Large printouts of proposed site changes sit on CBC.ca editorial director Jonathan Dube’s desk at CBC headquarters in downtown Toronto. Just prior to its tenth birthday on July 4, the award-winning website will receive a makeover. Dube says the new design will be modern, lively and put more emphasis on exclusive features. A new “Canada and the World” page will be integrated into the redesigned website. “It will give us a lot more flexibility,” Dube says, “and the navigation will be a lot more useful.”

Although the redesign process was well underway by the time Dube arrived from Seattle in July 2005, he’s given a lot of input since accepting the newly created position. In order to keep up with the daily workings of the website, the American online journalist has become a chronic BlackBerry user. In fact, he says, he’s often found himself so immersed in his tiny handheld screen that he ends up on the wrong floor of the CBC building. He also admits to getting in trouble with his wife, Rebecca Cook Dube, on more than one occasion for using his BlackBerry at the dinner table.

“I may have once or twice threatened to kidnap the BlackBerry,” Cook Dube jokes, “or drop it from a great height, or otherwise do bodily harm to the thing.” She says Dube tends to focus intensely on his tasks, “Which is great in a lot of ways but can make it challenging to grab his attention when I want it.” But Cook Dube says she benefits too because he’s just as dedicated to other things, like planning their vacations or designing her personal website.

“I don’t know where he gets all his energy from,” Cook Dube says, “but he’s the type of person who’s happiest when he’s figuring out solutions, coming up with innovative new ideas and juggling a million different things at once.” Dube more or less agrees, saying, “I don’t know what else I’d want to do right now – I love it.”

It’s an old love affair. “Jon has always been really interested in online journalism,” Cook Dube says, “even back when it was barely a blip on most people’s radar screens.”

Dube, who grew up in New York City, brings more to CBC.ca than his master’s degree in journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. He also brings a long history in the online news industry. He is founder and publisher of CyberJournalist.net, an online resource for journalists, and has worked as a national producer at ABCNews.com. When hurricane Bonnie hit in 1998, Dube, who was working for The Charlotte Observer at the time, used a blog to cover the breaking news – something news sites had never done before.

At the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Florida, Dube also taught online storytelling and collaboration skills as a visiting instructor from 2000 to 2003, and he still writes a column on web tips for the school. He also did a stint at The New York Times, has written freelance pieces for the Columbia Journalism Reviewand The Washington Monthly, and won a number of awards for his online work.

CBC.ca senior director Sue Gardner says Dube wasn’t the first person she thought of when she began to look for someone to fill the editorial director position. “I started on a hunt to hire someone,” she recalls, “and it took me about eight months. My first instinct, obviously, was to look around Canada.” But online journalism is a young discipline and hasn’t had a chance to develop a deep pool of talent, and Gardner figures she can count on one hand the number of Canadians that could fill the role. “I know them all,” she says, “and I talked to them about it.”

Gardner says one difficulty is that CBC.ca has one of the country’s largest online news teams, so it would have been a steep climb for anyone coming from modestly sized Canadian sites. She also considered bringing in someone with a background in print or broadcast, but she felt she already had a large enough talent pool at CBC. “What I needed,” she concludes, “was someone with a strong online background and good craft skills.”

Dube heard about the opening through a friend in Halifax who had been a former CBC employee. He’d already met some other CBC people through his involvement with the Online News Association (a Bethesda, Maryland-based association for journalists who produce news on the Internet and other digital platforms), and done some training sessions with CBC staff on convergence and online writing.

Gardner was delighted when Dube expressed interest. “He was exactly what I was looking for,” she says. “We’ll sit in meetings and he can say, ‘Well we did this at MSNBC,’ or, ‘We tried this and ended up going down some other road,’ or, ‘I know folks at CNN who can do X or Y or Z.'”

Dube arrived in July 2005 to take over responsibilities for all CBC.ca editorial programming, including news, arts and sports sections, and he has made a number of online content changes already. One took effect just in time for the January 23 federal election. Riding Talk, a series of moderated forums for each riding throughout Canada, allowed voters to discuss local issues directly affecting them. Over ten thousand comments from across the country were published. An online version of “Reality Check,” an election segment on The National, was also created. It examined what candidates said and tried to take viewers beyond the spin. CBC.ca also provided live analysis during the debates. “They took a detailed look at everything candidates were promising,” says Dube. “They added up what all the promises were, what all the spending was, and tried to compare what they were promising and what they weren’t.”

Dube also introduced an early version of the coming redesign for CBC.ca’s winter Olympics coverage in Torino, Italy. The new Olympics site not only proved to be popular, it’s also up for a prize in the Excellence in News, Information category at the Canadian New Media Awards.

These changes might be clicking with the website’s audience. According to a report released by ComScore Media Matrix, CBC.ca was the most popular media site in February 2006, with over five million visitors at home and work. CTV.ca came in second place with three million visitors.

Based on the company’s own WebTrends traffic logging software, on the January 23 election, the site had 1,329,500 unique visitors. It was the first time the site had broken the one million mark in a single twenty-four-hour period. It then broke its own record twice after that, with 1,381,076 unique visitors the day after the election, and 1,549,054 unique visitors on during the Torino Olympics on February 22.

Catering to its online audience has become a priority for CBC as the Internet becomes the preferred way to consume daily news. A national segmentation study conducted in 2004 by WashingtonPost.com in collaboration with Nielsen//NetRatings and Scarborough Research found that forty-seven per cent of respondents had increased significantly their usage of online media for news and information over a twelve-month period. The poll also found that sixty per cent of users accessed online resources daily. The top reason for their preference was “24-hour availability, ability to multi-task while browsing, breaking news, easy ability to search and free access.”

According to Statistics Canada, “Of the nearly 6.7 million households with a regular [Internet] user from home in 2003, an estimated 4.4 million (65 per cent) had a high-speed link to the Internet through either a cable or telephone connection.” This two-thirds penetration gave news providers the market they needed to invest in fancier websites. “It used to be that you were designing things knowing that the majority of people were going to be accessing it Monday to Friday, while they were at work where they have the best Internet access,” says Joyce Smith, assistant professor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, “but that’s not true any more. They can do it at home as well.” Also, users can now routinely handle larger files, which means media outlets can design interactive material, stream videos and generally produce higher quality website for a larger audience.

Online news sites have come a long way since they were first created. Smith says that although most major news organizations have had a web presence for some time, it wasn’t until the late 1990s that breaking news became a part of it. Before then, newspapers simply posted online replicas of stories that had appeared in the paper. “So there’s the point at which people had sites up,” she says, “but then a point at which they started to morph into breaking news sites with actual dedicated staff.”

Dube has dedicated himself to thinking about the transformation of news dissemination for the past decade. Cook Dube says that when she met her future husband at The Charlotte Observer in 1997, his passion for online journalism was already obvious. “I remember thinking,” she says, “‘Gee, he sure is enthusiastic about this online stuff, I wonder if it will really go anywhere?'”

“Now, of course,” she concludes, “journalism is all about online, and here we are in Toronto! What can I say, he was ahead of his time.”

Eleven copies of the March 3, 2006 issue of Calgary’s Swerve magazine are currently selling on eBay. At last check, the highest bid is just over $36. That’s pretty good considering Swerve is a freebie magazine tucked inside the city’s main daily newspaper, the Calgary Herald, every Friday.

The March 3 edition holds great appeal to fans of the hit film Brokeback Mountain, and they’ve turned the issue into something of a collector’s item. Swerve‘s story provided details about scenes from the film that were shot on location in southern Alberta, accompanied by stunning landscape photographs.

The year-and-a-half old Swerve is a testament to Calgary’s growth as a city and the need for area newspapers to adapt to a changing market. The weekly insert has been well-received – so much so that, in the tradition of imitation being the sincerest form of flattery, the CanWest Global Communications Corp.?owned Herald‘s rival, the Sun Media?owned Calgary Sun, has created its own lifestyle insert, a new monthly called Orb Magazine.

