I sat in a heart surgeon’s office, waiting to ask what it’s like to touch a beating heart. It’s not every day that you get to put such questions to people, even as a journalist. But this summer at the Calgary Herald, my editor assigned me to a project called What’s it Like? The idea was to ask local people about unique experiences. I also spoke to a former astronaut, a meteorite tracker, a paramedic and a paleontologist. I mostly presented the stories from the perspective of the subjects, as though they were talking directly to the reader. This approach erased me, the journalist, as the messenger.

The goal of our series, according to Tony Seskus, the Herald’s senior editor of news and my supervisor, was to find stories that reporters rarely tell. They’re about “people who are everyday, maybe unsung people, who do some pretty extraordinary, amazing things,” he says. We are surrounded by neighbours with stories to share, yet we never ask to hear them. These vignettes are meant to start that conversation. They’re “friendly,” as though you’re telling someone over a drink about something notable you did that day, except it’s an interesting person engaging with the reader at home.

Such series help readers get to know their neighbours at a time when, for many of us, connections over social media are more common than face-to-face encounters. It has become normal to know someone you’ve never met, who may live anywhere in the world and have a life that’s completely different from yours. You may be keeping up with Kim Kardashian West’s every move, but here’s someone who lives around the corner and has an interesting life. Although vignette journalism doesn’t tell the full story, it helps us understand the communities we live in. We can get our long features and our traditional human interest stories anywhere, but now some news outlets are engaging readers and audiences by putting more emphasis on this style of storytelling in the age of social media.

When I started working on the Herald series, it reminded me of Vice stories with headlines that start, “We talked to the guy who…” and Brandon Stanton’s wildly popular Humans of New York, a series of photographs accompanied by short captions, usually a quotation. Stanton has even gone global on sponsored tours, most recently to photograph refugees in Eastern Europe. Another example is The Globe and Mail’s What It’s Like health series, which health editor Hayley Mick says was partly inspired by Humans of New York. Reporter Wency Leung writes the majority of these stories from the perspective of the subject—with some even written by the subjects themselves—to build a sense of connection between the subject and the reader, which fosters empathy. This is especially true for health stories, where part of the aim is to help the audience understand what it’s like to have a certain medical condition.

Vignette stories connect well with online audiences because of their conversational tone, says Alfred Hermida, author of Tell Everyone: Why We Share and Why It Matters and director of the graduate school of journalism at the University of British Columbia. Social media is about making connections between people, so the impartial voice of a news article doesn’t play well. “You don’t want the voice of God through social media,” he says. “You want a person talking to you.” Longer human interest stories, meanwhile, usually have a mix of people telling their stories and disinterested voices from experts or information from documents.

When I asked Hermida if vignettes are the modern evolution of human interest stories, he pointed out that they aren’t necessarily anything new. Broadcast journalists have long used one person as an example of a larger story, as have print journalists with their anecdotal leads. But what’s different these days is the time and emphasis given to these vignettes, says Hermida. “It’s seen as more a central part of what the organization should be doing: reflecting the community back to itself.”

There are still challenges with this type of writing, including the problem of trying to fully reflect a community with only a few people’s stories. When we were putting our series together, it was hard to go beyond the usual suspects and find “unsung” people who had done interesting things. This is also the most challenging part for Leung, who says, “It’s not like there’s a phone book of people that you can look up people who have an allergy to cold.”

I also found that we ended up speaking to a lot of men for our series. I’m sure there were many reasons for that, including the common view that men are more comfortable sharing their achievements. But it still meant that we didn’t have the most balanced reflection of the community that we could have. CBC Vancouver did a Faces of BC project, with the goal of including a resident from every country in the world, but it depended on people submitting photos and captions. The station didn’t quite get every country, although it did reach an impressive 147 out of 194.

The Faces of BC project highlights one of the benefits of vignette journalism—it can increase an audience while encouraging participation. Seskus hopes that the Herald series, which started rolling out in early October, will help the paper engage with the community in new ways. He wants readers to submit other interesting experiences.

These stories move people to engage because they’re powerful. Mick says that power can come from how direct and personal they are: “Sometimes in 300 words, you can move people more than you can with a whole bunch of experts and a whole bunch of stats.”

