Heather McIntosh was cleaning out her grandmother’s house when she found some pages from an old issue of Chatelaine that had been used to seal a painting into its frame. The University of Ottawa master’s student was captivated. McIntosh says while it’s easy to label the magazine as exclusively recipes and cosmetics, these pages from the late 1920s or early ʽ30s seemed radical for their time. McIntosh studied Chatelaine for her thesis and spent months in the National Archives poring over issues from 1928 to 2010. In past issues, advertisements for beauty and homecare products sat companionably beside recipes and how-to articles, in addition to lengthy features about serious issues. “The contradictions,” she says, “were just absolutely crazy.”

Those contradictions persist because Canadian women haven’t stopped wanting serious journalism in the mix. And that’s what Lianne George, Chatelaine’s sixth editor since 2004, wants to give them. A decade of high turnover has left observers wondering if the venerable title is still relevant, but George’s appointment comes at an ideal time: conversations about feminism are flourishing online, and she wants the magazine to join the fray.

Chatelaine is one of the most widely read Canadian magazines, with a paid circulation of almost 540,000 and a readership of 3.1 million. In the 1960s and ʽ70s, widely regarded as the magazine’s feminist heyday, editor Doris Anderson ran articles about controversial issues such as child abuse and still maintained the wide circulation, which meant the publisher Maclean-Hunter seldom questioned the magazine’s content. “As long as the magazine was selling, she could do whatever she wanted,” says Rona Maynard, who was editor from 1994 to 2004. “Those days are long gone.”

Maynard should know. She was editor through the magazine’s sale to Rogers Publishing, a notable revamp and the launch of Chatelaine’s first website. After she left, Rogers wasn’t sure what the magazine should be, and that uncertainty was reflected in the short tenures of a parade of editors. At the same time, thin margins meant there was little tolerance for anything less than magic and new editors, some of them with no editor-in-chief experience, were subject to Rogers’s shifting standards. The longest serving editor since Maynard was Jane Francisco, at just four years, who left for Good Housekeeping at the end of 2013. “Very beautiful service is Jane’s strong suit,” says Maynard, and her Chatelaine was beautiful and light. Her successor, Karine Ewart, stayed only 17 months before George succeeded her in June 2015.

Choosing George signals that Rogers finally has a clear vision for Chatelaine. With a career that includes Maclean’s, Canadian Business and most recently Toronto alt-weekly The Grid, she is a strong choice for editor. Although she hasn’t finalized her plans yet, they clearly don’t centre around “beautiful service.” The magazine will continue with its blend of content, but George says it’s a living thing and readers can expect it to evolve: “Chatelaine has been around for almost 90 years, and it’s served a lot of purposes over the decades—domestic bible, community hub and under Doris Anderson it led the charge on a lot of women’s rights issues.”

Now George wants it to join today’s conversation about women’s issues. One of her recent moves was hiring Sarah Boesveld from the National Post, where she was known for her sharp takes on the issues of the day across platforms, as well as her thoughtful features in the paper. George wanted her newsy approach for the online site, but Boesveld is also looking forward to doing longer pieces for the print magazine.

Although George is clearly working on a politically engaged Chatelaine, some readers may not be ready. Carol Toller’s 2,500-word profile of Justin Trudeau in October 2014, for example, generated a lot of criticism. Post columnist Robyn Urback called the profile, which took readers inside Trudeau’s domestic life, “proof positive” that the Liberal leader doesn’t take women voters seriously. After all, he granted exclusive access to “a women’s lifestyle magazine” (emphasis not added) that wasn’t going to ask the serious questions but would zero in on “the family, the photos, the charm.” Now-defunct Sun News called it a “puff piece.” George says the pushback to Toller’s “smart, critical piece” reflects old perceptions of the magazine. And Trudeau’s win, and the part his family played in the last weeks of the campaign, suggests the profile had merit. “But at the time,” she says, “there was a perception that Chatelaine doesn’t cover politics in this way.”

And there was nothing puffy about the Q&As that ran in September with Trudeau, Stephen Harper, Thomas Mulcair and Elizabeth May. The magazine asked the federal leaders controversial questions on issues ranging from ISIS to abortion. And when Canadians woke up on the morning after this year’s federal election, Boesveld had published a smart, snappy online roundup of election news that included how many women were elected and a snapshot of the magazine’s July 1972 cover, which featured Margaret Trudeau in white, holding the now-PM. More recently, Chatelaine marked the one-year anniversary of the day the Jian Ghomeshi scandal broke by interviewing seven women in journalism, law and activism.

