Dear readers,

After more than a year of questions and discussion about the future of the Ryerson Review of Journalism, our plan’s building blocks are in place. It will be an audience-focused, audience-driven, audience-supported multiplatform magazine brand that continues to include an annual print edition, plus much more.

By audience, we mean you. But first, some background.

More than a year ago, I began asking colleagues what the magazine of the future would be like, how this should affect the Review, and how the magazine could become more sustainable given the flight of advertising dollars from print. These private questions quickly fuelled passionate public discussions, which hearteningly affirmed the Review’s importance to readers.

As I podcast, our engaging weekly newsletter, steady engagement on Twitter and the edgy blog you’re reading now. And it’s now clear that the mix should continue to include an annual print edition.

But the most central insight threaded through all the recent discussions and developments is that a successful magazine today is a multidimensional brand that enjoys a dynamic relationship with its audience community. It is neither print-first nor digital-first: it is audience-first.

Our most important goal for the Review’s future is, therefore, a more intimate understanding of our audience community and its information needs. Starting this September, audience contact and analysis will be built in to each year’s masthead activities—so don’t be surprised if you get a call from a journalism student asking for your story ideas and suggestions for the magazine’s form and content.

To serve that audience well, the Review’s various manifestations will express complementary aspects of the magazine’s unified brand.  Our digital and print offerings need to grow more interrelated and interactive. They should be supplemented by other branded activity (such as events and merchandise), and electronic publication should eventually replace newsstand distribution for single-copy sales.

To make all this possible without diminishing the very brand we’re trying to expand, we need to support an equally high standard of reporting, writing and editing on every platform, and to increase the number of students bringing diverse skills and interests to both editorial and publishing activities.

All of this will cost more money, not less. Even in a period of austerity in funding for post-secondary education, Ryerson will continue to invest heavily in instruction, technology and support for the Review, primarily because it’s a serious asset for students’ career preparedness. And the vigorous support expressed for the Review, on this blog and elsewhere, suggests that its audience members stand ready to add their support.

If that includes you, you can prove it now by subscribing to the print edition, whose cover price will be increased to reflect its costs, and pledging a gift that expresses the level of your support.

Students, too, will play a part in the sustainability plan. Each future masthead will be given a set publishing budget and will make its own decisions on how to grow and spend that resource, replicating the kind of entrepreneurial sensibility that drives a successful niche magazine today.

I will spare you the many details involved in implementing the above ideas, but be assured that our eyes are firmly on the prize of a growing presence for the Review as a keen eye on the dynamic landscape of Canadian journalism, in partnership with J-Source, which is now housed in the RRJ editorial suite.

As always, my colleagues and I welcome your suggestions and questions on any of the above. You’re our core audience, so please consider yourself promoted to Editorial Director and Co-Publisher, effective immediately.

Ivor Shapiro

Chair: Ryerson School of Journalism

Publisher: Ryerson Review of Journalism

A heavy silence takes over the room as Sylvia Maracle, executive director of the Ontario Federation of Indigenous Friendship Centres, takes a pause during her seven-minute speech. “You need to make sure that when people arrive they understand that some of the trauma they have left is the trauma that exists here for the original people of this country,” she tells the audience at “The Walrus Talks Cities of Migration.” Maracle’s speech is titled “Strangers in Our Own Land,” and her soft voice grows louder as she says that when some people arrive in Canada, they are not remotely aware an indigenous population is present. “We’re asking you to make some space for the conversation.”

The Talks are one such space for conversation, often on subjects covered in the pages of The Walrus. Despite a report of tumultuous internal affairs within the editorial department of the publication, the event series runs smoothly and generates much-needed revenue to sustain the respected magazine.

With approximately 20 Talks across the country annually, and an average attendance of 400 to 450 people, the series has allowed The Walrus Foundation to move its business model away from advertising dependence. This year, the Talks generated $1.3 million, making up approximately 27 percent of the foundation’s revenue. “It is our lifeblood,” says Shelley Ambrose, publisher of the magazine. She has run the Talks with David Leonard, the foundation’s event director, since 2012.

The origins of the series date back to 2007. As a non-profit organization, The Walrus Foundation is restricted to a smaller ad revenue than mainstream commercial magazines, and when the financial slowdown hit and advertisers began pulling out, the already limited ad base became even more precarious.

The foundation turned to creating events to make up for the third of revenue that had once come from advertising (charitable donations and circulation make up the rest). Ambrose moved to create a more engaging platform that would continue to uphold The Walrus’s mission statement to “promote debate on matters vital to Canadians.”

To find the just-right way to do this, Ambrose played Goldilocks: some events were too long, some too disorganized and some too old-fashioned, boring and ineffective. “We were looking for a format that allowed for a lot of ideas with the right length of time,” she says. “Anything over 90 minutes, your bum is numb, your brain is tired, you’re thirsty and you need to pee.” A former CBC radio producer, Ambrose settled on an arrangement akin to live radio: eight speakers delivering seven-minute speeches about one broad “Walrus-y” topic—a serious issue such as resilience, water or transportation.