Swerve was the brainchild of former Herald editor-in-chief Malcolm Kirk and executive Herald staff, and was introduced in November 2004. Looking to spice things up for Herald readers with a listings-heavy magazine, Kirk hired Calgary native Shelley Youngblut to create the prototype. Youngblut, a veteran writer and editor, had already helped launch or redesign a number of Canadian and American magazines. She was part of the original team that launched ESPN: The Magazine for Disney. She also redesigned ESPN: Hockey ’96 , was deputy editor for the launch of MTV/Nickelodeon’s Nick. Jr. magazine, redesigned and edited a special issue of Cosmopolitan, redesigned the front-of-book section for Western Living and helped launch two of The Globe and Mail‘s now-defunct magazines, West and Toronto.

Named editor-in-chief of Swerve upon launch, Youngblut says she was aiming to create a publication for “smart, funny people” in the city. “We wanted to intrigue new readers and those who thought of the Herald as their father’s newspaper.”

Originally Kirk had planned to create something more like Fast Forward, Calgary’s reigning alternative weekly, but Youngblut didn’t see a need to repeat that formula. Instead, she leaned in the direction of a service-heavy magazine, accompanied by one feature and a few smaller articles per issue. “There’s something to do in Calgary every night, ten things to do every night, and I thought, ‘Well that’s fine, but let’s make it even bigger,'” she said in an interview with Calgary radio station CKUA. She tries regularly to tap into the idea that what’s new in culture doesn’t necessarily equate to what’s good. “We’re not a flavour-of-the-week magazine and we’re not tied up in what’s timely,” she says. “To put it simply, the name Lindsay Lohan has never appeared in Swerve – and never will.”

Swerve looks at culture in a way that mainstream media often ignores, but not with the kind of alternative-weekly feel that would limit its demographic either. When everyone in Calgary was covering Canada’s performance in figure skating at the recent Olympics in Turin, Swerve instead looked inward with the March 17, 2006 cover story, “Why Amanda Can’t Skate.” It focused on Calgary’s Amanda Billings, who had been expected to compete but whose injury forced her off the ice in December. The article used Billings’s story to explain the world of competitive skating and the toll it takes on competitive skaters. “It’s about finding an emotional point of entry and telling the story through that,” Youngblut says. And, “While everyone else was covering one thing, we thought, ‘Why don’t we cover the very best that we have right here?'”

In an August cover story, Swerve took a fun angle with the story, “The Underachieving Gardener: Seven Overcomeable Garden Sins.” The lede, written with a sass characteristic of Swerve, set the tone. “They say the first step toward healing is admitting you have a problem – and that’s not an easy thing to do,” it read. “So, we here at Swerve will stand up first. I, Jacquie, am an underachieving gardener.”

Swerve is doing well with readers both young and old. Youngblut attributes this in part to the smart writing and the service of local Calgary listings, photography and content. “There’s a wink in Swerve, but it’s a very inclusive wink,” she says. “We see the best in you. If you get the joke, good. If not, turn the page.”

Although putting out a weekly magazine is a calculated risk, Herald publisher Peter Menzies says he understands the importance of keeping in touch with the community. “We live in an age of rapid social change and in which media must be continually reassessing what they do and how they do it,” he says. “The one thing that is always wrong is to do nothing.”

Swerve is housed within the Herald building, yet it is separate from its parent. Rather than hiring six full-time staff from within its own ranks, “The Herald allowed magazine people to create a magazine,” Youngblut says. This independence extends to editorial as well. “Half the time they don’t even know what we’re doing until Swerve comes out,” she says, laughing. “It’s because they trust me,” she says, adding, “it’s a trust I don’t want to abuse.”

This level of trust allows Swerve to engage readers in ways the newspaper can’t, but Youngblut points out that it doesn’t amount to complete autonomy. One week Swerve ran with a racy theme its editors dubbed “The Naked Issue.” The main story featured the word “penis” so many times that senior Herald staff became concerned. To settle nerves, Youngblut thought it might be funny to place a black bar over the word every time it appeared, and they ran a contest asking readers to email them the missing word. “We came to work and our in-boxes were overflowing with the word ‘penis,'” she says.

According to internal research done for the Herald by Cameron Strategy, Swerve has become one of the most-read sections in the paper. Since 2003, weekday Herald readership has increased by 32,000, according to NADbank statistics, with a 2.1 per cent increase in the Herald‘s Friday paid circulation between 2004 and 2005.

Over at the Calgary Sun, the numbers aren’t quite so rosy. Weekday readership has gone down by over 26,000 since 2003, and Sunday readership has decreased by 9,300. But Shawn Cornell, manager of theSun‘s new monthly, Orb, is quick to say the magazine wasn’t created as a counter to Swerve. “It’s not the same thing at all,” he says, citing reasons such as its monthly frequency and its more general lifestyle coverage. He also mentions the difference in look – Orb is a full-colour, glossy, regular-sized magazine.Swerve, on the other hand, looks more like The Canadian and Weekend magazines, the old rotogravures that were published by The Toronto Star and the Globe until the 1980s.

And with sections such as Jet (travel), Coin (finance), Spin (events around town), Space (home decor and urban planning) and Threadz (fashion), Orb brings offers a hodgepodge of information its creators hope will interest average Calgarians. Explaining that everything else on the market is either too low- or high-brow, Cornell says Orb targets a middle-of-the-road, 30- to 49-year-old demographic. “Maybe they can’t necessarily afford a Mercedes,” Cornell says of the Orb reader, “but there are other nice cars out there.”

Ryan Popowich, Orb‘s creative director, feels there’s a gap in the market. “It’s the ‘what’s cool’ magazine for everyday, ordinary people,” he says. Orb‘s April feature divides wine culture into reader-friendly categories such as “How to Fake Being a Wine Snob” and “Learning the Basics of Wine-Making.” Popowich says other local magazines, such as Avenue, aim for a cosmopolitan attitude that doesn’t always work with the local mindset. “Calgary is a booming, dynamic city that can be considered in a league with larger urban centres like Toronto and Vancouver,” he says. “However, we are different.”

The Sun already publishes several small-scale magazines, such as the monthly Urbane that is geared toward 18- to 35-year-olds, the quarterly Sun Country about western living and Wag for pet owners. It also produces dozens of single-issue destination magazines about Calgary and various industry-specific, single-issue magazines. But none is close in scope to Orb.

Introduced two months ago, Orb is an advertising department project, with the magazine’s main staff also directly employed by the Sun. Manager Cornell is the Sun‘s national ad manager, Popowich is the Sun‘s product development supervisor and special projects editor, and Orb associate editor Kristen Enevold is theSun‘s product development coordinator and a senior writer. “It’s a really neat time to start a magazine in the city,” says Enevold, “the only point I can ever remember the city changing.”

Advertisers have already noticed the new magazine, says Sun publisher Guy Huntingford. Sixty per cent of the ads appearing in the magazine so far have had no previous bookings in the Sun, which proves to him that adding magazines like Orb to the newspaper mix makes good business sense. “Readers start looking for free reads over time,” he says. The new monthly’s track record is also being watched closely by Sun Media executives, according to Huntingford. “Orb was a Calgary initiative, and national advertisers are watching,” he says. If it proves successful, similar models will be implemented at other Sun Media papers.

Youngblut isn’t terribly worried about the latest entry in the market. “Any competition keeps you sharp,” she says. Besides, the fit between Swerve and the Herald is portable, she says, with the model capable of being rolled out anywhere. “There’s a place for Swerve in every CanWest paper in the country,” she believes. “You take the template and then you put it in your own voice.”

Now is an excellent time to experiment in Calgary. With the new oil boom heating the economy, there has been impressive population spurt since the turn of the decade. By the end of 2006, Calgary’s economic region will show an increase of 145,000 people in the last half decade.

The Sun‘s Huntingford agrees that the changing face of Calgary has played a crucial role in the development of Orb, which is trying to capture the attention of this new influx of young families. “We felt there was opportunity for something like this,” he says.