Vanessa Milne, associate managing editor from 2007 to 2012, says the ability to curate feminism, cookery or beauty into a package is still one of the things that helps keep the magazine’s diverse readership.

George wants Chatelaine to be part of current political and cultural conversations about women’s rights. “At the same time,” she says, “we care about great, doable weeknight dinner recipes. It all lives together.” That combination kept the magazine alive in the past, and with George at the helm, Chatelaine just might be a “radical” read for historians 90 years from now.

Worn Fashion Journal was my first and only proper internship. The day I found out I had an interview, I had been fired from my job at American Apparel and I was miserable. Not because of the job, but because I wanted to buy some more stuff with my employee discount.

I showed up to my interview dressed to impress in whatever mismatched outfit I could pick out in time. Their old office was a mess—small, cluttered, decorations were all over the walls and back issues were in an organized pile in the corner. I loved it. I remember telling Serah-Marie McMahon, the editor in pants, that I had just been fired from American Apparel. She liked that. Before I met McMahon, I didn’t know how to write. She was my introduction to finding a voice in writing and my guide in, as corny as it sounds, finding myself.

Worn prided itself on provocative, diverse commentary instead of caring about trends. It was a fashion magazine with a true, distinct voice. And now it’s closing down. On November 22, Worn will be releasing its last issue—a special double anniversary edition. I remember when they made the announcement. I cried.

I wouldn’t be the same person I am today without Worn. It was my first proper byline, my first introduction to feminism and some of the greatest, most fascinating and talented people that I would ever meet. I wouldn’t trade anything for my time with Worn, and though I stopped interning there and started only occasionally contributing, it’s still a huge part of who I am. Every new issue that comes out fills me with pride. I swell because I get to say that it’s something that I was a part of: Toronto history, I’ll call it. Worn is, was—no, still is—a local powerhouse a source of pride. Joy. Excitement.

Worn: I will always love you.

Featured image courtesy of ranti. 

In spite of the rain, the Word on the Street festival site in Toronto buzzes with local readers and writers looking for a good deal on magazine subscriptions, someone to publish their opuses or perhaps an autograph from a favourite CBC personality. On the eastern curve of the Queen’s Park roundabout, where the festival is held on the last Sunday in September, Shameless magazine attracts a steady stream of interested browsers. One flips through back issues of the magazine, her meticulously applied nail polish sparkling against black and white pages. She flashes a furtive smile to the women watching from behind the table and drifts on, mom in her wake. Others hang around laughing loudly at ironies, pinning Shameless buttons onto jackets already clacking with political identifiers and stuffing back issues of the feminist magazine “for girls who get it” into their backpacks. Several women volunteer to write for the magazine.

Nicole Cohen, one of two co-editors, has just come back from her apartment where back issues are stored, and is replenishing supplies of the briskly moving stock. She’s annoyed. In fact, the 26-year-old student, enrolled in the Joint Graduate Programme in Communication and Culture at York and Ryerson Universities, is way too annoyed for anyone to mention the rumour that Shameless might not be around much longer. She makes it very clear she’s too busy to chat, but is able to comment on her definition of success: “For me,Shameless has been an absolute success in terms of fulfilling its mandate, winning awards and recognition, and being able to touch the lives of young women. We’ve been able to make important contributions to discussions of feminism and alternative media, as well as counter mainstream notions of what it means to be a teenage girl.”

Since Cohen and Melinda Mattos launched Shameless in Summer 2004, it has garnered international attention and a subscription base of nearly 700 – not bad for a mag with few ads, no grants and a volunteer-run production staff operating out of their homes. A small stack of awards and nominations from the indie press boosted Shameless into the spotlight in its first year. Last year it won an Utne Magazine award for Best Personal Life Writing and was noticed in almost every major Canadian mainstream and alternative newspaper.

But now, with the second anniversary issue on newsstands, industry observers seemed to have stopped noticing its good work. Doug Bennet , publisher of Masthead magazine, is glad to hear the magazine is still publishing but says he doesn’t know Shameless well enough to comment on content. He’s more interested in how publications running on volunteer-power stay in business. “You have to have a sugar daddy or an angel or family money or government grants to keep it going,” he says. His colleagues at the industry watchdog were equally unfamiliar with the magazine.

