid blasts were just a bunch of hot air. In a January 10 blog post, Stu Ostro, The Weather Channel’s senior meteorologist, called the connection “tenuous at best.” Instead, “a slow jet stream” caused the super-cold air southwards, according to a New Scientist article. The widespread misuse of the term even inspired American Meteorological Society president and university professor J. Marshall Shepherd to start the #StopPolarVortexAbuse Twitter hashtag.

After journalists simplified the science for catchy headlines and punchy tweets, “polar vortex” quickly became a colloquialism for freezing cold. It’s not the first time reporters have made the weather a joke: this phrase follows other viral winter weather terms such as “Snowmageddon” and “Snowpocalypse.” These unscientific terms are catching on more and more because nothing piques interest and boosts audience counts like freak weather events with ominous-sounding names.

Canadian news outlets including CBC, The Globe and Mail and the Toronto Sun covered the polar vortex—and its alleged return in late January—without mentioning the experts who didn’t think it was the reason behind the cold winter weather. It was even the inspiration for some facetious spin-off articles such as “The Polar Vortex music playlist,” in which QMI Agency writer John Williams asked, “Want to stick winter up someone’s polar vortex?”

Because “polar” means from around the Arctic or Antarctic and “vortex” often refers to whirling winds, the words could describe the cause of the frigid winds we experienced in early January. But as a scientific term, the phrase means something else entirely. Andrew Bell, the executive director of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society, describes the polar vortex as a band of cold, fast-moving winds in the stratosphere that spins around the north and south poles in the winter and shows signs of ozone depletion in the spring. It’s not a cold front or a storm system; it takes place many kilometres above the streams and currents that affect the weather.

And no, Rush Limbaugh, the media didn’t create it last month to push some global warming agenda. In fact, “the great polar vortex,” referring to the wind’s circular motion at the earth’s poles, appeared in The Living Age journal in 1853. According to Bell, it was always positioned in the Arctic and didn’t blanket Canada or the U.S. He chalks up this year’s first stint of record-breaking temperatures to the position and movement of the jet stream. “Technical terms were misappropriated just to generate more interest in the news.”

It seems to have started on January 3 with the Associated Press story, “‘Polar vortex’ to blast frigid air over much of U.S.” Carson Walker wrote that one reason for the then upcoming “life threatening wind chills” and “historic cold outbreak” is “a ‘polar vortex,’ as one meteorologist calls it.” That meteorologist was Ryan Maue, who works for WeatherBell Analytics. Walker also quoted him saying, “If you’re under 40, you’ve not seen this stuff before.” (Not true; according to Ostro, there were also intense cold waves in 1996, 1994, 1985 and 1977.)

By the time National Post digital reporter Josh Visser wrote about the weather on January 6, “polar vortex” was all over the web. “I’m not much of a science writer,” he says. “I basically write about what’s already popular.” Working under a tight deadline and with the goal of increasing web traffic to his story, Visser took the popular term and rolled with it. “Any time you’re trying to explain something science-y to a general audience, you’re trying to make it as interesting as you can. You don’t really get a lot of landscape to get into the nitty-gritty of what terms mean.”

His priority was getting the practical side of the story—the weather’s effects on traffic, flights and so on. There simply wasn’t time to verify the hard science with a meteorologist or climatologist. While Visser acknowledges there was “a certain element of sensationalism” in recent extreme weather coverage, he says his contributions informed travellers about flight delays and cancellations. “Those stories were successful for us. They were very well read.”

The polar vortex scored ratings elsewhere, too. Advertising sales managers don’t deny the importance of weather reporting, particularly extreme weather. Rogers Media-owned 680 News, for example, runs an advertiser-sponsored Extreme Weather Centre from November to March every year. For about $80,000 each, this year’s advertisers—Redtag.ca, Subaru, CG&B Group and Spartan Fitness—get to be named when the centre is activated, and get 500 30-second commercial slots. The station sees a spike in listeners with bad weather. “Our ratings go through the roof,” says Sabrina Korva, 680 News’s account manager until mid-January when she moved to Astral. “Of course to keep our advertisers happy, we will look for any excuse to activate it.”

Environment Canada climatologist David Phillips isn’t condemning the latest weather catchphrase. He’s just happy more Canadians are talking about the weather. “I suppose there’s no harm in describing it as a polar vortex or a Siberian express or arctic pipeline or an arctic outflow,” he says. “If people pay attention to it, are interested in it, and it leads them to taking action for more safety, then I’m all for it.”

While climatologists aim to simplify the weather for a broad audience, even Phillips has his limits: “If somebody uses it like, ‘Well, Rob Ford is caught in a polar vortex,’ I’d object to that.”

