A few hours before dawn, police lights began flashing on the Deerfoot Trail, just west of Calgary Heraldheadquarters.

Rick Mofina arrived within minutes. He got out of his blue Jetta, grabbed a notepad and headed toward a police inspector who was waiting for the medical examiner.

Mofina’s tired eyes betrayed the effects of the night shift. The 1988 Olympics had ended in a whirlwind and the Herald was tightening its budget. He had just been taken off the prairies beat and reassigned to night cops. What the hell was night cops? Mofina asked himself. Give me politics. Give me the labour beat. Why am I covering God damned car accidents at 2 a.m.?

EMS voices echoed over the radios. Mofina fixed his glasses and peered at the ditch, catching a flash of denim. The victim was still in the car; slouched over in the driver’s seat.

“You wanna take a look?” the investigator asked the young reporter.

Mofina raised an eyebrow, “Uh…sure.”

There were still “pieces of life” in the car when Mofina stared down at his first dead body. A hockey bag. A Coke in the cup holder.

The victim wasn’t much older than him.

As he gazed at two voids where eyes should have been, visions of Mofina’s own life flashed in his head. His adolescence in Belleville, Ont. His first jobs picking fruit and washing dishes. Journalism school at Carleton University. His wedding to Barbara in ’79.

With the stench of death in the air and police lights burning holes in his eyes, a philosophical air swept over Mofina and he realized he was meant to be a crime writer.

• • •

Mofina hurried back to the Herald and wrote a note on the accident for the day crew. After that, his desire to write a novel crystallized – it would be a thriller about a reporter chasing crime stories.

Almost 20 years later, he’s published seven paperbacks with A Perfect Grave set to hit Canadian stands in May 2007.

As a journalist, he spent a summer at the Toronto Star, more than a decade at the Herald and three years at CanWest’s Ottawa bureau. In 2003, he left journalism – or rather, was forced out – when CanWest downsized. The move, says his former boss Peter Robb, “was strictly economics.”

“Unfortunately, others had been there longer,” says Robb, now an editor at the Ottawa Citizen. “It’s corporate stuff.”

Mofina doesn’t pack any grudges. Working in the nation’s capital as a communications advisor, he wakes up at 4:15 a.m. most mornings, before the kids are up, and writes. He’s produced a book each year since the 2000 release of If Angels Fall, his fictional tale of “a grizzled homicide detective” and “a superb news reporter whose life is coming apart.”

To be a published novelist was a childhood dream, says Mofina, but it wouldn’t have happened without his newsroom experience. “I live the journalistic world now in a fictional sense,” says the 49-year-old. “I create fictional newsrooms and fictional challenges.”

Journalism made him the thriller writer he is today. And, if Mofina’s colleagues are right, fiction like his is making reporters better storytellers. True crime thrillers are appearing in newspapers like The Hamilton Spectator and the Toronto Star with gritty narrations and nail-biting endings. The line between suspense novel and news story has blurred since Mofina started.

• • •

Shooting the breeze one night in Calgary, Mofina noticed a cop carrying something in his hands. “What’s that?” he asked, pointing at the copy of Practical Homicide Investigation: Tactics, Procedures, and Forensic Techniques – a whale of a textbook for police training.

“Standard reading when you make detective,” the man answered. He passed it to Mofina, who wrote down the title.

A few weeks later, Mofina’s copy arrived. He’d had to special order it from a college library (his wife would later buy it for him as a gift). Soon, he’d read it cover to cover. He learned how to speak like a detective and, in turn, started asking better questions.

Getting into the mind of a detective, says Mofina, helped him become a better reporter. Mofina took the same principle home, where he quietly wrote his fiction – he began thinking like a cop, then like a lawyer; a psychologist; a kidnapping victim; and even a criminal. When he’d go back to write at the Herald he found himself empathizing more deeply with his sources. In form, Mofina’s journalism started looking more like fiction.

While editors at some papers rein in such creativity, others have begun to thrive on it. In contrast to most newsroom attempts to condense stories, The Hamilton Spectator regularly publishes serialized non-fiction pieces that run into the tens of thousands of words — written in a style so gripping that many have become paperbacks.

• • •

Jon Wells had been at the Spectator for a couple years when editor-in-chief Dana Robbins called him into his office. The Spectator was covering the trial of Sukhwinder Singh Dhillon, who poisoned his wife in 1995 and would soon go to jail for it. Robbins wanted a feature. “I want you to write something big,” he told Wells. “Take as much time as you need.”

Months later, Wells gave his editor four chapters of what eventually became “Poison: A True Crime Story.” He hadn’t shown anyone his work yet. It wasn’t like anything he regularly saw in the paper – written in thriller-style chapters as opposed to a bunch of related features. What if Robbins hates it? thought Wells.

Robbins loved it. But he was nervous readers wouldn’t. Stuff like this might sell on paperback shelves, but were newspaper readers ready? On January 24, the night before the 31-chapter series launched, Robbins went to bed with “a rock in [his] stomach the size of [his] fist.” It was counter to everything he’d been told about the newspaper industry – it wasn’t short, it wasn’t quick, and it spent 10 times as much space detailing characters and settings as a regular news feature.

The next day, the Spectator sold an extra 500 copies on newsstands. It was an incredible success for its entire 31-day span. “It became a seminal moment for us,” says Robbins, now the publisher of The Record in Kitchener, Ont. “One of the things we learned from this is that readers have a much higher acceptance of change than perhaps newspapers do.”

“Poison” later won a National Newspaper Award, which led to other acclaimed serialized narratives at theSpectator.