Judy Rebick, feminist scholar and publisher of the political website rabble.ca likes Shameless for its “third-wave feminist sensibility,” but admits she doesn’t really read magazines.

In Shameless, readers of Bitch magazine will find a comfortable familiarity. Like its American counterpart, the three-times-yearly publication offers a feminist perspective on popular culture in its features, with topics like an analysis of the motives behind the Dove soap “Campaign for Real Beauty,” a day in the life of a Marilyn Monroe impersonator and how community radio is giving girls a voice. But where Bitch spreads its “feminist response to pop culture” throughout its pages, Shameless launches into any arena where women tread. Features also cover women in global political life (“Skirting the Issue,” “Pretty in Parliament”), vaginal reconstruction surgery (“Making the Cut” ) and virginity myths (“Saint or Slut?” ).

Sections like Geek Chic, Sporting Goods and DIY offer reviews, profiles and directions for cool websites, girls in sport and instructions on how to makes bowls out of old LP records, respectively.

In the current issue, Summer 2006, DJ Morales, a “five-foot-tall slam poet” from Ottawa, is the subject of “She’s Shameless,” a regular feature of a model Shameless girl or woman. It offers a refreshingly positive parallel to similar profiles like “Miss Seventeen” in Seventeen magazine. Morales offers “props to girls who get it: the girls who are reading book who are spending more time at activist rallies than concerts. People will try to stop you because that’s not what girls are supposed to do. But don’t let anybody stop you.”

Shameless is a feminist delivery system of advice. In its guidelines for writers, the publication seeks “fresh, witty writing that engages and entertains. Frenzied ranting is strongly discouraged. So are over-the-top attempts at sounding young and hip. (Hint: Shameless is not Seventeen and “omigawd” is not a word.) Remember, you’re the reader’s trusted co-conspirator, not her cooler older sister. Let your natural voice come through.” But the biggest strengths of the magazine – passion, conviction, talent – may also contribute to its weakness. Ironically, in the vision of what it is to “get it” espoused by Shameless, some readers sense that the depiction of women is too narrow and confining. “It tells girls they have to be a certain way and not at all a girly-girl,” says Charidy Johnston. The 27 year old says when she reads magazine she prefers titles like In Style because she wants to relax and not be scolded that she’s not doing enough to change the world.

Perhaps it’s harder to change women when they’re age 27 than when they’re impressionable teenagers. Twenty-five-year-old contributor Thea Lim thinks Shameless does a good job appealing to young women and older girls. The die-hard volunteer says the magazine tries to “provide literary space, but neutral space and to be supportive of teenagers.”

That is, supportive of a certain kind of female. Rather than appealing to teenagers broadly, as both Lim and Cohen claim, Shameless targets that one girl in your high school class. You know the one – smart, informed and involved in everything. Teachers love and hate her because while she raises the bar on class discussions of A Tale of Two Cities by remarking on the objectionable labour practices in Dickens’ England and notices the sexist perspective of the narrator, her word is usually the last. Classmates who may have thought about mentioning how the title is like, a metaphor or something, or that they loved Chapter 10, wait for the bell instead. But from those girls across Canada that do “get it,” the Letters section regularly runs exclamatory thanks such as “Super-duper!” and “Life-altering.”

Although the magazine doesn’t appeal to all young females, newsstand sales of the magazine in Toronto bookstores are consistently high for a teen magazine. Book City, Toronto Women’s Bookstore and Another Story Bookshop all report selling at least half, often closer to three-quarters of the copies they receive. While that means just four or five copies at Another Story, both Book City and TWB receive 45 or more copies of each issue. Alex MacFadyen , a buyer for TWB, says Shameless was “extremely popular as soon as it came out and now has sales comparable to Bitch and Bust“. At his store, the magazine sells 25 or 30 copies each issue. He compares its success to the rise in zine culture and finds that Shameless contains certain identifiable elements of the zine – photos arranged in an overlapping, pasted-on fashion, the logo designed to look hand-inked – and the community it creates. “Doing actual work and outreach, going to where people are and selling your stuff is very like zine culture,” he says.

“Community building” is a big part of the Shameless newsstand business model. The magazine depends on newsstand sales, subscriptions and fundraising events for almost all the money it needs to keep the magazine going. Bennet says the model is “fraught with peril” because low revenue means a volunteer-powered publication, “which is great but not sustainable.”

