In the 1970s, there was Idi Amin. The vicious dictator made big news in the West with his brutal murders, rapes and torture of Ugandan citizens. Amin was ousted in 1979 and a few years of further instability ensued. In 1986, the current president, Yoweri Museveni, took over. The Globe and Mail praised him for being part of a new generation of African leaders after decades of big-man rule. Coverage suggested a blip of hope for legitimate democracy.

Then AIDS hit in the late 1980s. More instability. More death. Coverage waned; the six-year-old Globe bureau closed and we heard a lot from the wires throughout the 1990s. What did we learn? Hundreds died in tribal clashes, Asians exiled under Amin returned to the country, a religious cult convinced hundreds to commit suicide, Bono swooped in and promised to fix everything. The Globe’s Africa bureau reopened in 2003 and Canadians got more in-depth news from Uganda. We learned a lot about Joseph Kony’s army of rebels waging a civil war in the north, abducting children and putting them to work as killers or sex slaves. We learned a lot about AIDS. Uganda was praised for decreasing incidence. We also learned about anti-gay laws, a Canadian-funded clean water project and, well, more Kony and more AIDS.

This image of Uganda, indeed most of Africa, is familiar to Canadians who haven’t been there. It’s characterized by war, disease, poverty and political instability. It was what I expected to find when I went to work as a reporter in Uganda last summer. But I saw a whole other side of the country, one that was—and still mostly is—left out of the coverage. The Uganda I saw is more dynamic, cosmopolitan and modern than our papers suggest. Cellphones are everywhere (people use them to read newspapers online and trade commodities), nearly half of the country’s university students are women and every evening the bars are packed with people complaining about the president’s latest antics. The place is vibrant and alive.

Nowhere was this vibrancy more apparent than at the country’s oldest university, Makerere, founded in 1922, which I was assigned to cover for Uganda’s Daily Monitor. The campus was teeming with smartly dressed students sitting in the hot Ugandan sun, drinking tea and chatting about the 2011 national elections, university politics or Obama’s recent visit to Ghana. Many asked me informed questions about Canada (most knew more about the Prairies than I), the result of an education system still half-rooted in British colonialism.

The first story I came across on campus was about a campaign to fund innovative research projects that supported business plans to market tofu in stores, turn garbage into bricks for household cooking and use paper waste to make gift wrap. For another assignment, I met a young man who led a campaign to empower women to fight against sexual harassment on campus. There was also Venansius Baryamureeba, now the university’s vice chancellor, who has amassed a handful of international awards for grooming the university’s computer science department into one of the best in the country. And there was Sylvia Tamale, the outspoken law professor who very publicly opposes anti-gay legislation in Uganda.

There was so much more than absolute poverty, desperation, disease and violence. Uganda is more layered and sophisticated than that. Why didn’t I know this?

* * *

Since the 1980s, COVERAGE of Africa in Canadian newspapers has been event-driven; we usually hear about it only when a major war, outbreak of disease or famine occurs. “There’s nothing good from Cape Town to Cairo,” says Jim Travers, one-time correspondent for the now-defunct Southam News, who compares coverage to a jigsaw puzzle with missing pieces.

But bad news sells newspapers. And there’s a lot of sensational bad news coming out of Africa. It also comes down to resources. Foreign bureaus are expensive to run—a former Globe foreign editor estimates a $300,000-a-year price tag in the case of Africa—and today, more than ever, it’s harder for papers to justify shelling out the money to have a permanent Africa correspondent when they’re laying off journalists at home.

In fact, The Globe and Mail is the only Canadian newspaper with a reporter permanently stationed in Africa. Geoffrey York, like his predecessors over the past 26 years—Michael Valpy, Oakland Ross and Stephanie Nolen, all award-winning journalists—is an exceptional reporter. And like his predecessors, he’s been handed an impossible task. Nearly one billion people. Forty-eight countries—all of sub-Saharan Africa—to cover. Each with a unique set of rulers, history and economy.

So the Globe offers readers what it can: snapshots. Overall coverage provides little depth or nuance and almost no continuity. In the last decade, some western African countries have been glossed over almost completely (only three pieces written from Gambia, seven from Cameroon, and 13 from Togo). We don’t hear much about progress or Africans bettering their lives. We don’t get much analysis of why Africa is home to so much tragedy. We learn little about whether foreign aid is spent effectively. And we’re oblivious to the everyday realities. We’ve come a long way from racist depictions of Africa in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, but we’re still not getting the full picture.

* * *

Over the phone from his home in Toronto, Stephen Lewis, former United Nations special envoy for HIV/AIDS in Africa and co-director of AIDS-Free World, tells me why Canadians should care about Africa. “Common decency requires some feeling, generosity of spirit toward people in other parts of the world who are struggling,” he says, letting out a long sigh. He sounds exasperated, as anyone who has spent the last decade convincing Canadians to pay attention to Africa would.

Globe foreign editor Stephen Northfield offers a different response to the question of why Canadians should care about Africa: “9/11.” Places like Somalia and Nigeria are breeding grounds for terrorism and that’s why we should pay attention, he argues. There’s also the question of money. Investors, many from China, are looking to Africa, rich in natural and human resources and potentially a big player in the global economy. “Africa is going to be a very important continent when it gets itself together,” says Jonathan Manthorpe, who spent several years in Africa in the late 1980s and early 1990s for Southam News.And then there are all those Africans living in Canada—over 400,000, according to the latest census. Today, knowing about Africa means knowing about your neighbours.

All of this is true, but readers should also care simply because it’s a compelling place. “Newspapers have always taken pride in being able to bring news from distant places to people for whom it is news, it’s previously unknown and perhaps misunderstood,” says the Globe’s former foreign editor, John Gray. That is, after all, what journalists are supposed to do.

* * *

The number of Canadian correspondents feeding our papers with news from Africa wasn’t always so low, but it’s been waning since the early 1990s. After Nelson Mandela’s release from prison in 1990 and the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1993, most correspondents turned their recorders off, stuffed their notebooks in their suitcases and returned to Canada. The Globe closed its bureau in 1990, the Toronto Star in 1995 and the National Post in 2001. Southam News had a string of Africa correspondents from the 1960s to the 1990s, but also closed its bureau in 1995 after the end of apartheid. Colin MacKenzie, the Star’s current foreign editor (who spent the bulk of his career at the Globe before joining the Star last fall), believes it was only natural. “We’re magpies, right?” he says with a slight smirk. “We look for the bright shiny thing and if a bureau is not producing a bright shiny thing, you are inclined to open a bureau where there are bright shiny things.”

In the 1980s, apartheid was that bright shiny thing. “There was an enormous appetite for what was going on in South Africa at the time,” says Valpy, who established an Africa bureau in Harare in 1984 (there hadn’t been a Globe bureau there since 1968, when the Nairobi-based correspondent is rumoured to have lost it in a poker game). When he and then later Ross were stationed in Africa, that appetite was fed more frequently in the newspaper than it is today—sometimes every day. After the bureau closed in 1990, stories from the continent were supplied by the wires and short-term correspondents until it was reopened in 2003. The flow of news from Africa has slowed since Valpy and Ross’s time, though stories today are on average longer and more thoroughly reported. It comes down to economics, according to Valpy. “I mean, we’ve got less space in the front section and we’ve still got the same number of writers, all of whom desperately want to be in that paper,” he says. “We fight to get in the paper.”

For Stephanie Nolen, though, the bigger fight was about getting herself to Africa. In 2003, she argued her case for reopening the Africa bureau to the newspaper’s then editor-in-chief, Edward Greenspon. She wanted the paper to run more stories with a focus on AIDS and said she should be the one to go to the continent to write those stories. Initially, Greenspon didn’t think readers would care, and suggested they were sick of predictable coverage that made them feel guilty about the suffering of Africans. But Nolen was passionate and persistent, and Greenspon sent her there for a trial run. She returned with two stories, a profile of Stephen Lewis and an account of the Lord’s Resistance Army in northern Uganda, which Greenspon calls “extraordinary pieces of journalism.” His apprehension dissipated and the Globe reopened the doors of its Africa bureau for the first time in 13 years.

Nolen, now in India, earned three National Newspaper Awards for her Africa work and endless praise from journalists and Africa experts. “She’s very, very good at conveying a sense of Africa and Africans and capturing people and places,” her successor, York, notes. “She had a real sense of passion for what she wrote, which came through in the writing.” Lewis agrees. “She takes issues of great complexity and renders them simply and compellingly—in the years that Stephanie was in Africa there was no journalist writing for any paper that even came close to her. There just wasn’t.” Nolen put Africa on the map for Canadian readers who didn’t know or didn’t care about the continent before treating themselves to one of her small masterpieces. The subjects and places she wrote about came alive. Her work blended hard news with human stories, and readers were deeply moved by these riveting narratives.

One of Nolen’s earliest stories from Africa, about the civil war in northern Uganda—one of the pieces that persuaded Greenspon to reopen the bureau—showcases her skill. Her opening alone is magnificent: “Molly was 15 when the rebels took her as a fighter and sex slave. ‘After one month,’ she says, ‘you feel like killing.’ One day, she sliced a woman open. In Acholiland, there’s a Molly in every family.” As she does in most of her work, Nolen sketched a gripping scene for readers, making it difficult to dismiss as merely another dismal Africa story. Still, while beautifully written, the piece leans on sensational stereotypes of Africa as a place of savage brutality—using the term ‘sex slave’ supports the notion that Africans are submissive and oversexed. Also, with no supporting stats, it’s hard to know for sure that every family in the north has had a daughter kidnapped and forced into sexual submission.

Nolen faced the same problem as York, in that she was alone on a continent with millions of stories to be told. But she did her best to convey a side of Africa that most Canadians likely didn’t know existed. As she prepared to leave the bureau in December 2008, she wrote a farewell story in the Globe: “I started this job well aware of the preponderance of negative coverage of Africa in the Western media. So I was determined to tell the good news, as often as I could, even if famines and mass rape did demand my frequent attention.” She admits she didn’t always succeed. “In my bleaker moments, I was doing what I often chided others for—seeing Africa as an unchanging disaster and not realizing that between this coup or that rebel insurgency, change was happening—sometimes almost imperceptibly slowly, but definitely, defiantly happening.”

One place that Nolen insisted on showing us change was Uganda. She told us about a young girl abducted by rebels in the north, only to escape and start a support group for others like her; a rural community that had been transformed by a successful vanilla-growing project funded by Canadians; strides that Uganda had made slashing AIDS incidence in the country (even though some have attributed plummeting numbers to high deaths from the virus). But despite her best efforts, the bad news was so gripping and constant that a reader could still have a tarnished image of Uganda as a place characterized predominantly by civil war, AIDS and helplessness.

* * *

Today, most papers rely on wire services for news from Africa, one benefit of which is that they have more than one correspondent on the continent. On the other hand, they don’t give any one paper a competitive edge. “You get a richer menu, although everyone subscribes to the wires,” says the Star’s MacKenzie. And news from the wires is generic, often lacking depth and analysis. Manthorpe thinks so too. “Africa becomes a series of headlines,” he says, the result of shallow coverage. For Gray, who became the Globe’s foreign editor in 1985, a year after Michael Valpy reopened the Africa bureau, the problem with wire stories is that they aren’t tailored to Globe readers. “Their audience is too broad and ill defined,” he says.

Stories with a Canadian angle are what give the Globe an edge at a time when audiences can easily go online to get Africa news from other sources, like The New York Times, which has five correspondents on the continent. But focusing too narrowly on the Canadian connection can also be a detriment if the stories aren’t particularly newsworthy and it means missing out on more relevant news. Northfield is conscious of this. He doesn’t want to “turn every international story into a parochial Canadian story,” but still thinks the Canadian angle can’t be ignored. For some, Africa stories with a Canadian angle are tiresome and not very informative. “I’m not sure in the end if that approach is a great service to the readers,” Manthorpe says.

* * *

It was late winter 2008 in China when Geoffrey York’s foreign editor, Northfield, asked him if he would be interested in taking over the Africa bureau. He didn’t hesitate to say yes. York had wanted to work in Africa since reporting from Somalia in 1992, and calls it “one of the most fascinating parts of the world.” Nonetheless, he admits, “When Stephanie left, it was a big pair of shoes to fill.”

It’s hard not to compare the two. Nolen’s Africa coverage is rife with emotion, whereas York’s work is less literary, and doesn’t usually have the same emotional punch. Nolen hitched rides with AIDS-infected truck drivers and attended the funerals of people she wrote about, while York is more distanced and analytical in his approach. But every so often, he does something like stand in line at polling stations to interview voters, giving readers a sense of political conversations on the ground. Valpy says that while York’s writing is missing some of the “pizzazz of Stephanie,” his work is solid, authoritative and thoroughly reported. “It’s almost like the word of God.”

Godly or not, York is doing a fine job informing us about Africa. As of February, he’d visited 14 countries and written over 100 articles since moving to Johannesburg in December 2008, ranging from national elections in South Africa and China’s burgeoning economic influence on the continent, as well as a series on Canadian diplomats Robert Fowler and Louis Guay, who were kidnapped in Niger in 2009 and held for four months. Like his predecessors, much of his work is focused on crises—common to all foreign beats. “It’s a professional tendency that journalists have in any part of the world to cover conflict and tragedy,” he says in his commanding baritone voice.

York can only do so much. As he tells me via e-mail from his base in Johannesburg, “with 48 countries to cover, it’s always complicated to choose.” He says he tries to report on major social issues (food security, AIDS and the environment) and key leaders (Meles Zenawi, Robert Mugabe and Jacob Zuma) and does his best to report from different regions of the continent too. He also recognizes the importance of providing readers with a broader sense of Africa, though he admits it’s “a small fraction” of what he can do. “To the extent that you can, it’s nice to get a more rounded view of the beat that you’re covering,” York says, “to give our readers a sense that life is not all doom and gloom in the rest of the world.”

York’s doing his best. He’s written about a Canadian wine producer in South Africa, one of the only women in a male-dominated industry. He’s also contributed to Sports, Report on Business and Review, writing about the lead-up to the World Cup in Jo’burg, waning investments in Madagascar and Hollywood’s fairy-tale portrayal of post-apartheid South Africa, as a way of reminding readers there’s more to life in Africa than war and AIDS. He often uses his blog, Africa Diary, to convey some of the day-to-day realities that don’t make it into the paper. “There are so many gloomy stories about Africa, from the wars of Somalia to the cholera of Zimbabwe and the chaos of Congo, that it’s important to remember how much progress has been achieved by many African countries in recent years,” he wrote last June. “This is not a continent of hopelessness and despair, even though many people like to portray it that way. Disasters and coups always make the headlines, but there has been remarkable progress on many fronts during the past decade.”

Progress, for example, in Botswana, which in the last 35 years has experienced the highest per capita economic growth of any developing country in the world (we rarely read about it in the Globe). Or progress in Ghana, where school enrolment has swelled, infant mortality has dropped and democracy, though still fragile, has stabilized after two consecutive peaceful elections (this news did make it into the Globe, and York admits there’s a lot more progress to be made in Ghana).

York is an old hand who has been at the Globe since 1981, when he was hired as an intern fresh out university. That’s when he first met Ann Rauhala, a copy editor at the time, who later went on to be foreign editor. “I think I was under the impression that I was going to give him a hard time,” she remembers of a story critique, to which he responded “eloquently and succinctly and in powerful declarative sentences.” Rauhala expected him to be “one of these neurotic, ambitious, robotic kind of guys,” but he proved her wrong. “He established right away that he was not somebody to be trifled with, that he was really serious about his work.” They later became friends, and Rauhala discovered York’s dry sense of humour and love of old rhythm and blues. York’s passion for music earned him the nickname “King of Funk,” which Rauhala laughs about today. “It just seemed riotously funny to call this very tall, very pale, very baby-faced young man from the Ottawa Valley the King of Funk.”

Most agree York is doing a great job as the country’s only newspaper correspondent in Africa. He’s a relentless reporter, and refuses to back down when faced with stubborn officials. In October, he travelled to Ethiopia to write about the country’s most recent famine and the government’s tight grip on power. The government, which is downplaying the number of citizens dying of cholera, refused him access. York went anyway.

The article he wrote impressed members of the Ethiopian community in Canada. “It reflected the stories I hear at coffee shops, at Ethiopian restaurants,” says Samuel Getachew, an Ethiopian-Canadian who works for the Government of Ontario and contributes to the Ethiopian newspaper in Toronto, TZTA. “Whenever I go there that’s the story I see, that is a reflection of the majority of Toronto Ethiopian’s opinions,” he adds.

But York’s story about Ethiopia shows the general state of the Globe’s Africa coverage: spotty, sporadic and inconsistent. An exceptional piece of journalism, but one of the only glimpses of the country we get. Getachew recognizes that many stories are missed with only one reporter on the continent. The story, for instance, about Ethiopian-Canadians returning home with money they’ve made abroad to fuel development projects in their country. “Those people are having a large impact in Ethiopia,” he says. But we don’t hear about this in the Globe. Instead, we are left with the same impression of Ethiopia we first got 25 years ago when CBC reporter Brian Stewart showed us haunting images of thousands starving to death. The solution, Getachew suggests, is more reporters—including more African-Canadian reporters—an option that is simply not in the Globe’s budget, Northfield confirms.