Joanne Ramondt thought she had found a good example of male bias in the pages of the Calgary Herald. In a photo of a husband and wife business team, the husband was standing in the foreground, clearly the focus of attention, while the wife sat off in the background with the children.
Ramondt is a member of the gender monitoring committee at the Herald, which has been surveying the paper for such biases since last May. Although the photo indicated to Ramondt and other committee members that something was wrong, they agreed one photo wasn’t enough proof. But it took just a few more weeks to confirm their instincts: in almost every photograph of a family, the husband was the dominant image and the wife was in the background with the children. When the photo department was presented with the series of pictures, it realized its unconscious bias. Coverage immediately improved.
This was just one example of what the committee saw. “Whole days went by and we found our section fronts presented men only, even with the entertainment and life sections,” said Ramondt. “When you have day after day of this, you start to understand why women aren’t reading the paper.”

The Herald isn’t alone among Canadian papers, either in its lack of female presence or in its skew to a higher male readership. About 63 per cent of Canadian women say they read a newspaper yesterday, compared to 75 per cent of men, a gap which translates into hundreds of thousands of papers not read each day. And newspaper articles refer to women as subjects or sources only 19 per cent of the time, according to a Media Watch study of 15 Canadian papers.
Newspapers are no longer the main source of news for most Canadians, who turn to television instead. Merge that with the fact that women-the main audience advertisers want to reach-have stopped reading newspapers in alarming numbers in the past two decades. This explains why, over the past few years, newspapers have seriously committed themselves to regaining this lost constituency.
The women they’re seeking are too busy with careers and families to read anything not interesting or relevant. Weekday readership dips to its lowest levels, at 57 per cent, among women in their late 20s and early 30s, 75 per cent of whom are in the work force.
The most direct approach to the problem has also turned out to be the most controversial: the creation of a special section for women. The concept aims to reflect the lives of women in the 1990s, but evokes memories of the fluffy women’s sections of the past. The approach has been called “condescending” by some and “liberating” by others. The Montreal Gazette became the first, and so far, only Canadian newspaper to try it when their weekly five-page section, called WomanNews, debuted in March, 1992.
At worst, it’s seen solely as a gimmick to attract advertisers. The first of these new women’s sections was the Chicago Tribune’s, which appeared in 1991. In its first year, the Tribune’s Womanews drew a 21 per cent increase in ad lineage over the previous section, launching a women’s-section trend in the United States. But the biggest concern is that these sections will become a ghetto for stories about women, excusing editors from improving women’s coverage elsewhere.
“My first choice is to have those stories all through the paper,” said Patricia Graham, a senior editor at The Vancouver Sun. That is, in fact, what the Sun and other newspapers, such as the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, The Edmonton Journal and the Calgary Herald are attempting. But it’s tricky. Not only must papers implement changes quickly, they must market them aggressively, or they won’t convince women to start reading newspapers again.
That’s why the new women’s sections, though not necessarily the best answer to the problem, shouldn’t be readily dismissed. Unlike previous women’s sections, they have a more dynamic feel, with articles such as how feminism excludes minority women, advice on being a pregnant working professional and opinion columns by freelancers from across the continent.
But newspapers still need to make a strong and vigilant commitment to improve coverage overall, in order to dispel the perception among many women that newspapers are for men. Women obviously aren’t going to start reading the paper regularly just because of a few pages once a week. A special section, however, may be a starting point to draw them in. And The Gazette’s WomanNews, although it hasn’t attracted much advertising, does seem to please its target readers, including busy working women.

The new women’s section works because of the simple premise on which it is based: find out why women are reading papers less, understand who they are and give them what they want. Then they will read. This idea came out of the experience of Colleen Dishon, a senior editor at the Chicago Tribune.
As a manager, she heard stories from women who worked for her complaining how difficult their lives were. Dishon thought that the newspaper was not meeting the needs of these women and others like them. “There was nothing in the paper that showed them they weren’t alone in their struggle, that others were in the same boat,” she said, “How could the paper serve these women? With the affirmation that this was a large group.”
And so, in 1985, Dishon created Tempo Woman, a section aimed at working women. Over the next six years, following extensive research, it changed three times and broadened its target audience. Its final version, called Womanews, appeared in April, 1991. “The male reporters thought it was a terrible idea,” said Dishon, “but they would think that any special thing for women would be.”
Womanews uses all the paper’s bureaus and has a large freelance budget to produce a mixture of in-depth news stories, features, profiles, a calendar and classifieds. Distributed in the 7ribune’s Sunday paper, it goes to more than two million readers.
Almost three-quarters of the 7ribune’s female readers say they read it regularly, and it has the strongest appeal to working women, particularly under age 35. In less than two years, Womanews has been syndicated to more than 60 newspapers. It was a model for The Gazette’s WomanNews as well as similar ventures in Arizona, Ohio, Oklahoma and Kentucky, to name a few, with names like Every Woman, Accent on Today’s Woman and You. Its critics no longer complain.