Without the usual major advertisers like Procter & Gamble and L’Oreal that aim their products at young women, the magazine’s message is unfettered and uncompromising, but also chronically short of funding. When asked what she might do if approached by a conglomerate, Cohen dismisses the question outright. “We’re not a magazine conceived to deliver a mass audience to advertisers,” she advises, “so we haven’t had large companies that use questionable images of women in their advertising knocking at our door.”

Back at the Shameless booth at Word on the Street, über-volunteer Lim spends the afternoon selling promotional buttons and back issues, trying to keep dry whenever the blustery day turns rainy. Lim writes for both the print and online versions of the magazine. She likes the positive working environment and the sense of community she receives. It’s certainly not for the money. When asked about the lack of payment, she’s unconcerned about the optics of providing free labour to an organization that cares about feminist social justice. She beams, “I really believe in Shameless so I’m happy to contribute.” Then she adds, “Of course, I won’t be able to do it forever.”

Forever is a long time, especially when you’re worried about tomorrow. When she’s finally asked to comment on the rumour that the magazine might fold after publishing two more issues, Cohen writes back in an email, “Publishing an independent magazine run by volunteer power alone is a challenging (but rewarding!) experience that always comes with a degree of uncertainty. Our plan and goals for Shameless have always been to publish the best magazine we could, filled with interesting, engaging content you can’t find anywhere else, and get the message out to as many young women as possible. It is a process that is constantly in flux, as we have a high turnover of volunteers and our own lives are continually changing. At the moment, we are taking things one issue at a time.”

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.

It is going to be a hard night for Jack Layton. Pre-election polls have forecast defeat of Toronto’s NDP mayoralty candidate at the hands of his Tory opponent, and at 7 p.m. on election day, time is ticking away. And here is Layton, sweating in his overcoat and red scarf, rushing from door to door in the Ryerson student residence, trying to garner some lastminute votes. Though well-spoken and personable, he cannot mask the aura of panic that accompanies him. And as if this weren’t trying enough, this personal campaigning, this compilation of months of work into final-hour sell lines for college voters, a reporter has emerged out of nowhere to chronicle the act. Not just any reporter, either, but gritty Toronto Star columnist Rosie DiManno-not exactly a die-hard fan of the New Democratic Party. But Layton greets her amicably, and they exchange witticisms as she follows his rushed passage up and down cement stairwells and along hallways.

DiManno, too, has been anxious all evening, dreading the notion of a political story, unsure about the slant she will take. She has even developed a tension headache on the way over in the cab. But leaning back against a wall, observing Layton, she is in her element. She scrawls constantly in her notebook, managing to maintain an air of grace. Layton is making her job easy. As he promises better student housing, Metropasses for university students and better lighting in the residence, DiManno visibly relaxes.
To her amusement, Layton, in his hurry, is knocking on doors and entering rooms before he is invited in. “I’m much better now,” DiManno says, laughing. “I can see the column taking shape. He didn’t even wait for them to answer the door! Does he look manic?!”

“They left you off the voters’ list. That’s how much they think of you,” Layton informs student after student, while DiManno stands to the side, eyes slightly squinted in thought, smiling. If Layton had time to think about DiManno’s presence there that evening, he might have been worried.

Knock-knock, Who’s there? began DiManno’s column the following day.

Jack.

Jack who?

Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack who could not win over the electorate.

But oh, how he tried. Until the very last moment he tried. What followed was a sympathetic account of the final hour of Layton’s campaign. Humorous at times, but certainly not cruel.

“It’s so easy to ridicule people,” says DiManno. “But you don’t make fun of losers. It was funny, but it wasn’t ridiculous. Here was a man heading for defeat, and he was going to fight till the last minute. These are admirable qualities.”

Who could have foreseen this forgiving slant on a piece by the writer whose coverage of the funeral of a murdered child aroused public fury for its alleged ruthlessness? And it was only last May that DiManno condemned “a trendy, all-purpose NDP ideology” for being ”as much at fault…as any Tory national agenda or broken Liberal promises.” Not to mention the charges of self-righteousness directed at NDP cabinet minister Marilyn Churley in at least two other columns.

But if DiManno is anything, she is unpredictable, a rare quality for a newspaper reporter in this age of pack journalism and creeping orthodoxy. “Rosie doesn’t toe the political party line,” says friend and fellow Star writer Craig MacInnis. “She doesn’t wear party colors on her sleeve. She’s a situational person. She sizes up a situation on its own merit.” Says city editor Joe Hall, “I find it difficult to pigeonhole her. One of her most appealing qualities is that she’s not predictable.”