When Bob Dylan brought his Christian gospel tour to Toronto’s Massey Hall in 1980, he didn’t play his popular songs from before 1979. The ensuing controversy carried over to newspapers, where Toronto Sun reader Douglas Greenwood wrote a letter to the editor, reminding people of Dylan’s Jewish heritage. Some of Greenwood’s comments, such as, “If he is not a Christian, let’s not put too much significance in his singing about Jesus Christ,” upset 19-year-old Bobby Anderson—a poet and avid Dylan fan—who’d picked up a copy of the Sun issue at his local smoke shop.

Anderson grabbed a pencil and sheet of paper and wrote a response to Greenwood. He agonized over the grammar and syntax because he wanted to sound intelligent, not like some cultish Dylan-worshipper. He was thrilled when his letter was published. “I had entered into the adult world of public discourse,” he says today. Anderson still has the clipping of his letter beneath its own bolded headline: “Bob Dylan would not be amused.”

While letters to the editor used to be revered in newspapers and a thrill for writers who made the cut, over the years, word counts have shrunk and writing quality has diminished in the name of speed. While many mourn what’s been lost, some editors see today’s letters pages as more accessible and more democratic.

Letters to the editor have been around since the dawn of newspapers, but over the years, they’ve lost their cultural cachet. William Thorsell, former editor-in-chief of The Globe and Mail, points out that having a letter published around 1990 gave you special access to a large population and, thus, coveted influence. Today, he adds, letters are buried in so many competing viral voices. J.D.M. Stewart, a regular letter-writer to the Globe, says his new rivals are less dedicated to the cause: “Anybody can write a letter to the editor now, because in the old days, it took a little bit of effort.” Before, people with something to say needed to find paper and a stamp and walk to the mailbox. Now, they type and click send.

Aside from the transformation engendered by technology, the most obvious change to letters to the editor over the last two decades is length. Fifteen years ago, the Globe asked for 400 words or fewer; 10 years ago, it wanted 250. Stewart, who keeps a scrapbook of 200 of his letters, says he must now keep his word count to 150.

But that hasn’t dampened readers’ interest in sharing personal opinion. Robert Wright, who was letters editor at the Toronto Star from 1985 to 1987 and returned to the position five years ago, says he used to get about 100 mailed letters in a week. Now, he receives between 200 to 400 emails a day.

Yet the immediacy has increased knee-jerk responses. “In some ways, because [email] makes it easier, it cheapens some of them,” says Paul Russell, former letters editor at the National Post. Russell, who was laid off in January 2013 along with other Postmedia staff, says there were more rants out of the 150 missives he would receive each day. Clever and creative writing has also suffered: “Not that it’s disappeared,” says Wright, “but you have fewer colourful letter-writers.” About half are mindless tirades, spam or hoaxes.

Not everyone agrees that the days of typewriters and handwritten letters were better, though. “A lot of crap was sent in to newspapers then as well,” says Andrew Phillips, editorial page editor at the Star. Many letters were illegible. And with fewer to choose from, the pool of discourse was diminished. Now, a diverse array of opinions floods email inboxes.

Not all good letters can fit in a paper, but websites give a home to letters that would otherwise have been trashed. Besides the six to 10 letters that make it to the Star’s print page, another 10 to 20 go on the online opinion page. And the word constraints in the hard copy encourage more focus. “Letter writing is a bit of an arcane institution, but now you get more learned, factual-based opinion,” Wright says. “Shorter letters have also pushed readers to articulate their opinions.”

Meanwhile, online culture has led to a more relaxed tone. Tim Currie, assistant professor of journalism at the University of King’s College, says, “Today, the language is much more casual. And that’s born of social media.” This language—more approachable and less stuffy than handwritten letters of the past—is more inviting for readers. As columnist Robert Fulford recently wrote in the Post, not only are email letters “more detailed, better argued and in general more skillful,” but the writing is also more fluent—“the first step to engagement.”

Today, engagement extends to roving the Internet for public discourse, rather than going straight to the letters page to gauge discussion on hot topics. Even though more letters are available online, according to Currie, it’s important that they appear next to the articles they refer to, for reader interaction. Some may be hyperlinked to a piece, but they’re still on a separate page. Instead, comments—some more moderated than others—are more likely to catch the eye of readers.

Still, in an age when news organizations have yet to balance what the Star’s public editor, Kathy English, describes as “the demand for unfettered expression with a desire to foster civil discourse,” the letters page, no matter what medium, still offers a place for informed discussion. More opinions, carefully curated by editors, result in a liberated and nuanced debate. But with Russell’s departure, the Post no longer has a dedicated letters editor—the work is shared among people in the comments section who have their own responsibilities.

Other news outlets haven’t abandoned this position. Sifting through letters about the death of former Israeli prime minister Ariel Sharon, Wright tries to narrow down different opinions for print to reflect the readership; the remainder will be posted online. Sometimes, when he’s reading the Star over the weekend, he can spot the influx ahead of time. Stories about education or Mayor Rob Ford usually entice people to express their opinions, he says, laughing. “I can go, ‘Oh yeah, that’s going to be a big one.’”