“Women-food” reads the big banner headline of The Gazette’s women’s section from 1960. A glance at any such page of the time shows what editors thought women were interested in: weddings, social gossip, cooking, fashion and not much else.
It wasn’t always so. In 1889, Kit Coleman started writing a column for The Toronto Daily Mail called “Fashion Notes and Fancies for the Fair Sex.” She soon renamed her column “Woman’s Kingdom”-perhaps sarcastically-and started filling a page with political commentary, literary criticism and short stories along with the lighter items. Coleman had thousands of fans, male and female, including Wilfrid Laurier.
The women’s pages survived into the 1960s, but they had their critics. In 1963,Christina Newman wrote in Macleans condemning their content. “In the collection of cliches and
claptrap, of syndicated syrup and trumped up trash they call the women’s pages, the editors and publishers of newspapers are apparently trying to reach some long since vanished female who measures out her days dispensing kindliness in tea gowns and sandwiches on silver salvers, preoccupied mainly with the length of this spring’s skirts or the content of this Sunday’s supper menu,” she wrote. The sour attitude toward the new women’s sections may well be rooted in memories of these old sections.

Lucinda Chodan of the Gazette was skeptical when the male managing editor mentioned the idea of a woman’s section to her in the summer of 1991. Chodan, assistant managing editor, immediately thought “ghettoization.” That August she visited the women’s section editor at the Tribune to study the idea. “I came back converted,” said Chodan. The success of the Tribune’s section as well as Dishon’s extensive research convinced her that a new women’s section might work in Montreal.
The research considered, for instance, the startling fact that American papers lost about a quarter of their female readers in the 1980s. In Canada, the losses have been similar, but not so dramatic. In 1992, there was a 12 per cent gap between the number of men and women who read newspapers, compared to 1968 when 82 per cent of women and 81 per cent of men said they read a newspaper on an average day.
Yet a U.S. study found that women between the ages of35 and 44 find time to read three hours a week, compared to 2.7 hours by men the same age.
“These women are reading magazines,” said Donna Nebenzahl, editor of WomanNews at The Gazette. “The reality is that there isn’t anything in the paper they want to look at.”
The committee on women’s coverage at the Saskatoon StarPhoenix found that women “will make time to read gripping, intelligent writing, even longer pieces as well as humorous articles and practical, well-organized features that help them cope with their complex lives and demanding roles.”
When they do pick up a newspaper, women are more prolific readers than men. They have a wider range of interests and will look at or read more sections and pages. This makes them appealing to advertisers. Women control 85 per cent of consumer spending, and advertisers believe they are responsible for most household decisions (including the cancellation of newspaper subscriptions).
The research from the Tribune, The StarPhoenix and The Gazette also showed that women want information relevant to them in one place, so they don’t have to search for articles of interest.
Unlike the Lifestyle or Living sections which followed the women’s sections in the 1970s, WomanNews at The Gazette is targeted exclusively at women and based on a “news you can use” philosophy. “There’s nothing in the section about how to cook, how to parent or how to clean,” said Nebenzahl. And unlike most women’s magazines, it examines harder news stories. The section has published an infographic on dealing with stress, a story on the low percentage of women working in the sciences, a fashion piece on briefcases, and every week it carries news briefs and a calendar of local events.