“The challenge for us,” says the Herald‘s Menzies, “is balancing how we serve our readership base between what is simplistically but accurately described as the old and the new Calgary.”

As we sit down to lunch at Tequila Bookworm, a funky, laptop-friendly coffee shop on Queen Street West, Jessica Johnston and I both notice a familiar problem. Our table is wobbling on its uneven base. While I whine about our poor luck, Johnston chooses to address the issue head-on. She grabs a handful of napkins and places them under the table, establishing a stable plane for our conversation. “It’s one of my superpowers,” she says, and though she’s speaking specifically about her knack for fixing wobbly tables, she might as well be talking about a general ability to create order from chaos.

Johnston will get a chance to demonstrate such talents at This Magazine, the current affairs and culture publication that recently named her its latest editor. The magazine has been a fixture in Canada since 1966, when it began its life as This Magazine Is About Schools. It has served as an incubator for such literary and journalistic talents as Margaret Atwood, Naomi Klein and Clive Thompson. Given that so many hall-of-famers have appeared on its pages and in its offices, one might expect This Magazine to be one of the most organized publications in the country, but it has always thrived in an unpredictable environment, maintaining a steady circulation of almost 5,000 subscribers with limited resources at its disposal. As former editor Patricia D’Souza says, “It’s a seat-of-the-pants organization.” And Johnston, who turned thirty just three days after taking over the editor’s chair on April 3, is about to find out if she can fly.

I have first-hand experience with the hectic, often improvisational culture of This Magazine, having served a two-month internship there in the summer of 2005. In a small office shared with two other interns, publisher Lisa Whittington-Hill, editor Emily Schultz and art director Stephen Gregory, I performed tasks such as fact-checking and copy editing. But I also spent almost an entire day wandering the streets of Toronto with Schultz, looking for a bakery that could design a cake for the cover of an issue celebrating Alberta’s centennial.

The field trip is an example of the daily surprises that come with a job at This Magazine. According to Whittington-Hill, those unexpected jolts are a blessing. “It makes you want to tear your hair out sometimes but it’s exciting. You never know what’s going to happen.” When I ask her what she’s learned since becoming This Magazine‘s publisher in January 2005, Whittington-Hill considers the question for several seconds before a grin spreads over her face. “That I’m never going to quit smoking,” she laughs. “And that I handle pressure better than I thought I would.”

There’s a particular kind of pressure Whittington-Hill is familiar with – dealing with staff turnover. She has witnessed the departure of D’Souza, who became associate editor of Canadian Geographic in July 2005 after just over a year at This Magazine, and Schultz, who called an abrupt halt to her seven-month tenure in February 2006. Whittington-Hill understands why editors leave – the position only pays $30,000 per year and demands long hours – but she would like to slow down the revolving door that has been spinning so furiously during the last couple of years. “It’s hard for the magazine when there’s too much turnover,” she says. “It’s hard for the readers, too, when a new editor comes in with a different take every few months.”

Johnston is introducing her take on things in the midst of This Magazine‘s fortieth anniversary, but unlike her two most recent predecessors, she plans to stay on long after the celebrations are over. Her dedication to the magazine is evident in the fact that she accepted a significant pay cut from her copy editing gig at theNational Post to take what she calls her “dream job.” Such sacrifice is important at a magazine that can’t afford to motivate employees or freelancers with money. The editorial budget for an average issue is $2,000 and contributors generally earn in the neighbourhood of ten cents per word – a sliver of what larger publications like Toronto Life offer. “We wish we could pay our writers more,” says Whittington-Hill, “but in a way it makes us lucky because people don’t write for us for the money. They do it because they like the magazine.

Johnston’s affection for her new employer verges on puppy love – she claims to have “had a crush” on This Magazine for several years, having discovered it at Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, where she was news editor for the student paper. When she moved to Toronto in 2003 and began working as a communications co-ordinator at the independent record label owned by folk musician Loreena McKennitt, her office was right beside This Magazine‘s. Taking advantage of the serendipity, she began to form a relationship with the magazine. “It took some courage to knock on the door,” she says, “but after that, I started stalking them – and they encouraged that.” Her stalking took the form of freelance contributions, copy editing and eventually a position as co-editor of This & That, the magazine’s front-of-book section. She occupied that role, along with Shawn Micallef, from July 2005 until being hired as editor-in-chief.

Johnston expects her current commitment to last roughly three years. “It’ll take time to get the magazine to the point where it reflects my vision,” she says. That vision includes getting This Magazine the respect she feels a forty-year-old publication deserves. “I’d like to haul it off the margins a bit and get it into more people’s hands. I’m always amazed by how many people haven’t heard of it.” Indeed, one of the problems that This Magazine continually faces is its struggle to attract a younger reader base. Subscribers skew to the older demographic – those who have been with the magazine since its inception in the radical 1960s – and Johnston recognizes that one of her challenges will be to bring new readers into the fold without crowding out the ones who’ve kept the faith.

“I think the best word is playful,” she says of the sensibility she believes will bring generations of readers together. Although the magazine has strong, left-of-centre political roots, Johnston feels it’s imperative not to preach. Citing a specific example of the kind of story that matches her own editorial philosophy, she points to a This & That story from the March/April issue entitled “Gone Buggy.” The story focuses on a Vancouver industrial arts student who designs special carts for homeless people who transport bottles and cans to recycling plants in exchange for cash. In Johnston’s view, the story was a “creative and interesting way to address homelessness and poverty.” Such offbeat approaches to familiar lefty issues, she feels, is the key to attracting young readers whose social consciences are still developing.

Another key, says Whittington-Hill, may lie in the results of the recent federal election. While she’s no fan of the new Conservative government, the publisher admits that the shift in power may galvanize the Canadian left. “People want an alternative voice to the government,” she says, pointing to the spike in the readership of U.S. magazines like The Nation in response to the George W. Bush administration.

While there’s reason to be optimistic, it’s unlikely that an enthusiastic new editor and a convenient political punching bag can solve the problems that have shadowed This Magazine for forty years. With its staff in a constant state of flux and monetary restrictions making it difficult to commission in-depth investigative reports by top-notch writers, the magazine may be consigned to the fringes of Canadian culture. If Johnston is going to accomplish her goal of bringing This Magazine in from those fringes, she’ll need to summon all of her superpowers.

As the Toronto Blue Jays start their 2006 baseball season, many sportswriters say the team will be a serious contender. For the first time in thirteen years – since Toronto last won the World Series – fans might have something to get excited about.

“Touch ’em all, Joe [Carter],” said radio voice of the Jays Tom Cheek of the championship-winning play all those years ago. “You’ll never hit a bigger home run in your life.”

But as the Jays get ready to challenge for a title again, the announcer won’t be giving the play by play for us radio listeners. Cheek, who called over 4,300 consecutive games since opening day in 1977, died of cancer at age 66 in October 2005.

The last twelve months have been tumultuous for those who take solace in an older generation of sportswriters and broadcasters. Scott Young, 87, known to most adults as aGlobe and Mail columnist and to children as the author ofScrubs on Skates, died in June. Jim (Shaky) Hunt, 79, long-time broadcaster and columnist for the Toronto Sun, died of a heart attack in March. A few are still around – Trent Frayne, 87; Milt Dunnell, 100; and George (Baron) Gross, 83 – but bylines like Jim Coleman or Dick Beddoes have long been put to rest.

Their primes were long before the days of twenty-four-hour sports television and instant online scores and stats. There were so few media outlets outside the major dailies and radio that those who worked the stadiums and arenas of the city became voices unto themselves in Toronto sports. More importantly, their relationships with the teams they covered reflected that older, different world – one where loyalty to a team counted for something.

“[Cheek] had two families,” said his broadcast partner Jerry Howarth in a Globe article the day after his death. “He had his wife, Shirley, their three children and seven grandchildren and the other family was the Blue Jays.”