After Leonard joined the team in 2009, he and Ambrose set out to make sure the right conversation happened in the right city. Leonard’s aim is to generate a conversation that can continue after the event, so he curates speakers from different backgrounds. For instance, at “Cities of Migration” in Toronto, other speakers included pianist Robi Botos; Gautam Nath, a marketing expert who immigrated from India; journalist Desmond Cole; and Meb Rashid, the medical director of the Crossroads Clinic, a Toronto-based clinic that serves refugees. Then, Leonard makes sure that about 20 percent of the audience are invited guests such as business leaders, philanthropists and community leaders in culture and education. “Imagine if the head of the TTC, a social media advocate for cycling, a CEO and a community leader came together and talked about transportation,” he says. “That’s a win.”

Occasionally, the topics come together with stories in the magazine in a way that highlights the symbiotic relationship. This unity was evident at “The Walrus Talks Transportation.” “This is a perfect world,” says Ambrose. “We’re talking transportation. The magazine’s cover story is on Uber by Jon Kay. Jon Kay is a speaker tonight.” In this way, the Talks generate revenue for the magazine, but they also create content as contributors become speakers and vice versa.

Together, the Talks and the magazine attempt to profitably adapt to the way people consume information today, combining the best elements of live events, radio and social media. Consultant D.B. Scott, president of Impresa Communications Limited, says the Talks have the ability to draw subscribers to become part of the greater community and community members to become subscribers. The downside of this is that people may not want to go year after year, time after time. “They’re driven by the topic and the presenter, and maintaining a high quality of talks will be, in my opinion, a challenge,” says Scott. “There is a question as to whether there is a limit to what they’re going to be able to sustain.”

Leonard and Ambrose have already booked 21 Walrus Talks for next year. For each one, Leonard will fly to the host city, help the speakers prepare, set up the venue and live-tweet the speeches.

One constant at each event is a big red poster for The Walrus Foundation that sits next to the podium, the words Read and Watch visible from every corner of the room. The word order is inaccurate, because without the revenue generated from people watching the Talks, there would, perhaps, be no Walrus to read.

By Karizza Sanchez 

It’s the September launch party for Sharp magazine’s Book for Men, a hardcover offshoot filled with glossy images of luxurious cars, men’s fashion, and exotic destinations. The ballroom at the new Shangri-La Hotel in downtown Toronto is crowded, lit with purple lights, and filled with loud music playing—a little reminiscent of a nightclub. The male guests are all carbon copies of one another: handsome, impeccably dressed in suits, and seemingly successful. They are the men Sharp wants reading its magazine, and the men Sharp’s advertisers want to reach.

Some of those advertisers are at the party. Near the back of the room, in an area dubbed the Editor’s Lounge, there are displays of luxurious Chanel and IWC watches, and bespoke shoes from Treccani Milano. There are also complimentary shoeshines from Walter’s Shoe Care and hand massages from American Crew. Nearby is a bar stocked with drinks courtesy of Glenlivet, Absolut Elyx, Peroni, and Havana Club.

“It’s the one event where Sharp brings everything we think men are interested in to the men we want,” says the magazine’s editor-in-chief, Jeremy Freed. The coffee-table Book for Men is a biannual publication, one of Sharp’s newer projects under the aegis of parent company Contempo Media. Contempo’s founders, publisher John McGouran and editorial and creative director Michael La Fave, had the idea for the oversized book when they first launched Sharp five years ago, but decided to wait a few years before starting it in 2010. “When you launch those things,” says McGouran, “they’re very expensive and probably won’t make money on the first issue, and it did not.” But it is meant to take Sharp to greater heights, he says. “We wanted that kind of product out there so that people know, Hey, these guys are very serious about what they’re doing and that they have the capability. If there’s one point I would look to that kind of really jumpstarted our fortunes, [it] was when we launched that.”

The Book for Men is sold for $16.95 on newsstands, with total sales amounting to about 9,500 copies, and roughly 10,000 copies are distributed at special events throughout the year. A portion of the leftovers that don’t sell on newsstands (around 10,000 copies) is used for other events and specialized distribution. Readers will sometimes order the book through the magazine’s website; about 7,000 are purchased by companies in bulk to use as handouts. “Sometimes it’s a premium to their customers because it’s a prestigious product,” says McGouran.

The Fall/Winter 2012 edition of The Book for Men is essentially a 268-page guide to the hottest men’s fashion trends and products, including a 32-page “MANual” full of how-to pieces on etiquette, health, travel, and even survival. The content is not far from what can be found in Sharp itself, which is also home to style and grooming manuals.