Uganda, one country that York had not yet visited as of early spring, receives the same brief treatment. We haven’t seen in-depth coverage from Uganda since Nolen wrote a series of stories between 2005 and 2008 about the civil war in the north. York wrote about a controversy dividing Commonwealth leaders at a summit in November 2009: President Yoweri Museveni supported a proposed bill to make homosexuality punishable with life imprisonment, which inflamed some attendees. The article gave us a glimpse into the frightening homophobia of some Ugandans, an attitude that has bled into national politics. We’re left with a pared-down impression: the government hates gays. Period. But what about tireless gay activists like Nikki Mawanda, who wake up every day, risk their lives getting into public taxis and fight for their freedom? What about the liberal-minded (and heterosexual) Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo, who speaks publicly in defence of Ugandan gays and lesbians? These perspectives complicate the picture, showing us that some Ugandans are trying to effect change.

Ugandan-Canadian journalist and elementary school principal Opiyo Oloya, who lives in Newmarket, Ontario, and writes a weekly column for a Ugandan national paper, The New Vision, says the lack of nuanced coverage solidifies clichés about Africa. “It is crisis coverage rather than a consistent coverage of what else is going on,” he says. “The alternative point of view needs to be available to break the stereotype.” We’re missing a sense of what happens in between these crises. The Globe doesn’t give us much about post-genocide Rwanda, he notes, we read little about Africa’s first female president—Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf—and we’ve heard almost nothing about Sierra Leone after a decade-long civil war that ended in 2002.

What he’d like to read more about from his own country is how western donors continue to pump money into Uganda, despite crippling corruption. “There is a silence on the systemic corruption that has wracked Uganda for so long,” he tells me. The president has been let off the hook, “almost scot-free” he says, because our papers have written nothing about it. “If we don’t provide another perspective every so often, what you are left with is a really narrow view of what Uganda is all about,” Oloya says. Based on coverage of Uganda over the last decade, the narrow view we’ve been given is that there is a vicious war in the north and homosexuality is illegal. In the period when Nolen was feeding us news about the civil war, the Globe glossed over the Ugandan national elections in 2006 and ignored the discovery of oil in the same year. Like Getachew, Oloya believes the only solution is more correspondents. But, he says, “They don’t have the resources, so we will have to rely on the little windows that are provided by people like York and Nolen.”

The downside of snapshot reporting isn’t lost on Northfield. “In the rush and anxiety to cover political developments, I worry that there’s another side of Africa that we’ve missed,” he says. “There’s joy and humour and humanity everywhere, so at some point along the way we want to take a deep breath and write those stories as well.”

Another story that deserves more thorough coverage in the Globe is the role of foreign aid. In recent years, some in the development community have questioned, and even rejected, the usefulness of aid. At the Munk Debates in Toronto last year, Zambian economist Dambisa Moyo took Stephen Lewis to task over the ineffectiveness of foreign aid. Moyo said aid should be cut off completely, blaming the flawed foreign-aid model for corruption, inflation, debt burden, the death of the export sector and a culture of dependency. Lewis insists the answer is to ensure money reaches people at the grassroots, not to completely “expunge it from the balance sheet.”

It’s an important story for Globe readers. The Canadian government has pumped billions of dollars into Africa in the past decade; in 2007 and 2008 alone, $1.73 billion was spent on development projects. Moyo wrote an entire book on foreign aid, Dead Aid. Lewis has dedicated much of his career to ensuring international aid is spent wisely in Africa. It’s a complex issue that can’t be captured in one or two brief articles and blog postings. In general, the paper praises Canadian development projects and fails to give us much critical analysis.

York disagreed with the work of Moyo and others who dismiss the efficiency of aid in one article. “Canada’s aid often works very well, making a crucial difference in the lives of the poor,” he wrote last May, citing the example of a Canadian-funded water sanitizing project in Malawi. “Before the Canadians arrived a few years ago, the maize and banana farmers of Njale took their water from a dirty stream below their village.” A week later, York delved deeper on his blog, telling us aid could be spent more effectively. However, the Malawi story is the only time York has written about the grassroots effectiveness of Canadian aid in Africa, despite the huge sums of money spent there every year.

Africans in Canada have a unique and valuable perspective on what coverage of Africa should look like: Oloya would like to see regular updates about Canadian-funded projects in Africa, offering a better understanding of the flaws (and successes) of development work. Zimbabwean-Canadian journalist Innocent Madawo thinks current coverage encourages us to donate, but doesn’t tell us enough about the flaws of international aid. Madawo, who fled his country as a political refugee in 2001 and now lives in Toronto, says stories that encourage aid instead of investment convey a pitiful image of Africa that fuels a culture of dependency. “When you highlight the political strife, the disease, you are appealing to me and you to donate.”

Madawo, too, would like to see more in-depth coverage in the Globe. “If you tell me that there is a problem in Zimbabwe today and you don’t tell me tomorrow how that problem has been solved,” he says, his calm demeanour giving way to agitation, “all you are achieving is showing me the problems in Africa as they sprout up from various areas. You are not taking time to give me the solutions so that I also have a rounded view.”

Madawo is right, and his line of thinking applies to coverage of the entire continent. We never learn about the everyday complexities of Senegal, Rwanda or Uganda. We don’t learn about the vibrant political debate that keeps Ugandans awake late into the night sipping local beer, whether in raucous Kampala or the sleepy countryside. We don’t hear about refugees in the country making sanitary pads out of local papyrus reed. We don’t hear about the burgeoning popular music culture.

That’s what I found when I went to Uganda. Certainly, there was poverty and illness, but it’s not what I noticed first and it’s not what defined the place and the people. What was perhaps most remarkable about Kampala was how unremarkable it was. It was a society that functioned like most others I know. Even in the countryside, where poverty is most pronounced, people simply get up, feed their families and get to work—selling bananas or chicken on the side of the road. When I told people this after arriving back in Canada, I sensed their disappointment. It was as if they wanted to hear how exotic and different it was, but in many ways, that simply isn’t true.

As a reporter, I, too, was drawn to stories about what was going wrong in Uganda. But I tried not to ignore the people I met trying to make things better. That is what struck me about Uganda: the resilience, tenacity and intelligence of so many politicians, refugees, lawyers, farmers and young students.

One sweaty August afternoon on Makerere University’s historic campus, where thousands have come to learn over the past 88 years, I packed into a sun-soaked auditorium with dozens of people. We were there to hear a debate between two renowned Ugandan intellectuals, Mahmood Mamdani and Dismas Nkunda, co-director of the International Refugee Rights Initiative, on how to rebuild Darfur. After the discussion, audience members got up to ask questions or challenge the speakers. “We need a system to satisfy victims. What about people who have experienced suffering?” charged one young man, confronting Mamdani’s assertion that jailing Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir for his war crimes merely perpetuates violence. Most who spoke were well informed about the politics surrounding Darfur and the debate about whether to jail al-Bashir. These were not the illiterate, helpless and impoverished Africans I so often read about in the pages of theGlobe. They were engaged, bright and analytical. I left the auditorium and hopped on the back of a boda boda, one of the motorbikes that weave through traffic on Kampala’s congested red dirt roads, to go back to the office to file the story.

I learned a lot about Darfur that afternoon, but even more about a side of Uganda I didn’t know existed; it gave me a complex picture, not just a snapshot. I want to learn more about this side of Africa in The Globe and Mail. And I want other Canadians to know, too.

“Here we have the usual Roy Arden stuff—garbage, rubbish, scraps—very boring, of course,” Brussels-based curator Dieter Roelstraete harrumphs in front of Canadian art star Roy Arden’s black-and-white photographs. Arden’s body of work is part of a group showing in Antwerp, Belgium, called Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, that Roelstraete has co-curated.

Wait—the curator just called the art in his own exhibition boring? That would be like Stephen Harper calling his cabinet ministers boring! But as Roelstraete sticks his nose up—”garbage, rubbish, scraps”—R.M. Vaughan, a Canadian critic, doesn’t see anything wrong with calling a bore a bore.

Roelstraete continues shepherding Vaughan around Intertidal. They move from Arden, stopping in front of Kelly Wood’s colour photographs. “Yes, more garbage. Very amusing, and apparently stupid,” he tells Vaughan.

Garbage? Boring? More garbage? Stupid? Vaughan agrees,  later writing in Canadian Art’s summer 2006 issue, “My prejudices are well known. Most Vancouver photo-based art leaves me underwhelmed….[It is] as achingly boring as it is unattractive.” Vaughan continues: “[Roelstraete] is the most laid-back curator I’ve ever met. I am tempted to remind him (again) that I’m a journalist (well, of sorts), and that I’m taking notes. But why ruin the fun?…I decide to keep quiet.” And Vaughan did keep quiet—until his feature on the Vancouver exhibition abroad, “Antwerp Diary,” was published. The reaction to the article, his “prejudices,” wasn’t just short harrumphs, though. Benches of self-appointed Canadian judges, from artists to curators, howled their disapproval.

Vaughan was even compared to Adolf Hitler in a mass e-mail. And Canadian Art editor Richard Rhodes received enough letters-like-lashes to run a special letters section in the magazine’s subsequent issue.

A year later, Vaughan published “Eye of the Art Critic,” an online rebuttal to the naysayers, on J-Source. “The most rewarding aspect of writing this story was that I finally got to speak my mind about work that had pissed me off for years, and in a major publication….The arts in this country are too cozy and prone to boosterism.” (Much later, Vaughan responded to a request to comment for this article this way: “I will in No Way discuss the “Diary”article. No. Way.”)

“It’s bitchy cocktail talk,” says Meeka Walsh, editor of one of Canada’s larger art magazines, Border Crossings,of the article. “It didn’t advance the position of art at all. It just created a little stir in what’s otherwise a very quiet editorial agenda in the magazine.” In other words, if you are going to write a considered piece of criticism around the Vancouver club, you should probably talk about the roots of photoconceptualism. Vaughan didn’t. He was harsh, yet insubstantial, in his critique. He went too far in some ways and not far enough in others.

But Vaughan isn’t alone. After conducting 40-odd interviews with artists, critics and curators across Canada, I found precious little evidence that our critics understand their primary job. (It’s like a painter not knowing the primary colours.)They’re not cheerleaders. Nor cocktail bitches. Their task is to critique a piece of art by taking it seriously. In so doing, they should define what is good and what is not.

Think of your best friends. They usually love you, right? But as the saying goes, to love without criticism is to be betrayed. Vaughan’s “Diary” was critical, but it was written in a more backstabbing than constructive way. What sticks, though, is Vaughan’s main and most constructive point: the Canadian arts are too cozy, too prone to boosterism. Genuinely critical voices, as Eye Weekly’s arts columnist, David Balzer, puts it, are so few “you can hold them in the palm of your hand.”

* * *

The crux of art criticism is what German critic Boris Groys calls “the phenomenon of negative appreciation”—which means to dissect critically, to give art that honour. Good criticism, then, need not be agreeable, but it is always necessary, as Winston Churchill said, “It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” A healthy art scene needs criticism. Without it, art can fall prey to illness.

 It’s not just Canadian criticism that’s unhealthy. “Art criticism is in a worldwide crisis. Its voice has become very weak,” James Elkins cried in his 2003 book, What Happened to Art Criticism? He references a 2002 survey of hundreds of art critics conducted by an arts journalism program at Columbia University. It found making judgements about art was the least popular goal among critics, and that merely describing art was the most popular. So Vaughan’s critique of Vancouver photoconceptualism probably falls into the category of least-common goal. His cyber-comeback to “Diary” included this retort: “If, as my detractors claimed, I was neither intellectually nor academically qualified to discuss the art, then all the positive things I’d written about the art were also wrong.”

How could Vaughan suddenlynot be qualified to discuss Canadian art? Partly because “Diary” didn’t read like the typical Canadian review—it wasn’t promotional. But Vaughan’s article wasn’t negative appreciation; it was a public spanking.

* * *

“Who thinks that Canadianart critics should be more critical?” asks critic Nadja Sayej at a panel discussion held by the Toronto Alliance of Art Critics last December. (Besides Sayej, the group includes local critics like Balzer and Leah Sandals, associate editor of Canadian ArtOnline.) The majority of the hands in the room jolt up. Someone from the audience shouts back, “But what does it mean to be more critical?” The panellists scramble for an answer, as shouts multiply like Warhol’s soup cans. The Alliance regroups. “I wouldn’t be a critic if I didn’t believe in constructive criticism. I don’t feel like a destroyer,” says Balzer.

Yet, criticism and the art community aren’t on the friendliest of terms. I asked AA Bronson, co-founder of General Idea—Canada’s foremost contemporary artist group for those who aren’t stuck on the Group of Seven—what he expects of critics. He clarifies via e-mail: “I can’t think of an article that has stayed with me, although some have been not bad. It’s rewarding when critics take one’s work seriously, but that almost never happens.”

* * *

“A good art criticinforms people about good art,” says a fatherly Rhodes, editor of Canadian Art, our largest visual arts magazine. Rhodes and his magare as pleasant as a still-life floral arrangement—think Van Gogh’sSunflowers—and, for the most part, as non-confrontational and inoffensive too.

Jessica Wyman upset the flowerpot with her critique of Canadian Art’swinter 2008 issue on art schooling and education in Fuse, a small culture book. “Canadian Art’scontributors took a…boosterish approach,” she wrote, “reading more like a series of press releases than a serious reflection on the state of training in art practice.” It’s a common refrain: the magazine doesn’t publish criticism, just criticism-by-omission. If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.

But Rhodes sees Canadian Art as playing a “supportive role,” and dismisses concerns of boosterism or coziness. “The skepticism about liking Canadian art and writing appreciative things about it is a continuation of our long history of colonization. Life is elsewhere. Good art is elsewhere. It’s true, there’s a lot of good art elsewhere,” he says, “but there’s also lots of terrific art right in our midst.”

Balzer draws another picture: black charcoal lines of frustration instead of Rhodes’s moseying pastels. In a 2007 article for the Ontario-based magazine Canadian Notes & Queries, Balzer wrote that Vaughan’s “Diary” “may have been sloppily executed, but its attitude seems to me to be rather un-Canadian.” Indeed, Balzer argued that the article was “more in line with a European, and particularly British, tradition of art criticism—one that…is patently unafraid to give something the flagrant, flamboyant brush-off.” Asked if that means the very concept of the brush-off is un-Canadian, Balzer shakes his charcoal stick. “I think that to some extent [attacking ‘negative’ critics] is Canadian-style bullying. You are bullying people who want to criticize Canadian art by saying…” he intones like a thespian, “How could you possibly criticize culture! Don’t you believe in culture! Why would you detract from our small pond of culture growers with your acerbic voice?”

* * *

Before Balzer and Eye Weekly, Elkins and What Happened to Art Criticism?, Rhodes at Canadian Art, there was the 1980s. The AIDS crisis. Queer theory. Second-wave feminist theory. And General Idea. There wasVanguard, Parachute, Impulse, C Magazine and the tough-love metaphor ofCanadian art as a barroom for idea brawls. “There was something in art and art criticism that seemed deeply at stake. There’s not much sense of that anymore,” says William Wood, University of British Columbia assistant professor and formerVanguard associate editor. “Vanguard and Parachute were not like, say, Canadian Art, which is a personality-profile magazine now. Those contained writing about art, not about artists per se. And that’s a major shift that’s taken place.”

Andy Patton, Toronto artist and Ontario College of Art & Design instructor, remembers that back then, “art was almost a war. You could lose friends over the work that you did. But it meant then that art was a battleground and it mattered.” He continues, “There were a lot of brushfires back then. Now I think what we’ve got is a flat-screen TV with an image of a fire burning on it.”

Dismiss it as a veteran’s affection for an old flame or wave it off as nostalgia for the golden age that never was, but Patton has a point. There’s no war of words these days. Most critics don’t put themselves on the thin red line. Patton’s talking about a time when a critic like Philip Monk heated up the debate in the art scene. Rhodes calls Monk our most important art writer in the past 25 years. “He was aggressive and didn’t provide any easy answers,” Rhodes says. “People wanted to know what he thought.”

Monk now works at the Art Gallery of York University as director and curator. “I’m no longer a critic,” he says. “I’ve moved into other forms of writing about art.” But, according to a 2001 profile of Monk by Gerald Hannon for the now-defunct Lola magazine, Monk’s “famously explosive lecture,” “Axes of Difference,” remains legendary.

On Valentine’s Day, 1984, Monk—like a Canadian Moses parting Lake Ontario—read his article “Axes,” which originally appeared in Vanguard,to a crowd of Toronto art folk. According to Hannon’s profile, Monk clearly defined what he regarded as good art and bad, and in the process set off the explosion that shattered hearts. “And what was all the fuss about?” wrote Hannon. “[To] put it simply, it seemed to come down to this: girl artist good. Boy artist bad….And he did that rare, courageous thing in the arts community: He named names. ” After the lecture, according to Hannon’s piece, Globe and Mail critic John Bentley Mays described the resulting fuss: “In a spectacular move [Monk] lambasted all the people he’d previously supported. The impact was devastating. Andy Patton was devastated.”

Twenty-six years later, Patton explains: “‘Axes’ was an article where Philip slams me and several other people. And though I was not pleased with it at the time, and I still don’t think he was right, the fact is, that kind of thing is so rare now that it would be like seeing a unicorn on Queen Street.”

Ironically, Patton was also the recent subject of the most cutting—not backstabbing, though—critique I was able to find for this article: Globe critic Gary Michael Dault’s review of Patton’s fall 2009 show at Toronto gallery Birch Libralato.

* * *

“What do you think about the negative review?” I ask Dault. He was writing criticism before Monk, before we put a man on the moon.