Another article featured reactions from close friends and associates – including Jays executives old and new. “For more than twenty-five years, Tom was not only my radio link to the Blue Jays, he was a loyal friend and colleague,” said former general manager Gord Ash. In 2004, Cheek was inducted into the Jays’ Level of Excellence – banners above the right-field stands of the Rogers Centre honouring the club’s greatest players.

George Gross, 83, corporate sports editor at the Sun, remembers the late 1960s through the blue-tinted lens of a reporter on the Toronto Maple Leafs beat. There were only four people covering the team then: Gross, then with the now-defunct Toronto Telegram; Red Burnett of the Toronto Star, Rex MacLeod of the Globe; and Foster Hewitt of Hockey Night in Canada (who posthumously had a broadcast booth named after him in the Air Canada Centre).

This who’s who crew of Toronto sports scribes actually paid its own way from arena to arena. In those days, payment meant a spot on the team flight with Tim Horton and company. “We had real access to those guys,” Gross says. Compare that to the scrums on TSN or Sportsnet, where Mats Sundin speaks to a wall of microphones, the same sound byte for all, before slinking back to the dressing room.

At the head of the ’60s Leafs was coach Punch Imlach. Aside from being the architect of the team’s last four Stanley Cups, Imlach was also known for his kindness to the journalists and broadcasters who chronicled his every action. It was partly due to his acknowledging the positions of power sportswriters held in the city, but it was kindness nonetheless.

“We knew he had to do a job, but at the same time, Punch Imlach knew that we had to do a job,” Gross says. “We couldn’t prostitute ourselves. If the team played lousy, we said it.” When a poor line change against the Boston Bruins one game cost the Leafs a goal and the win, Gross spelled it out in a Telyheadline the next morning: “Imlach blows last night’s hockey game.”

At team practice, Gross says, Imlach would approach him and say, “You didn’t have to be that rough on me.” But after a brief chat, Imlach would say, “‘Okay, I understand. Let’s have lunch.’ And that was it.”

To this day, Gross says his time on the Leafs beat thirty years ago allowed him a chance to develop the kind of access younger reporters wouldn’t have. “I can call several, well, most players, at midnight at home and they’ll still talk to me.”

Some journalists, like Young, took such a liking to Imlach that, when he was eventually fired by then owner Conn Smythe, Young was one of the first to show up at his front door – as a friend. Now? Don’t count on a Damien Cox or Bob McKenzie showing up at coach Pat Quinn’s door the day he’s fired.

“Today’s sportswriters are less protective of organization,” says Rick Matsumoto, a Star sportswriter who started out at the Tely. “We’re always hammering away at someone.”

He attributes the change in posturing to changes in ownership since the days of Imlach. “Harold Ballard [owner of the Leafs after Smythe] was an old curmudgeon,” Matsumoto remembers. “People viewed him sort of as a silly old man. You don’t have the same feeling toward Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment,” whose majority owner now is the Ontario Teachers Pension Plan.

Along with that transition of sport into business was the rise of the multimillion-dollar player. Today they are younger, richer, “smartass, punky athletes,” says Matsumoto. In the old days, he says, “They were more like the guys who were writing about them. You could ride with them and play cards back then.”

Of course, it’s even tougher to ride with the boys when throngs of writers and broadcast teams all want to know why you blew it during the game. “There’s almost an antagonism today,” says Bill Stevenson, former sports host for CFRB radio. “The coach is afraid to say anything and the journalist can take the blame for that. I guess in those days, too, it wasn’t quite as competitive for the very simple reason there were no sports stations.”

Or, as Jim Hunt eloquently put it during an interview in October: “Now there’s so much television – there’s so much damn TV.”

Sitting in an Internet café in the Czech Republic, Clive Thompson is frantically searching for lawyers in Spain who specialize in Internet law.

A week prior, in Britain, Thompson received news that a virus writer had been arrested in Spain. The only information he could find about the arrest was on a website written in Spanish – a language he doesn’t speak – which didn’t name the virus writer, his lawyer or the city in which the arrest had taken place.

En route by train from Britain to Belgium, Belgium to Germany, and Germany to the Czech Republic, Thompson contacted the Spanish police, who confirmed that a man had been arrested for writing and releasing a virus that infected 120,000 computers – but declined to release any names.

“So I’m figuring, okay, these lawyers probably know each other,” Thompson says, “and if I can just talk to one of them, he’ll probably know who the lawyer handling this case is, right? Because there’s going to be a finite number of lawyers who know enough about cyber law to be able to defend this guy.”

Thompson has only two days before he has to be in Austria. Even if he’s able to track the virus writer down for an interview, he’ll have to take a train up to Prague, catch a flight to Britain, then catch the next flight to Spain. And then he’ll have to figure out how to get to Austria in time for another interview with a virus writer who’ll turn out to be the lede of his story.

“There was a lot of hair-trigger timing with that story,” Thompson says, laughing, a year after it was published inThe New York Times Magazine, “but it all came together nicely.” He tracked down the lawyer and, halfway to Prague, received a text message on his mobile phone from the virus writer agreeing to the interview.

It’s hour number three of my interview with Thompson. In his West Village apartment in New York City, the 37-year-old freelancer is wearing dark jeans, a four-day growth of beard and a headset, so that he can walk around the apartment while he talks. Thompson, who grew up in North York, Ontario, is a regular contributor to the Times magazine, New York magazine and Wired. His most recent feature, about blogs, was the cover story for the February 20 issue of New York.

Like the Times magazine feature about virus writers, Thompson’s writing tends to fall along the intersection of politics, culture and technology. He’s written about artificial intelligence, neuromarketing and video game violence. And he loves wearing suits. “Some of us think it’s just an affectation,” says Greg Sewell, who was the best man at both of Thompson’s weddings. “Clive just thinks it looks better than any other format of men’s clothing.” His dogged work ethic has earned him the praise of his editors. Like few other Canadian-born journalists – Patrick Graham, Guy Lawson and Malcolm Gladwell – Thompson has made a name for himself in New York City. “He’s insanely successful,” says Sewell, “He’s not just getting by.” And he’s done it with style.

• • •

“So, who else have you talked to?” asks Thompson’s wife and fellow New York journalist Emily Nussbaum as she rocks their three-month-old baby. She guffaws when I mention Sewell. “He must have basically said that Clive is this fabulous person, very well-dressed, curses like a sailor,” she says. “Did he compare him to a Tarantino movie?” No, I tell her. “He once said that to me, that Clive is like a Tarantino movie.”

Sewell, who also lives in New York, has known Thompson since his University of Toronto days in the late 1980s, when they reported and edited for The Strand, a biweekly Victoria College newspaper, and The Varsity. It was where the two of them learned and fine-tuned their journalism skills.

Thompson has known since Grade 12 that he wanted to be a journalist. He wrote hundreds of articles for The Varsity and took a year off to serve as its news editor. One piece in particular he worked on, a profile about Ursula Franklin, a philosopher of the politics of science and technology, turned him onto what has become his life’s work. (His childhood spent programming games on a Commodore 64 and his self-described “geekiness” might also have contributed.) “I realized, oh my god, I could actually unify this technology stuff with my interests in politics,” he recalls, “and that’s essentially when I began to realize, this is something I think I’d like to do with my life. I’d like to write about science and technology and how they impact society.”

When he graduated from U of T in 1992, Thompson took a job as a receptionist at a driving school on Bloor Street for $8 an hour. Then he worked at the League of Canadian Poets for a year. He considered himself a good reporter, but had no connections in the industry and no one would hire him as a journalist. So he enrolled in Ryerson University’s two-year post-graduate journalism program. “Generally, I hated it,” recalls Thompson. “It was horrifying to have to go back over all this crap I already knew how to do.” He spent more time working with his classmates on a zine called Shapeshifter than on schoolwork. (In one issue, Clive wrote about the nutritional value of Pop-Tarts.) “We’d take them to bars we liked and dump a pile,” remembers former classmate Sean Stanleigh.