Flip through any issue of Sharp and you’ll see fashion layouts, service pieces, and plenty of product write-ups. While there are celebrity profiles, travel stories, and car reviews, most of the editorial focuses on Sharp’s idea of the best of what’s out there. “It’s almost like it’s glorified advertising in a way,” says Chris Lachine, a Toronto-based painter and Sharp reader.

Still, Sharp has a great reputation among Canadian men who appreciate the lavish lifestyle, maintains Rob Cribb, a Toronto Star investigative reporter and former columnist. Sharp is smart, he adds, because there’s a sensibility that it’s been able to capture.

Since launching in April 2008, Sharp has courted affluent men aged 25 to 54—and those who aspire to join those ranks—and it’s been able to stay in business in a men’s market where other efforts have failed. The most recent Winter issue is Sharp’s biggest so far—198 pages of editorial and ads, plus an insert of Time & Style, a watch magazine, well up from the 130-page average.

Published six times a year, Sharp is distributed through the National Post in Toronto, the Vancouver Sun, the Calgary Herald, and The Gazette in Montreal (a total of 100,000 copies), as well as through events (10,000), newsstands (20,000 to 30,000, with a cover price of $5.95), and subscriptions (2,500). Copies are also supplied to Air Canada Maple Leaf lounges and VIA Rail Canada, and mailed directly to members of the Cambridge Club health club chain in Toronto and Montreal. Though a majority of its circulation of 146,500 is controlled distribution, Sharp’s subscriptions are increasing, says McGouran. And in 2011, the title landed just outside of Masthead Online’s ranking of the top 50 Canadian magazines according to total revenue, chalking up an estimated $2.3 million.

Much of Sharp’s content is similar to that of other men’s lifestyle publications, such as GQ and Esquire—in theory, at least. Certainly it aspires to be as good as, if not better than, those titles, and thinks it fares well against them. “You can take our products for the year 2012, six issues of Sharp and two issues of The Book for Men, and compare those to any leading men’s lifestyle magazine and say, Hey, this is on par with them in terms of quality,” says McGouran.

But is Sharp really as good as it claims? Does it have the same quality and scope of content that GQ and Esquire offer? Or is it more focused on landing advertisers than serving readers with the best editorial possible?

For a company that touts the look of its magazine, Contempo Media’s head office—on Queen’s Quay West near Spadina Avenue in Toronto—is surprisingly plain. There are off-white walls, black shelves separating desks, and a lone bookshelf holding other publications used for inspiration, but not much else. La Fave’s office is similarly low key. His inner sanctum has few decorations, other than some items from PR companies. His desk features no photograph of his wife and son; there is only a computer monitor beside his MacBook, an empty glass, loose paper, and a copy of British GQ’s October 2012 issue. “In our opinion, the world’s standard for a men’s magazine is British GQ,” says La Fave. “This is obviously the pinnacle. That’s what we aspire to.” Though he seems private about most things, La Fave is honest and open about this goal. He knows men’s lifestyle magazines like Sharp need to be just as good as GQ and Esquire to compete.

Few, if any, would disagree that those two titles are the big dogs in the men’s lifestyle market. Both award-winning magazines have a good mix of celebrity news, serious journalism, fashion, service pieces, product reviews, and literature. As David Granger, editor of Esquire, told The New York Timesin 2004, “Men have range! There’s no man interested only in sports, only in women, only in electronics.” GQ and Esquire balance the different things men are interested in. Take Esquire’s November 2012 issue, for instance. Inside, there’s a feature on the presidential election, while a topless Mila Kunis adorns the cover.

As for GQ, it serves a younger demographic (the average reader is 34 years old; Esquire’s is 44), yet also offers serious narrative journalism. Even its reputation as a fashion magazine hasn’t stopped the editors from publishing excellent writing and earning multiple U.S. National Magazine Awards nominations and prizes in the feature writing and reporting categories. “It’s an important part of the editorial identity of those big American magazines,” says Cribb, “and frankly, it brings a level of credibility that I think Sharp doesn’t have journalistically.”

For his part, McGouran says he’s subscribed to GQ since he was 18, so starting a men’s lifestyle magazine was not so far-fetched for him. Prior to co-founding Sharp, he worked as the director of advertising and sales at Hockey News for five years, and later as the director of sales at Quebec-based Auto Journal Group, which published Motomag, Automag, Auto Journal, Québec Tuning, Auto Passion, and, starting in 2004, Driven. It was at Auto Journal Group that he first got to know La Fave, who would become Driven’s editor-in-chief.

It was actually La Fave who first approached Michel Crépault, the owner of the Auto Journal Group, in 2003, Crépault says, with the idea of starting a Toronto-based men’s lifestyle magazine with an automotive core. “He told me more, and quickly I said yes, because lifestyle was definitely in my court,” says Crépault in his thick Québécois accent. “Also, starting in Toronto was an interesting challenge for me, so I said yes.”

The now-defunct Driven was published six times a year and distributed through The Globe and Mail. Crépault appointed McGouran—someone he describes as the best sales guy he’s ever met—as the magazine’s director of sales. La Fave’s previous business partner and friend, Laurance Yap, became the artistic director, and with McGouran they made up the core of Driven, which at the time had a staff of about six people.