 “It’s never worth being negative just to say…” Dault slap-slaps his hands together, “There, that’ll fix the bugger.” A black scarf is subtly looped over his black turtleneck and suit jacket. His words are not subtle, though—imagine bird shit or a Jackson Pollock paint drip, thick and white, running down a black shirt.

“Listen, I don’t want to waste hours writing about something I don’t care about. Unless…” Dault nods, his hands around a saucer now, “in Andy Patton’s case.” Dault called Patton’s fall show as he saw it: “These four pretentious paintings remain bathetically inexplicable.” The review stood out in the Globe, and would have inCanadian Art, too, like those white drips.

Dault didn’t want to “fix” Patton. He didn’t want to betray him or the art. He loves art; they both do. Yet Dault wrote criticism that wasn’t cozy. “Andy is a very smart guy and normally a good artist and I think his show needed a corrective.”

But is Dault always a good friend to art? “I’ve been criticized for being too affirmative, but that’s because I have deep enthusiasm when I find something I really enjoy, and I try to convey that enjoyment. So what I do instead of being negative in print is, I just won’t write about it.”

Dault says criticism-by-omission isn’t due to a failure of nerve or lack of generosity; it’s because there’s limited space. “The editor of a magazine makes the same kind of decisions I do. Why is he going to waste pages of his precious art magazine, when there aren’t very many, on stuff that isn’t very good?”

Christopher Brayshaw—who’s written for papers likeVancouver’s Georgia Straight and for magazines likeCanadian Art—calls this the “precious-space excuse.” Brayshaw speculates that a reason for a limited number of reviews in Canadian Art was due to issue sizes. The magazine, he says, “had to cover a national scene and condense a massive quantity of information into a finite word count, which was fine.” (Rhodes says that Canadian Art now runs more reviews on its website.)

But if criticism-by-omission is used to conserve “precious pages,” what ends up happening other times is worse: the soft-boiled stuff gets published instead. Brayshaw recalls being told to cut and condense his pieces, then later seeing Vanity Fair-style photo spreads, like “Toronto Now,” commissioned.

“Toronto Now,” which appeared in the winter 2007 issue of Canadian Art, featured group portraits of the city’s influential artists and art luminaries. It ran from pages 58 to 73. “With text spaces shrinking on one hand, things like that are the most useless use of 15 magazine pages I can think of,” he says. “It was involved with marketing and lifestyle, disconnected from the idea of art. It was embarrassing.”

Brayshaw has lost faith in most Canadian art publications. He always thought the job of the critic, as American art writer Dave Hickey suggests, was to complicate love with judgement. Art matters to Brayshaw. But he’s not sure a lot of art criticism does anymore. “I guess I feel about Canadian art magazines kind of like that girl I used to date in high school. I’m glad that she is still around and that life is working out okay for her, but I don’t really have any interest in rehashing old times.”

* * *

So Vaughan didn’tget it quite right with his “Diary.” And Dault gets it sometimes. What’s an art critic to do then? And, more importantly, where does this leave their readers and subjects?

After about an hour of audience picket signs and pitchforks at the Alliance panel about the critic’s iron-fist deficiency, Sayej finally asks, “What could we do to do our jobs better?” Again, shouts multiply: “Be more critical!”

But good Canadian art criticism does exist. Consider: In an April 2009 review for the Globe, former editor ofCanadian Art, Sarah Milroy, asked, “Are we past the age of an aboriginal art show?” Milroy argued that the AGO show Remix: New Modernities in a Post-Indian World offers a “cautionary tale: This is what happens when museum curators focus on ethnicity over aesthetic discernment.” Her article resulted in a symposium held by the AGO. Gerald McMaster, Remix’s co-curator, said at the event that “the article really set off a chain reaction of ideas and thoughts. Some angry, some critical. But the aboriginal art and curatorial communities began talking a lot.”

On her blog, Digital Media Tree, Sally McKay, Toronto art writer and former co-editor of Lola, echoes Milroy’s stance at the symposium: “As a critic, her job is to make aesthetic value judgements. Were she to shy away from that role, she would not be giving the work the respect it deserves.”

So, another cautionary tale: Canadian art critics need not betray the art they love with handholding or spankings. Instead, they need to do art the honour of taking it seriously—and critiquing it honestly. Best friends don’t love to criticize; they criticize out of love. Canada’s critics could be a true best friend. Canadian art could use one

Canadian Business editor-in-chief Steve Maich sits at a two-seater table at a Timothy’s coffee shop in late October 2009, a short walk from Rogers command central, the hulking mass at the north end of downtown Toronto. He strikes what I can only assume is his signature pose, the same one he has in the portrait accompanying his editor’s letter. Here, as there, he appears relaxed, arms at his side, one leg crossed over the other, his face displaying the same confident grin of a man who believes he’s in control. Today, though, he doesn’t have to mirror Bay Street’s basic suit, shirt and tie. Instead, he’s dressed down in a navy pullover, sleeves casually rolled, plus jeans and hiking boots.

Just over three months have passed since Maich took charge of the now 82-year-old magazine and just weeks since the newly redesigned mid-October issue hit newsstands across the country.On its cover: a scowling Frank Stronach, founder of Magna International Inc., the mammoth auto-parts supplier. The coverline: “Frank Stronach Bets the Company.” Clearly, Maich is making good on the promise in the relaunch issue, which stated that CB will follow the “glamour and adventure of modern business.”

He begins our conversation by saying that the magazine’s aim is to be as “authoritative, engaging and interesting” as possible while being “insightful and entertaining.” Though his words sound like promotional copy, there’s no doubt about his passion for business journalism and his confidence in his ability to lace the magazine’s pages with that enthusiasm. “We’ve changed the look, certain things about our approach, but I don’t think the mandate has changed,” he says. The goal: to get readers “caught up in the drama, excitement and stakes of business.” Maich’s head nods in agreement with himself. “Business is inherently interesting because you’ve got these big companies driven by people with big egos and big ideas with formidable talents who are out there competing with one another—the stakes are huge,” he adds. His words drip with genuine elation and fascination. As a gambler might explain the draw of his game, he says, “The conflict is where the drama lives and dies.”

Maich has certainly seen his share of conflict and drama over the past few months. Following the involuntary departure of CB’s former publisher and art director and the shunting aside of his predecessor, Joe Chidley (who’s since left the company), Maich found himself holding the knife in yet another magazine bloodletting: two editors and four writers departed, among other staffers, and fact-checking was scaled back. Maich calls carrying out the layoffs “the worst thing in this business.” He then restocked CB’s masthead with a new managing editor from Financial Post Magazine, plus some colleagues from Maclean’s, where he’d been a business columnist for a year before serving as senior editor of the business section for three years. (He still remains executive editor at the newsweekly.) There were whispers in the industry that he was merely a puppet whose strings were held by the hands of Ken Whyte, though it may just be that Maich’s vision mirrors Whyte’s.

However, the events at CB weren’t without precedent. After leaving the National Post, the daily he helped found, Whyte had become publisher and editor-in-chief of Rogers-owned Maclean’s in 2005 and, as of June 2009, taken on additional responsibilities as publisher of CB, Profit and MoneySense before tacking on publishing duties at Chatelaine last October. Following each expansion of his portfolio, Whyte’s modus operandi involved substantial changes of editorial staff, including the delisting of senior people at each title.

All of this unfolded in a climate in which magazine and advertising sales had been plummeting at most titles and, more significantly, the publishing industry, like most businesses and individuals, was trying to reinvent itself in the midst of the Great Recession, the extent of which few, including wide swaths of business journalists and their employers, saw coming. And the chief villains? Jeff Madrick, editor of the scholarly economics magazine Challenge and former New York Times columnist, says, “If I’m going to blame journalism, I’m going to pin it more on the editors.”

As I watch Maich sip his tea, I wonder if he’s one of the editors to whom Madrick was referring. But right now all Maich is talking about is the new CB, that the key to its future growth and prosperity is to “be very current and reactive and analytical of things that are going on in the conversation right now,” and that business is everywhere: “If you have a bank account, if you go to the mall and shop, you’re engaged in business. CBneeds to speak to people as workers, as bosses, as owners, as investors. I want to do it all and strike a balance between all of them.”

Yet nowhere over the course of this interview, nor in the first several editor’s columns, does Maich discuss the current miserable economic times.

* * *

It was Ken Whyte who made the decision to change direction and leadership at CB. Though he declined to be interviewed for this article, it’s clear that his actions were based on his perception of the magazine’s flaws under Chidley, who had been CB editor for nine years. One of those flaws, however, was not profitability.

In fall 2007, CB had gone through a major relaunch amid dwindling subscription sales—a June Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) report noted more than 5,000 fewer subscriptions than the previous year. Chidley’s redesign ushered in a wave of aspirational theme packages often doused in investment. The first several issues of 2008 repeatedly touted investment stories, including an investment “survival guide,” and articles on “where to invest,” “how to stop worrying,” “where to invest in real estate” and “winning strategies for your beaten-down portfolio.” Masthead Online publisher Doug Bennet feels the magazine overdid the investment focus and lacked broader business coverage.

But advertisers embraced the revised CB; ad sales jumped, with revenue increasing by nearly $1 million from 2007 to 2008. The editorial packages even received two honourable mentions at the 2008 National Magazine Awards, and the next year CB was shortlisted for Magazine of the Year.

At Timothy’s, Maich was diplomatic in discussing his predecessor’s magazine, maintaining that Chidley “did a good job and put together a really good team of good journalists” (a handful of whom he retained) and choosing to herald the “position of strength” he is now building on. He sidestepped any criticism of his predecessor except to say, “There were a couple of areas where we looked at it and thought we could do better, like newsstand sales.”

It’s true that newsstand sales plunged nearly 40 percent between 2007 and 2008. On the other hand, most major North American business magazines had undergone significant losses during that time. Aside from the obvious impact of the recession, CB also experienced a dramatic drop of so-called sponsored sales of single copies: multiple issues purchased by companies for promotional purposes. At the end of 2007, these had averaged nearly 18,000 per issue, but a year later the number was down 83 percent. A $1 cover-price increase after the relaunch also likely had an impact. However, thanks to the solid ad revenue, Masthead’s 2009 Top 50 report indicated CB’s total estimated revenue for 2008 was $11.4 million, up roughly two percent from the year before. As unimpressive as these results may seem, competitor Report on Businessmagazine’s revenue declined almost eight percent in the same period, to $7.7 million. For that matter,Maclean’s didn’t do too well, either, showing a decrease of close to six percent from the previous year, and a near eight percent drop from five years earlier.

Though Canadians have been relatively sheltered from the U.S.-style repercussions of the burst financial bubble, hardship still followed here, though in the early days CB didn’t give it much coverage—or predict how bad it might get. When it did, the attention was not always prominent. Shortly into 2008, Chidley acknowledged in an editor’s note that Canada would be hard hit by a U.S. economic slowdown. But in the summer, he blithely predicted, “I think the U.S. recession will not be as severe or last as long as the doom-and-gloomers predict.” Still, he did go on to say, “On the other hand, I suspect the U.S. recession will have a longer and more severe impact on Canada than most Canadians think.” Maich, still at Maclean’s, wasn’t very prescient either, though he did acknowledge the growing turmoil in the occasional article, such as his August 27, 2008, piece where he highlighted the growing concerns of economic commentator Nouriel Roubini, an early prophet of the collapse.

Closer to the mark were CB’s online columnists. In December 2007, with markets still apparently strong, staff writer Jeff Sanford, who was dismissed after Maich arrived, predicted that 2008 would batter the markets and financial services. “Remember all those credit card offers you got in the mail over the last decade?” he wrote. “All of that easy lending will have to unwind to some degree.” Sanford advised his readers to proceed in 2008 “with caution.” The following March, he announced that the impending crisis was inevitable, stating, “The question now is whether the recession will be shallow and short or long and deep.”

On April 24, 2008, columnist Larry MacDonald posted an online column titled “Recession Watch.” He listed five economic indicators to monitor in order to determine where the economy was at and where it might be headed, though he didn’t venture a guess. By fall, when even the most bullish began to recognize the punishing economic state, Sanford warned we were “heading into another down leg of this grizzly bear of a market.” And at Maclean’s? Recession coverage remained sporadic until early 2009, when Maich and a few colleagues began keeping tabs on the unfolding chaos in a weekly online column entitled “Econowatch.”

As the financial train wreck was being tracked online, CB itself provided the requisite “survival guide” and suggestions on “how to deal,” and even ascribed blame (big business greed and congressional indiscretion). The April 14, 2008, coverline echoed the North American sentiment: “Is It 1929 All Over Again?” Yet CB’s overall examination wasn’t nearly as frequent or critical as its online-only content.

* * *

In what manynow call Recession 2.0, a great debate took place about whether business journalists did a good job of informing citizens of the coming catastrophe. Dean Starkman, managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review’s business press section, The Audit, believes coverage “was essentially a failure,” namely, that it failed in its “massively important role to make sure people have a grasp of what’s going on in the system that affects them profoundly.”

Starkman says the U.S. press “didn’t do the fundamental reporting, keeping tabs on major financial institutions. No one’s asking anyone to be clairvoyant, all we’re saying is—and the failure of the U.S. media was acute here—report on what’s happening now.” Starkman notes it’s the responsibility of the international business press to keep an eye on the U.S., but particularly for Canada. “What happens in Washington probably has a lot more to do with the way the Canadian economy is going to go than even what happens in Ottawa,” he says.

Madrick is of a similar mind: “What happens to us deeply affects Canada as well, and that’s all the more reason Canadian business journalism should have a responsibility to look into the facts and not go with the flow of conventionalism.”

American Journalism Review senior contributing writer Charles Layton described that conventionalism as “a cacophony of naive reportage.” Madrick’s prescription for avoiding this problem is simple, if hardly inevitable: “There should be an active culture in favour of going against the grain.”

* * *

In the tightly packedbusiness section of a suburban Chapters newsstand, sandwiched between the bold yellow covers of the Harvard Business Review and Strategy and Business magazines, are two CBs, the December 7, 2009, issue, featuring The Rich 100 List (an 11-year CB staple), and the newly conceived Winners & Losers special edition, a pass or fail business report card examining the people and companies that floated to the top or sunk to the bottom in 2009. These CB issues look nothing like the sparse covers of their competitors, though all the other CBs since the Maich relaunch have. Rather than a splash of text over a primary-colour background, the two CBs broadcast a barrage of faces, a who’s who of business. Glancing around, I notice they look conspicuously like the celebrity gossip mags racked nearby. They also look like Whyte’s Maclean’s. The CBs haven’t moved all afternoon, but neither has any other book, save for a lone issue of Fortune.

When I said to Maich at Timothy’s that CB’s new look reminded me of Maclean’s, he thumbed through his first issue, nodded slowly and raised his eyebrows. I got the impression the notion hadn’t occurred to him, or if it had, it had failed to register. (Presumably art director Christine Dewairy, who designs both titles, as well asProfit and MoneySense, is aware of the similarity.) “We managed at Maclean’s to go in and take a different approach to our covers that actually showed pretty substantial improvement in newsstand sales. One of the things we thought is that we could take some of the lessons learned from Maclean’s and apply them to CB’s cover and CB’s look and hopefully drive higher newsstand sales,” said Maich.

It’s a fact that the Whyte-regime Maclean’s has seen an increase in single-copy numbers, but what Maich fails to note is that there was considerable room for growth. In 2005, ABC recorded an average per-issue sale of 7,100 (by comparison, Loulou, “Canada’s shopping expert,” was moving more than three times that number). The most recent figure, for the last half of 2009, was a more respectable—but hardly blue chip—11,500. Overall, the retooled Maclean’s circulation has drifted downward in recent years: the Print Measurement Bureau shows a decline from 394,000 in 2006’s report to 380,000 in 2009’s.

The succession of CB post-redesign covers has followed Whyte’s trademark approach of favouring grabby, newsy content. Thinner and elongated, the all-caps new logo—rather grandiosely divided by an icon of the Rogers building stamped with “Since 1928”—conveys a more professional, highbrow tone than the former title, rendered in a chunky serif font and consuming twice the space. Save for the two gossip-rag issues, the revamped covers are less cluttered than earlier CB incarnations, often proffering answers like “How Google Really Does It” and “Why You’ll Buy Anything from Steve Jobs.” It’s too early to tell what the core 40-plus business audience will make of this approach in the long term; so far, it would seem not much: single-copy sales of the five 2009 issues after the Stronach cover have ranged from 2,100 (November 23: Reinvention of The Bay) to 9,600 (December 7: The Rich 100) and averaged 5,100, a little less than what the magazine was doing under Chidley in 2006, before the crash. Still, David Olive, Toronto Star business columnist, points outCB needs to distinguish itself in an environment far more competitive than in the 1980s, when he worked at the magazine.

CB’s content has also been renovated. The feature well, averaging five pieces from multiple markets across the globe, is now labelled by theme, allowing readers to skim tags like economics, technology, finance, world trade or justice for their arenas of interest. It’s convenient and effective.

Here, too, the design has changed. The newsier and denser format looks surprisingly cleaner than prior versions, even while decreasing white space. Perhaps the most beneficial alteration is the slight departure from investment focus. “Small investors are a very important part of our readership, so we won’t abandon them, but I want a larger tent,” says Maich.

A noticeable aspect of this broadening scope is increased coverage of female business issues: at present women make up just a third of CB’s audience. Pieces on an all-female executive team, investment firms for women run by women and a comparison of female fashion and economic trends have all found a place in the new CB. This past winter’s Winners & Losers special edition hails women as one of the year’s big winners, claiming that as many lost their jobs, Canadian female employment rates hardly changed.