Without aligning herself with any faction, DiManno seems to speak for…the people. She writes with a snappy, witty rhetoric which often appears to take on the voice of her subject: the prostitute, the TTC striker, the mother of a murdered child. “Her politics are emotionally situated,” says MacInnis. “She writes from the perspective of someone who feels a certain empathy for the little guy.”
The response she elicits from her readers is emotional too. “She infuriates large numbers of readers,” says Hall. “She outrages them.” He estimates that DiManno gets more phone calls from readers than any other staff member on city side. It’s easy to believe. At her desk this Tuesday afternoon, DiManno’s phone is ringing constantly. Her latest column was about the shooting of Jonathan Howell, a black man, by Detective Carl Sokolowski, and criticism of the police provokes the most virulent of public responses. DiManno listens patiently to the opinions of each caller, responding firmly but respectfully unless the reader gets rude. And some of them do. After one such call impugning the purity of her motives, DiManno sits back in her chair, looking more sad than angry. “This job is disheartening at times,” she says. “You really get to feel the pulse of the city.”

The idea of having a city columnist had been in the air for years at the Star before DiManno was selected for the job in September 1989. “I’d always said the Star should have one,” says DiManno. “I was always interested in the prospect of me doing it, but I just thought that somebody should do it. It was an element that we were missing in the newspaper.”

Hall was looking for a column that would provide a younger person’s perspective as well as a sense of the city. Born and raised in Toronto, at 33 DiManno seemed like a prime candidate. It was an impressive position to hold at such an age, and DiManno knows how fortunate she was. “I’m not stupid,” she says. “I think I got the best job in this city.” It didn’t exactly fall into her lap.
Born to Italian immigrant parents, DiManno was raised around Christie Pits in Toronto’s west end. The only girl among five boys, she experienced the restricted childhood typical of kids of traditional Italian parents. At 12 she was forced to attend Central Commerce, a secretarial school in which she had no interest. To her horror, she excelled there. But she left halfway through the year when her family moved to North York. “I don’t know what would have happened if my family hadn’t moved,” says DiManno, who doubts she would have become a secretary. “I might have led a life of crime.”

So it was on to William Lyon Mackenzie Secondary School, and the trial of adolescence under the thumb of “phenomenally strict” parents. “Curfews? What curfews?” asks DiManno. “I couldn’t go out at all. No curfew. Home after school. You weren’t allowed to go to a dance or anything like thatever .” Her marks began to slip when she started cutting classes. She would go down to Yorkville and panhandle, pretending she was a hippie, or go to a movie, or go to a mall. It was the only freedom she had in those days.

North York was also the place where DiManno discovered sports. She’d played a lot of softball as a kid, but she’d never been a good athlete, never had much interest. Then one morning she woke up a sports nut. Her primary fixation was hockey, and she read everything she could about it. “If I read a newspaper at all, it was just the sports pages,” says DiManno. Except for a “book” she put together while in Grade 9, DiManno did not do much writing in those days. “God knows what it was about,” she says. “It was a stupid book, about sex and drugs and being 14. I used to hand it out in class. There were always people reading chapters of it.”
Still, she had the notion back then that she was going to be a writer, and the Ryerson School of Journalism seemed like a good place to start. The restrictions set by her family had always been a problem, and with the prospect of a career in sight, they loomed larger than ever. “I didn’t know how I could be a journalist and get along with my family at the same time. Even in my ignorance I realized that journalism involved travelling; it involved long hours.”

Bu t DiManno thrived at Ryerson, becoming editor of The Ryersonian, the journalism school paper, in her final year. She describes her paper as the worst one in history. “I just picked my friends, people who were good partiers, and I don’t know how we put that paper out. 1’d bring from .home these great big bottles of homemade wine. We’d sit in the back…and we’d just drink all this wine, and then we’d go outside and smoke some dope. Then we’d come in and try to put the paper together .”

She began working part-time for the Star when she was 17 years old, and the summer after third year she was hired full-time as a sportswriter. She doesn’t remember when the epiphany occurred at Ryerson, when she decided that she wanted to write sports. But Christie Blatchford was already doing it at The Globe and Mail, and DiManno thought that even being a female sportswriter might be a more realistic goal than setting out to write fiction.