• • •

Today, years after he left the paper, it wouldn’t be surprising to still find one or two of Mofina’s paperbacks on desks at the Herald. “People still talk about him,” says civic affairs reporter Tony Seskus. “Rick’s a legend.”

By the time Seskus joined the Herald in ’97, Mofina was already an established crime reporter known for powerful characters and scene-setting ambiance. “He could tell a story in a very compelling fashion,” says Seskus. “He was always able to express a lot of empathy for the people, no matter who they were.”

In 1989, Mofina became captivated by serial killer Charles Ng. The man had fled California in the late ’80s after the sex murders of 11 people and was arrested while hiding in a Calgary park not far from Mofina’s home. After writing a few stories about Ng, Mofina decided to write to the killer, who’d never granted a press interview.

“I am a reporter with the Calgary Herald,” Mofina began. The media is presenting you as a monster, Mofina told him, I want to tell your side of the story.

On December 28, 1990, a letter arrived on Mofina’s desk from “C. Ng.” Ecstatic, the reporter ran to his editor reading the letter aloud. “The prison officials here will not allow me to call you,” wrote Ng in scratchy handwriting. Instead, he told him how to get on the visitor list.

Mofina was never able to sit down with Ng due to a battle with the convict’s lawyer, but they continued corresponding through mail. Ng revealed frustration from his jail cell, saying it was inhumane for the state to condemn him without telling him when or where he would die. He quoted Camus’ “Reflections on the Guillotine.” His writing was eloquent, bordering on intellectual, at times.

In 1998, Mofina covered the trial in California, lacing his stories with lines like, “revulsion and horror were written in the eyes of jurors,” and “the victims came to life on large colour monitors in the courtroom.” Colleagues say it was some of Mofina’s best work.

“He didn’t try to paint Charlie Ng as this evil monster,” says Seskus. “He wanted to understand how this guy came into being.”

The Star’s Quebec bureau chief Sean Gordon says his former colleague “would twist himself in knots to find the right atmosphere.” Gordon says it was “classic Mofina.”

• • •

In his fourth-floor suite at the King Edward Hotel, Mofina was busy getting ready for the Crime Writers of Canada awards banquet when he saw there was a message on his phone.

On June 4, 2003 his boss at CanWest told Mofina that he no longer had a job. The company was downsizing.

It was almost time to leave for the awards. Mofina was dressed in a dark blue suit and soon his sales rep from Pinnacle Books would be waiting in the lobby. His heart racing, Mofina called his wife in a panic.

“What do I do, Barb?” he asked.

A little shaken up, he went to the awards as she suggested. As he sat in a high wingback chair in the Ontario Club on King Street West, his mind flooded with thoughts of the future. Then he heard his name. He’d won the Arthur Ellis Award for Best Crime Novel.

He walked on stage and accepted the prize from Canadian author Peter Robinson and The Globe and Mailcolumnist Margaret Cannon.

“I really needed this award tonight,” Mofina told the crowd.

It poured that night; the thunderclaps almost audible from inside the Ontario Club’s dark ballroom. Mofina got back to the King Edward around midnight, a little dizzy from champagne and celebration.

Maybe editors like Robbins were right: newsroom dinosaurs weren’t ready to print thrillers. They were about cutting words, staff and budgets. If Mofina was going to write the stories he wanted, he’d have to stick with fiction.

He entered his room as lightning flashed outside. This is like a bad film noir, he thought throwing off his tie. Mofina flipped on the news. Once again, he was pondering his life. But now, journalism didn’t seem to have a place for him.

“The 21st century is shaping up to be the most difficult period for journalists who work in war zones.” — Adnan Khan, freelance journalist, currently reporting in Afghanistan.

While the debate continues to rage about whether or not embedding is good or bad, ethical or unethical, better or worse than unilateral reporting, most of the arguments focus on whether or not journalists can report objectively on the military if they’re relying on it for protection and using its members as sources. Often glossed over is the fact that embedded and unilateral journalists serve important but very different roles—both crucial to providing the public with an accurate and complete picture of the war. The Canadian Forces have managed to create an embed program that appears less restrictive than other countries’ embed programs – letting media workers go on and off the base freely. But even so, other factors are making it less appealing for journalists to pursue stories unilaterally in Afghanistan – a country that is becoming increasingly dangerous for media workers. Some Canadian freelancers fear the very act of embedding, a trend that is on the rise, will only increase the danger.

The term embedded became a media buzzword in 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq.  To be an embedded journalist meant to stay and travel with the military under their protection, whereas unilateral journalists reported from conflict zones without military association. Phillip Knightley, former reporter for The Sunday Times (1965-1985), now a freelance journalist, says using the term embedding is a “smart new PR game” which tries to disguise censorship. He has been writing about wars and propaganda for more than 30 years, and backs up his argument saying, the first modern war correspondent, William Howard Russell, “was embedded with the British Forces in Crimea in that he was there under tolerance from the military.”

The level of media access to the military in conflict zones has varied from war to war; there is an almost constant push and pull between the two. But according to Knightley, “The basic fact is that the aims of the military and the media are irreconcilable.”

During the Persian Gulf War in 1991, for example, media coverage was “tightly controlled through censorship, pool reporting, and press conferences…[and] much of the press information on the war came from frequent military briefings,” according to Shahira Fahmy and Thomas Johnson in “How We Performed,” fromJournalism andMass Communication Quarterly. This was the United States’ reaction to its mistakes during the Vietnam War, when it had encouraged the media to publicize as much as possible to show the world how it was standing up to Communism. The war was virtually uncensored, Knightley believes. “This plan worked while the war was going well for America but collapsed when it began to go badly,” he says. “In the end the military decided that the media had failed to ‘get on side’ and its negative reporting cost the United States the war and it would never allow that to happen again.”