When one of his journalism instructors sat him down and told him that he’d never seen such a depressed and angry person, Thompson took that as advice to leave the program – but not before he’d landed a summer internship at The Globe and Mail. That same summer, in 1994, Thompson got a call from Naomi Klein, then editor of This Magazine. She’d edited The Varsity a couple of years before Thompson and knew him from activist groups he’d been involved with at U of T. She wanted him to write a feature about anti-racist action. The feature catapulted Thompson into freelancing after he left the Globe at the end of the summer.

“I thought, if I can just make $250 a month for rent and maybe $100 more for food, then I’ll be fine,” Thompson says about his first crack at freelancing in Toronto. He lived in “an absolute shithole” infested with cockroaches in Kensington Market with four other underemployed friends. When Klein left This Magazine a year later, he got the editorship.

The first issue Thompson edited was the second-worst selling issue in the history of This Magazine. The January 1996 cover story about legal corruption on a Native reserve from his second issue won a National Magazine Award. Then Thompson had the idea of running a technology issue. “At the time, the readers ofThis Magazine were really, really technophobic,” he says. “They were like, ‘Technology and robots are taking our jobs away. We have to fight this.'” The controversial issue ran stories about interactive pornography and digital cash. Though there was a lot of backlash, the May/June 1996 issue was Thompson’s favourite.

• • •

The first time Thompson’s wife remembers hearing of him in New York was at a job interview for Lingua Franca, a now-defunct New York magazine. “I walked in, and the editors at Lingua Franca, who I knew because I’d been writing for them, said, ‘We just met this crazy Canadian! He talked a mile a minute!'” Nussbaum remembers. “They were so flabbergasted by him.” Thompson, who had traveled into New York City for the interview, didn’t get the job. But he moved to the city shortly after with his first wife who was attending university there. Thompson has an equation that he uses to illustrate what moving to New York is like, financially: to live in New York and maintain the same standard of living as in Toronto, you must double your income and convert it into American dollars. Even then, you’ll only be living in a Brooklyn suburb. If you want to live in Manhattan, you must triple your income. “I was terrified of the move to New York,” says Thompson. “I was prepared for total failure at any time.” Although he wanted to freelance, Thompson considered looking for a full-time job. “I had these visions I was going to end up working for a magazine about the organizational infrastructure of the paper clip industry,” he says. “It only comes out once every quarter, and there’s two people who work for the magazine in some sub-carrel in the Time Warner building and I never see the light of day, and that’s essentially my journalism career.”

His first big New York feature was an article published in Lingua Franca in 2001 about a university professor who’d created a controversial “essay-grading machine,” a story that plunged Thompson into a study of linguistics. He worked full-time for two months on the story. “It didn’t make that much money, but I was like, I’m going to make this story absolutely rock,” Thompson says. “I’m going to just kill myself so that this thing is fantastic. I’m going to cover every base. I’m going to talk to every single person.”

In that year, Thompson, who was still freelancing for Canadian magazines, wrote two monthly columns, three features for Report on Business magazine, four features for the now-defunct Shift Magazine and two features for Lingua Franca. “And anyone who called me up and needed a 300-word brief written for some minor magazine,” he says, “I would do it.”

From there, Thompson’s career became a web of editors – “precipices of connections,” he calls them – who moved from smaller American magazines he was writing for to larger ones, editors who saw his writing in other magazines and a hell of a lot of hard work. Seven years after he arrived in New York City, Thompson got his first story in the Times magazine. By that time, he had a tremendous work ethic. “He seems to be able to write a lot more than most writers,” says Paul Tough, Thompson’s editor at the Times magazine. “Most of our writers only write for the Times magazine because we take up a lot of their time. Clive’s got enough energy that he can write for a couple of magazines at the same time. I’m always impressed by that.”

When his friends aren’t working on anything specific, Thompson urges them to freelance. “And our answer is always, ‘We’re not you, Clive,'” says Sewell.

Thompson stopped working for a couple of months when his son Gabriel was born, but now he’s back to juggling 16 features (3,000-8,000 words each) a year, a biweekly column for Wired News, a monthly column for Wired, a bimonthly column for the Times magazine Play and a few occasional guest columns. His home office, filled with old-fashioned typewriters, huge stacks of video games, origami and thousands of books, was converted into a nursery, so Thompson moves his laptop from sofa to sofa in his living room and rents a desk at a “cubicle farm” across town. He occasionally works out of Internet cafes.

“I’m actually delirious right now,” Thompson said when he answered the phone for one interview. He’d gone to sleep at 8 that morning, after working on a draft all night. He’d slept for three hours and woke up again to spend the rest of the day writing. He’d forgotten, when he scheduled the interview, that he’d made plans to meet up with a friend.

“I’m going to be up at 7 tomorrow morning,” he’d said, “You can call me anytime after that.”

When I call, Thompson launches into a story about an unemployed manic depressive, living in San Francisco, who’s built a machine that mimics human conversation so well that people can’t tell they’re not talking to a human being. “Clive has three million different interests that he’s extremely passionate about, knows a lot about, and can debate about,” Nussbaum says. “He’s genuinely not monomaniacal.”

Thompson even writes poetry. A slow-running computer became an excuse for writing a series of poems called “startup poems” – each composed on a typewriter while Thompson waited for his computer to reboot.

And one of the hardest reporting assignments he’s ever had was the first story he wrote for New Yorkmagazine about an art dealer who’d been running a forgery scam. The only information that the editors had was a clipping from a newspaper, and they wanted the article researched and written in two weeks. Thompson worked twenty-two hours a day on the story.

“When the story came out,” says Thompson, “the FBI called and said, ‘You actually hunted down people that we weren’t able to contact.'” He admits he drinks lots and lots of coffee.

For more Clive Thompson, check out his blog Collision Detection, or read some of his articles in our selected reading list below.

Selected reading list:

“Blogs to Riches,” New York Magazine, February 20, 2006.

“Meet the life hackers,” New York Times Magazine, October 16, 2005.

“The Other Turing Test,” Wired Magazine, July 2005.

“Cruel Intentions,” New York Magazine, February 7, 2005.

“The Xbox Auteurs,” New York Times Magazine, August 7, 2005.

“How to Make a Fake,” New York Magazine, May 31, 2004.

“A Really Open Election,” New York Times Magazine, May 30, 2004.

“The Honesty Virus,” New York Times Magazine, March 21, 2004.

“The Virus Underground,” New York Times Magazine, February 8, 2004.

“There’s a Sucker Born in Every Medial Prefrontal Cortex,” New York Times Magazine, October 26, 2003.

“Approximating Life,” New York Times Magazine, July 7, 2002.

“The Know-It-All Machine,” Lingua Franca, September 2001.

“Good Clean Fun,” Shift Magazine, December 1999.

Dana Robbins can’t sleep. The Hamilton Spectator‘s editor-in-chief is worried and excited about how readers will respond to the changes that will appear in the next morning’s paper. Actually, he hasn’t been trying all that hard to sleep. He just got home half an hour ago – at 3 A.M. – because he chose to stay at work and watch the first few papers roll off the press. In a few hours, he’ll make his way back to the office, only to be greeted by a four-piece jazz band and a radically different Spec.

Readers had known for some time that “The Revolution” was coming on October 1, 2003. They’d seen the billboards and read plenty about it in Robbins’s columns – and some weren’t happy about it. Their traditional six-section newspaper was reduced to just four sections: News, Sports, Classified and GO, a magazine-like catchall containing lifestyle, fashion, entertainment, food and health. “We had lots of pushback from many of our older readers who didn’t want to see their paper change,” says Robbins. “We had hundreds and hundreds of calls in the first three months.”

Despite the firestorm, Robbins knew something had to be done to reverse declining readership – a trend happening at all Canadian newspapers. Rather than trying to lure in new, younger readers, the Spec took an unorthodox approach by looking for ways to increase readership with the subscribers it already had. Circulation wasn’t the problem because people were still buying the paper. The problem was the paper would go straight to the blue box without being read. So, after identifying two specific sets of readers on which to focus – baby boomers and women between the ages of 25 and 49 – the newsroom spent eighteen months deciding how to better reach them.