Still, some women are offended by the idea. Where is the guarantee that male editors will still worry about coverage of women’s issues, or about male bias in the rest of the paper? Will this hinder more than help women in the long run?
“It’s insulting to give women 10 pages and say that’s enough,” said Linda Hawke, who conducted Media Watch’s survey last year. “Is that what we’re aiming for? I don’t think that 10 pages in a newspaper is what we’re aiming for.
“We’d like to see things more evenly distributed throughout the paper, and dealt with in a comprehensive way. There has to be more of an effort to get women’s opinions and voices in the rest of the paper.”
Nebenzahl says the section isn’t intended to replace the news, but to put a new spin and local angle on items of particular interest to women, with more context and depth than the typical news story. “We don’t cover issues that are deemed news for the A or B sections,” she said. ‘~nd there’s a concerted effort to not make it a repository for stories about women.” Chodan says having the section has sensitized others in the newsroom to women’s concerns.
Most importantly, WomanNews is satisfying its readers. “The best experience was the reaction I got from people I interviewed,” said Frances Bula of her stint as Woman News reporter. “There were professionals, businesswomen, immigrants, educators, a diverse range of women. They were excited about [WomanNews] and told me they read it every week.”
According to The Gazette’s research, 59 per cent of women who read WomanNews say it increases the value of the paper for them, and three-quarters say it’s useful in their lives. What they like most are health and lifestyle articles and news stories affecting women. Advertisers have reacted with much less enthusiasm. In some weeks, the section has had just one ad. This may be because they’ve committed themselves to other well-established sections in the newspaper where they’ve always bought ads. For now, though, the section will remain as long as it continues to satisfy its target readers.

At other newspapers, the process of balancing coverage has been neither smooth nor quick. Editors at The Vancouver Sun had a mandate to reserve page three of the first section for stories of interest to women. The plan lasted less than a year because of other changes to the newspaper, but there were problems with the approach. Patricia Graham, a senior editor at the paper, said some of the articles were too featurish, which broke the pace of the news section. And sometimes it had too many stories about serious issues, such as breast cancer and rape, on the same day. The approach now is to ask section editors daily whether they have stories of interest to women or multicultural communities.
“We worry sometimes whether we can move fast enough before we lose more readers,” said Graham. “We still haven’t come to grips with the content question. It’s not just what’s covered, but the angle. For instance, women are more concerned about sexual assault, while men are more interested in stories about false accusations. It affects coverage. “
At the Saskatoon StarPhoenix, the idea of a woman’s page was first mentioned at an editorial meeting in the fall of 1991. It was only considered seriously after a task force created to deal with the issue of women’s coverage recommended it as part of its report.
The idea wasn’t popular in the newsroom at first. The task force circulated a questionnaire among newsroom staff to ask what they thought the problem was with coverage. Some of the responses they got were “women are using the paper for their own agenda” and “there’s nothing wrong.”
With the support of senior editors, two pages called Access became part of the Saturday paper’s Prism section last September. Women’s issues editor Deanna Herman worked with the Prism editor to find space for Access. They moved some columns into the Sunday paper, and cut back on space for books, art and the cover story. To combat potential ghettoization, Herman attends news meetings and assigns stories to reporters in other sections.

Despite the initial problems, the pages are now accepted in the newsroom and women readers seem to like them. In contrast, a few months previously, The StarPhoenix’s auto section increased in size without the backlash or commotion surrounding the women’s page.
This sort of reaction happens because the problem is so deeply entrenched. A study by Gannett newspapers in the United States found that papers allocate beat reporters in favour of male interests. For instance, 19 per cent of reporters cover sports while only 8 per cent are assigned to family or lifestyle issues.
Yet 74 per cent of women say they read family or lifestyle sections frequently compared to 67 per cent of men who say they read sports just as often.
“If there were more women in higher positions, part of the problem would start to take care of itself,” said Hawke of Media Watch, “and they have to be in positions where they can make decisions about how information is presented.” In addition, an eight-month study of the readership gap by The Edmonton Journal said there should be more female reporters and columnists, more stories about women, more women experts quoted in stories and the creation of a special page to cover women in the workplace.

As editors rely more on the opinions of focus groups, and as society becomes more diverse with more people from different cultures, it’s difficult to foresee how newspapers will adapt.
“There’s an argument to be made that the newspapers of the future will be highly targeted,” said Nebenzahl of The Gazette. “In the past there was a captive market. It was easy to say, ‘Let’s give them blank section.’ It’s more difficult now. Resources are limited and you need to consider the market. But this has to blend with the fact that you’re still a newspaper.”
At the Tribune, Dishon now works full-time developing sections. Her latest creation was a section called KidNews which started last August, and she’s exploring the idea of a section for baby boomers of the Clinton generation. The Tribune is also looking at ways of unbundling the paper so that readers can get just the parts they want. At an extreme are papers like USA Today, which are highly market-driven. Although it may be criticized for its short, superficial reporting, USA Today is considered a leader among American papers for its coverage of women and minorities. Each section has stories which reflect the diversity of its readers. It also has a mandate to have a photo of a woman or member of a minority on page one, above the fold, every day.
Canadian newspapers are headed in different directions. Joanne Ramondt of the Calgary Herald is involved in a project to merge the city and life sections. Back in 1972, when she worked as a summer student at The London Free Press, female interns were obligated to spend a month working on the women’s pages. “We all hated it, and cheered when the section died,” she said. She sees the disadvantages of the new sections, but won’t completely reject the idea. “Now I’m coming full circle. I’m thinking that these sections may be good.