In mid-January 2008, the Auto Journal Group faced challenges—namely, the recession and the crippled automotive sector. But Crépault would come across even tougher times. The core team of McGouran, La Fave, and Yap was leaving Driven, and tendered their resignations, effective immediately. “I was in despair,” says Crépault. Almost four years after the fact, you can still hear the grief in his voice. “I was completely taken by surprise.” There was no explanation provided for the departure, not that one was needed to make sense of the situation. “I knew that if they were leaving together it was definitely to start something,” says Crépault.

“In hindsight, it’s clear the reason they left,” says Johnny Lucas, who took over as editor-in-chief of Driven the week after La Fave departed. “They wanted to do their own thing. I just thought the way it was done was not my idea of what was proper.”

Crépault says he sent McGouran a letter in 2010, about a year and a half after Driven and the Auto Journal Group folded, saying he finally understood why McGouran had left, although McGouran denies receiving it. In 2007, a marketing consultant from the Auto Journal Group advised Crépault to hire a director of sales for all the magazines the company published. McGouran wanted the position, and while Crépault thought highly of him, he didn’t feel he was right for the job—he didn’t speak French (Driven was the only English magazine in the group), and he didn’t live in Montreal. “I understand that he was, rightly so, disappointed,” says Crépault. “Maybe pissed off. Maybe at the time that was the button I pushed, without realizing it, that contributed to the three of them leaving.”

As for La Fave, Crépault says he could always sense he wanted to do something bigger, and he kept his door open for him. “But unfortunately, he took his decision without talking to me first, the way I would have wished that things could have happened.”

McGouran and La Fave simply say they left Driven, and took Yap with them, because they wanted to go in a different direction from where the magazine was heading. Both men wanted to start a Canadian-made publication modeled on GQ and Esquire—something they thought was missing in the market.Sharp would grow out of ideas discussed over a casual lunch at Vox on Adelaide Street East in Toronto—although they didn’t meet with that purpose in mind. “It was fate,” says McGouran. They launched Sharp four months later, after starting Contempo Media, which now also publishes the custom magazines Volkswagen, Audi, Time & Style, S/Style & Fashion, and M/Men of Style.

Fate aside, some questioned the pair’s decision to launch a men’s lifestyle magazine, especially in the heat of the recession. “I don’t know that anybody thought it was going to be an easy ride for them,” says the Star’s Cribb. Canadian men’s general-interest magazines have struggled to stay afloat over the past decade—Toro folded in 2007 after just under four years in print, followed by Driven. According to Toro’s former editor, Derek Finkle, the pool of potential advertisers was shallow, especially compared to what was available south of the border. Then with the recession in 2008, advertising dollars overall were down. Any magazine that didn’t have deep enough pockets to help ride it out until things improved was in trouble.

Were McGouran and La Fave concerned about this? They funded Sharp with their own money, so they were taking a big risk. “Absolutely,” says McGouran. “Sleepless nights. But at that point there was no turning back. It’s sort of like swimming halfway across the lake and saying, ‘Oh, I can’t make it, I better turn around.’ That was never really an option. We just had to find a way.”

A large part of that way was to concentrate on fashion. Indeed, Sharp has been able to attract male readers with its heavy fashion content, largely thanks to a growing interest in the subject. Simply, men are no longer as diffident as they were in the past about grooming and style. “Men have always cared,” says Henry Navarro Delgado, an assistant professor at Ryerson University’s School of Fashion. “It’s just a matter of publicizing that care.”

Enter Sharp, whose readers say they look to the magazine for style advice and ideas. “I would say that I wasn’t [a fashionable man],” says Ira Brenton, a business manager and reader of Sharp, “but I’m making more of an attempt right now, and Sharp is a good tool.” The accessibility of the brands and products featured in the publication has also helped build readership. “I know it’s Canadian,” observes Brenton, “so I know that a lot of the stuff will be Canadian-centric.”

But simply offering Canadian content may not be enough. “You can’t rely on that because I’m not sure enough people care,” says Finkle, adding that magazines need to offer comparable editorial to what can be found in the big men’s publications.

Back in 2008, Sharp’s inaugural issue featured Leo Rautins, a former Canadian basketball player and head coach of the Canadian men’s national basketball team—a national celebrity, but certainly not a George Clooney, Denzel Washington, or Leonardo DiCaprio, the Hollywood stars who would appear on subsequent covers. While products and style guides were evident in early issues, there were also full-length features covering such topics as child soldiers, counterfeit fashion, brain injuries, and the Beijing Olympics. Today, however, long-form investigative features in the magazine are scarce. While Finkle says he thinks Sharp has improved and has made genuine attempts in the past, he does wish it had “more stuff to read.”