Two-time Olympic medallist Jennifer Heil is used to performing under the lights with her ski goggles and skis strapped on. But this month, as a commentator for CBC’s Sochi Olympics broadcast, the former freestyle moguls skier performed by analyzing the event in which she competed four years ago.

Heil isn’t the only athlete to turn to broadcast sports analysis after retiring. At the Olympic Games in Sochi, CBC will employ more than 20 athletes, some of whom still compete, on its broadcast team. They include gold medallists Clara Hughes, Rosie MacLennan and Adam van Koeverden. As more events are added to the Olympics and the number of TV sports channels grows, so too does the number of on-air jobs for former professional athletes. Many of these ex-athletes are household names and although they have real-world experience and connections to their sport, the broadcast booth presents them with fresh challenges.

Former competitors have been a part of sports broadcasts since at least the 1970s. CBC’s coverage of the 1976 Summer Olympics featured ex-diver Irene MacDonald as an analyst, or colour commentator. CBC had 17 former athletes covering the 2006 Winter Olympics; the CTV-Rogers consortium had 29 in Vancouver in 2010. “Now if you’re an athlete you think to yourself, ‘Oh, what am I going to do? Well, I want to be on-air,’” says CBC Sports senior producer Karen Sebesta. But not just any athlete can walk into a broadcast job. Many have to audition, and even after they’re hired, they go through more training and practice at World Cup events leading up to the Olympics. And sometimes it simply doesn’t work out when former athletes don’t apply the same work ethic to their broadcasting as they did to their sport.

Part of an Olympian’s allure on TV is profile. “Ultimately, in broadcast, you’re looking for some cachet or status,” Sebesta says. “Any Olympian or high-performance athlete who’s competed, that’s good TV or radio.” Producers are always on the lookout for a fresh face. Heil, for example, replaces Veronica Brenner, a 2002 Olympic aerial skiing silver medallist, who analyzed the Olympics in 2006 and 2010.

But Olympians as commentators aren’t just friendly faces. Analysts don’t explain to the audience what’s happening—that’s what the play-by-play caller does; instead, they are responsible for what sports broadcast veteran Scott Russell calls “the why”: an insider’s take on the strategy behind athletes’ tricks or performances, what might be going through their heads and the emotional side of competition. “A non-athlete cannot give you the why,” says Russell, who will host Olympic Daytime in Sochi. “Only the athlete can bring that perspective.” The audience is more likely to trust an analyst’s commentary since he or she has done a spread eagle jump, landed a pirouette or shot the puck. And despite having relatively little broadcast training, many former athletes do the job well: Catriona Le May Doan, a retired speed-skating gold medallist, won a Gemini award for her coverage of speed skating at the last Olympics.

But there are always exceptions. “It’s not always the best athletes that make the best commentators,” says commentator and CBC Sports Weekend host Brenda Irving. “How well you did in your given sport has little bearing on whether you’re going to be a good ambassador for that sport on television or radio.”

Sure, former athletes are hired as analysts to give their opinion, but they must also stick to the tenets of sports journalism, including being critical and balanced—they can’t simply praise the home team. When athletes underperform, analysts have to be willing to bring attention to it and to talk about why. But former athletes are often intimately connected to a sport’s coaches and competitors, which can threaten their ability to be objective. At CBC Sports reporter Karin Larsen’s first Olympics as an analyst in 1996, she covered her sister Christine’s synchronized swimming silver-medal performance. “That’s probably my most nervous moment in broadcasting because I was nervous for my sister,” she says, adding that she was able to focus on the performance and offer a fair analysis. When Canadian snowboarder Craig McMorris analyzed slopestyle snowboarding in Sochi last week, he had to critique his younger brother, Mark. In December, he told Postmedia News, he was “going to bury the bias” and be “very objective and very fair” and call it how he saw it. He did just that, critiquing fairly when it was needed and getting excited when Mark landed at the bottom of his final run, winning Canada’s first medal of the Games.

On the flip side, fearful of showing any favouritism, colour commentators risk being too harsh in their analysis. Irving says they could easily go either way: not critical enough or too disparaging. It’s a difficult balance. “I think it would be hard for me if I all of a sudden had to analyze the performance of some of my peers,” she says. “It’s kind of a double-edged sword because you want them to be fresh out of the sport in a lot of ways, but the further they are away, maybe the more objective they can be.”

While athletes can bring their connections, experience and profile to a sports broadcasting analyst gig, they also risk appearing biased, uncritical or biting in their work. But until seasoned broadcasters have felt what it’s like to train at a sport for years or stand on the podium as a winner, they’ll never be able to offer what a former athlete can. “There is nothing better when deciding what something means than asking a person who has done it,” says Chris Irwin, executive producer of CBC’s Sochi 2014 broadcast. “A former skier can say, ‘That was a huge mistake,’ whereas, if I said it, people would be able to say, ‘What do you know?’”