In 2003 when the U.S. invaded Iraq, the government created the embed system, which was designed to bring about greater military-news cooperation. It was as if the tight reins on coverage during the Persian Gulf War were being loosened once again, perhaps as the media pushed back. More than 600 journalists were placed with front line and rear echelon units from the start of the war through 2005. They were promised interviews would be on the record, and they would have access to service members and operational combat missions.

Although the Canadian Forces (CF) have been embedding journalists (without calling it that) since they went to East Timor, more journalists are embedding than ever before, says Capt. Doug MacNair, public affairs officer at the Canadian Expeditionary Force Command Headquarters (CEFCOM). Right now, southern Afghanistan is the only place where the CF takes embeds. Currently, there are approximately 15 reporters embedded with the CF from eight major Canadian media outlets, including CTV, CP, CanWest, Global, CBC, and The Globe and Mail. With space for 16 reporters, spots in the program are in high demand by Canadian and international media institutions alike. MacNair says the number of embeds has increased from 21 over a six-month period in 2003 to an average of 13 on any given day currently. Most are embedded for approximately six-week rotations.

Globe writer Graeme Smith suggests the Canadian media tents are often filled to capacity because “the Canadian embedding program has a good reputation among my colleagues in the foreign media. It offers a window on the conflict in southern Afghanistan with fewer restrictions than some other options.”  MacNair echoes this sentiment. “The U.S. philosophy is that once you embed with an operational unit you cannot leave until that embed stint is over. They allow no loitering at Kandahar Airfield,” he says. He says the CF program allows embedded reporters to leave the base to do unilateral reporting and come back at any time. “Graeme Smith meets with the Taliban and then comes back and sleeps with us at the base,” says MacNair. “How weird is that?” He doesn’t see a problem with it “as long as they don’t take [Smith] hostage or put a bomb in his bag.”

And Smith himself has no issues with straying outside the comfort of the base, and in fact makes it a priority. “Everybody makes their own decisions about risk,” he says. “I’ve been followed, bombed and shot at with AK-47s and RPGs. Earlier this year, masked gunmen kicked in the door of my office in Kandahar city and searched the place. Still, I’m spending the majority of my days away from the military base because that’s how I find the best information.”

Not every journalist, however, wants to take such risks to get stories, particularly when there have been such definite indicators of danger. In March 2002, Kathleen Kenna, a former journalist for the Toronto Star, was badly injured while reporting in Afghanistan when a grenade was thrown into her car. Thus, the benefits for embedding are clear.

Mitch Potter, a Star reporter who embedded in Afghanistan in September of last year, emphasizes the importance of the CF program. “I think it’s important we know how Canadian dollars are being spent, and how the Canadian effort is being managed on the ground.” But like Smith, Potter always does unilateral reporting in addition to writing about the military. He says journalists who only report from the base severely limit their ability to tell the larger story. He calls this practice “lobotomy journalism.”

Bill Roggio, a renowned blogger on conflict zones who served in the U.S. Army and the New Jersey National Guard and has since embedded with both the U.S. and Canadian forces, whole-heartedly supports embedding but acknowledges, “If you want to cover what the Afghan person thinks about the war then probably embedding with a unit may not be the best place to do it.”

Adnan Khan, a freelance journalist who’s been published in Maclean’s and The Walrus, agrees. He says, “Once journalists embed the range of stories available to them narrows, along with it the range of perspectives they can give on the war.”  Although Khan has been both an embed and a unilateral, he believes embedding is one of the reasons war reporting is becoming increasingly difficult. “Journalists are no longer viewed as independent. They are the ‘tools of the occupiers’ or worse, spies…There’s nothing worse than being labelled a spy in Iraq or Afghanistan and the embedding process has only served to strengthen the perception that journalists are spies.”

However, the fact that Afghans are suspicious of journalists is not a new thing, says Smith, because “spies and assassins have often pretended to be reporters.” Smith adds, “The covert wars of the last three decades have also taken a toll on the Afghan capacity for trust in general. I don’t see any recent increase in the mistrust of journalists.”

Still Khan is convinced mistrust has increased since he started working in Afghanistan five years ago. He says that in the summer of 2002 there were at least a few journalists driving around Afghanistan independently. Now that rarely happens. Another sign, he says, is that fewer journalists in Iraq plaster their vehicles with press signs when it used to be commonplace. War reporting is caught in a vicious cycle, says Khan. “The more journalists are perceived as enemy agents, the more dangerous it is for them, and therefore, the more likely they are to embed.”

Kathy Gannon, a Canadian who lives and works in Pakistan as bureau chief designate for The Associated Press, echoes Khan’s concerns. While reporting in Iraq, she saw firsthand the suspicion locals had. “When an embedded journalist came in with the military to question some people, the person I was talking to suddenly stopped talking when he saw the uniform person walk in. I had to end my interview because I realized I wouldn’t get anything more from him…[This] meant [the other journalist] would only hear what that person wanted the U.S. military to hear.” She says the people in Afghanistan won’t say what they are truly thinking when the military is around because they are afraid.