The results were encouraging. A year later, readership was up 6.3 per cent overall and even higher for both boomers and women. “If the readership is going up, then it’s the only newspaper in Canada that has achieved this,” says John Miller, a journalism professor at Ryerson University and author of Yesterday’s News: Why Canada’s Daily Newspapers Are Failing Us. “Even if the readership stays flat, it’s a success.”

The Spec has received international acclaim for its changes. Editors of newspapers from the U.S. and even as far away as Norway have put in requests to Robbins and managing editor Roger Gillespie to come and share their experiences and knowledge. Randolph Brandt, editor of The Journal Times in Racine, Wisconsin, says he was motivated to intensify change at his newspaper after hearing Robbins speak at an American Society of Newspaper Editors event. “I didn’t want to alienate regular readers, but when I saw the Spectatorand all the changes that were made very quickly and heard Dana speak on it, I just decided to do it all at once,” he says. “I’m glad I did because we immediately saw reader increases for our target audience.”

Robbins, 45, has become an evangelist for change at newspapers, which is unusual for someone who has spent most of his professional career in one organization. He grew up in Red Lake, a little mining town about 600 kilometres northwest of Thunder Bay. His father was a miner and his mom worked in restaurants and stores to help make ends meet. In 1978, he entered Ryerson’s School of Journalism. Upon graduation, he interned at the Spec, then left to pursue freelancing and found work for some community weeklies. But by 1984, he was back at the Spec, and he hasn’t left since. “It makes me somewhat of an oddity in our industry nowadays,” he says.

Something else that makes Robbins an oddity is his willingness to experiment, even though some strategies are risky. For example, the series “Poison,” written by Jon Wells in 2003, was a 90,000-word story about a local man who poisoned his wife and business partner. Even though research suggested people don’t have the time to read long-form journalism, the Spec ran the series for five weeks straight, with two pages dedicated to the story on weekdays and six pages on Saturdays. The gamble paid off. Newsstand sales increased by five per cent during that five-week period, and the Spectator won a 2003 National Newspaper Award in the Special Project category.

The Spec has since produced a few more multi-week series. Robbins welcomes ideas from everyone in the newsroom when deciding what the next big series should be. “The bar is high under Dana,” says special reports reporter Fred Vallance-Jones. “There’s the opportunity to be that pole vaulter – a sense that if you want to grab that pole and push yourself up over that bar, you’re going to be given the opportunity in this sport to do that. That’s one of the most gratifying things about working here.”

Robbins also sets the bar high when it comes to serving the community. The Spec recently initiated The Poverty Project, a full-time beat, the goal of which is to reduce poverty in Hamilton. Articles profile poor families in the community and focus on issues that contribute to poverty. “We are doing this because we believe that there is nothing more pressing in our community, no greater obstacle to Hamilton reaching its fullest potential,” Robbins wrote in his October 29, 2005 column.

Robbins recognizes that taking such a strong advocacy role leaves the paper open to criticism, but he doesn’t have a lot of patience for carping. “The Spectator has published in this community for 160 years,” he says. “We have a financial, intellectual and emotional investment in this community. We’re not dispassionate observers of the city of Hamilton. This is our home. There is no one who cares more about Hamilton than the Spectator.”

Nor is Robbins a dispassionate observer of the newspaper industry. When faced with readership decline, he looks beyond previously employed and tired formulas. “That is a very encouraging sign,” says Len Kubas, president of Kubas Consultants, a newspaper marketing research and consulting firm. “Many newspapers, when facing difficult and challenging times, respond by hunkering down, cutting costs and whacking staff.”

Robbins has certainly transformed his beloved Spec, and his efforts have not gone unnoticed. His paper won the Canadian Journalism Foundation’s 2004 Excellence in Journalism Award. Yet it’s more difficult to say whether he’s achieved his goal of “reinventing the contemporary newspaper.”

Circulation is up, interest is up and awards are up, but Robbins still hasn’t tackled the one issue that has flummoxed newspaper executives for a generation: How to attract new, younger readers?

Peter Desbarats, chair of the CJF selection committee, is impressed by the Spec‘s efforts, but he is hesitant to acknowledge that its pioneering work will affect Canada’s journalism industry as a whole. “That would only happen if the owners of most Canadian newspapers were looking for ways to improve their newspapers and to provide a little more time and money to their newsrooms,” Desbarats says. “I haven’t seen much evidence that that’s true.”

With files from Brendan Edwards.

Two colour photographs hang on the wall of a nondescript office on the fifth floor of CBC headquarters in downtown Toronto. Each picture features the same subjects – David Knapp shaking hands with Pope John Paul II – captured at specific moments in time, eighteen years apart.

As CBC manager of special events and elections, Knapp worked directly with the Pope in September 1984. He says the eight-province, twelve-day Papal visit was the most challenging production he’d ever undertaken and he had to start the planning in fall 1983. “I lived that project for a year,” he says.

Knapp oversaw and co-ordinated a crew of two thousand. There were no cell phones in those days, so he used a marine radio as a portable communications system to facilitate keeping the event on track. The radio came in a briefcase and “weighed a ton.”

The setup for the event included 300 cameras, 370 positions and fifty-four television mobiles. “There are just so many little details,” says Mark Bulgutch, executive producer of CBC News and CBC Newsworld. “The dressing rooms, the size of the podium, the timetable of what time people should arrive, the media pens, the photo opportunities we’re going to give people – he knows these things.”

In all, 120 hours of live television were filmed. The event was a moving target, so it was difficult to anticipate every circumstance. “When the Pope would go for his walkabout,” Knapp says, “you’d never know where he’d end up.”

The Pope returned to Canada for World Youth Day in 2002. Father Thomas Rosica, then national director and chief executive officer of World Youth Day, now CEO of Salt + Light Media Foundation, co-ordinated coverage with Knapp. Rosica says the Vatican mentioned repeatedly over the years that, out of 104 international visits by John Paul II, the CBC’s handling of the 1984 Papal tour was one of the best. The Pope’s handlers trusted Knapp enough to allow his crew full access the second time around.

Papal visits require that extra level of co-ordination, but Knapp has managed a variety of large-scale productions. He has planned all the royal tours to Canada covered by CBC since the 1960s. He covered Charles de Gaulle’s 1967 visit to Quebec when the former French president said, infamously, “Vive le Quebec libre!” He covered Expo 67 in Montreal and Expo 86 in Vancouver. He covered the Queen signing the repatriation of the Canadian Constitution on Parliament Hill in 1982. He covered former Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s funeral in 2000. He has covered the annual anniversaries of VE-Day celebrations. The list goes on and in most cases, he wasn’t simply covering these events, he was organizing the overall broadcasting.

This year, the 62-year-old Knapp celebrates his fortieth anniversary at the public broadcaster. CBC ombudsman Vince Carlin calls him the most important unknown journalist in Canada. Richard Stursberg, executive vice-president of CBC Television, calls his work “crucial to our efforts as a leading news organization.” And Peter Mansbridge, anchor of The National, says, “If Dave didn’t do what he does well, those of us on air would never have the tools to do what we do.”

Knapp was born and raised in Montreal. He first became interested in journalism while still in high school, where he participated in Junior Achievement, a co-op program that gives students hands-on experience in a professional environment. One of the participating businesses was the now-defunct radio station CFOX in Pointe-Claire, Quebec. As an intern there, Knapp learned about journalism and the radio business. He began working professionally at CFOX in 1961 as a reporter and later as an assignment editor. He then moved to CBC as a city hall reporter in 1966 and became executive producer of CBC News in Quebec by 1970. In 1978, he was posted briefly in Ottawa, where he headed the parliamentary news bureau. A year later, he was transferred to Toronto and promoted to the role of executive producer of CBC special events and elections. By the time of the 1981 economic summit in Ottawa, he was director of broadcast operations. And by the mid-1980s, he was managing all CBC news special events.