Another addition to the front of book is opinion columns. Conrad Black wrote one, a November 23, 2009, defence of Research In Motion co-CEO Jim Balsillie. One reader wrote about the “bad aftertaste” he experienced; another declared he was “cancelling my subscription, effective immediately.” Maich respects those who disagreed with his decision to allow his former boss at National Post to file his opinion from a prison cell, but notes, “We should want as many good, provocative voices in the magazine as we can get. It’s as simple as that.”

* * *

Three months afterour first meeting, Maich is back at Timothy’s, his attire as casual as before. The notable change is in his confident enthusiasm, which has risen from its already heightened state in October. “It’s really starting to turn; we see it in advertising because advertising is incredibly economically tied,” he says. (Interest may be up, but a comparison of the last six issues of 2008 with those of 2009 shows the latter contain one-third fewer ads and 20 percent fewer pages. Maich disagrees with these numbers, but says, “We’re feeling much better about 2010.”) His zeal is also magnified by two sampling campaigns (the distribution of free issues with subscription cards) that he says “did really, really well compared to how those campaigns have done historically.” That might be true, but recent ABC numbers have yet to show an overall increase in subscriptions: for the first six months of 2009, they averaged just under 70,000; for July to December, the figure was 61,500.

I ask Maich what guides him now that the retooled CB is starting to find its footing. His focal point is ensuring his audience is adequately served. “The good thing is that our readers don’t really expect us to predict the future for them. What they want is the best information they can get to frame and to inform their opinions,” he says. “Our readers want it to be entertaining; they demand it be useful.” There is no doubt Maich refreshed a stale magazine—but something he said moments earlier still gnaws at me: “The good thing is that our readers don’t really expect us to predict the future for them.”

Or so he believes. It’s a view at odds with that of David Carr, New York Times business media columnist. “It’s not just business that has changed, it is the idea of business,” he wrote last November. “Writers and editors who cover business now know that the jig is up,” that they can no longer get by on the old “brand promise that suggests that if you clip the right articles, internalize the right rhetoric, then you too will end up as one of the shiny, happy people striding boldly across the pages of magazines.”

Perhaps Maich needs to ask himself: if Canada were hit today with the same severity as the U.S. was, how would he and Canadian Business fare under the same scrutiny directed at American business editors and their publications?

In the din of the newsroom, an orchestra of hammers struck the first note. Old sets were hastily torn down and replaced by transparent desks, luminescent backdrops and television screens. As the sound of buzz saws and workboots grew louder, so did the pressure to meet the on-air deadline. Newscasters rehearsed their standups on unfinished sets. Staff complained privately about increased work hours. In the days leading up to October 26, 2009, the music playing out at CBC News was a cacophony of anxiety and uncertainty. And when the orchestra finished, the performance began.

* * *

Peter Mansbridge stood on the new set of CBC News: The National, grinning into the camera as kinetic text and colours flashed behind him. Gone was the generic background. Instead, Mansbridge walked from screen to screen, story to story, reporter to reporter, in a bright, plastic space where everything seemed faster paced. Stories were sometimes introduced on different parts of the set. Some reporters delivered their reports and standups live rather than on location. Retired General Rick Hillier stood at a desk as he talked about his new book. To everyone involved, it was an excruciatingly choreographed production.

Mansbridge appeared to be playing a different role. Previously dignified as the rock of Canadian journalism, the 61-year-old anchor now looked uncomfortably jovial, as if he were trying to be younger, to keep stride, to be cool. In the middle of a Wendy Mesley piece on the H1N1 virus, Mansbridge looked at her and awkwardly asked, “What’s up with that?” Mansbridge wasn’t the only player who seemed out of place: London correspondent Adrienne Arsenault filed a piece on a poll concluding Canadians don’t care about the British monarchy, and Mesley dressed up in a haz-mat suit and asked for a book on swine flu at a local Chapters. It was a broadcast without bite.

When the show ended and the curtains closed, the actors retired for the night. There was a sense of momentary relief among the staff. They had produced a show that, because of the choreography between reporters and screens, was near impossible to direct. Part had been taped prior to broadcast because, as one former staffer recalls, there were concerns it would “blow up on television.” Though the show wasn’t as smooth as producers would have liked, there were few lineup glitches and reporters made no noticeable mistakes.

Despite the supreme effort, audience reaction to the October 26 revamp of The National did not sound like applause. Globe and Mail columnist Rick Salutin called it “talking down to dim, self-absorbed viewers, with weak attention spans who don’t care about complex issues or, yuck, details.” One viewer wrote to the Globeasking, “How stupid do they think the audience is?…[T]he banter between reporters is even worse on this new program and totally unreal. The stories are much too bitty and the whole program comes across as unprofessional.” Furthermore, viewers did not flock to the new version. Opening night audience numbers hit 704,000, according to an article television critic John Doyle wrote for the Globe—just over half the audience of that evening’s CTV National News—but as usual, dropped off 20 minutes into the broadcast to 573,000. Low numbers are nothing unusual; CBC’s main competitors, CTV and Global, typically dominate ratings.

The most common criticism, that reporters, anchors and guests now stood up on The National, was easier to defend than more valid concerns of fellow journalists: Why were the stories shorter? What had become of the long-form pieces that usually ran in the back half of The National? Why were CBC’s star reporters such as Arsenault and Mesley filing puff pieces? And, finally, why did everything seem sensationalist and populist—the type of flash news associated with CNN?

The uncomfortable truth about the network’s approach to news is that it had to change. It had become stale and predictable. It was a common joke that CBC Newsworld, renamed CBC News Network, took weekends off, and The National hadn’t had a major overhaul since the early 1990s. It needed, as Doyle observed, a “shot of adrenalin.” But had CBC gone too far?

The network is in distress. CBC must maintain its viewers under a perpetually thin budget. Its parliamentary appropriation, which in the last 20 years topped out at a little over $1.5 billion in 1991, took a cut in the late ’90s and hasn’t been adjusted annually for inflation. CBC/Radio-Canada’s revenue in 2008-2009, including advertising and other income, totalled just over $1.8 billion, about $16 million short of its operating costs. Last year, a $171 million budgetary shortfall forced CBC to cut approximately 800 jobs.

What Canadians get, then, is a network that has to do more with less, and how much CBC spent on the relaunch hasn’t been made public. Most troubling, however, is that CBC is on the verge of losing its relevance. With stiff competition and an audience that has more news options than ever, Canada’s public broadcaster, a national and cultural institution since 1936, is struggling to remind viewers of its own importance. CBC’s answer, a massive overhaul of news and programming, has the network under tremendous pressure in one of the most turbulent years of its existence.

* * *

Although Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president of English services, has publicly said the news renewal began around 2006, its origins date back to 2003, when Tony Burman, the former head of CBC News, commissioned a study that explored the state of CBC News and how it needed to change. The 248-page document is extensive, a thick manifesto detailing everything from branding and presentation to a new system of newsgathering called “tri-media collaboration,” or “editorial engine,” that would integrate CBC’s different news platforms.

It made no concrete suggestions. The study pointed out that many viewers wanted more international coverage made “local.” It suggested CBC move toward flashier branding to attract a younger demographic, yet contradictorily noted the problems with the overly slick news associated with U.S. networks. One of CBC’s issues, according to the study, was the “superficial, cosmetic or style changes that seem out of character or, worse, compromise the core integrity of the brand.”

“It became the manual and the justification to do anything you wanted, because you could read anything into it,” says a former staffer. “Viewers wanted foreign news, they wanted local news, they wanted more weather, they wanted shorter pieces, they hated politics. You could read anything into it, so anytime anyone had an idea, management would say, ‘That’s what the news study says.’ The fact that something entirely different was said four pages later mattered not.”

Burman left CBC in July 2007 and in May 2008 became managing director of Al Jazeera English. The study died. But from its corpse, Stursberg had a clear field to implement his vision. “Richard doesn’t give a shit about the news. And this is completely about the news,” says a former CBC News producer. “All he gave a shit about was power between him and Tony.”

What Stursberg wants—a network that isn’t just surviving but thriving—is the dream shared by everyone at CBC, and it’s ironic that it was Burman’s study that opened the door for the news renewal, as Burman is revered while Stursberg is vilified.

Both Burman and Stursberg declined multiple requests to comment for this story, but some former CBC staffers believe Stursberg won a power struggle between the two. “He hated that Tony had an area of influence that he didn’t control, which was the news,” says one. “He probably also hated the fact that whenever you talk to anyone anywhere, they’ll tell you the news is what CBC exists for. And, as you know, what Richard wished it existed for is Little Mosque on the Prairie”—a reference to the fact that, since he arrived in 2004 and was put in charge of all English-language programming services in 2007,Stursberg has been criticized inside and outside the network for his populist vision.

Todd Spencer, executive director of news content, was given the task of reconfiguring the divided newsroom into a hub system, where television, radio and online assignments, plus planning, would be merged into one desk. Executive producer Mark Harrison and director Jonathan Whitten were charged with guiding The National through the extensive revamp, with Whitten planning the changes and Harrison keeping the show running in the meantime. (In March, Whitten took over the hub while Spencer was made executive director of CBC News Network, a shuffle not considered a lateral move.)

But Stursberg wanted a team capable of not just running CBC, but selling it as well. Jeffrey Dvorkin was a managing editor of CBC Radio before he left in 1997, after 21 years, to become head of news at National Public Radio in the U.S. He encountered Stursberg’s hiring preference in 2008 when he applied for the job of head of radio. He recalls Stursberg calling about 10 days later to tell Dvorkin he didn’t get the job. “You’re a good journalist and programmer and all that, but that’s not what we’re looking for.”

“What are you looking for?”

“Well, we’re looking for someone with experience in the music industry because we think CBC Radio is underperforming as a marketing agency,” said Stursberg.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, CBC Radio could do better in marketing for its products, like music.”

“You mean like iTunes?”

“Exactly.”

Stursberg still found capable people. He hired John Cruickshank, a former chief operating officer of the Sun-Times Media Group’s Chicago portfolio, to replace Burman, making him publisher of CBC News. But Cruickshank soon left to become publisher of the Toronto Star. So Stursberg looked again, this time within CBC. He hired Jennifer McGuire as interim general manager and editor-in-chief of CBC News—same job, different title—in November 2008, then made the job official the following May. By the time she reached the top, McGuire had an impressive resumé at the network. She had been in charge of programming on CBC Radio and previously worked as a producer on television shows such as Foreign Assignment and Sunday Morning Live.

McGuire is considered by many to be a loyal, ambitious, competent employee. But some express concern that she speaks Stursberg’s language too well to ever really lead her staff, and that she is not Burman. The sentiment is unfair to McGuire: Burman’s legacy casts a long shadow over CBC, and McGuire took over at a time when her every decision was being scrutinized. For her part, McGuire says she didn’t think too much about it. “Tony’s held the reins in news for a very long time. He’s a big personality and he’s a journalist with great credentials. I’m not intimidated by that nor am I disrespectful of it. I think it’s wonderful; Burman had a great legacy, and on we go.”

Endless meetings and committees were scheduled, and it appeared that one major influence on what Stursberg did came from representatives of Frank N. Magid Associates, an American media consulting firm known for its “if it bleeds, it leads” mandate that found an ear at CBC around 2005 and has seen its influence grow since. The Magid approach emphasized crime, weather and traffic. Newscasts were to carry more stories with shorter run times, or stories cut up into segments scattered across the program, to keep viewers engaged.

Ian Morrison, spokesman for Friends of Canadian Broadcasting, says Magid’s reputation for “promoting sizzle rather than steak” doesn’t jibe with the ideals of a public broadcaster. “In the mainstream of the Western democratic tradition, public broadcasting has a distinctive something. It’s not something that follows, apes or mimics the private sector. It’s something that goes into more depth, covers things longer, tries to get behind the news to explain what’s going on and not chase fire trucks, sensationalizing, using news as entertainment, shock. Magid’s reputation is moving it in that direction and that is consistent with the current CBC management’s preoccupation with audience numbers and stylistically copying things that happen in the private sector in this country, and particularly in the United States.”

An access to information request for Magid’s contract and details of the company’s consultation with CBC was denied by the network on the grounds of journalistic exemption, and McGuire disputes the company’s perceived influence on the relaunch. “I think it’s ludicrous; it implies Magid somehow has a decision-making role here, and they don’t,” she says, adding that CBC made all decisions internally and that Magid’s consultations were specific to work flow, content analysis and local programming.

It can be argued that while hundreds of people took part in the relaunch committees, opposition to CBC’s new direction never had a chance to develop because so many experienced staff were taking themselves out of the game through voluntary retirement packages. CBC News senior correspondent Brian Stewart and Don Newman, host of Newsworld’s Politics, were among the biggest names to take the buyout, and newsroom morale was damaged by reassignments, layoffs and buyouts.

Stewart likens it to a troubled sports team being reinvented from the bottom up. Veterans are traded for rookies and draft picks in the hope that a fresh look can spark the team’s fortunes. But in a newsroom, that breeds anxiety. “People lose confidence,” says Stewart. “They wonder if they’re the mistake, if they’re the weak link. It had to linger as long as the rediscovery period went on. And I’m not sure how management could have soft-coated that in any way. They had to be honest and say a lot is going to change. Human beings can only live within that cycle for so long before they get kind of spooked. It happens with athletes, it happens in business, it happens in media.”

* * *

Under the hood, one of the biggest changes is the introduction of the hub, an assignment system meant to integrate television, radio and online editorial into one unit. Previously, assignment on each platform operated independently. A radio reporter and a television reporter might, for example, be sent to cover a protest unaware of each other. The hub is a way to do more with less in a clean, efficient manner. Theoretically, it should help CBC get ahead of the curve.

The system is organized into a desk in the middle of the CBC Toronto newsroom, with about 60 people working among three sections. At the planning desk, editors work out CBC’s future coverage. The daily desk assigns traditional stories, and the live-now desk feeds new information and footage to platforms—such as CBC News Network and the network’s website—that are capable of relaying breaking news. “Seventy to 80 percent of news can actually be planned for,” Spencer explained last January before he was reassigned to News Network. “You can’t plan for an earthquake in Haiti but you can plan for how you’re going to respond to an earthquake somewhere, so you can be a little bit ready. We can certainly be planning for most events that we end up covering.”

Spencer said the idea of a hub had been floated around the network even before Burman’s study, but that staff were skeptical because nothing had ever materialized. “When I had conversations with the staff they said, ‘Yeah, you know, we’ve been talking about this for years.’”

Spencer and McGuire began gathering suggestions in the spring of 2008. By the fall, they had enough information to assemble three small “blue-sky” groups that would come up with possible models for the hub. Then, for eight gruelling days at the end of January 2009, a work group tested each model and decided on how the hub would operate. The new system was unveiled in March 2009. A version of it was tested in Vancouver, then implemented in smaller newsrooms such as CBC Manitoba, where it fit with ease, though many regional newsrooms were already using their own versions of the hub. When the Toronto hub, which handles national coverage, launched last September, it ran 24/7.

Internally, the hub has met with plenty of complaints. Following the layoffs, there was grumbling that CBC should have been hiring reporters instead of adding a new layer of bureaucracy. A newsroom joke was that it took nine people to assign one reporter, though Spencer said there is little truth to this. He admitted it was challenging getting reassigned staffers, a mix from television, radio and online, used to new ways of working.

“We did a lot the last 12 months. People are very tired, and that leads to stressful situations,” he says. “But people are amazing and they’ve worked really, really hard.

“We’ve got at least another two years of work to refining, to making it work. This whole change of CBC News is a five-year project, in my view. You plan the work, you work the plan, and then you make sure it’s all working over the next few years.”

* * *

The local news reboot was, however, a mild precursor to the October relaunch, in which CBC changed its focus from delivering the news to connecting with the viewer. On The National, this can be seen in a number of ways. Reporters in the studio casually discuss their stories with Mansbridge instead of authoritatively delivering the news to the camera. Pieces are shorter. A typical long piece might run five or six minutes, down considerably from the 17- to 20-minute stories that used to air on the program’s back half. (Mansbridge attributes the shorter stories to a lack of resources and access. “That programming’s not as successful as it used to be. Long-form documentary programming has its home; we have lots of it on our network. There still is longer form on The National, but the documentaries have got to be worth it.”)Time is set aside to promote upcoming stories before commercial breaks. What the stories have lost in time, and therefore content, has theoretically been gained in keeping the viewers’ short attention spans throughout the program.

Derek Foster, an assistant professor at Brock University who has written several academic papers about the network, calls CBC’s attempt to establish a relationship with the viewer “a rhetoric of display. It’s a mode of presentation much like museums, which are constantly updating the way in which they try to appeal to their visitors. That’s the same thing CBC is doing. How can we encourage more visitors to come to our broadcast and how can we encourage them to stay through the half-hour and want to come back again? So they try to make it more homey.”

In a bid to use social media and get even cozier with viewers, CBC has placed a greater emphasis on The National’s Facebook page. Along with providing a space for comments, CBC also invites viewers to suggest the stories they want to see. And if you ever forget about it, Mansbridge is there at the end of The National to remind you CBC is online.