Potter of the Star agrees. “The likelihood that you’re going to get an honest answer from an Afghan is much less likely if you’re standing beside a soldier. I think that’s the larger concern.” Gannon believes the embed program blurs the role of journalists in the minds of local people in countries such as Iraq and Afghanistan. “If we are seen as part and parcel of the military then we become fair game. It has always been critical that journalists not be armed, not be affiliated, associated with anyone. That line has been blurred with embeds…” She says this has made it more difficult and dangerous for journalists.

So embedding would seem to be the obvious solution in order to stay safe while still getting stories. But if embedding makes local people in those countries suspicious of journalists and that mistrust sets journalists up as targets for violence, the media looses access to important stories.  And so the vicious cycle continues…

Let the Sun Shine In
“You’re right on time,” he says, opening the door to his second-floor apartment in Toronto’s west end. Although his scalp is bare and he’s wearing glasses, he’s nothing like the “bald-headed, squinty-eyed gnome” he described himself as over the phone. Instead, wearing a white dress shirt, navy sweater vest, khakis and brown dress shoes, he looks put together. After helping me remove my jacket, he leads me through the living room and into his office. “I really must show you how wonderful this is,” he says, pointing to the large window over his computer desk. “It’s so nice to be able to work by natural light.”

It’s in front of this window overlooking the visitor parking lot that Michael Kesterton combs through 120 websites, searching for five to six unusual news stories to use in Social Studies, his daily column for The Globe and Mail. Tagged as “a daily miscellany of information,” he has filled the space with stories about things such as a woman sexually aroused by fires, American veterinarians treating pet goldfish, and how not making your bed could eliminate dust mites. Although the stories are mainly inconsequential, readers are hooked. The Facts and Arguments page (which houses Social Studies) is arguably second only to the cover in terms of most-read – not surprising considering the public’s interest in oddball news. At least one unusual news story appears daily on both Yahoo and MSN’s most emailed or most viewed stories lists (and both The Canadian Press and Reuters have ‘weird news’ feeds). But why do people enjoy reading about topics like robots with feelings? “It’s a palate cleanser,” says Facts and Arguments editor Moira Dann. “After reading all kinds of stuff that is generally a downer it makes readers laugh.”

9 Years in the Trenches

After graduating, he applied to the Toronto Star. Kesterton says the paper turned him down because, while the Varsity was “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll,” the Star was “sober and industrious.” He didn’t bother applying to the Globe for the same reason. Determined to be a journalist, he responded to an ad looking for retired people to work at the Globe as proofreaders. He thought if he got the job he could make the move to editorial within a year. Things didn’t go as planned. He landed the job but spent seven years as a proofreader and two years in the computer room before becoming a copy editor for Report on Business. Although he worked briefly as a ROB feature writer and Technology section editor, his “dream job” didn’t come until the Globeunderwent a major transformation in 1990.

The “Magnificent Redesign”
When William Thorsell became editor-in-chief of the Globe in 1989, he wanted to change its content and organization. “I was thinking about what matters to the reader. When I’d spend time with friends at dinners and weekends, what they talked about wasn’t in the paper,” says Thorsell. His solution: the Facts and Arguments page. The page would include an essay written by a reader, a column covering different topics such as education, law and science (now replaced with Lives Lived, an obituary) and a column consisting of short, often unusual pieces called Social Studies. It would be on the back page of the A section and complement the cover’s “strong news agenda” with a “strong interest agenda,” says Thorsell.

But there was an obstacle; the back page is high advertorial real estate and was already contracted out to Sporting Life, an athletics store. After a presentation, during which Thorsell presented mock-up pages, Sporting Life executives agreed to give up the back page for ad space on A2 or A3. With that hurdle overcome, Thorsell had to determine who’d write the Social Studies column. Starting at one end of the newsroom, he worked his way to the other, examining every writer. When he got to Kesterton’s cluttered desk, he stopped. “I remembered Michael making a witty comment at a fellow ROB colleague’s goodbye party and thought, ‘This guy must have what it takes,’” says Thorsell. Neither man can recall the comment today.

Starting the job on Victoria Day, 1990, Kesterton completed only four days worth of columns in the following six weeks. “I was finding nothing. I was sure they were going to fire me.” But they didn’t and he found his groove. He’d go to Lichtman’s, a bookstore across the street from the Globe offices, and buy twelve different newspapers such as The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, and The Philadelphia Inquirer. He’d then bring them back to the Globe’s library and hunt through them, searching for material.

One day, shortly after the redesign launched on June 12, 1990, Thorsell saw numerous Globe front pages staring at him on the subway. “It was exciting because it meant people were reading the back page,” he says. And it wasn’t an isolated incident. Six weeks after the redesign, when Globe managers were on an executive retreat, their waitress asked to meet the guy who wrote Social Studies. Focus groups also proved that people — lots of them — were reading the Facts and Arguments page. “We’d suddenly hit gold,” says Kesterton.

Gold Rush
Although online rankings show unusual news is gaining popularity, Kesterton insists his column is not strictly weird stories. “It’s everyday news that has a bit of a twist,” he says. “It intrigues you.” Stories that make it into Kesterton’s column have to interest him and be significant. When asked what significance a story about a woman aroused by fires could have, he replies, “I thought, ‘How strange…’ It is interesting because it makes you think about what stimulates people.”

Scalping

Kesterton says he’s a scalper: not doing his own interviews and pulling from other sources. He tries to make this clear to readers by diligently citing all sources. But his dry sense of humour still shines through in his paraphrasing and subtitles. In a story titled “Birds do it, bees do it,” Kesterton highlights research suggesting that an evening of lovemaking could rid you of headaches. Sometimes the simplest stories, though, are the most humorous. He once printed just the caption of a photograph from a board of directors meeting report. “I noticed almost everyone’s name was Mr. Smith, Mr. Jones, Mr. This…and Wendy,” he recalls. “It said something about the way they look at women.”