The Pope’s 1984 visit was a career highlight, but there have been many others, including leadership conventions, royal tours and general elections. Planning all of them has been logistically tricky, he says, “like putting together a jigsaw puzzle.”

Right now, Knapp is setting up coverage of the April 4 opening of Parliament and throne speech. He says it will be a three-day, fifteen-camera event. It will take one and a half days to set up in Ottawa, and a half day to tear down. He’ll arrange the installation and optimal placement of cameras. He’ll balance the lighting in the building, which involves placing “gels” on the windows to block out excessive sunlight. He’ll make sure all the equipment cables work. And he’ll meet his new contacts in Stephen Harper’s Conservative government.

CBC also covers all provincial and territorial elections but only Ontario and British Columbia have fixed election dates. This means, Knapp says, that in many cases “we’re flying by the seat of our pants.” A few years ago, there were elections in both Ontario and New Brunswick held within forty-eight hours. “It makes life rather difficult.”

Decisions are made quickly. During the 2006 general election in January, Knapp had to find a suitable venue to hold the first leaders’ debate in Vancouver on just six days’ notice. He had to find one with enough room for the debate area, the media centre, the scrum area, the spinners’ area (each party has two spinners who talk to the press after the debates) and the dressing rooms. He had to make sure all the necessary equipment was on-site and ready to go. And he had to co-ordinate all security issues with the RCMP.

According to Canadian Press, Knapp was still at it with ten minutes to go before the party leaders took their places. Apparently, Conservative and Liberal aides started bickering about the lack of space for water and notes on the podiums. “There are no lips (on the podiums) or trays,” Knapp, who wasn’t having any of it, reportedly said. “We agreed to this two days ago.”

Despite all the routinely meticulous planning, strange things can happen. During World Youth Day in 2002, for example, CBC had twenty-eight cameras in place at Downsview Park in Toronto. Then, the night before the mass, a huge thunderstorm turned the park into a mud bowl. The next day, the resulting humidity caused five camera lenses to fog up. None of the crew could get at the lenses to change them because spectators who had erected makeshift shelters to keep themselves out of the mud blocked the roadways. “We ended up using the fogged cameras,” Knapp says, “and getting a different perspective of the event – kind of like a halo effect.”

There seems to be a kind of halo effect around Knapp as well. While his lengthy career has put him close to many important Canadians and world leaders, he’s remained virtually anonymous outside the CBC. Looking back, he says he feels privileged to have been involved in so many history-making experiences.

“When you start listing them all,” he says with a faint smile, “it’s been a pretty rewarding time.”

When cartoons ignite worldwide protests, resulting in torched embassies and many deaths, the decision to reprint is easy. Many outlets believe in freedom of speech and providing readers with context, but few in Canada have actually run the cartoons. Western Standard magazine and The Jewish Free Press, both based in Calgary, are two that did, and they’ve both been slapped with human rights complaints.

The decision not to publish the dozen caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, which first appeared in Denmark’s Jyllands-Posten newspaper last September, has become almost a no-brainer for Canadian media owners. They simply say they’re respecting religious sentiments. But a Compas, Inc. poll conducted February 20 found that many working journalists believe fear is the real reason more Canadian outlets haven’t reprinted the satirical works. According to the survey of 221 Canadian journalists, seven out of ten think more media should have carried the caricatures. And seventy-eight per cent of those journalists think fear was why Canadian media executives held back.

Here’s a synopsis of the controversy so far. Jyllands-Postencommissions twelve satirical images of Mohammed, the representation of whose likeness is forbidden in Islam, by twelve separate cartoonists. One infamously depicts Mohammed with a bomb in his turban. Innocuous caricatures are also included, like one of a schoolboy-aged Mohammed scribbling on a blackboard: “The journalists atJyllands-Posten are a bunch of reactionaries.”

In “Why I published the cartoons,” the Jyllands-Postenculture editor Flemming Rose explains the cartoons are a response to “incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.” He suggests the fiasco may serve as a quasi-integrationist tactic to accept Muslims, like others, as subjects of traditional Danish satire.

In his defence of freedom of speech, Rose cites the totalitarian climate of the Cold War as a lesson against the proverbial “slippery slope” of giving into demands for censorship.

In one case of giving in, the editorial staff at the New York Press, an alternative weekly, walks out following their publisher’s change of heart, pulling the caricatures at the eleventh hour.

In another, the editor of France-Soir is fired after publishing cartoons of several religious deities under the caption: “Yes, we have the right to caricature God.”

Ezra Levant, publisher of the Western Standard, certainly would concur. He defends his decision to reprint the cartoons in a debate with Scott Anderson, the Ottawa Citizen‘s editor-in-chief and vice-president of editorial for CanWest’s newspaper chain, on CBC Radio’s The Current.

“One thing we don’t do as responsible journalists is offend for the sake of offending,” Anderson argues.

There are many Arabs and Muslims in Ottawa, Levant contends, implying this might have been in the back of Citizen editors’ minds, adding: “This newfound respect for religion is code word for ‘I’m afraid.'”

In the final minutes, Anderson denies deference to religion played any part in his decision, but admits the hostile response did. “Under different circumstances we may have published these cartoons to illustrate the story,” he explains, “but the reaction is so vitriolic and so angry.”

Levant confesses he’s “a little bit” intimidated – but “not so scared that I’m going to throw out freedom of speech” – and hires extra security for the Standard‘s offices.

Security may lie behind the hesitation to print, according to Jonathan Kay, managing editor of comment at the National Post. “It is expensive and difficult to provide security for an office building and printing presses,” he says. “I think this was a bigger factor than most media outlets were willing to admit.”

So far, Levant has received 7,000 emails and 2,000 calls, but no one’s shown up at the Standard‘s Calgary offices.

Doug Firby, who edits the editorial page at the Calgary Herald, thinks Levant is playing to his perceived right-wing readership. “I don’t believe, as he alleges, that he was motivated by any desire to defend freedom of expression,” says Firby. “I thought it was irresponsible and a bit childish.”

At The Globe and Mail offices in Toronto, the debate over running the cartoons is first raised at a morning news meeting by Marcus Gee, editorial pages editor. Gee argues in favour of publishing, but the final decision against is made by editor-in-chief Edward Greenspon. In his editorial, “Self-censorship vs. editing,” he labels the cartoons “unnecessarily provocative.” It’s a phrase Giles Gherson, The Toronto Star‘s editor-in-chief, uses in his own editorial on the subject.

Respectfully disagreeing with his boss, Gee says, “My own feeling was we should have published them. Canadian newspapers are pretty strong on freedom of expression. They made an exception in this case, and you can argue whether we should’ve made that exception.”

Gee thinks a newspaper should supply the readers with context. “What is this all about? How did it all start?” he asks. “You can’t really understand that properly unless you’ve seen the images.”

The Globe offers readers context in other ways. Lengthy pieces delve into the history of Islam and the Prophet himself. Greenspon calls this “the spirit of illumination over heat.”

Doug Saunders, the Globe‘s foreign correspondent, also takes part in the dialogue. He writes about Muslim identity in Europe and answers readers’ questions through an online question-and-answer session. “I suspect that most major newspapers, including this one, would print them if they were in any way hard to obtain,” he argues. “But since they’re so widely available, why should everyone automatically print them?”

CBC News: Morning‘s international editor Harry Forestell points out this same fact in an interview with Levant, who later laughs it off, retorting, “If the best argument that CBC can muster is that some little blogger is already meeting Canada’s demand for news, then what’s the point of the CBC?”

But if Canadian media are shielding readers from the offending images, many of the rioters haven’t seen them either. In Saunders’s online Q&A, he notes this fact. He says the bulk of protestors have acted on hearsay, along with the belief that major English papers have reprinted the cartoons.

Saunders also speaks with Ahmed Akkari, the Islamic scholar who distributed a booklet of the cartoons, along with other obscene caricatures of the Prophet as a pig, a dog and a sodomite (caricatures that were never published in Jyllands-Posten). Akkari wished to call on fellow Muslims for support, but later regretted the outcome. “I suspect he was partly naïve,” writes Saunders, “but also somewhat disingenuous – obviously, the package was intended as a provocation of some sort.”