Such cross-promotion was given a greater focus after the relaunch. On local news, sports stories were sometimes replaced by plugs for upcoming sports programming. On The National, the cross-promotion was more shameless. When Battle of the Blades, a ratings hit for CBC in 2009, ended its final episode, one of the stories on The National following the broadcast was an interview with one of the show’s executive producers, Sandra Bezic, that included her speculating on future spinoffs. Increasingly, it seemed as though CBC treatedThe National as a billboard rather than a sacrosanct news program. That’s because CBC no longer had viewers; it had fans.

“This is part of their new identity,” says Foster, “that they’re not necessarily going to educate or service people in the way that has been traditionally understood as the mandate of public service broadcasting.

“So CBC is now on Facebook and they’re saying, ‘Tell us what you’d like covered.’ Like they’re literally saying, ‘If you express enough interest in this story, maybe we’ll put it higher up on the actual nightly coverage.’ It’s quite fascinating, the degree to which they are trying to actually not just become more of a public broadcaster but more of a popular broadcaster.”

* * *

When Brian Stewart looks back on his 45-year career as a journalist—37 of which he spent at CBC—he uses words like “fun” and “lucky” to describe his time in the ’70s and ’80s. Before he became one of CBC’s star foreign correspondents, Stewart was having a gas in ’70s Montreal covering city politics, protests and the FLQ crisis. Like many current and former CBC staffers, Stewart recalls that period with nostalgic fondness. Canada was eager to bolster its status in the world, and CBC was one of only a few networks worldwide that had the resources to bring the story home. For his own part, Stewart made his name in 1984 reporting on Ethiopia’s famine with daring footage of dying children and terrible living conditions. “There was a very good backup to our efforts abroad,” says Stewart. “If we could sell them on the importance of a story, there was much more the atmosphere or the attitude that, fine, we gotta be there and let’s beat the world.” It was a gutsy time for a network that could afford to show some swagger. CBC had little domestic competition and rarely worried about ratings. It also had The Journal

Then Frum died in 1992. Soon after, CBC management decided to roll The National and The Journal into one seamless program called Prime Time News, which many agree was a negative turning point for the network.

“The decision to kill The Journal was a grave mistake. A very grave mistake. It had tremendous potential to move on, like 60 Minutes, like Panorama on the BBC. But to kill it off a decade after it was launched, it was only 10 years old and it was one of the major names,” says Stewart. “Probably for 10 years people would still refer to The National’s back end or any other manifestation as The Journal.”

In the face of a new rival in CNN and stronger domestic competition from CTV, CBC hoped Prime Time Newswould revitalize the network. Hosted by Peter Mansbridge and Pamela Wallin, the show combined the current affairs aspects of The Journal with the news stories of The National in a 9 p.m. time slot.

“The idea at the time was that it would be a unique newscast,” says the Globe’s Doyle. “It would not necessarily lead with the biggest hard news event that happened that day. It would lead with the most interesting story of the day. If there was a big political story that day, it might ignore that and lead with a long report on some new research on breast cancer. It was a very experimental CBC program. Highly unusual for its time. Possibly ahead of its time.”

It was also a disaster. Prime Time News competed against American rating monsters such as Frasier,Seinfeld and Melrose Place, and viewers weren’t interested in watching news earlier than 10 p.m. The new format lasted less than three years before CBC quietly slumped away from the changes.

* * *

Harrison and Whitten are both sensitive to the impact on the audience, but they also feel the show had to respond to the times if it were to continue. Whitten points to The National’s website and 10-minute downloadable podcast (updated every weekday at 6 p.m. ET before the main broadcast) as examples of the show’s attempts to adapt to the times. “It’s recognizing that, 10 years from now, are people really going to be still sitting waiting for 10 o’clock at night to get the news? And The National is a hugely important brand for CBC, so why have people wait until 10 o’clock at night?” Whitten says. “This was a pretty wide-ranging change in the way we do things. It didn’t really involve the set and whether Peter stood or not. And I think that gets kind of lost in a lot of the hubbub.”

All of this may be too little, too late for CBC. Doyle thinks these changes should have come 20 years ago, during the rise of CNN in Canada, and that it cost CBC an opportunity, in particular with Newsworld, to be effective. “They knew there was a huge interest in the kind of live, on-the-spot reporting that CNN was doing. I think CBC was caught completely unaware. They failed to use Newsworld to respond to the existence of CNN in Canada.”

CBC’s troubles today are a far cry from the network’s glory days. In January, Spencer conceded CBC isn’t necessarily the first choice for Canadians anymore. “No one really loves anyone in Canadian news,” he says, adding the relaunch was informed by viewer feedback. “There’s no big winner. This myth that, Don’t worry, when it’s really hitting the fan people will go to CBC News. That isn’t true anymore. They go to whatever they’re going to on a regular basis more and more. So the audience was telling us, You’re not as important as you think you are.

“Numbers are really important to us and ratings are really important to us, because that’s the only way we know if we’re actually making a difference with Canadians.”

Still, CBC is undeniably a ratings underdog, though according to Mansbridge, it’s also a network “that survives on the strength of our journalists and what they deliver for us. We don’t survive on the strength of the lead-ins to our program. We never have. We’re not CTV at 11 o’clock coming out of viewers watching CSI. We’re The National coming out at 10 o’clock, which is the heart of prime time, against the heaviest competition, which isn’t news. And our lead-ins are usually very small in TV prime-time numbers.”

But that a public broadcaster would measure itself in terms of viewers, Foster says, is inevitably going to anger part of CBC’s audience, even though healthy viewer numbers lead to more advertising revenue. “Then you can continue to put more money into these things that will build and drive increasing future audiences.

“That is really problematic for some people, the traditional cultural nationalist public that says the CBC should not be servicing this master of advertising. That they’re serving dual masters: the public interest and commercial interest.”

In an ideal world, CBC would provide the stories Canadians need, not what they want. In reality, CBC must labour to convince the audience and federal government that a public broadcaster is still necessary.

CBC News then walks a tightrope of expectations between two types of audience: the one that thinks CBC as a public broadcaster has a duty to give Canadians vital content without pandering for advertising money, and the other that wants CBC to maintain its quality while providing a return on taxpayers’ investment. CBC News can either continue, underfunded and struggling to compete for shorter attention spans, or be burnt to the ground.

“Public opinion, public interest and public expectations. All these things are wrapped up in this idea of what a public broadcaster can do,” says Foster. “And the CBC as a public broadcaster almost inevitably is going to fall short.”

At the end of the 20th century, a promising new phenomenon appeared—amateur reporters and commentators who came to be known as “citizen journalists.” They presented their writing on the internet, called web diaries, weblogs or simply blogs. The people maintaining these sites were writers unhindered by conventional journalism practices who wanted to tell stories from a viewpoint that perhaps the mainstream media were unable or uninterested in publishing. Some of these self-described truth tellers, who busied themselves correcting errors, oversights and misinterpretations in what they regarded as the biased or agenda-driven mainstream media—or MSM, in the culture’s parlance—predicted an imminent renaissance of journalism that would be driven by their efforts, which eventually would supplant the MSM altogether.

In his 1999 book What Are Journalists For?, Jay Rosen offered a manifesto for this new era: “On the Web, every reader is also a writer, every consumer a potential producer,” wrote Rosen, a New York University digital journalism professor and an early advocate of citizen journalism. “Everyone there is in potential reach of everyone else who is there. These are new conditions for journalists, and they stand out even at high tide in the hype that often surrounds Web talk.”

Similarly, in Dan Gillmor’s 2004 book We the Media, he argues that the internet allowed citizens to “participate in the news-gathering and dissemination processes.” The world wide web is part of “an expanding, thriving ecosystem,” as Gillmor put it.

But looking at today’s media, where are all these grassroots reporters with contributions so much more compelling than what the “legacy” media offer?

The explosive growth in technology that has allowed people with access to iPhones and BlackBerrys to shoot video and take photos has not spurred the emergence of newsworthy revelations that citizen journalism champions thought the internet had the potential to unleash. Arguably, citizen journalism has mostly yielded images uploaded by volunteer photographers and videographers to the amateur sections of MSM websites. Here you’ll find photos and videos of freakish weather events, highway accidents and a lot of nature shots that might best belong in someone’s scrapbook. Interesting and profound content from citizens has been scarce.

Rosen offered this definition of citizen journalism at the 2008 Netroots Nation conference, an annual event held to discuss ideas on how to use technology more effectively: “When the people, formerly known as the audience, employ the press tools in their possession to inform one another, that’s citizen journalism. Got it?” Rosen might have had in mind sites like that of Steve Munro, a Canadian who writes a frequently updated blog, Steve Munro’s Web Site, about Toronto transit and politics. Munro’s work is insightful and engaging for anyone who wants in-depth analysis of Toronto Transit Commission policies and practices—topics the MSM don’t often have the room, time or ability to describe in detail, or cover at all. But there are few of these types of blogs maintained by people who aren’t trained journalists. And while there may be more topics that could use coverage by a knowledgeable person like Munro, a lot of time has to be invested in internet work of his calibre. Most citizens don’t have the time for that. So the best that most internet contributors manage is to upload a video or photo to their favourite TV network. This is their stab at news.

People who have posted to citizen journalism platforms of conventional news outlets have rarely made impressive contributions. Besides, what’s fresh here? News organizations have been using citizens as members of their newsgathering teams for years, getting news tips from them and, more recently, posting their submissions on their websites. The tips from readers, listeners and viewers used to be delivered by phone or snail mail. Now, with the internet and the proliferation of affordable digital cameras, submissions get there quicker and may look more professional.

Ira Basen, a long-time radio producer, says citizen journalists have contributed some valuable information, including reports about the disputed Iranian presidential election last summer. While the foreign press was “confined to reporting from their hotel rooms,” as Basen says, citizens were able to file informative reports on protests.

But citizen journalism, like the regular kind, can be mischievous. Basen offers the example of an online report of Steve Jobs having suffered a heart attack. The January 2009 report, originating on iReport, a section of CNN.com devoted to user-generated content, gained credence because the Apple CEO had a history of health problems. Apple shares dropped until the truth was reported: Jobs’ heart was fine. CNN’s iReport is similar to MyNews at CTV, My Breaking News at CP24 and CBC’s Your Voice. The difference is that the Canadian broadcasters have web teams to moderate and verify all submissions.

Not that items are always vetted carefully, though. Back in December, CBC’s Your Voice carried a photo of Barbara Ann Scott, the 1948 Canadian Olympic skating champion, carrying the Games’ torch into the House of Commons. Submitted by a viewer whose name didn’t appear on the page, and likely taken with a camera phone, the picture was grainy and facial details, including Scott’s, were barely discernible. Without news reports anticipating Scott’s Commons appearance, it would have been difficult, if not impossible, for even the sharpest-eyed screener—or viewer—to verify her identity. Pictures of celebs, A-list or minor, are the exception. A lot of viewer-contributed “news” shots consist of pics of fires, storms, road mayhem or images titled “The Amazing Sky” or “Coyote.”

While the images submitted to traditional media sites by citizens are seldom arresting, broadcasters expect volume to increase. Mark Sikstrom, executive producer for news syndication and CTV.ca, is enthusiastic about providing a platform for viewer submissions via CTV’s MyNews. “It’s taking the 10 million camera-enabled people out there and making them part of our newsgathering force. It’s another way of gathering important breaking news.” Sikstrom adds that it’s also “a way of creating community and loyalty. Rather than people being passive viewers, they can be active participants in what we do every day. It does create more loyalty to our brand. And it’s where people are going. They have now come to expect to be partners in media rather than just observers.” MyNews seems to be working for CTV. Since its launch in May 2008, the site’s traffic has tripled, although it’s hard to tell whether that’s due to all the folks posting their snapshots of cats or fires, or because visitors are avidly seeking these out.

True, uploaded photos and videos can also be of genuine breaking news, such as the tornado that hit Durham, a region east of Toronto, last summer. But who follows up on such stories? Journalists at the traditional news organizations. Meanwhile, though, in the pre-web days, tipsters might get a thank you, or even a modest payment; now there’s usually not much reward for contributors. Larry Cornies, coordinator of the print journalism and new media programs at Conestoga College, recalls that “it used to be special for a newspaper when a citizen had a great photo that a paper might buy for $500 and put on the front page. There was a bit of glamour for the contributor.” Today, contributors give up all rights to the content they provide and don’t see a cent or even receive a call to confirm receipt of the image or when, or if, it might be used.

Cornies has experienced this phenomenon. “I was living in Toronto along Queen’s Quay and there was a snowstorm,” he says, describing a location near the city’s waterfront. “In the winter it’s deserted, and I took this great shot of the CN Tower in the background and the desolation of the lakefront. I uploaded it to The Weather Network and heard nothing back. It may have been shown, it may never have been shown, you don’t know. It feels like a hollow exercise when there’s no acknowledgement of your contribution.”

Perhaps the best way to integrate citizen reporting into mainstream news is to train or guide citizen journalists. Websites such as blogTO and Torontoist could be mistaken for citizen publications, but actually are more like small versions of mainstream newsrooms. Writers at Torontoist have guidelines and procedures to follow, making them function in a way similar to a metropolitan daily. David Topping, Torontoist editor-in-chief, explains that the site’s editors examine submissions before they’re posted. Torontoist also has a code of ethics to follow and a fact-checking and editing process similar to larger media organizations.

As a vocation, journalism takes a lot of time to practise well. Cornies, who has his own blog, is cheering for citizen journalists but is skeptical about their potential because of the time required to thoroughly report a story. “Finding and talking to sources, challenging authority figures, collecting and correlating information from a wide variety of sources, and making judgements on how to tell the story are things few people are willing to do for free, or spend a lot of time doing,” he says. “So far, citizen journalism is a cult of amateurs feeling their way into this brave new world called journalism, and I’m cheering for them.” However, Cornies admits that he has yet to see citizen journalists consistently break important stories.

When the utility of citizen journalism is questioned, invariably the case of Victoria’s Paul Pritchard is raised. It was Pritchard who captured the Tasering of Robert Dziekanski by RCMP officers at the Vancouver International Airport in October 2007. Dziekanski, a 40-year-old Polish man who had never flown before and spoke no English, began to behave erratically after spending hours inside an arrivals area. Four officers Tasered Dziekanski five times, ultimately resulting in his death.

That video spurred extensive coverage of the police and their use of Tasers. Pritchard earned the first ever Canadian Journalists for Free Expression Citizen Journalism Award in 2009. Had Pritchard’s video not been submitted, published and reproduced all over the internet, the incident and the issue of using Tasers might have gone largely unnoticed. But was it sheer luck that Pritchard happened to be at the right place and time or an act of journalism? Cornies seems to think that this is an example of a one-off that a citizen broke. It was the MSM that followed up on Pritchard’s information—Pritchard hasn’t produced more stories since.

Pritchard made a bit of money for his scoop, but the citizens whose blogs and musings on the internet that reporters cruise for ideas for their own stories generally don’t even get that. So what has become of the early vision of grassroots freethinkers providing knowledge and insight the MSM fails to provide? Although citizens are breaking news every now and then—the first images from Haiti were shot by civilians—citizens are tipping traditional news media to important or overlooked stories at about the same rate as they have for the last six decades, and the concept of citizen journalism as originally articulated by the Rosens and the Gillmors has yet to become a reality.

Jamie Patterson, web developer at CTV, happily pulls up his favourite viewer submission to date. In the “My Toronto Is…” section that CTV’s website includes as part of its MyNews page, a teenager dressed in a plain tan shirt with a plaid sheet as background gives a two-minute-and-38-second description of his Toronto. Patterson says there is something endearing about how the amateur video was put together—it seems the boy used all the different editing transitions—zigzags and dissolves—available to him. The CN Tower, Rogers Centre and Air Canada Centre are among his top Toronto attractions. He pauses and looks into the far distance as his face dissolves into images of the sites he has mentioned. He leaves CTV viewers with this message: “Some more interesting things about Toronto: Toronto is a very busy city. There’s the GO train you can travel on, there’s the TTC bus, there’s the streetcar, there are taxis you can drive in, there are your own cars you can drive in. Toronto is a very busy city. People are bustling everywhere.”

So now you know.

By 8 a.m. most days, Mir Mahdavi is walking his customary 15-minute route from his home in western Kabul, greeting the same friendly faces and stopping in the same grocery store for cigarettes before arriving at the three-storey apartment building that houses Aftab (“The Sun”), the weekly newspaper of which he is founder and editor-in-chief. There he makes his way down the first-floor hall, past the offices of his 10 employees, before settling at his desk, which overlooks a busy street. On Monday mornings, when Aftab goes on sale, the local kiosks along the rock-strewn road outside are especially crowded. One week a typical headline might read: “The Death of Democracy.” On another: “Religion + Government = Despotism.” Aftab’s willingness to explore incendiary issues and write harsh criticisms of corrupt warlords and fundamentalist groups has earned it a large following, but also powerful enemies. In November 2001, two months after Aftabreleased its first issue, Mahdavi received a series of warnings and bribes proffered by police, fundamentalist groups and political parties; he was even offered a position in a ministry of his choosing so long as he desisted from his work. “Democracy is a big lie,” the officials told him. “The reforms are not going to happen. You need to slow down.” But Mahdavi was not deterred. “My voice was important. Lots of people were listening to my words, and when you feel that, you feel much better,” he says today. One evening a week Mahdavi would even open Aftab’s office to university students—often 75 or 80—who would sit on the floor to listen to him lecture on Islam, poetry and journalism.