Kesterton’s stories may make you think, but they are also easily forgotten. Even he admits that often he can’t remember stories he wrote the previous week. He does, however, have a memory for statistics. Did you know if there are 23 people in a room, the chances are 50/50 that two of them share a birthday?

Striptease
“I think anybody who reads my column will get the impression that the guy who writes it is good natured, and maybe quick-witted and on top of things,” says Kesterton, “while I’m kind of a morose worrywart and I don’t know anything until I’ve just seen it.” Though his friends and colleagues agree he’s shy, they disagree with him about his sense of humour and intelligence. “He has an incredible memory,” says Dann. “If you want to know who Toto’s trainer was on The Wizard of Oz, ask Michael.” All of his friends cite his deadpan sense of humour as a Kesterton characteristic, though no one can recall a specific anecdote.

Perhaps his friends were worried about telling me too much since Kesterton is leery about revealing himself outside his column. “Don’t show them the real you — people might yawn,” he says. “It’s like striptease. I mean, anyone can do it in theory. But unless you enjoy being looked at and can take the yawns, well, don’t.” The naked truth is that to escape work Kesterton plays squash at the gym. His squash buddy, Katherine Dalziel, says most of the women at the gym know his name. Kesterton’s also just finished writing the last chapter of a novel. It’s set in 1925 Africa, though he hasn’t been within “a million miles of Africa.”

“Hooray for Me!”
His column isn’t life changing and the details of its stories aren’t memorable. But he is content spending his days searching websites for “news with a twist” and writing squibs that offer readers a little humour in their often serious and stressful lives. He’s content working under his window.

Thought du jour
“There are hundreds of reporters who can do a better job at [news stories] than I ever could… The light-hearted hack work that I am doing isn’t hugely important and will never win journalism awards, but I’m better at it than anyone I know and readers often love the columns and tell me so. There are worse ways to earn a living.” – Michael Kesterton

Sorry, but there’s no crying in journalism. Sorry, but there’s no part-time position available, it’s 24/7 or nothing. Sorry, but this is a tough job, and you’re just too nice. Sorry, but…

The first thing I have to say is that, while I am a female and a journalist, this is not one of those tired, old-news feminist stories. This is a not a poor-us rant about sexism, or short skirts, or the fact a woman makes 29 cents less on the dollar than a man. That said, this is, in fact, a story about me, about women and our struggles to rise above statistics, stereotypes and the status quo. If you just rolled your eyes, you’re already a part of this story too.

This story started as a research project for class. My group (four women and one man) combed through the mastheads of 35 Canadian newspapers, including the papers with the largest circulations in each province except Quebec. We looked to the top — the coveted Editor-in-Chief job. We started counting the female names, and, well, it didn’t take long: Patricia Graham (The Vancouver Sun), Lynn Haddrall (The Record), Janice Dockham (The Leader-Post) and Lucinda Chodan (the Victoria Times-Colonist). We counted again. Only four? Disgraceful, we thought. Disappointing, discouraging. I had, after all, earned a considerable debt in my quest to be Lois Lane. Surely there were more of us, but where?

We did the research project this year, in the oh-so-modern new millennium, yet men outnumber women in journalism’s highest-ranking editorial job eight to one: Patricia, Lynn, Janice, Lucinda.

The jobs just below — senior management — were a more palatable mix at three to one, implying the existence of the dreaded “glass ceiling.” We looked to department heads: men are eight times more likely than women to be business/technology or sports editors. They outnumber women in news four to one, and there are twice as many male city editors. On the other hand, fashion editors were predominately female (8:1), as well as food/lifestyle (4:1).

For the last decade, journalism schools have been pumping out mostly female graduates — in my class alone women outnumber men five to one. So why, then, are journalism’s top jobs dominated so dramatically by men?

Gertrude Robinson, in her book Gender, Journalism and Equity, says that women are at a disadvantage because journalism promotes “maleness” and “information” as the norm. “[I]t thus enshrines very specific workplace practices, such as a 10- or 12-hour working day, as ‘normal,’ and evaluates ‘entertainment’ as somehow ‘inferior.’”

She goes on to talk about “personality stereotyping,” which sticks women into “a small number of femaletypes, such as ‘mom,’ ‘kid sister,’ ‘girl next door,’ or ‘bitch.’” These are designed to make women less threatening, she says, and serves to exclude them from participating as “full members” of any given group. Think about a strong female professional you know — if you can put her in a category like that you’ve just demoted her to one dimension.

These stats and assessments don’t mean a lot to me. Yeah, sure, they contradict Society, which says women and men are equal, but so what? Women already know that story. My research group could have stopped there, sticking a big ol’ Status Quo in our paper’sconclusion. But I’m not much for numbers or broad appraisals. I needed to talk to some real women.

• • •

Ann Rauhala, a Ryerson journalism professor, has been researching decision-making in Canadian newsrooms for years. In the course of her research she has been struck by the lack of female decision-makers. She can’t speak to me about her research results until they’ve been published, but when I ask her about her personal experience with the subject she gives me the same tired list of problems: a lack of affordable daycare, combined with the fact that child-rearing responsibilities still fall mostly on the mom, and as always, problems with stereotypes. People might assume that, because you’re a woman, you will write, lead or behave a certain way. “An editor took me aside when I had a dispute with a reporter and said I was too nice,” Rauhala explains, rolling her eyes. “Do you know anyone who thinks I’m nice?” She didn’t seem to expect an answer.