Saturday Night, the magazine that hasn’t made a penny for more than 40 years, has always been a hard sell. And now that the venerable but perennially money-losing magazine is operating on a controlled-circulation basis, few media forecasters are predicting an easier economic future. At the magazine’s glitzy launch party last October at Toronto’s Royal York Hotel, David Olive, editor of Report On Business Magazine, foresaw a rocky ride. “The bigger the launch, the bigger the fall,” he said, recalling the demise of Vista, Domino, Quest and City Woman.

Under the intense scrutiny of the country’s magazine industry, consulting publisher Jeffrey Shearer has been charged with the burdensome task of turning Saturday Night, which is one of Canada’s most expensive magazines to produce and is estimated to still be losing money, into a profitable success. Shearer rode the controlled-circulation concept to heady heights with Quest and City Woman, as executive vicepresident of Comac Communications Ltd., until Quest got into trouble in the early eighties. He ought to know that controlled circulation is a hard sell.

But Shearer believes Saturday Night will not only break even, but will also see profits within the next two to five years. “We’re doing tracking studies by phone and personal interviews with readers after every issue. We’re getting an excellent response. Our targetted audience is clearly interested in this broader range of editorial material. They may not have read it before, but they’re reading it now,” he says.

Restructured from a subscriber base of 127,000 to a controlled-circulation newspaper supplement of 400,000, gracing homes with incomes of $40,000 a year or more, the new Saturday Night is delivered with selected issues of the Montreal Gazette, The Ottawa Citizen, the Calgary Herald, the Edmonton Journal, The Vancouver Sun and The Globe and Mail. Still available on the newsstand and delivered by mail to paying subscribers outside the targetted controlled-circulation areas, the relaunched magazine is a controlled/subscriber hybrid.

Patrick Walshe, vicepresident of the advertising firm Harrison, Young, Pesonen and Newell Inc., says, “It’s a quasi-controlled magazine. A magazine that will succeed is one that is really well-focused and well-niched, and I don’t see Saturday Night delivering on these scores. The key issue is not the receivership of 400,000 magazines, but the amount of time spent by its readers and how they value it.”

Janet Landreth, media group head of the McKim Media Group, explains, “Advertisers in the first few issues weren’t taking a big risk because of the huge discounting that went on.” The rejuvenated Saturday Night will have to continue discounting rates until it can assure advertisers it is not only being received but read. Nevertheless, advertising sales manager Jennifer Bedford says ad sales are strong. “In the first three issues alone, we’ve generated more advertising business than we did all of last year.”

The flashy premier issue resembled a cross between Vanity Fair and Harper’s, instead of the blend of stodginess and cultural nationalism that characterized its former incarnation. There was more lavish display of type, artwork, photography and graphics. But despite the new look, clearly aimed at a younger audience, there wasn’t much new in the new Saturday Night. Ironically, the cover, an arresting photo of Cowboy Junkies’ Margo Timmins, left the impression that the magazine was outdated. Timmins might have been hot, say four years ago, but at the time of the release of the magazine, she wasn’t on tour, nor had she produced a new record.

After reviewing the first issue, Doug Bennet, editor of Masthead magazine, didn’t think the restructuring was satisfying both new and old readers. “It’s unfocused right now. The new graphics are amazing, but it’s not known who they’re trying to appeal to,” he said. “As a result of this ambivalence, advertisers will probably wait for six months to a year before buying.”

But despite such negative predictions, there are at least a few who don’t expect the new Saturday Night to fall from the sky just yet. Hugh Dow, president of Initiative Media, agrees there is some obvious fallout from the previous readership, but he believes the magazine will ultimately attract a broader audience. “It has a sizable circulation and good editorial content.”

Joann Webb, who has been the editor of a number of publications, sees the magazine as a breath of fresh air. “I am personally excited that Saturday Night has the guts to move forward in the midst of the bleakest environment I’ve ever seen. I don’t know if they will succeed, but I sure as hell hope they do.”