Eight years later, Mahdavi is barely awake at 8 a.m. as he heads toward the bathroom in his three-bedroom Hamilton home and eases himself into a hot shower. He then dresses and prepares breakfast for his two daughters, 14 and six, and goes online to review the latest news out of Afghanistan. At nine, just as his wife and three-year-old son are waking, he drops the girls off at Sanford Avenue school, then parks his 2006 Dodge Caravan cab in a nearby Tim Hortons lot. As he waits for orders, he removes a stack of square papers held together by an elastic band from the front console. Each sheet contains a different English word on one side and its use in a sentence and translation in Farsi on the other. With the windows up, he reads each word aloud—“Vulnerable. Fury. Contemplate”—in what has become his de facto office. In the afternoon, still on shift, he searches for unfamiliar words in his copy of The Hamilton Spectator or reads from an assortment of Farsi texts he keeps tucked underneath his front seat.

With the exception of spending 2005 as a visiting lecturer on human rights and democracy in Afghanistan at George Brown College in Toronto and a year-long paid internship at the Spectator, Mahdavi’s seven years in Canada have been spent working in a sports equipment factory and as a pizza delivery man and taxi driver. “I feel like I’m killing myself here,” the 38-year-old Mahdavi says in a slight accent as he peers down into a cup of tea. “I think about my worth and what I’m going to do and how I’m going to get out—to get back to something that fits my knowledge. At home I felt like I was doing a useful job—something important for people or the future of my country. But anybody can drive a taxi.”

* * *

We’re all familiar with the tales of émigré physicians or professors who arrive in Canada to find that their immediate future is delivering pizza or driving a cab. Among us, though, are also hundreds of journalists like Mahdavi, who has degrees in physics, journalism and Islamic studies and two years of experience managingAftab in Kabul, stuck in low-skill, low-wage jobs. “The modern version of what used to be doctors coming to Canada and not finding work,” says Haroon Siddiqui, the Toronto Star’s editorial page editor emeritus, “is now the reality for journalists.” According to John Fraser, a journalist and master of Massey College at the University of Toronto, the state of the media is so dire “that even exiled journalists looking for work will find it hard to evoke empathy here.”

No one really knows how many foreign journalists are living in Canada, although the 2006 census indicated that one in 400 immigrants who came to Canada from 2001 to 2006 identified themselves as journalists, editors, writers or authors. And their numbers may not increase substantially in the immediate future; foreign-born journalists are not eligible for Citizenship and Immigration Canada’s federal skilled-worker category.

But what about those who are already here?

“Other than feeling safe and secure, I don’t feel good about any other aspect of my life,” Tesfaye Kumsa, a 45-year-old Ethiopian journalist, says despondently as he sips tea in a coffee shop near his home in south Scarborough, Ontario. He arrived in Toronto in 2002, and tried to launch a newspaper for the city’s Ethiopian community, focused largely on issues back home. But, like other foreign-born journalists with similar ambitions, he had difficulty attracting advertisers and was forced to shut down after only six months. Asked if he has since attempted to work in the Canadian media, he dismisses the suggestion. “You don’t have any fundamental human rights issues or problems related to that,” he says. “Journalists here are completely different. They’re more commercial and concerned with serving their employers. In Ethiopia our journalism saved lives.” He references an event in the mid-1990s, when as a senior editor at Urjii (“Star”), an independent biweekly newspaper in Addis Ababa, his team reported on a secret underground prison where the government was holding 108 political prisoners. Urjii’s report, he says, coming to life, alarmed the International Committee of the Red Cross, which registered the detainees, guaranteeing their safety. “Can you imagine what pleasure this gives you—you can see the fruits of your job right away.”

 Although he was routinely arrested for his work—10 times in 10 years—the beatings and subsequent injuries never bothered him; he wears his wounds as if they are medals earned in battle. Kumsa says he never intended to leave his country, but had little choice after his 10th imprisonment in 1997 lasted almost four years and involved torture. “I feel like I’ve betrayed my people. I know they’re still suffering,” he says despairingly. “They relied on our independent media. It was their only voice.” Kumsa still tries to help his native community by researching human-rights abuses in Ethiopia for the Human Rights League of the Horn of Africa website, but the guilt of not being closer to the reality still lingers.

Across town, I meet AbeerAl Askary, a 34-year-old Egyptian journalist who spent 13 years courageously reporting on issues such as abuse by state security officers within Egypt’s interior ministry. Her work, she says, made her apolice target and resulted inmore than 20 arrests. In police custody, Al Askary was often badly beaten; her nose is still crooked from breaks on two separate occasions. As she recounts these experiences, Al Askary’s passion for human rights in her native country is evident, and although she’s willing to write for Canadian publications, so far, they haven’t been willing to give her that opportunity.

Al Askary first visited Canada in November 2006 to receive an award from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression. She recalls how the media honoured her as a “freedom fighter” and encouraged her to settle in Canada, which “made me feel that if I stayed everything would turn out great.” When she arrived for good in May 2007, her English was rough, but her network of contacts was vast. “I asked people from the [event] for work and they said to improve my English and look for work in Arabic papers. They offered many solutions, but all of them involved staying away from them,” she recalls. After scouting several Canadian-Arabic papers, which Al Askary dismisses as businesses, not journalism, she launched her own publication—Sootna (“Our Voice”)—in June 2008, about human rights issues in the Arab world. Again, her Canadian colleagues briefly showed support. But then “all the people who said I’ll help you with fundraisers and I’ll write about you in our newspaper were gone.” Financial constraints limited Al Askary to publishing a single 12-page edition, which she still carries in her bag, and flips through with enthusiasm, pride and longing. Today, a combination of freelance pieces for Arab newspapers and international human rights organizations keeps her afloat, but it’s a comedown for an award-winning reporter with a master’s degree in journalism and 13 years of experience.

“Do you know what it’s like to be a journalist and live for three years without writing?” she says, putting her publication and her dream back into her bag. “The Canadian media doesn’t accept us as journalists—we’re just freedom fighters to them. Yes, I was honoured when I was tortured in Egypt, but what’s happening to me now is worse than torture.”

Many journalists who come here by mischance or choice share her sense of disillusionment. Nik Kowsar, a 40-year-old editorial cartoonist from Iran, arrived in Toronto in 2003 with a portfolio that included images distributed by the New York Times Syndicate, published books of illustrations and awards from the National Press Club and Cartoonists Rights Network International. “I was told I didn’t have enough Canadian experience,” he recounts of his attempts to penetrate the mainstream. Instead, he was urged to work in a clothing store or a restaurant to gain a better appreciation for Canadian culture. “It was very insulting,” says Kowsar. “If somebody comes from a different background and has a lot to give but doesn’t know how, there should be a system that helps them share their potential.”

Now, though, the primary system at work is the precariousness of the newspaper industry. As Haroon Siddiqui says, “There are almost no jobs. It’s a horrible, tragic situation that doesn’t look like it’s going to get any better.” There may be some desire to diversify newsrooms, but in a profession where the last in is the first out, it’s hard to find room. “One of the great failures of modern journalism is that publications didn’t make the hires when they should have. They missed the boat and now they’re subject to greater forces.” Siddiqui’s former boss, John Honderich, now Torstar chair, argues that the mainstream media is trying to accommodate these individuals: “It’s not like we are against these people—quite the contrary.” But Kowsar isn’t so sure: “Any new person from another country is trouble for them. They think they’ll have to start at square one.”

Talking to Roger Gillespie and Jim Poling reveals a different perspective. Both work in the mainstream media and share a track record of dedication to the foreign-born journalist cause. Gillespie has been the training and development editor at the Star since June 2008, after working at the Spectator for 20 years. As the Hamilton paper’smanaging editor, he would often stay in the newsroom late into the evening to assist interns such as Mir Mahdavi with their articles. “It’s not patience but resources that are required,” he says today from his office at the Star. “Not very many newspapers are prepared to put in those resources and that’s a shame.” However, any publication serious about integrating foreign-born journalists should offer several years of training to those who need it, not just a few weeks.

For a short time, the Spectator came close to achieving this,offering a year-long paid internship through its Internationally Trained Journalist program. Hanging on managing editor Jim Poling’s office wall is the Vox Libera Award he received from Canadian Journalists for Free Expression in 2008, for his leadership in establishing the ITJ program in 2003. Over lunch, Poling reminisces about Mir Mahdavi, a former intern, who had an impressive ability to get in touch with Afghanistan’s most influential players so effortlessly from his desk. Although restructuring forced the program’s end in March 2009, Poling’s enthusiasm for diversity is undiminished. “There’s lots of understanding needed to piece together our society,” he says, “and new journalists can bring new insights into the newsroom.”

* * *

One major event to acknowledge the value of foreign-born journalists was the 2004 “Building a Writers in Exile Network” event in Ottawa. Hosted by PEN Canada, it gathered over 90 PEN representatives from a variety of countries, plus publishers and delegates from Canadian cultural organizations, universities and colleges. Among the attendees was Joyce Wayne, department head of journalism at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario, at the time. Wayne was moved by the speeches delivered by exiled journalists and author John Ralston Saul, husband of then Governor General Adrienne Clarkson. Wayne remembers Saul, who co-chaired the event, encouraging the audience to embrace foreign-born writers, reminding them that diverse voices are essential to a vibrant democracy.

 “Something had to be done,” says Wayne. “Here we were in this historic building, and Canada has a long history as a haven for refugees, and I felt moved by that and the need to carry on that tradition.” Less than two years later, Wayne, with the assistance of Philip Adams, who ran PEN Canada’s Readers & Writers program, and David Cozac, then program coordinator for PEN, founded Canadian Journalism for Internationally Trained Writers. The one-year Sheridan College program, renamed Media for Global Professionals in 2009, strives to provide educated foreign-born journalists and academics with the tools to better understand their new environment, cultivate contacts and acquire Canadian experience through a six- to 14-week internship. Since 2007, 73 students from countries as diverse as Pakistan, Eritrea and Colombia have gone through the program, which includes such courses as media law and ethics, Canadian news writing and Canadian cultural studies.

To get the program started, Sheridan received over $110,000 from The Canadian Press, The Globe and Mail, CBC and the Toronto Star combined, as well as six-digit sums from the provincial and federal governments. In September 2007, the first group of students headed off to CBC or the Star or, in the case of Mir Mahdavi, to the Spectator for a one-year internship. It was all going so well. But then, according to Wayne, the Globe, which had initially expressed willingness to accept interns from the program, didn’t follow through. Then, just one night before four students were due to be interviewed for two paid internship positions at CP, she received a call from Paul Woods, the human resources manager, cancelling the meetings.

 “But you haven’t even met the candidates,” Wayne objected. “How do you know before meeting them that their English is lousy and they won’t be able to keep up in your newsroom?” (Woods says it was Wayne’s own recent admission that her students “struggled to write at an acceptable level of English” and had little, if no, audiovisual training, a requirement for the internship, that deterred him from following through.) Either way, the students, who were eager for their first Canadian interview, were devastated, and for the 42 students who have gone through the Sheridan program since, obtaining journalism internships remains difficult. Of last year’s class, four of the 15 students interned in newsrooms, while the rest were sent to work in book publishing or public relations.

When there are open positions, some of the strongest competition Sheridan students and their counterparts face is from people like Danielle Wong, a recent hire at the Spec. A first-generation Chinese-Canadian, she’s fluent in three languages, well connected to Toronto’s Asian communities, has interned at the Toronto Star,TheWindsor Star and National Post, and has a Ryerson journalism degree. Each year, the country’s journalism schools graduate similarly qualified students.

As for the foreign-born journalists who are working in the mainstream media, many are not newcomers; they are people like Haroon Siddiqui, who arrived in Canada from his native India in 1967 at 25, with Indian experience and good English. “If I came today I’d probably fail as well,” he says. Siddiqui also had a break when he moved to Toronto. Clark Davey, then managing editor of the Globe, interviewed him, and pitched him to a publisher acquaintance for a position at the Brandon Sun, where Siddiqui garnered his Canadian experience.

Luck also touched Merita Ilo, a former Associated Press reporter in her native Albania. “Mine is not a typical story because a lot of things worked,” the 40-year-old acknowledges. When she arrived in Toronto with her husband and their nine-year-old daughter in August 2002, Ilo was fortunate to have a contact at AP with whom she had worked during the war in Kosovo in the mid-’90s. Her colleague found her a part-time job with AP, but more importantly, her new office was located in the same building as The Canadian Press. A month later, a position at CP’s world desk came up and Ilo was tipped to it. “If I wasn’t with AP or in that building, there’s no way I would’ve found that job,” she says. She got an interview with the foreign editor, a journalist from Hong Kong who had immigrated to Canada 33 years earlier, and who “understood my story in a way a person born here wouldn’t be able to,” she says. Eight years later, Ilo is a national desk editor at CP’s Toronto office.

Nik Kowsar’s story is more typical than Ilo’s, although he too belongs to the small cohort of émigrés earning a living by practising journalism here. Kowsar, whose work for 20 newspapers in Tehran earned him numerous death threats, says his initial years after arriving here in 2003 were trying. “I went from hero to zero. I had a lot of energy to say something, to do something, to be seen, to publish stuff that was useful. I would have loved to get some experience in a Canadian newsroom and not lose that fire I had in my mind and my heart, but it was difficult.” Kowsar spent his first year and a half here working at two dry cleaners before becoming a midnight online editor for Marketwire. All along he worked as a freelance illustrator and, beginning in 2006, filed reports for Radio Zamaneh in the Netherlands.

Today he runs a citizen journalism forum at khodnevis.org for Iranians in Iran and abroad, and makes his living from illustrations for roozonline.com and the Washington-based Win TV. Most importantly, he has found a way to express himself and the issues he feels passionately about: “I now get e-mails and questions from Canadians because they want to learn more or help. I feel as if I’m giving something back. I’m educating, and that’s positive.”

Oscar Vigil, a Salvadoran journalist, also believes his contribution to Canadian media has been positive even though he now wields just a shadow of the influence he enjoyed as the owner of two radio stations back home.Vigil, his wife and three children, were forced to flee their country in 2001 after repeated death threats and an attempt on his life. In Toronto, given his weak English, he concluded that his future lay outside the Canadian mainstream. He spent three years writing for Correo Canadiense, one of Canada’s most influential Spanish-language papers, and two years operating paginauno.ca, a Toronto-Latino community website, before launching his own site, revistadebate.ca, in 2008. Vigil currently supplements his income by writing forEl Popular, a Toronto-based Spanish-language paper, and freelancing for publications back home. “When I came here I had to ask myself what I was going to do. Was I going to sell insurance? Cars?” he asks. “Or was I going to continue to do what I love? What’s more important: the position I had or the profession?”

Not all foreign-born journalists have the same capacity to adapt to their new environments. Kumsa and Mahdavi, for example, have had difficulty diverting their attention from issues they have invested years fighting for. They are accomplished men nearing middle age, and for Mahdavi, the idea of working for an editor who is younger and unaware of the sacrifices he has made on behalf of his craft is hard to accept. There is also the challenge of writing in English: “Those silly articles. They can’t bring back the power of Farsi,” laments Mahdavi of his attempts to express himself at the Spectator. In fact, for Mahdavi, the situation in Canada has become so bleak that he is considering a return to Afghanistan despite the risk of imprisonment or assassination. “When your life is meaningless it’s like you’re already at the end,” he says despairingly.

Intikhab Amir, a 40-year-old Pakistani journalist, who arrived in Toronto in 2006, is also considering a return home. Amir is another Sheridan graduate, yet aside from a seven-week CBC internship and eight weeks at Torstar’s Metroland, he hasn’t found media work here. He is applying for a master’s program in communications and culture, but if he isn’t accepted and fails to find a good job, he will return to Pakistan and seek work from his former employers, BBC Urdu and Dawn news, Pakistan’s oldest English TV station. “I do not want my daughters to be identified as girls whose father works as a security guard,” he says. “They tell their fellow students that their dad is a journalist and I don’t want to shatter their dreams.”

Nonetheless, there are still journalists willing to employ whatever means necessary in order to practise journalism in Canada, like Kowsar and Vigil, says Vladimir Kabelik, a Czechoslovakian documentary producer and Sheridan professor. In his 2009 documentary So Far from Home, he chronicles the lives of five exiles, including Mahdavi and Kowsar, to highlight the professional and personal challenges facing these individuals.

But today Kabelik still can’t identify the magic ingredient that allowed some of his protagonists to keep their careers alive in Canada, while others, like Mahdavi and Kumsa, have floundered. Kabelik says having sound English and good time management skills are essential for success, in addition to being flexible and having the capacity to handle stress. “There is filter after filter after filter and only a few reach their goal,” he says. “If you are prone to be depressed or angry, it will backfire.” Kabelik’s colleague, Joyce Wayne, is also baffled. “It has something to do with just getting a break at some point.”

Getting a break. It’s an observation shared by many of the foreign-born journalists I interviewed: “If only I get a shot,” they would say. “We know our English is not as strong—that it might take more time to copy edit our work—but we also bring so much to the newsroom. We have contacts all over the world and unique perspectives and plenty of experience as well, even if it’s not that damned ‘Canadian experience.’

“Why can’t the media do more to include us?”

Travelling west on Yellowhead Highway 16, Vancouver Sun reporter Neal Hall took in the loneliness of the road, especially desolate in 23-below December weather. The isolated landscape was beautiful as the sun climbed and dipped, blushing the tips of the mountains in pink hues. After driving for an hour or more and not glimpsing a house, he thought, “This is the perfect place, if somebody were hitchhiking, to pick them up, kill them and ditch them somewhere in the bush.”