She had “the time of her life” covering the ’76 Olympics in Montreal for the Star. Her stories were getting good play, and she describes that period as a delayed adolescence. Because she worked in sports, she worked a split shift. She’d work in the morning, have the afternoon off, then return to work at night. Most people went home during the d~y but DiManno, who was still living with her parents, would go drinking. Sometimes her assignments were late. “This was the first time that I was going home at one, two, three o’clock in the morning. That never happened before. So perhaps I was behaving like a
lot of other people when they’re 15I thought that those good times were never going to end.”

When DiManno finally moved out she was 23 years old, and the action did cause a rift. She now lives by herself in a downtown apartment. Relations with her parents were eventually restored, though the relationship has always been limited by the language barrier; DiManno speaks Italian but not very well. “I don’t think that they know to this day what it is that I do for a living,” she says. “It must be a terrible puzzle to them.” And any freedom she has taken for herself was reluctantly yielded. “If I phone them and say ‘I’m going out of town tomorrow,’ then there’s always that sigh, ‘Oh there you go again. Why do you always have to do this?'”
When her quarterly probationary period at the Star came up for the third or fourth time, then-sports editor Jim Proudfoot fired her. “It would probably be correct to say that I was having too good a time,” says DiManno. “I didn’t take it all that seriously, they tell me.” Thus began a low period in her life which didn’t lift until six months later when she started freelancing for magazines. She got a story in the first issue of City Magazine, a now defunct Toronto Star publication then under the editorship of Hartley Steward. Freelancing kept her alive for three years until she decided to go back to newspapers.

This time she tried The Globe and Mail. “I walked over to the Globe, got an interview and was hired. I remember later coming out and sitting on a curb outside the Globe and thinking ‘My God, what have I done?'” She worked as a general assignment reporter at the Globe for four months before she decided to quit. “If there was ever a person who was un Globe, it was me,” says DiManno. “It took itself much too seriously.” She walked into managing editor Ted Moser’s office ready to quit, but before she could get the words out of her mouth he said, “You’re gone.” She had gotten in trouble for hitchhiking home from an out-of-town assignment the previous week, and he didn’t like the way she dressed. “You didn’t wear little halter tops to the Globe,” says DiManno.

After a year of freelancing, Star city editor Mary Deanne Shears offered her a job as a summer replacement. “I jumped at the opportunity,” DiManno recalls. “I always felt that I had the Star tattooed on my ass. I always felt that I wasn’t where I should have been. I mean, I felt like a Star person all those years when I wasn’t a Star person.” Shears gave her a stern welcoming lecture about responsibility, but by the end of the summer DiManno was hired on as a general assignment reporter. She worked as a GA reporter for five years, in entertainment for less than two, and then for one and a half years as part of the features team. Last September was the second anniversary of her column.

The role of a city columnist is a precarious one, says Blatchford, city columnist for The Toronto Sun. You’ve got to be newsy, but not too newsy, to avoid taking stories away from reporters. You’ve got to be topical, and at the same time give readers something they won’t get from a news story or from television. What you have to do is provide the kind of detail that newspaper and television reporters can’t supply.

“I like columns that rely heavily on detail,” says DiManno. “I think I have an eye for detail. Sometimes you write columns that are really just mood pieces. They’re not really saying anything. They’re just word pictures.”

This knack for verbal impressionism, nearly poetic at times, is typical DiManno. Hall compares her work to Jimmy Breslin’s, and DiManno too is a fan of Breslin’s writing. “I’m not a great hockey fan,” says Hall, “But I remember quite well a piece she wrote a year ago about the Leafs. It was just a look at the Leafs all geared up for a new season…but with the words she used you could just about see the blades cutting through the ice.”

Blatchford describes the relationship between herself and DiManno as “curious.” DiManno keeps her on her toes, she says, especially when they’re covering the same story. In one case last summer, both columnists were writing about Kay~a Klaudusz, a missing child who was later found murdered. “I can’t tell you the times I’d see her in front of [the family’s] apartment building and start to worry,” says Blatchford. “Then she’d disappear and I’d think ‘Fuck, she got inside,’ and it would turn out she went for a coffee.”

But DiManno is a harsh judge of her own work, and says there are many columns she regrets having written. She warns of the traps columnists can fall prey to: like falling in love with the sound of your own voice. “Sometimes I just want to say: ‘Shut up, Rosie! Shut up!’… There are days I don’t go into work because I’m so ashamed of what I’ve written.”