Nonetheless, La Fave says the magazine has done well over the years. “We’ve had a number of pieces that I’m very proud of and that I think are definitely noteworthy,” he says. He’s entered features, such as the brain injury story, into the National Magazine Awards, albeit without success. “To not even receive a nomination had us wondering, Are we on the outside of this community or something?” La Fave says Sharp would love to publish stories that could be picked up by CBC. They’re on the lookout for great writers, he says, and want to make more space for features. They also recently commissioned award-winning writer Shaughnessy Bishop-Stall to contribute a fatherhood column. But, La Fave adds, with a hint of uncertainty in his voice, “A lot of the things we’ve done haven’t necessarily attracted attention within the writing community. Perhaps it’s just a case of Canada. Perhaps people are more inclined to go to Maclean’s or someone else with those types of stories.”

Certainly that wasn’t the case with Toro, which leaned heavily toward strong magazine journalism. The men’s lifestyle glossy was generally well regarded by readers and the industry, and was a frequent National Magazine Awards nominee—and winner. The content was witty, honest, intelligent without being overly intellectual, and at times unabashedly sexual. In one issue, you could read a serious, long-form feature on the Canadian Mafia and then a more humourous piece on the 24 pick-up lines that never work. While not all were award-winning articles, they sparked conversations. “If you went into a news meeting after Toro would come out,” says Cribb, “inevitably, somebody would say, ‘Hey, did you see that piece in Toro?’”

Sharp sparks a different kind of conversation. The publication does a great job of capturing the lighter side of the market, says Cribb, but adds, “I worry a little bit about the relationship with the advertisers and to what extent editorial is influenced by advertising.” In its September 2012 issue, Sharp ran a feature titled “Sharp’s Guide to Effortless Italian Style,” with ads from the Italian brewer Peroni. The fashion spread, shot on location in Italy, included a photograph that showed models drinking Peroni’s Nastro Azzurro beer. “We were in Italy and we thought it was appropriate to have Peroni there,” explains La Fave flatly.
The separation of editorial and advertising has long been a concern for editors, and it’s becoming increasingly difficult to uphold as advertisers make greater demands for reader engagement. But the advertising-editorial guidelines, created by a Magazines Canada task force to help editors, publishers, and advertisers maintain a distinction between editorial and ads, state: “Advertisements should not be placed immediately before, within or immediately after editorial content that includes mention of the advertised products or services. Exceptions are allowed for listings and contests.” So, was Sharp’s piece about Italian style more advertorial than actual editorial?
Other conversations have revolved around the ads on Sharp’s covers. In the April 2010 issue, an Audi ad was visible beneath a transparent plastic cover. Some argue this contravened one of the magazine industry’s key guidelines: “No advertisement may be promoted on the cover of the magazine or included in the editorial table of contents, unless it involves an editorially directed contest, promotion or sponsored one-off editorial extra.” Then in the September 2011 issue, there was a BMW ad that incorporated cover flaps that revealed the company’s tagline “Shape the Future”—one flap turned theSharp nameplate into “Shape” while the other revealed “the Future.” Again, Sharp arguably contravened the guidelines.
But Todd Latham, publisher of ReNew Canada, says the ethics of such covers are debatable. “It depends on how it’s done,” he says. As with other publishers and editors, he suggests the lines of editorial and advertising are blurred only when the ad is directly on the cover; flaps and gatefolds are similar to ads on the back of the cover, so those are okay. Consider: Cottage Life has published a “peel and reveal” cover featuring Corona beer andMaclean’s featured a “trapdoor” ad for the Audi Q5 on its cover.
Still, D.B. Scott, president of Impresa Communications Ltd., a magazine industry consultancy firm, says covers should not include ads, referring to such “flapvertising” as gimmicks. “It sends the message that everything in the magazine, including its brand and its cover, is a commodity and it’s for sale,” he says.

So, is Sharp more focused on landing advertisers than building its readership? A source close to the magazine says he worries that sometimes it “doesn’t care enough about the reader” and it’s concerned “more about creating that beautiful environment and creating a nice premium package.”

As Sharp marks its fifth year in the market, the questions are beginning to pile up. Will it finally win a National Magazine Award in something other than the beauty category (Sharp won gold for “Fragrances,” a visual spread that ran in the Fall/Winter 2011 Book for Men)? Will it once again give readers more than a look at the best new suits and manly gizmos? And will Canadians ever recognize Sharp in the same way they do GQ or Esquire?

On the cover of the December/January issue, Ryan Gosling wears a red lumberjack jacket and holds a flaming bottle. Across the page, in bold letters: “Ryan Gosling Is a Better Man Than We Are (and We’re Okay with That).” Would Sharp say the same if it were comparing itself to the heavyweights in the American men’s lifestyle market? More likely it would say, “GQ Is No Better Than We Are.” But to convince some industry observers of that, Sharp clearly still has some work to do. “It’s a catalogue of things to buy,” concludes Johnny Lucas, La Fave’s successor at Driven. “Is that a magazine? Meh.”