Margo Goodhand is the deputy editor at the Winnipeg Free Press. I like her immediately because she says “I don’t want to sound like an old feminist…” before making what is essentially a feminist point about the challenges of being a mother in a demanding, all-encompassing job like journalism. When I gave her my stats-spiel she says, “Wow, that’s not bad. I’m surprised there’s that many.” She goes on. “I’ve known too many talented women who reach a certain level in management and then move on, not up. They look for a more ‘sexy’ balanced job elsewhere, in PR or communications, where they’re working almost as hard, but not 24/7.” In journalism, it’s nearly impossible to get a part-time job as editor — Goodhand works seven days a week these days. When she decided to have children, after four years in journalism, she quit her job as business editor. She worked as a copy editor for eight years (“eight years in purgatory on the night desk”), which gave her more time to raise her three children. “I was home most of the day and worked evenings, when my husband would be home.” Pre-babies, she’d done nearly every job in the newsroom. I ask her if she wants to be EIC — “I do and I don’t…I don’t know if I can take that final step and survive it.”

Then there’s Vancouver’s Graham, arguably Canada’s most powerful female journalist as EIC of our seventh-largest paper. “Women are still learning to play in what was until very recently almost exclusively a male domain,” she says. “It’s not going to transform overnight.” The absence of women in senior positions can have a ripple effect. “The fewer there are, the fewer the role models and mentors to inspire and include other women.”

Graham, originally a lawyer, has been a journalist since the ‘80s. Like Goodhand, Graham sees a lot of women self-select out of the management game for their family, lifestyle or because they simply prefer “on-the-ground” journalism. Graham took three years off early in her career (save one summer) to raise her two small children — she had suddenly become a single mom — and spent another year as a part-time copy editor before pushing herself up the ranks. Unlike a lot of women I talked to, Graham’s career took the logical leaps forward — she has been an editorial writer, editorial page editor, reporter, senior editor in charge of news, managing editor, and, in 2003, EIC. “Societal expectations are still different” between the genders, she explains. “I believe this can make it easier and more acceptable for women than for men to say ‘no thanks, not interested in that.’” She’s modest about her trip to the top in the same way my mom is modest about raising three kids on her own. “I’ve learned that it helps to believe that you’re the best person for the job and be willing to say so.”

Janet Hurley is the Arts and Entertainment editor at the Toronto Star. A Ryerson journalism grad in 1992, her first “real” job was at the Haliburton County Echo, where she was mentored by its female EIC. In 2000, when she was Saturday Arts editor at the Star, her water broke at work — she came dangerously close to having the Star‘s first newsroom baby. When she came back from maternity leave she found that the Star had given her position away and she was shuffled into the Sunday section. Luckily, though, six months later Sunday’s paper got a complete overhaul. Hurley was responsible for the birth of the edgy, popular Buzz section. Today she is the mother of two young girls and pulls tag-team baby duties with her husband, also a journalist — she looks after the kids in the mornings and he takes over when he gets off work in the early afternoon, picking the girls up from daycare. “I’d love to spend more time with my kids, but I also love my job…and it’s important for me to be a role model for my girls.” When I ask if she’s ever considered her gender an obstacle, she says no. When I push a little further, she remembers, before she was at the Star, “Someone once told me I didn’t yell enough to do this job.”

Three women, all mothers, all love their jobs and none are bowled over by some bullshit statistics and their vague “nice” complexes. I think I finally Get It. I’m glad I’m a woman, but the label I fight for is Journalist. And I think, as Goodhand thinks, that I’ll see it in my own time: It’s a simple matter of critical mass.

I’m graduating in less than a month with a class full of eager, competent women. But maybe I’ll stop being nice altogether, just in case.

The world’s journalists have a problem, and it’s murder.

The international death toll of journalists is reported to be increasing at a staggering rate, according to an extensive report released by the International News Safety Institute (INSI) earlier this month. The INSI, a non-profit coalition of media organizations, press freedom groups, unions and humanitarian campaigners based in Brussels, reported that 168 members of the news media were murdered in 2006 — up from 146 in 2005 and 105 in 2001. The INSI website reports that there have already been 36 murdered this year.

If you’re picturing soldiers and crossfire as you read this, think again. One of the most startling facts in the report is that of the 1,000 journalists murdered in the last 10 years, 731 were killed, not in settings of armed conflict, but in countries at peace. The most dangerous peacetime countries in which to practice the craft are Russia, Colombia, the Philippines and Iran. INSI stats show Russia to be the deadliest of these, with 91 news media members killed in the last 10 years (1996 up to mid-2006) compared to 138 in Iraq, the only country with more murders.

The INSI is not the only organization recognizing this disturbing trend. The Committee to Protect Journalistsand Reporters without Borders both reported that 2006 was a record-breaking year for number of journalists murdered. The actual numbers listed by each organization tend to vary though, depending on whether or not they include journalists who have been reported to have just disappeared, committed suicide or died under mysterious or suspicious circumstances.

In the Reporters without Borders 2006 annual report, Benoit Hervieu, head of the organization’s Americas desk, called Colombia “one of the region’s most dangerous for journalists,” with threats and pressure coming from, among other sources, guerilla groups. “News is a key commodity in Colombia’s civil war, that all sides try to control by monitoring, threatening or even punishing journalists,” wrote Hervieu. The report also targeted the Philippines stating, “President Gloria Arroyo… tried to stop the press from doing its job of safe-guarding democracy.”