Ironically, the columns she regrets are rarely the ones that caused public furor. Perhaps the best-known of these controversial pieces was on Andrea Atkinson’s funeral. Six-yearold Andrea had disappeared days earlier from her mother’s east end apartment, and her body was later found in the storage room of her building. DiManno went beyond the death of the child, exploring the intentions and suspicions of the funeral goers, many of whom had appeared with small children and shopping bags.

There are times when you can almost touch the face of madness. And it was there in the tawdry spectacle of a service for the dead, turned into a circus for the living. In the almost giddy grief of a childless mother. In the murmur and hissing of strangers. In the hostility of a crowd engorged with rage.

Some of that rage was directed at Ruth Windebank, Andrea’s mother, and DiM anno’s piece made that clear. It was her description of Windebank’s behavior which provoked an outcry from readers who felt the grieving mother had been unjustly served by DiManno’s prose.

In the chapel, Andreas casket was laid out in front of pale pink curtains, laden and surrounded with flowers. On the lid, a burst of pink carnations with a card that read: To our little girl. From Ruth and Doug. Not mother, not mom, but Ruth. That’s Ruth Windebank, mother, and Doug Heinbuch, the boyfriend she met on Labor Day.

Hall doesn’t regret having run the piece, though he wishes he could have prevented the error which caused DiManno’s photo byline to be dropped from the column, making it look like a news story. But even without this confusion, people would have complained, says Hall. DiManno was trying to convey that the funeral had become a spectacle of sorts, with a turnout that seemed more like audience than mourners. But her efforts were largely misinterpreted, because in our society funerals are like death itself. They are surrounded by taboo.

DiManno admits that she did not like Ruth Windebank. She was angered by the fact that Windebank had let Andrea out of her sight for at least three hours the morning she disappeared. And on the day she was told that Andrea’s body had been found, DiManno overheard Windebank complaining about her stereo.

DiManno concedes that nobody can judge somebody else’s grief, and Windebank’s reaction could easily have been an expression of shock. But that doesn’t excuse the behavior of Windebank before her daughter was found, she says. The reason she was there that first day was because Windebank, dissatisfied with the way the investigation was going, had phoned the Star and the Sun, asking to give her side of the story. “Christie Blatchford…was there from the Sun and we went inside [Windebank’s apartment],” recalls DiManno. “And for over an hour Ruth Windebank talked about herself. Ruth Windebank told jokes. She was more concerned about the image that was being presented in the press about her than she was about her daughter’s disappearance, and that was my honest-to-gut feeling about what was happening that day.”

DiManno never heard from Windebank after the column came out.

In contrast, her column on the World Cup soccer sparring in July 1990 elicited an active response from its subject, the Italian community. After Argentina knocked Italy out of the World Cup in Naples, thousands of Argentinian and Italian soccer fans battled it out with eggs and bottles on St. Clair Avenue West.

Arriverderci Italia.

And shame, shame, shame, wrote DiManno in her column the following day. She continued to reprimand the Italian community for being sore losers, “despite all the practice we’ve had at it.” The Italians were so outraged by the column that a reaction was broadcast on Italian TV. Letters of complaint poured into Corriere Canadese, Toronto’s Italian newspaper, which went as far as to publish an article in response to DiManno’s. “It raised a lot of fur,” says Silia Coiro, then English news editor at the paper, of DiManno’s piece.

Surprised by the reaction, DiManno does not regret the column. “I didn’t anticipate that they would react so virulently,” she says. “What were they so angry about? Were they angry because I said they behaved like a bunch of assholes on St. Clair Avenue West? They did.” She says while some members of the Italian community are proud of her for having made it in “the big Anglo-Saxon culture,” others think they own a piece of her and consider her a traitor when she is critical of them.

The Italians aren’t the only ones to lay claim to DiManno’s loyalties. She has also been attacked by feminists who say that she writes articles demeaning to women. They write in to say that she’s sexist, and if not sexist, simply stupid. “Had DiManno been racebashing instead of feminist-bashing, would her column have been printed?” asked one Star reader after the appearance of a column criticizing a LEAF (women’s Legal Education and Action Fund) breakfast.

She has always considered herself a feminist, and is shocked by the suggestion that she is not. “The word ‘feminist’ has been co-opted by certain factions,” she says, “and their definition seems to be the only working definition that’s allowed any more. My feminism is as good as anyone else’s, goddammit!”