Photographs by Darrin Klimek

Prue Hemelrijk sits at her desk on her first day at The Canadian, a national general interest magazine. She’s unsure what’s in store for her as editor Harry Bruce, carrying a manuscript, makes his way toward her. He sets it on her desk and says, “We need to do something called fact-checking. Do you know what that is?”

She has no idea.

“I think they check the facts,” says Bruce.

Hemelrijk takes the manuscript and starts going through it line-by-line, underlining everything that looks like a fact. Then, in the margins, she notes where she thinks the information came from in her neat, economical writing and starts making calls.

Soon she is a pro, catching errors and sparring with writers over corrections. Earl McRae is in his office at the magazine when Hemelrijk comes to see him about a profile he wrote on a retired athlete. She has his manuscript in her hand and he can see all sorts of scribblings in the margin. “Oh God,” he thinks. “What the hell?”

“Earl, he says his stomach is not fat,” Hemelrijk says. “When he sits down it appears fat, but when he stands and is walking, his stomach is not fat.”

“Yes, he has a fat stomach. I was there; I saw him.”

“He says that when he stands his stomach is not fat,” she responds patiently. “It was just the way he was sitting.”

That tenacity, which McRae can now laugh about, helped Hemelrijk earn the respect of Canada’s top journalists and become the first-ever winner of a National Magazine Award (NMA) for Outstanding Achievement in 1990.

The practice of checking is straightforward: Researchers go through a story and identify every fact. They then conduct interviews with sources, examine documents and do whatever else is necessary to confirm everything in the piece. “I think fact-checking’s terribly important,” says Hemelrijk. “It drives me crazy when I read things and they are not accurate. I think, ‘That is not right. Why didn’t they take the trouble to find out?’”

But after setting the standard for rigorous fact-checking, she said goodbye to the craft 13 years ago. Since then, the magazine industry has gradually followed, jeopardizing the accuracy that gives long-form journalism its credibility.

* * *

Hemelrijk was born in Liverpool, England in 1927 to a wealthy family in the cotton business. Nannies cared for her and her siblings in their childhood home, which had a separate nursery wing. But in 1932, her family lost its fortune after the cotton market crashed and she lived hand-to-mouth for the next several years. Eventually, the family got back on its feet and she was able to study piano at the Royal Academy of Music in London. At 28, she began working for the Arts Council of Great Britain. Close to the Arts Council were a number of shipping company offices, and she would often pass by at lunchtime, wondering what it would be like to take a trip by sea. So in 1956, at the age of 29, Hemelrijk quit her job and boarded an ocean liner headed for Canada. She landed in Montreal and made her way to Toronto where, through connections, she got a job as an editorial assistant at Maclean’s. She moved to Chatelaine a year later. In 1959, she returned to England, but five-and-a-half years and a broken engagement later, she settled back in Toronto. In 1966, she started working at The Canadian. Distributed on Saturdays in 13 newspapers across the country, it had a circulation of nearly two million.

Bruce, who hired Hemelrijk, remembers being struck by her intelligence and proper manners. Then, when she started fact-checking, he was impressed with her knack for isolating what needed to be verified. “Some checkers would be so literal that they were kind of missing the point. For instance, a writer might make an extreme exaggeration as a joke. A checker might think that was a mistake. But not Prue,” says Bruce. “She was not just smart—she was smart enough that you could trust her absolutely.” David Cobb, a managing editor at The Canadian, recalls her strong will. “When she got in her head that something was wrong, you better change it or accept the fact that she was going to change it instead.” Hemelrijk attributes this to “a terrible eye for detail” and admits, “Anything that looks even slightly shady I say, ‘Wait a minute, there’s something wrong here,’ and sit with it until I get it. It’s the kind of silly thing I excelled at.”

Hemelrijk may call it silly now, but there was a time when that skill was highly sought after. Time first introduced fact-checking after it was founded in 1923. The New Yorker did the same in 1927 after mistakes began appearing in its pages. A profile of poet Edna St. Vincent Millay, for example, incorrectly stated her father’s profession (he was a school teacher, not a stevedore) and said her mother’s memory was weak. Millay’s mother wrote a letter chastising the publication for not verifying the information and listing other inaccuracies in the piece. After this embarrassment, The New Yorker famously built one of the most scrupulous fact-checking departments in the magazine industry—a department for which Hemelrijk says she aspired to work.

Initially, editors and publishers saw checking as work suitable for intelligent women—but not men—and didn’t consider it as important as writing or editing. Time’s fact-checkers were bright, young females from well-respected families who had graduated from the right schools. Over time, this “women’s work” became a staple at magazines throughout Canada and the United States.