The ongoing uproar has provoked some dialogue, which is likely the most positive thing it’s spawned. “Both sides certainly know a lot more about each other than they did two weeks ago,” writes Haroon Siddiqui, theStar‘s editorial page editor.

Siddiqui points to a lack of understanding of Islam in the West, which consists largely of Judeo-Christian societies. Robert Fisk, The Independent‘s Middle East correspondent, writes, “The fact is that Muslims live their religion. We do not.”

Tensions run high in the Middle East, where fear of the West encroaching on Muslim land and culture cannot be dismissed easily. The actions of the United States and its coalition partners in Iraq and Afghanistan, rightly or wrongly, are prime examples of fuelling this fear.

Siddiqui asserts that Islamophobia has played a big part in the Jyllands-Posten episode. He characterizes the paper as freely anti-Muslim. Danish Muslims no doubt have at times faced xenophobia within their own country – one member of the right-wing Danish People’s Party has posted comments online likening Muslims to “cancer cells.”

In Canada, Kim Bolan has dealt with religious sensitivities for over two decades as a reporter for theVancouver Sun. Although she admits she’s relatively uninformed about the entire crisis, she says, “My gut response is that most Canadian media outlets don’t want to deal with the underlying issues or even assess the concerns of protestors. Nor do they appreciate the range of debate within the Muslim community because our approach to minorities is often very one-dimensional.”

Then Bolan adds this ominous caveat: “I do think most newspapers will adopt some self-censorship in the future without even thinking about the real issues, because they don’t want the hassle.”

On February 23, the bodies of correspondent Atwar Bahjat, cameraman Khaled Mahmoud al-Falahi and engineer Adnan Khairallah were found near Samarra, Iraq. Bahjat was a correspondent for Al-Arabiya, while al-Falahi and Khairallah were employees of Wasan Productions on assignment for Al-Arabiya. The Wasan crew was covering the bombing of a Shiite shrine near Samarra, Iraq, when armed men attacked them and demanded to know the whereabouts of Bahjat. Their last broadcast was at 6 P.M. the day before their bodies were found.

On February 2, Wu Xianghu, deputy editor of Taizhou Wanbao, died of liver and kidney failure after months of hospitalization. He was attacked by traffic police in the eastern coastal city of Taizhou, Zhejiang province, China, in October 2005, after writing an embarrassing exposé of high fee collections for electric bicycle licenses.

On January 25, Baghdad TV correspondent Mahmoud Za’al was shot and killed in a U.S. air strike while covering an insurgent attack by Sunni rebels on two U.S.-held buildings in Ramadi, Iraq. He had worked for the station for one year.

On January 24, the day before, Subramaniyam Sugitharajah, a part-time reporter for the Sudar Oli, was killed by an unidentified gunman on his way to work. Photographs taken by Sugitharajah had shown that five students in Tamil, Sri Lanka, had been killed by gunshot wounds January 2, despite claims by the military that the men were blown up by their own grenade in an attempted attack on the army.

And on January 6, Prahlad Goala of the Asomiya Khabar was murdered near his home in Golaghat, Assam state, India. He had written articles linking local forestry service officials to timber smuggling.

So far this year, seven journalists are confirmed, and two others suspected, dead. At what number this tragic toll stops in 2006 is anyone’s guess and, at least for now, 2005 remains the most violent year in journalism’s history. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ) reported in January that 150 were killed last year, including forty-eight in a December 6 plane crash in Tehran and eighty-nine “killed in the line of duty, singled out for their professional work.”

The previous record was 129 deaths, set in 2004. The December 26, 2004 tsunami in Southeast Asia claimed eighty-nine journalists, and marked the start of an increasing trend in the field: foreign-location assignments are killing journalists.

“Unfortunately, journalists are now more part of the conflict,” says Douglas Struck, foreign correspondent forThe Washington Post. “It used to be that journalists felt with some degree of accuracy that we were not in the line of fire, that we had a special status as neutral observers that usually kept us pretty safe. That’s clearly not true any more, particularly in Iraq, where journalists are targeted specifically by those on one side.”

The number of recorded deaths depends on differing criteria. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) estimates forty-seven deaths in 2005, to 2004’s fifty-seven. The CPJ, whose numbers are the most widely cited, also says that a total of eighty-four journalists have been killed in Iraq since the conflict began in 2003. This figure excludes journalists who have died in non-hostile situations, unlike the International News Safety Institute (INSI), which cites 101 as the actual figure of media deaths in the country. The INSI number more closely coincides with the IFJ, reporting 146 casualties for the year 2005 – thirty-three in Asia and eighty-seven in the Middle East.

Though the exact figures differ, the tally might as well be the same: too many. “It’s a big challenge to be a foreign correspondent,” says Paul Loong, world editor for Canadian Press. “You have to be adequately trained and take all the necessary precautions while going about your job.”

But what can be done?

“It depends on the area,” says the Post‘s Struck. “In the past, our major precautions were our own wits. We had to evaluate every place we went – how safe it was, the safest way to approach it, who you can contact safely. For example, a local journalist or translator… are they reliable, do they know the terrain and territory?”

Struck says media personnel are now transported in armoured cars between destinations. Armed guards often accompany them as well, either in the vehicle with them or in a trailing car to protect journalists from being kidnapped for ransom or used as bargaining chips. “We live outside the Green Zone in a compound heavily guarded by men with automatic rifles,” he says. Travel is restricted in Iraq, more so than in Afghanistan and other places. But that’s changing, because now “Afghanistan is looking increasingly dangerous,” he says. INSI reports that three journalists were killed in Afghanistan in 2004, compared to thirty-two in Iraq.

“The problem is the dangers are so often around them and savage in nature,” says David Walmsley, assistant managing editor for national and foreign news at The Toronto Star. “We train our reporters in medical techniques and try to minimize the potential for a random attack.” Walmsley says reporters are also equipped with hard hats, flak jackets, and other safety and medical equipment when on assignment. “What more can you do?”

INSI dedicates an entire section of its site to safety tips for journalists, suggesting they remain neutral and never carry firearms. It is also valuable to understand the history of the area and to take hostile environment courses before going into a conflict zone.

“The people that go to troubled areas of the world tend to be more experienced,” says Loong. “There is never total security, so it’s a matter of being vigilant and knowing the environment that can make the person respond more promptly to threats.”

The most valuable safety precaution is almost universally adopted by news agencies: foreign correspondents volunteer for potentially lethal assignments. “A lot of journalists weigh the dangers of accepting an assignment,” says Struck, “and legitimately decide the danger is not worth the story. Quite frankly, no story is worth being killed for.”

“Anytime we go to conflict zones,” adds Walmsley, “we do it with a great degree of caution.”

Safety organizations respond to the increase in deaths of journalists in any way possible. The CPJ says it protects journalists by publicly revealing abuses against the press, and by acting on behalf of imprisoned and threatened journalists in order to warn others where attacks are occurring. When news correspondents do get into trouble, it can intervene by notifying news organizations, government officials and human rights groups. Journalists in dire situations can also appeal to the CPJ Journalist Assistance Program, which is “intended to aid journalists who have been physically assaulted and need medical attention; those who need to go into hiding or exile to escape threats; and those in prison who have specific, material needs.”

Few Canadian news organizations have their own foreign news departments, and as such aren’t quite as concerned with the alarming trend. Organizations that do, such as CBC, haven’t yet lost staff to hostile environments.

However, the increase in violence toward journalists cannot be ignored. Precautions are being taken, but as the last two years have shown, being careful only goes so far. “The challenges are ones we’ll continually face,” says Walmsley. “They’re not going to go away.”

The seven recent deaths not only prove Walmsley’s point, they also paint a grim forecast. “Hopefully, we don’t pay the same price this year,” he says, “but we may.”