Rodney Pinder, director of INSI, says two main factors have caused an increase in the number of murders in peacetime countries. First, journalists are not as likely to be seen as politically neutral or objective. “Years ago, journalists were more separate and were respected as such. Now they are seen as targets,” says Pinder. The second more serious factor is impunity. “Only one in 10 of the murderers of journalists are convicted,” he says. “They see murder as a cheap and easy form of censorship. If they got away with one, what’s stopping them from killing another?” says Pinder. The rising culture of impunity makes it difficult to know who is executing and ordering the killings. It has become such a major issue that UNESCO has chosen impunity as the theme of the upcoming World Press Freedom Day on May 3.

• • •

Edward Lucas, a British journalist, has covered Eastern Europe since 1986, and was the Moscow bureau chief for The Economist for four years. Currently he is the magazine’s central and east European correspondent. He says reporting in Russia is more dangerous now than at any other time during his coverage of the region. “If you offend the wrong people, you may get killed.” And journalism there is riddled with payoffs, he says. “For instance, as a reporter you will write something positive, receive a bribe from it and give some of the money to your editor. This is one of the main businesses in Russian journalism.” But it was not always this bad. Lucas says in the early 1990s until about 1998 Russian secret police (called the KGB until 1991 and following that the FSB), had much less influence and power, which made it easier to report in the region. “In those years, it was easier for journalists to get the mobile numbers of powerful people,” he says.

Being a Western journalist in Russia is less risky than being a local reporter for a small paper, says Lucas. Although no one is completely immune from threats or intimidation, “few Western journalists are ever killed,” he says. “Western journalists are more likely to run into problems with libel suits, or having their sources frozen — no one will talk to you anymore — or not being allowed to enter the country, which is a big problem if you are the Russian correspondent and you can’t get into Russia.” Still, in 2004, Paul Klebnikov, the editor-in-chief of the Russian edition of Forbes magazine was shot as he left his office building in Moscow. “Khlebnikov’s murder showed that even a Western journalist could be murdered, thus raising the risk level for everyone else.” Lucas sees the murders of journalists in Russia as a symptom of complex social and political problems, including economic class issues. “The rich and powerful have become more daring,” he says. “If you’re rich, you’re rich enough to have a journalist killed.” But, he says, drawing international attention to the problem can help.

One of the most prominent recent examples of a Russian journalist being killed was the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the reporter known for her critical reporting on Russia’s policy in Chechnya. She was gunned down in her apartment building in Moscow. The INSI report states that most of the journalists murdered in peacetime countries, listing specifically Mexico, the Philippines and Russia, have “typically been working on stories about corruption, drug trafficking and other criminal affairs.”

The Politkovskaya case got a lot of attention from NGOs and Western media, including a feature story in this year’s January 29 issue of The New Yorker. Canadian Journalists for Free Expression (CJFE) and 10 other media watch-dog groups wrote to President Vladimir Putin asking him for “an independent and thorough investigation.” Julie Payne, the manager of CJFE, says that they have not yet received a reply from the Russians. “The mail must be terribly slow,” she laughs.

Payne says one of the reactions by major news organizations to protect their journalists, especially in war zones, is the recent trend of embedding. “They are doing this as a move to keep journalists safer,” she says, “but most [of the journalists murdered] are local journalists, who are without protection.”

Samantha Topping, a representative of Reuters — one of the world’s foremost media organizations, which has lost five journalists in the current Iraq war — says, “Obviously, the problem is on our radar.” But she declined to describe the agency’s security measures to protect its journalists.

The INSI report calls for international groups, national governments, military groups, news organizations and other journalists to respond to the problem by condemning the attacks and informing journalists more clearly about the dangers in specific countries. It also recommends training journalists how to better protect themselves. One recent step forward: a United Nations Security Council resolution condemns attacks on journalists. It may turn out to be “all shout and little action,” says Pinder, “but it’s a small step in ratcheting up the pressure.”

Still, he says, “There is not much improvement anywhere, and it will take a long time before things get better.”

By Ann Ruppenstein. Camera by Jennifer Fong

When Will Braun attends Hope Mennonite Church in Winnipeg, he sits right at the back, where he feels most comfortable. Braun, a left-leaning activist, organic farmer, and editor of geez magazine — a quarterly launched in December 2005 — was raised in the southern Manitoba Bible Belt and felt frustrated with the insularity of the Church. “But at the same time there’s something there that I can’t let go of,” he says. He doesn’t make it to church every Sunday, but as he said on CBC Radio’s Tapestry, he tries “to go for the discipline, just to be present with other people and hang out.”

All three people at the core of geez — Braun, publisher and co-editor Aiden Enns, and art director Darryl Brown — were raised as observant Christians. Although they want the magazine “to carry an irreverent smirk,” geez’s editorial content belies their serious commitment to community, Jesus and social justice activism. According to Braun, its target audience is “people on the fringes of faith” — those who have either left the church entirely or are dissatisfied with the mainstream expression of Christianity and other religions.

Enns — a former reporter at Canadian Mennonite and former managing editor at Adbusters — decided to start the magazine because he saw “a whole community of social justice-oriented people whose words were not put down on paper, were not uttered. Journalists should be able to ask those questions, to articulate those unspoken words.” Despite geez’s in-your-face name, which was inspired by the New York-based Heeb: The New Jew Review, Enns isn’t just interested in making Christianity hip or simply attracting the many Christians who don’t attend church on a regular basis. Rather, he wants the magazine to build a community for itself within the already specialized world of Christian publications. With subscriptions steadily increasing — up from 500 to 2,000 over its first year — and newsstand sales of around 1,250 copies per issue, geez is accomplishing its goals of building community and offering a critical counterpoint to the religious right.