Not everyone welcomed that. Some writers, including McRae, saw checking as a nuisance. Although fond of Hemelrijk, he’d sneak into the copy department’s offices at The Canadian to see what notes the checker had made on his manuscript. “I felt that fact-checkers could sometimes be a little too precise, a little too anal. If you’re writing, you’re being creative at times,” he says. Now a columnist for the Ottawa Sun, McRae admits the practice can come in handy with details such as the spellings of names and places, but believes the writer’s research and observations need to be trusted. He doesn’t think it’s fair to always take the source’s word over the writer’s after a fact-checking call.

But even the best journalists can be fooled. When Paul Grescoe, a writer for The Canadian, submitted his story about a 70-year-old running superstar, he had no reason to think anything was amiss. He’d been in the man’s home, had seen all his trophies and had spent ample time interviewing him. After all this, Grescoe and his editors were stunned when letters started rolling in from the organizations that ran the events the man claimed to have won. As it turned out, they had never heard of him—he made it all up. Editor Dennis Harvey, who didn’t believe in fact-checking, had earlier reassigned the magazine’s checkers to new duties. If only checkers had called the race organizers to confirm the man’s story—a relatively quick process—the magazine could have avoided embarrassment. When Harvey moved on, his successor, Michael Hanlon, reinstated them.

Hemelrijk stayed at The Canadian until 1977. She then left for The City, where she first met writer D.B. Scott. “Prue was a kind and courtly person, but she was relentless,” he recalls. “The conversation would start, ‘Oh, good morning, sir. I have a few teeny, tiny questions,’ and 40 minutes later you were still on the phone with the blood running out of your ears because she had so carefully taken the story apart.” Hemelrijk enjoyed deconstructing each story, fact by fact. “If you were feeling vindictive against somebody and they got something wrong you’d think, ‘Ha! Got ’em!’”

When The City, which was owned by Torstar, folded in 1980, Hemelrijk and the rest of the staff interviewed for other positions within the company’s empire. One after another, they returned from the interviews with bad news. Then it was Hemelrijk’s turn. While she was waiting, one of the bosses saw her and said, “Oh hi, Prue. You surely didn’t think we were going to let you go, did you?”

But she lasted just four months as copy editor for Starweek, a TV magazine, before she got fed up with the pointless gossip. When she told the editor she was quitting, he said, “I’m surprised you lasted this long.”

Hemelrijk went freelance in May 1980, working for the Toronto Star, Toronto Life, Saturday Night, enRoute,Canadian Art and Financial Post Magazine. Later, it was during her stint at the short-lived Vista, a flashy business magazine, that she made her most memorable mistake: The cover line on an issue with a Hong Kong package read “Hong Hong.”  No one caught the error in editorial and it got all the way to the art department. She made photocopies and stuck them on the walls of the copy department as a cruel reminder to herself and her colleagues.

* * *

After 32 years of checking the facts, Hemelrijk retired in 1997 at the age of 70. Her departure coincided with a shift away from a commitment to meticulous fact-checking in the Canadian magazine industry. When Ken Whyte became editor of the now-defunct Saturday Night in 1994, he slashed the in-house fact-checking department in half and relied on freelancers to pick up the slack. Three years later, Canadian Businessswitched from a monthly to a twice-monthly production schedule and introduced a lighter checking system to keep up with the increased frequency. Editors flagged what they felt needed to be checked; everything else went virtually unchecked. After a few weeks, the magazine reverted back to its full checking policy. ButMaclean’s made similar cuts to its fact-checking department when Whyte became editor and publisher in 2005. Now that he’s publisher of CB, that magazine, too, has slashed its fact-checking department. Managing editor Conan Tobias says the cuts were to save costs; Whyte did not return calls seeking comment. CB now only checks pieces written by freelance writers or particularly contentious or number-heavy stories. Staff writers are expected to be extra diligent in their reporting and to check their own work. “We’re no less committed to accuracy, but the writer is more responsible for it now,” says Tobias. “Writers make mistakes and checkers make mistakes too. It’s never going to be 100 percent accurate, no matter what you do. No publication is 100 percent accurate.”

Pat Ireland was one of the checkers let go in the most recent CB restructuring. A checker for over 25 years and with the magazine for 20, she feels the cuts will be detrimental to the publication. “It makes a lot more sense to check [business magazines] because the people who read them know what you’re talking about. If you get numbers wrong, if you get something foolish wrong, it just stands out.” It also erodes reader confidence—a huge setback for any magazine.

Another blow to the tradition has been an increasing reliance on interns. Some magazines, includingChatelaine and Toronto Life, use interns who are trained and closely monitored. Both have staff checkers who vet their work and handle challenging pieces. Linda Besner didn’t know what fact-checking was when she started interning at The Walrus in 2008, but she had to learn fast: She started checking everything from sidebars to major features after receiving a tutorial from managing editor Jared Bland on her first day. AtMore magazine, copy editor Brenda Thompson oversees interns. She starts them off with back-of-book pieces or shorter features and they work their way up to more complex stories.