Hall steered his rented SUV toward Prince Rupert, B.C., some 750 kilometres northwest of Vancouver. He wanted to see the spot where Tamara Chipman was last seen hitchhiking before disappearing on September 21, 2005. Now, months later, Hall’s editor had sent him to drive Highway 16, known as the Highway of Tears. The 3,500-kilometre highway begins its mainland stretch in Prince Rupert, curves north toward Terrace, dips down and heads east to Prince George before snaking through Alberta, Saskatchewan and ending in Macdonald, Manitoba. The RCMP had been actively investigating cases involving 18 teenage girls and young women who had been murdered or gone missing since 1969 along the 720-kilometre stretch linking Prince Rupert and Prince George.

Hall had plenty of experience covering such investigations, having worked the crime beat at the Sun since 1986, including reporting the trial of serial killer Clifford Olson. On this trip, he spent three days talking with Chipman’s family, volunteer searchers, a criminology professor at Northwest Community College in Terrace, locals and RCMP officer Fred Maile, who had helped solve the Olson case. Hall’s resulting 2,700-word feature focused on community concerns as well as the family’s agonizing search for something that belonged to their daughter—a piece of clothing, jewellery—that might lead to her discovery. He says he couldn’t have conveyed that detail if he had not driven the highway. “You can’t describe it unless you experience it first-hand. It’s invaluable to impart to your reader.”

But these types of assignments, once standard in print newsrooms, are now rare, victims in another way—of tight budgets, staff cutbacks and tiny travel funds. As a result, reporters and editors must find new ways of keeping this story alive, which now goes back 41 years, includes 13 recovered bodies and five disappearances, yet no murder charges. Print journalists have faced allegations of apathetic coverage and even racism—more than half the women were native—by victims’ families, aboriginal activists and native women’s organizations. They claim the media assign a lesser value to aboriginal women; scant coverage over the years is proof. Many reporters reject this, laying blame, instead, on resources and time constraints, which force them to develop new tactics to keep these cold cases hot.

The earliest case included in the RCMP’s investigation, Project E-Pana, is that of Gloria Moody, 27, whose body was found beaten and sexually assaulted off the highway in October 1969. By 1974, five more women and teenage girls thought to be hitchhiking were found dead on or near Highway 16. The media paid little attention, even after the town of Terrace held a vigil in 1998, dubbed “Highway of Tears.” The Province, the first major paper to pick up on the title, did not mention it in a news story until 2000. It took another five years for the RCMP to launch Project E-Pana, a homicide unit with a mandate to investigate commonalities between victims’ files and determine if a serial killer was responsible. Meanwhile, the list of cases swelled to nine names, then doubled to 18 in 2007, when the RCMP added similar unsolved cases that had occurred along highways 5 and 97, which intersect with Highway 16.

Given the slow and sporadic media coverage, many have argued that more tears have been spilt on this highway than ink devoted to the story. Journalists, claim critics, only react when a new body is discovered or a police search conducted. The latter took place last August and resulted in a fresh slew of coverage. Over the years, the highway and the women intrinsically linked to it fade in and out of public attention.

In the summer of 1994, David Macfarlane was among eight journalists at the Banff Centre in Alberta for the prestigious, month-long literary arts journalism program. A freelancer since the late 1970s, and, he jokes, notorious for missing deadlines, Macfarlane had managed to get his draft in on time after warnings from Barbara Moon, his editor. To submit his story, he went right to Moon’s room. He knocked, waited, but no one answered, so he slipped the piece under her door.

Macfarlane remembers Banff that July as generally grey, but the day after he handed his manuscript in, the sun finally came out. He and some of the other writers decided to celebrate making their target by enjoying the nice weather on a rooftop patio. A tape deck played music, someone brought up a pitcher of vodka and orange juice, and they just relaxed.

Then Macfarlane realized someone new, and not very happy, had arrived—he could feel the chill. There, standing before him, was Moon, glaring. He had gotten the wrong room.

That tense moment passed quickly, but working with Moon was seldom without drama and, not infrequently, friction, a combination that often resulted in both author angst and award-winning writing. (The next year, Macfarlane would win a silver at the National Magazine Awards for his finished piece, “A Fan’s Notes,” a profile of jazz musician Bill Grove with a memoir component, which was published in Saturday Night.)

For decades a highly regarded writer herself, in an era when women were as rare in creative positions as sunny days were that Banff July, Moon’s later career was devoted to wresting excellence from authors at a number of magazines, but primarily at Saturday Night. As she told the Ryerson Review of Journalism in 2008, for her, the craft of editing was “rich and fulfilling and different every day and marvellous.” To her admirers, her skills were almost preternatural. After Moon’s death at 82 from viral encephalitis in April 2009, writer Eileen Whitfield wrote on the Toronto Freelance Editors and Writers listserv: “No one could give as fast and intelligent a ‘fix’ to a long piece as Barbara Moon.” Journalist Peter Worthington, in an article for the Toronto Sun, described Moon as a talented editor “who specializes in rescuing writers from themselves.” But others remember her as overbearing and “discouraging.”

In all, her fierce commitment to quality beyond everything and her love of working on long, meaty features for extended amounts of time would likely render her unemployable today. And with her death last year, the industry lost someone who symbolized a time when stories weren’t rushed to be posted online, edits weren’t made in “track changes” and it wasn’t uncommon for writers to spend months on a story.

* * *

Moon undeniably had a number of quirks. She distrusted technology and would seldom accept manuscripts sent by fax in the days before e-mail. Hand delivery was her preferred method of receiving copy, no matter if it was time-consuming. She decreed writers were entitled to “three exclamation marks a year.” If you turned a draft around quickly, odds were she wasn’t impressed. Speed was not her imperative; quality was. As she once advised a writer with whom she was working, “Let it ferment. What stays with you are the critical things.”

The critical things about Barbara Moon herself are these:

Born in St. Catharines, Ontario, in 1926, to an engineer and a homemaker, Moon was the second daughter and last child. She attended the University of Toronto’s Trinity College, the High Anglican factory that manufactures leaders and thinkers, whose students still wear academic gowns to dinner; at the time, just over a fifth of all bachelor’s degrees in the country were awarded to women. Moon played on a basketball team, was an assistant editor on The Trinity University Review and won several prizes during her four years studying English. After graduating in 1948, she got a clerk-typist job at Maclean’s, where she became girl Friday to Pierre Berton, then an assistant editor. Moon saw the edits he made to copy, learning exactly what he looked for in a story. Soon, she was offering her critiques of stories to Berton and, in 1950, she became one of 10 assistant editors, and one of only a few women who did anything other than type and file at the iconic bimonthly.

The first article Moon produced for the magazine was in 1950, called “The Murdered Midas of Lake Shore,” about millionaire Sir Harry Oakes, a native of Kirkland Lake, Ontario, who had been found murdered seven years earlier at his home in the Bahamas. Moon only used a single quote before the final paragraphs of the 3,700-word story. Instead, the piece offered meticulously phrased detail and engaging narrative: “He spent more than half his life in rawhide boots and lumberjack shirts, slept in caves and lean-tos and pup tents, trenched and single jacked and swung an axe, shared quarters with rattlesnakes and fought black flies. Before he died he bought his suits on Savile Row and his underwear from Sulka, had mansions in Kirkland Lake, Niagara Falls, Bar Harbor, London, Sussex, Palm Beach, as well as the estates in the Bahamas.” It read like a short story. She was 23 when she wrote it.

In 1953, Moon left Maclean’s and soon was editing at Mayfair, a high-end general-interest title. In an obituary for Maclean’s,Robert Fulforddescribed meeting her there:“It was as if a bird of paradise had alighted among sparrows.” He also observed, “[She] looked like one of nature’s Parisians, a woman who made chic self-presentation seem easy and inevitable.”

Within a couple of years, Moon was back at Maclean’s as a staff writer, and stayed until 1964. Her forte was hard-hitting profiles—among them, actor William Shatner and drama critic Nathan Cohen—but it was a different kind of piece that won her the 1962 University of Western Ontario President’s Medal, for best magazine article of the year. “The Nuclear Death of a Nuclear Scientist” explored the accidental radiation poisoning of a young Winnipeg-born physicist and biochemist, reflecting her new-found interest in science writing. Over the next eight years, she wrote various features at The Globe and Mail; was part of a blue-ribbon team that produced a “storyline” for the Ontario pavilion at Expo 67; turned her flare for science journalism into scriptwriting for the nascent The Nature of Things and other documentary shows; and was commissioned to write The Canadian Shield. Published in 1970, the finished work was an unabashed paean to the rugged landscape and its place in our collective imagination: “Bedrock, tundra, taiga, boreal forest, deranged drainage, muskeg, mosquitoes, black flies: add to these a climate that at its worst is arctic and at its best offers only four frost-free months a year. Even as far south as Timmins the yearly average is a mere forty frost-free days. And that is the Shield.”

A quarter century after it first appeared, writer Greg Hollingshead wrote about Shield, saying, “This is not only personally charged nature writing of a good kind, but it gives you a sense of what is so difficult and so magnificent about this country.” The craft and passion that imbued the text also hinted at another facet of “nature’s Parisian”: she was an enthusiastic birdwatcher, a member of Friends of Point Pelee, an association dedicated to ecological preservation, and was so entranced with the Far North that on a trip there, she somewhat jokingly suggested to her husband, Wynne Thomas, that they move there.

It was in 1968, during one of her freelance periods, that Moon met Thomas, a Welsh-born journalist, who was editor of a trade magazine covering the advertising industry. He had noted her byline, and assigned her a story analyzing TV ads. It was, he recalls, “a crackerjack piece.” They had drinks. A few months later he proposed, and they were married in a small ceremony in St. Catharines. Very small. Moon’s long-time friend from the Globe, Sheila Kieran, wasn’t invited. Fulford, with whom she had become close, didn’t learn of the wedding until someone said in passing, “Well, Barbara and her husband….” As a later colleague would note, “She wasn’t a person you were casual with. You know, there are folks you can call up to chit-chat. Well, I never felt I could do that with her.”

* * *

If Moon was your editor at Saturday Night during her 13 years there, your experience with her might have gone like this: You feel as if you had been summoned; you might even dress up, at least by freelance writer standards. She worked in a real office, with a door, four walls and a ceiling, not the ubiquitous cubicle in which all but the most senior editors toil these days. If it was the Saturday Night offices at 36 Toronto Street, there would be a dictionary on her knee, a typewriter before her and neat piles of manuscripts on her desk. Chances are the story you were meeting about was one you had proposed, perhaps as short as 1,000 words, but more likely it was a 6,000-word piece on a lawyer’s fight against a company that had implanted faulty heart valves in patients, or a look at how murder methods change over time, or, say, a piece on the disappearance of a Canadian woman in the U.S. 27 years prior. Essentially, the kind of articles there is almost no home for today, pieces that involved a month (or two or three) of research, often including travel, and another month of writing. You had handed in your draft a week or so previous and were understandably anxious to get a sense of how much more work you needed to do before you could finally finish the story and submit your invoice. Saturday Night was one of the top-paying magazines at the time, with writers earning $5,000 or more per feature. Plus, being published there was considered a coup.

But first: “This is a mess. You’re not telling me what I want to read. Bring it back.” Or, “But what point are you trying to make?” Or, “What do these things”—tar ponds, perhaps—“look like? You haven’t described them in a way for me to understand just yet.” Or, “I will not tolerate that sentence in this magazine.” These frank, even cutting, critiques would be delivered in Moon’s distinctive husky voice—some liken it to Carol Channing’s—tuned by years of heavy smoking.

The dissection of the piece could last several hours and would not likely be punctuated by much leavening conversation or gossip. It would culminate in your taking away a draft heavily annotated in spidery handwriting, and maybe a typed fix note, too, offering comments like, “That word isn’t working hard enough in this sentence” or, “There’s too much bulk at the opening of the story,” or, maybe a kinder-sounding request for more research. If you were lucky, each subsequent draft would contain fewer and fewer notes.

* * *

Moon arrived at Saturday Night in 1986, after knocking around the mag trade, spending six months atCanadian Business here, 18 months as editor of a doomed city book, Toronto Calendar, there. Fulford first hired her as a senior editor at Saturday Night, though later she would become an editor-at-large. But her tenure at what was arguably the country’s top writers’ title and certainly the most award winning extended through the reigns of John Fraser, then Ken Whyte.

George Galt, who was also on staff during the Fraser years, recalls her distinctive presence: she was, he says, straight out of a film noir. “She would come to editorial meetings wearing her dark glasses, sitting at the very end of the table. She had a certain heft in the place. She was much older than any of us, including Fraser. She had decades on me and John, even. She was a very powerful presence and with her voice, her deep growly voice, she was an impressive figure.” Moon at that point was in her 60s, whereas many of the team had small children, and although she was interested in her colleagues’ lives, as Fraser remembers, when staff would bring their kids into the office, her door would always quietly close.

It was the prose appearing in the magazine that had her full attention. Ernest Hillen, another fellow editor from the Fraser period, says, “Nothing got in the magazine, if she could help it, that wasn’t as good as it could be.” If something did happen to appear that she felt was substandard, “For a certain length of time, there would be lots of caustic remarks about that particular piece or a particular writer.” From his perspective, what drove her was “an anchored idealism. She really believed in the trade of journalism, and how good it could be.”

What that sometimes translated to, though, was an exasperating disregard for time constraints—both the writer’s and the magazine’s. For some years, Charlotte Gray contributed a monthly national politics column toSaturday Night. As her editor, Moon would still be asking her to fix passages or do more research for what Gray felt were final drafts.Gray admits Moon was a thorough and an “absolutely brilliant” editor, but says, “There were other editors I preferred because she was so demanding and, when you’re doing a monthly column, it’s hard to keep up the rhythm if somebody is putting so much pressure on you.” After awhile, Hillen took over from Moon.

Sandra Martin also experienced the less-practical side of Moon’s editing style. In the mid-1990s, Saturday Night commissioned a story on employment equity based on a trip Martin had taken to South Africa. After seeing the first draft, Moon wanted Martin to re-research the piece and come at it from a different angle. Martin protested there was no way she could do that—she had already gone to South Africa and it wasn’t feasible to return. The story never made it into the magazine.

A piece of Martin’s that did get published was the 1,700-word obituary of Moon in the Globe. Moon would likely have approved—it was neither sentimental nor purely laudatory. The accolades it did contain, though, were lavish. Fraser, now master of Massey College at U of T, said simply, “I loved her.” Anne Collins, a one-time Saturday Night colleague, remembered, “She was outsized in character and glamour, elegant, ferocious, witty. When it came to language, she had a finely calibrated internal Geiger counter that registered the slightest tremor of bad thinking and bad word choice….I can see her handwriting in the margins of a manuscript even now, delicately suggesting six exquisite word choices in place of your inept one.”

Back in 1997,Anita Lahey worked with Moon on “Black Lagoons,” a story on the possibly carcinogenic tar ponds of Sydney, Nova Scotia, which won an honourable mention at the National Magazine Awards. Lahey still has the notes from her conversations with Moon about the story. In one case, Moon’s advice was, “Go to a present day scene, maybe November day, trotting around the pond. Look one way at Eric’s house, the other way at Jane’s. Doesn’t need to be long. Think about any brilliant, 30-line poem.” Lahey, who is both a journalist and a poet, says, “I can’t think of another example where someone I’ve worked with on a magazine piece has brought in other genres of writing to help illustrate how to structure a piece.”

It’s not hard to imagine this kind of editorial direction arising from Moon’s own outsized writing talent. In Martin’s obit, she called Moon “our Joan Didion,” and quoted Peter C. Newman’s observation that she was “justifiably considered one of the half-dozen best Canadian magazine writers in the trade.” He adds now, she was one of the “best read,” as she was always very controversial. “People would read her to get mad.”

* * *

If Barbara had one maxim when she worked with writers, it was, “Everyone has a secret. Your job is to find out what it is.” Of course, she, too, had a secret: Why, after her early and demonstrable success as a writer, did she suddenly stop writing in 1984?

There are several theories, but no clear answer. The most common is that Moon had, as Fulford says, “a writer’s block the size of Mount Kilimanjaro.” Moon wondered how Fulford and other writers were able to turn around drafts quickly. Hillen endorses this notion: “It’s not as if you reach a certain level and then you can relax, because you’re always trying to top yourself and you’re expected to top yourself.” He also wonders if her punctilious editing style might have been due to the “idle writer” syndrome—the tendency of an editor to tilt a little too much to the writer role. As Martin says, “The point of editing is for you to ask questions of the material and of the writer, but there’s a certain point where it’s the writer’s piece and I’m not sure that Barbara always felt that way.”

Dianna Symonds, another editor who worked with Moon at Saturday Night, has another suggestion: “Maybe when she met Wynne and they got married, that relationship meant more to her than writing.” Certainly her approach to writing was all-consuming. When she worked on the story about TV ads that brought her and Thomas together, she spent a week locked up in her apartment watching countless hours of ads a day. Wynne seems to confirm Fulford’s take. “We were very much in love with each other,” he says, “but I think Barbara had discovered editing. She found writing incredibly hard work. She was a perfectionist to the nth degree. And when she started editing for Saturday Night, she felt she had discovered her true métier, and in editing she could contribute to the development of other writers and at the same time could have her own satisfying career, without perhaps all those agonizing days of looking for the right word and the right lead and the right sentence.”