In one instance, DiManno co-wrote an article on pornography with MacInnis in which she defended it from a civil rights perspective and because she finds it funny and entertaining. She attributes the critical response to the piece to an increasing trend among journalists to adhere to the laws of political correctness. As an example of this DiManno cites the issue of a national day care program which, despite the fact that it has opponents, is covered largely from the perspective that it should exist. ‘We don’t approach it as a news story any more,” she says. The feminists have become the status quo these days, says DiManno, and the role of the media has never been to uphold the status quo. “You’re supposed to have questions. You’re not just supposed to say ‘four legs good, two legs bad.'”

Hence her problem with Marilyn Churley, an NDP cabinet minister and the focus of several of her less flattering pieces. In a column last March, DiManno called Churley “the mother of all big sisters.” The column was inspired by Bob Rae’s decision to put Churley in the position of Peter Kormos, former minister of consumer and commercial relations. “The fey Ms. Churley: charming, earnest, and always righter than the rest,” wrote DiManno. “The standard-bearer, during her truncated tenure at Toronto City Council, for a certain dogmatic strain of feminism that long ago parted company with the most basic tenets of diplomatic principle.”

The reference here is to Churley’s efforts to ban sexist ads from City of Toronto property, and beauty pageants from Nathan Phillips Square. DiManno sees her as a member of a group of people cavorting under the title of politically correct, dictating to everybody else the right way to live. “These are all people of the same age-group. They’re a little older than I am,” she says, “but they went through the sixties. And they had free sex. And they went out and did all the drugs they wanted to do. And they went out and had the adventure of their lives. They broke all the taboos. They went against their parents. And now they’re 20 years older and they’ve had their little piece of fun and they want to go back and have the same Victorian prudish society they rebelled against in the first place. Now they want it for different reasons, though.”

DiManno has little tolerance for people or institutions she perceives to be taking themselves too seriously. Certainly she can ‘t be accused of taking herself too seriously. She has no noble objectives as a columnist, and does not see herself as being under any particular obligation. “I don’t have a role,” says DiManno. “I just want to tell good stories.” Maybe, she suggests, she is having a late adolescence. “I want to be perverse and outrageous.”

She sees herself as a city-side reporter given the freedom to write in her own style. Her desk sits amidst the hustle and bustle of the newsroom, not in the tower with other columnists and editorial writers.

She would rather write about breaking news than pontificate about a subject. “I don’t like using I,” says DiManno. “It’s embarrassing. Where do I get off using 20 inches of the Star to tell you what I think?”

Despite herself, her column seems to have taken on a life of its own, says DiManno. It’s become more personal than she ever intended, and now she considers that perhaps there is really no way to keep her personality out of it. And she doesn’t know how long she should continue to write the column either, before the time will come to pass the space on to someone else. “I’m always waiting for the tap on the shoulder saying ‘Hey kid, it’s been fun, but you gotta run!'”

Blatchford agrees that DiManno’s opinions usually manage to sneak through somehow. “Even though she doesn’t say ‘I think,’ it’s pretty plain 90 per cent of the time what she thinks.” DiManno insists there are few issues she gets really passionate about, that steam her up enough to bring out the opinionated Rosie. One of them is the conflict between the police and the black community.
“You talk about being affected by a story,” says DiManno. “That one I wanted to go home and rip out my hairI think there are a lot of really good police officers in the city who care. But the fact that we should even be discussing that it’s right to shoot people over a theft kills me. How can it be? How can it be?”

And taking a stand on the police issue is not an expression of her feeling of responsibility as a columnist, she says. Rather, it’s the least she can do in the face of the racist sub text of the incidents. She’s had readers and even some police officers suggest that given her stance on the issue, she must be ‘sleeping black.’ “If you’re not outraged by that, then you can check out,” says DiManno. “Then you’re not alive.”

While some may see inconsistencies between her stands on racism and feminism, DiManno can’t equate the two. “If you’re talking about the opportunities that women are given or not given in their lives, that’s a far cry from young black males being shot in Toronto,” she says.

But then there is nothing neat or packageable about Rosle DiManno’s assorted stands. There is no way to infer one from the next. Every issue is considered individually on its own merit, and there are no hard-and-fast rules that apply’ to any of them. If this capriciousness makes her somehow more credible than other, party-oriented columnists, the effect has occurred incidentally. She never set out to create a persona for herself in print. It just happened naturally.

“Be a maverick,” says DiManno, who ought to know. “Go your own way. Question everything. Accept nothing. Accept no dogma, no cant. There are too many people walking around thinking they’re sacred cows, and they’re only half right.”