While the magazine is a fresh new take on independent Christian publications like Sojourners and the now-defunct Catholic New Times (CNT), its content places it on the fringe of mainstream journalism. Many of its stories are first-person essays written by non-journalists. Along with poetry, conceptual art and how-to pieces about greener living, the pages of geez seem more like those in Adbusters than a conventional magazine — especially considering the fact that geez doesn’t accept advertising (Braun says they “want to experiment with divorcing money and message”). It runs on a shoestring budget; last year, the core team of Enns, Braun and Brown awarded themselves honoraria of less than $5,000 total. In the cash-strapped climate of magazine publishing today, for geez to survive in its current incarnation will take a miracle.

• • •

On page 1 of the “Let’s get Evangelical” issue (Winter 2006) we meet the perfect family. Mom, Dad, teenage son and daughter — all pristinely turned out, all Barbie-like dolls — pose for a photograph, their smiles plastic. The son wears a sweater emblazoned with the Jesus fish symbol while the daughter proudly sports a peace symbol on her shirt. Cut to page 64, where the family is having a crisis: daughter sulks while Mom rips a political poster from her bedroom wall. The poster, depicting a scene of police brutality, proclaims “Terror Begins at Home” and clearly doesn’t fit with Mom’s beliefs. Dad looks stricken. Jennifer Williams, a Yukon-based freelance artist, created the carefully-crafted dioramas. She had a great experience working for geez, partly because the editors gave her the freedom to take an idea and run with it. “They gave me a lot of creative latitude,” she says. “It was a dream assignment.”

For the folks at geez, this kind of openness to experimentation and other perspectives is a core value in both the magazine’s content and their lives. In the same issue, a section called “Experiments” includes reader-submitted reflections on how to live more simply. This section is connected to the “De-motorize Your Soul” campaign launched by geez on the back cover of issue three. Braun, an avid cyclist who bikes on the Trans-Canada Highway, called for readers to give up motorized travel for one day a week and avoid airplanes for a year. Suggestions like, “Bike as though you were riding the road to heaven — human energy is the alternative energy,” certainly veer from the path of typical service journalism.

But geez also runs thought-provoking essays. The winter 2006 issue contains a reprinted Harper’s Magazinearticle by Bill McKibben, an environmentalist and author who argues that the U.S. is, among strongly self-professed Christian nations, the one that acts the least Christian. Other pieces include an analysis of the global evangelical movement and a series of short profiles of Christians and former Christians, probing their beliefs by asking what the religion means to them. They’re then rated, according to religious fervor, on an “Evangometer.”

• • •

CNT was just a few months shy of its 30th birthday when it closed its doors in November 2006 due to lack of funds. The bi-weekly, independent newspaper was started by a group of left-leaning Catholics who were disaffected with the narrow-minded coverage in the Catholic Register — the official organ of the church — and wanted an alternative voice that was committed to their social justice beliefs. From 2001 until its death, the editor of CNT was Ted Schmidt. “[The failure of the newspaper] didn’t make me sour,” he says. “It just made me think, �Wow, there are so many wonderful people doing the right things in society, and they’re not being fed by the institution as well as they should be.’ That’s my pain, that’s my sadness.”

The demise of the CNT was partly due to the fact that the younger generation of Catholics wasn’t subscribing. Rates fell steadily from around 12,500 in the early 1980s to about 4,000 in November 2006 (in an attempt to address this cultural trend, the CNT collective plans to re-launch the paper in an online format). Schmidt has doubts about whether print is a wise move for a niche magazine like geez that is aimed at younger readers. He thinks Braun, who once worked for him as a freelance writer, has the right idea, but needs to rethink his approach. “You are living in a capitalist society,” says Schmidt. “And you can’t survive without ads.”

John Longhurst, director of communications and marketing for the Canadian Mennonite University in Winnipeg, has written extensively about the role of the Church press. He agrees that the main challenge forgeez is financial, and tells the story of Canadian Mennonite, Enn’s former home. Originally called Mennonite Reporter, the publication started as an independent newspaper, but ultimately had to accept partial funding from Mennonite Church Canada to survive. “It has to adhere to the denominational line a little more,” explains Longhurst. “There is no watchdog that says, �Here’s what you can and can’t print,’ and nobody vets their articles, but they know that if they annoy too many people their funding will get cut off.”

Braun and Enns are well aware of how impractical it is to run an independent magazine without advertising. They struggle to find the resources to go forward and the staff to help them. Currently they aren’t eligible for many government grants because they don’t meet stipulations for Canadian content, though they recently hired a part-time circulation and office manager to help them get better organized. Braun underscores that their position on advertising is not based on moral judgement, but he does prefer the uncluttered look of an ad-free geez. He and Enns also want to spend their time working on editorial content rather than seeking out advertisers. On the phone from Winnipeg, he chuckles ironically, “We’ll see how that goes.”

Enns is thrilled with the number of Canadians that has signed on as subscribers and wants to expand his audience to the U.S. to counter the strong Christian right. He also wants to run more investigative pieces that expose the hypocrisy within the Christian business community.

But the main question surrounding geez remains: who’s going to pay for it? The magazine has many admirers who want to see it thrive despite a seemingly unsustainable formula, but will the support be enough? “We’ll have to see how long they can hold out,” says Longhurst, and then adds hopefully, “Aiden and Will are real simple-living guys. If anyone can do it, they can.”