Certainly Barbara and Wynne seemed to find the right life after she left Saturday Night in 1998. They moved full-time to their country home in Prince Edward County (a decision made even though Wynne jokingly pointed out there was no Holt Renfrew there) and freelanced via their consulting company, Editors-at-Large. Less than a year before Barbara’s sudden death, they bought a house overlooking the Bay of Quinte, with Barbara declaring, “I think I have one more reno in me.” They were due to move in a few weeks after she died.

After the couple’s relocation to the countryside, no one was too surprised to not hear much from Barbara. “She always predicted that when she retired she would disappear like the Cheshire Cat,” Symonds remembers, “And all that would remain is the shadow of her smile.”

“This job is really boring,” the reporter sighs soon after she begins transcribing an interview for a weekly news show in one of Fairchild TV’s editing suites in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The elevator-sized room is walled by a file cabinet, a ceiling-high shelf of Beta tapes and a sticker-infested desk with an analogue editing system that resembles the head unit of the DeLorean from Back to the Future.

She rewinds the clip for the fourth time. “What does flourishing mean?” she asks in Mandarin. I translate. She moves onto the next 30 seconds. “What’s she saying?” She lets out a long sigh. “Freer? What’s freer?” She turns to me. “Is it ‘of a free’?” I spell the word and explain its meaning, but she’s still puzzled. “It’s a superlative,” I add and get up to write on her script. “And travelled has a v and e before the two ls.”

Behind us, the station’s newsroom is surprisingly quiet for 11 a.m.—just a handful of staff on their desktops, looking for story leads in e-mails and on news wires, and keeping an eye on the feed room where raw footage from CNN, CBC, Global and two Chinese stations air on five small television screens. “What is martial law?” The reporter’s moan redirects my attention. “Whatever, I’ll just write it down first.” Although the reporter I’ve been talking to says she was the editor-in-chief for China Central Television’s Morning News in Beijing for seven months, it will take her a few hours to complete her task—plus, her editor will have to weed out her numerous errors before it goes live.

This is business as usual at Fairchild, the biggest player in the Chinese broadcast news market in Canada. With varying degrees of success, the station tries to serve as a bridge between Chinese culture and mainstream society; it offers a mixture of overseas and Canadian-made programs across the country for an additional monthly cable fee of approximately $15. Along with a daily Hong Kong satellite news show, it runs a Canadian-made evening newscast and seven other weekly current-events programs. But these programs only take up 405 minutes, or 29 percent, of Fairchild’s airtime, of which more than 100 minutes are repeated content; the rest of its airtime is devoted to talk shows, dramas and entertainment news. By mainstream standards, Fairchild’s news is not good. Yet, the 18-year-old station has long prided itself on operating the only Chinese-Canadian newsroom in the country.

Not anymore. In May 2008, a new 24-hour Cantonese, Mandarin and Vietnamese channel called WOWtv started broadcasting and, like Fairchild, it also has a mixture of reruns and homegrown programs, of which only five are news shows—available via cable for about $4 a month. Despite its promises of more local content, high-definition technology and a younger and fresher staff with innovative ideas, this newborn has yet to do in-the-field reporting. While Fairchild usually has four teams of reporters, WOW just has writers who chop recycled footage into one- or two-minute clips.

So although the launch may be a long-anticipated alternative for Chinese-Canadian audiences, viewers aren’t yet getting value for their cable dollars. If Chinese broadcasters don’t start increasing their reporting and offering unbiased news that affects this immigrant group, they risk contributing to the already existing self-centredness and intolerance of other cultures by some in the Chinese community.

* * *

Fairchild Media Group, a business conglomerate based in Richmond, B.C., with investments in media, information technology, retail and real-estate management, runs Fairchild and the all-Mandarin Talentvision. According to a 2007 study by Ipsos Reid, Canadian Chinese Media Monitor, Fairchild Media reachesmore than half of Chinese-Canadian adults in Vancouver and Toronto—the two cities with the highest number of Chinese immigrants.

With the Chinese population in Canada predicted to reach at least 1.8 million by 2017, Chuck Yeung, an elusive businessman originally from Hong Kong with ties to the computer industry, wanted to tap into the gold mine. Yeung’s idea, according to WOW executive producer Joe Tay, was to launch anall-digital TV channel that’s accessible in multimedia platforms for a younger audience.

Currently, some of WOW’s content is available via podcast and live streaming. “We want to extend broadcast beyond the limit of the television so that viewers can watch us through a small screen on their fridges one day.” Tay laughs and glances at his office TV—it’s usually on CNN. Originally a celebrity in Hong Kong, the 47-year-old now arrives at the station around 4 a.m. every morning with a Tim Hortons coffee. He says that WOW is not here to compete, but to offer Chinese-Canadians an alternative. “For the longest time, people had no choice,” he says as he leans back on his chair. “It’s kind of like dating. You can either continue your 20-year-old boring relationship or, hey, look, there’s a younger, fresher, prettier one just right here!”

But clearly, the station wants recognition and ad revenue, which is why it boasts about its investments in broadcast technology and Canadian-made programs: WOW produces more than 50 percent of its content, compared to Fairchild’s 25 percent.

* * *

Having been told that 4 a.m. is when the most arduous news writing session of the day occurs at WOW’s headquarters in Scarborough, Ontario, I arrive one Friday morning to find two people typing up scripts among rows of computers in a dim, cavernous room. Besides the desks, the only furniture is cheap-looking chairs, three red sofas and some host desks that look like they were bought at Ikea.

These early risers are WOW’s “playlists,” essentially assignment editors and news writers for recycled news. They are in charge of scanning news feeds and determining what to run and in which section of the 15- to 30-minute-long newscasts. On the floor today are a former OmniTV intern, who is now the head playlist in WOW’s news department, and a third-year University of Toronto accounting student who was hired for $13 an hour because she can type English and Chinese and has a nice voice. Most of WOW’s employees have minimal training: the station is even known to hire program hosts through Facebook.

At 6 a.m., the first news show of the day begins: screen shots rotate around the rim of a clock and then an italicized title spins forward. After the anchors exchange forced greetings in a sparsely furnished studio containing a glass table and a TV set, the camera cuts to the male host standing in front of the weather green screen. But for the entire segment, he repeatedly stutters and manoeuvres awkwardly in front of the map, at times gesturing to the wrong locations. Despite WOW’s boasts about its high-tech equipment, the morning news show features a television set behind the anchor instead of over-the-shoulder graphics. And during one of the 15-minute Cantonese newscasts, I note 11 stutters and fumbles, in addition to inaccurately timed subtitles. Some of these mistakes are made again when the hosts repeat the same script for the second morning newscast.

During much of the fall, WOW broadcast three such subpar shows throughout the day: two 15-minute Cantonese and Mandarin segments in the morning, then half-hour ones in the afternoon, and again in the evening in all three languages. (The newscasts are now all 30 minutes.) In between isan odd array of news shows, including the imported afternoon Hong Kong satellite news, short segments called News Expressaired throughout the day—during which an anchor repeats important headlines—and Front Page News, on which a Hong Kong celebrity literally reads the headlines from various newspapers in front of a green screen.

Meanwhile, over at Fairchild, the state of news is better, but just marginally. The station gives its writers up to five minutes per story, and covers community events often missed by mainstream media. Unlike WOW, Fairchild has an anchor desk—albeit small—that accommodates two news and one sports anchor, over-the-shoulder graphics and an opening segment that doesn’t look like a prelude to a cartoon show. Although Fairchild insists that WOW is not yet a threat to its viewership numbers, it did release a combo cable package with two overseas Chinese stations last summer, clearly to lure customers.

Maybe the poor quality news at both stations can be traced to one key fact: they may not be able to afford much more. In the last decade, more than half of Canada’s Chinese immigrants came from mainland China, and the median income per person of this group is almost $7,000 less than that of Hong Kong immigrants, according to the 2006 census. Since this population doesn’t have a lot of buying power, advertising and sponsorship support don’t bring in enough revenue to fund a full production team, says Fairchild news editor Jeffrey Lee. So for most stories, it relies on news writers who can crank out up to three stories a day using purchased footage. And since Fairchild targets first-generation immigrants who can’t speak fluent English and who watch the news for nostalgic reasons, Lee thinks that a CBC logo on a clip won’t hurt the station’s credibility, “Unless they’re a really picky audience.”

Likewise, Tay admits that investing in WOW’s news production is not a priority. So instead of quality, it offers five broadcasts throughout the day that each have short clips of information presented intermittently on a crawl, a scrolling text bar. This way, viewers can always be in the know without having to wait for competitors’ evening shows: the 5 p.m. Omni Mandarin newscast, the 7 p.m. Fairchild news and the 9 p.m. Omni Cantonese newscast.

Using second-hand news also partially compensates for a skilled team that neither Fairchild nor WOW can afford. Tay says WOW’s playlists are expected to only rewrite and translate, and the playlists themselves say their knowledge of current events and passion for news is enough for the job. “It’s not really about journalistic background,” says Lina Li, the U of T student and playlist. “We have more spirit than the people who are older in age; we’re willing to put in the work and time.” Meanwhile, although Fairchild editors try to hire applicants with work experience, the basic requirement is the same as WOW’s: the ability to speak and type Cantonese and Mandarin. But since Fairchild values experience more than language proficiency, its staff is less fluent than its competitor’s younger team.

However, given that Fairchild pays news staff much less than mainstream media, it can’t expect more from its employees. Perhaps to compensate, editors micromanage. “Journalists have very limited writing freedom here,” says Titus Leung, a Fairchild reporter and a former feature writer for the Chinese newspaper Ming Pao Daily News, as he inserts a Beta tape into the analog switcher in an editing suite. He is cutting down a CBC story about coughing in public, featuring a lanky man hacking around pedestrians in different situations. In the original story, the reporter explains that it was an experiment conducted by the camera crew, but due to the strict time limits at Fairchild, Leung cuts the prologue, which changes the story’s meaning. Regardless, viewers may not have liked the original piece anyway: Fairchild has a conservative audience that prefers news over gimmicks. “When we try new things, they don’t like it,” says Leung.

He’s aware that his employer and the competition both could step up the analysis side of their news. “Any story can be reduced to one line,” he says. “What we need to address is why is this issue important and requires attention?” But after almost three years at Fairchild, he knows this is nearly impossible: reporters just don’t have enough time between writing scripts, recording voice-overs and editing. Some reporters even have to alternate daily between the roles of reporter, writer, editor and assistant editor. Also, some staff take part-time jobs for extra cash, which precludes using that time to stay on top of current affairs. Just a few years ago, a sports reporter disappeared from the station after he was seen in a car advertisement. “I don’t know if they fired him because he was in the commercial,” Leung laughs. “I’ve never done anything like that, but I am always tempted to,” he whispers with his hand covering one side of his mouth. So to compensate for reporters’ lack of news awareness and time constraints, Fairchild’s editors often dictate the angle and analysis they want.

Just then, editor Lee comes by with two Beta tapes. “There were suicide bombings in Pakistan and Iraq today. We don’t have the feeds for the Pakistan bombings yet, so just lead with Iraq and move this paragraph here and add a line about the second explosion at the end,” Lee says, gesturing to the switch-ups on the reporter’s computer screen. When Lee is out of sight, Leung shrugs and says, “See, they tell you exactly how to present the stories.” He sighs and starts rearranging his paragraphs. “Writers—to be frank—are like the editors’ secretaries,” he jokes.

But these stations’ cookie-cutter news is no laughing matter, says Tam Goossen, the vice president of Toronto’s Urban Alliance on Race Relations. Along with its low credibility and dearth of original reporting, the absence of perspective in Chinese-Canadian broadcast news weakens the connection between the content and its audience. “Straight translations mean viewers do not understand the issues’ impact on their community, which further confirms that their news is not worth watching,” she says. Just because Fairchild’s and WOW’s models work for an audience of first-generation immigrants who have no alternatives doesn’t give these stations the excuse to be lazy. “If they don’t start inputting their own voices,” Goossen says, “Chinese news will become redundant.”

It’s perspective and analysis that viewers want today, adds Pierluigi Roi, news director for multilingual channel Omni, which has been on the air for just over 30 years. The relationship between broadcast news and the audience has changed now that viewers can get breaking news every second via satellite, the internet and sites like YouTube.

But Fairchild’s handholding style of management is not confined to the newsroom. At community events, reporters are sometimes discouraged from getting the full story. Senior reporter Linda Tse recalls covering a press conference after a martial arts competition.As soon as she opened her mouth, once she realized all the winners trained with the same master, her cameraman shushed her. “The lesson is, don’t get on people’s bad side and don’t say the wrong things,” she says. “You just shoot it, report it and leave.” But when I ask her the consequences of revealing such a small scandal, she responds, “It’s something you learn on the job, what to say and when to keep your mouth shut. The Chinese community is very weird. So much politics, my goodness.” Leung thinks management assumes that Fairchild’s audience lacks knowledge of Canadian issues and just wants basic information. Anything more complicated would be too time consuming and irrelevant to them.

But Gloria Fung, a Toronto-based independent media commentator, attributes this self-censorship to a bigger political issue. She speculates that Chinese-Canadian media can’t survive without financial support from the Chinese government, allowing it to exert control over coverage despite being an ocean away. For instance, Fung remembers the Chinese-Canadian media aired reports on the chaos in Tibet and its negative impact on China’s reputation right before the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Though she refuses to disclose any names, Fung says a few print reporters admitted they received “suggestions” from the Chinese consulate and some affluent pro-China leaders regarding what not to report. She also heard that people with business connections with China were threatened and were urged not to fund media organizations critical of China.

As news sources for many first-generation Chinese-Canadians, stations like Fairchild and WOW should re-evaluate their choice of content. Omni Mandarin news reporter Jenny Hu says offering information on a range of communities can better integrate immigrants into Canadian society. “We should have a mindset that, yes, you’re Chinese but don’t forget that you’re living in Canada now. It’s not just Chinese Chinese Chinese anymore.” This magnification of community views becomes a breeding ground for disrespect and intolerance for other cultures, adds Fung. While she understands that Chinese media like Fairchild must develop a community angle, its stories should be relevant to the broader community and written from a Canadian perspective. Otherwise, hyper-Chinese reports could foster tension between immigrant groups, especially for first-generation immigrants, who may be more narrow-minded. “Yes, all media organizations have the responsibility to integrate the audience into the society; yes, they’re responsible for informing the audience of domestic and international issues—but from a Canadian perspective,” Fung says.

But after almost two decades of shallow news coverage, this audience has learned to expect little from their news sources.

Hermia Law, a Hong Kong immigrant who arrived here 25 years ago, says she doesn’t consider what Fairchild is doing as news, but a mix of regurgitated information. She only watches it to fill in the facts she misses from mainstream channels—which doesn’t always work, because the news is often one day late due to the lack of time and delays in receiving feeds. “Sometimes I’ll turn on Fairchild and my husband will say, ‘This was already on yesterday, why are they only talking about it now?’ So he never watches Fairchild. In fact, he doesn’t watch any Chinese news,” she says. Likewise, Wendy Choi—a Hong Kong immigrant and Fairchild subscriber of 12 years—says its story lengths can be compared to radio briefs. And contrary to Fairchild editor Lee’s hope that his audience disregards the logos on borrowed footage, Choi knows it’s a symbol for second-hand information. “But since our English is not that good, we can’t be too picky.”

Yet, Choi feels that these stations have some merit. Fairchild’s coverage of David Chen, the Toronto grocer who was charged with kidnapping and assaulting a suspected thief, for example, reflected the community’s concerns and raised awareness of Chen’s unjust treatment. Despite Choi’s complaints, she agrees thatFairchild’s presence gives Chinese people a louder voice, so the Canadian government can’t overlook their concerns.

But one good story may not be enough, especially since there is a successful model for ethnic-based broadcast news out there: OmniTV. Operated by Rogers Communications, the station serves five language communities, including Cantonese and Mandarin audiences. It also uses pick-up footage, but from its own network of Rogers broadcasters, and focuses on providing context. “It’s not that we don’t send cameras out. It’s a decision not to do that because people are going to get breaking news from CP24, CBC and CTV,” Roi says. “We’re a comfort station to make new Canadians understand the laws and rules of the society, while keeping an eye on the old country.” Omni covers general stories on things such as health and government, but its items highlight how the news affects ethnic audiences, which, Roi explains, is the reason for its success.

Though Fung understands the obvious financial differences between Omni and the Chinese broadcasters, she insists these stations could improve if they focused their resources—however limited—on training their writers and replacing their minute-long briefs with longer, analytical reports that offered exclusive Chinese-Canadian perspectives, thereby fulfilling their role of integrating viewers into society. “If these broadcasters stay at where they are, they’re not going to survive,” she predicts.

But realistically, neither station has serious change on its horizon. Tay says WOW would eventually start training reporters for in-the-field reporting. “News is not extremely important at the moment, but I can assure you that it’s not totally being left behind.” He thinks WOW’s investment in multimedia availability and new broadcast technology—something Fairchild doesn’t plan on doing for a long time—will eventually attract advertisers and viewers. “You have to go at your own pace. We’re a growing company and our quality is improving,” he insists. “In an era where old grandmas are starting to catch onto iPhones, nothing is impossible.”

Perhaps the vicious cycle of low funds and a lack of thoughtful reporting can never be broken, and Chinese-Canadians will just have to tolerate it. Maybe WOW’s approach to broadcast news will develop into the new multimedia winner in the future. But what is for sure is that until Fairchild and WOW start investing in local production, they can never represent a true Chinese voice, but only be a fragmented and weightless extension of mainstream media.