The reliance on unpaid or under-trained staff can be detrimental to a magazine’s credibility, says Craig Silverman, author of Regret the Error: How Media Mistakes Pollute the Press and Imperil Free Speech. “It defies logic to say that eliminating an entire phase of quality control will not degrade the quality of your work,” he says, adding that fact-checking is an integral part of the journalistic process, just as reporting and editing are. He thinks employing people with little or no experience is not ideal. “It makes an organization feel like it’s doing some checking. When it comes to what is worth investing in, fact-checking is absolutely seen as second class.”

More than credibility is at stake. Brian MacLeod Rogers, a lawyer who specializes in media law and litigation, says fact-checking is often one of the few tools a magazine has to protect itself in libel suits. Under a recent Supreme Court of Canada ruling, a publication can protect itself by proving it took thorough measures to ensure the accuracy of a piece. And magazines that do light checks or rely on interns diminish the protection fact-checking provides. Rogers says interns don’t make the best witnesses in libel cases and an experienced and respected fact-checker has more authority. Although only a fraction of defamation suits in Canada actually make it to trial, mistakes can still have serious legal and financial repercussions for a publication.

* * *

When it came time to choose a winner for the inaugural NMA for Outstanding Achievement, there was no question in the judges’ minds the winner should be Hemelrijk. David Olive, now a columnist with the Star, was president of the NMAs in 1990 and wanted to honour someone who rarely enjoyed the limelight. Don Obe, an editor at The Canadian in the 1970s, says, “She got the award not only for her own accomplishments, but for what she represented, working in the trenches.”

The award came as a shock to Hemelrijk. When Olive called to deliver the news, he first asked, “Are you sitting down?” Her immediate response was, “The committee must’ve been drunk.”

A week before the NMA banquet in 1990, Hemelrijk fell on a slippery road, tipsy from a late-night dinner with photographer Bert Bell on the day Vista folded. The accident left her with a bad hip injury. Although her colleagues wanted to carry her to the awards, the doctors would not have it, so Barbara Sutton, managing editor of City & Country Home at the time, read her speech: “I’d like to share the award with all those other equally dedicated and devoted, accurate and precise, tenacious and tactful, punctilious and perfect—are we running out of adjectives?—copy editors, proofreaders and fact-checkers across the country who have toiled, are still toiling and will continue to toil in the background at what some might regard as a thankless job.”

Hemelrijk moved to Victoria in 1998, relocating for the better weather conditions and what she considered an agreeable cost of living. The 83-year-old is cheerful as ever, with her proper British accent and collegial nature. She spends her days practising the cello (which she took up at age 79), playing in a small orchestra and socializing with her friends from the Victoria Women’s Newcomers Club. This winter she had a marathon celebration for her birthday that lasted several days. (And, every year, she throws her beloved Paddington Bear doll its own birthday party. The parties are sometimes catered with fine food, lots of wine and, of course, a birthday cake. Hemelrijk says her 36-year-old Paddington is a big part of her life. She bought it in 1974 and had it customized to her specifications—blue hat and coat, and size four children’s boots.)

She no longer does any fact-checking or copy editing. “When I moved to Victoria, I thought, that’s it. Goodbye.” And goodbye it was. A self-professed workhorse, Hemelrijk started checking by chance and continued because editors recognized her skill. She also got an undeniable thrill from the chase. “I found it rather fun. It was like detective work.” She believes that accuracy is vital to the magazine industry.

“People read things and they think it’s gospel truth,” she says, “and if it isn’t gospel truth then it’s sad.”

A nun who tended to her in the rehabilitation centre after her hip injury called her an independent perfectionist. “That’s me,” says Hemelrijk. “If I ever have a grave, I’d put that on my grave.” (The facts are, though: She wants to be cremated and have her ashes scattered in the sea.)

They still wanted to expand, but how? Where? “Instead of business we know, weekly papers, in a place we don’t, Vancouver, let’s try a business we don’t know, glossy lifestyle mags, in a place we do,” is how Shaw sums up their decision. “Once the idea came up, we stayed up late going through the stacks and stacks of mags that Christine and I have, looking at the world of magazine publishing with new, fresh eyes,” he remembers nostalgically.

The result was Coastlife, a 54-page full-colour magazine with a print run of 25,000. With strong graphics, historical features about the Black Loyalist Heritage Society and Chester’s 150 years as a haven for prominent international residents, and pieces celebrating life in the Maritimes like “40 Reasons We Love Atlantic Canada” (number 13: The Chickenburger restaurant in Bedford, Nova Scotia), the magazine was an enthusiastic exploration of the region without being too smug. One memorable cover featured Rick Mercer of This Hour Has 22 Minutes fame. Which was about as long as the book lasted: it appeared just six times, before dying in October 2001, joining general-interest East Coast titles Axiom (1974-1978), Atlantic Insight(1979-1989) and Cities (1987-1989).

It is perhaps no coincidence that just months before Coastlife‘s demise, yet another general-interest magazine had been launched in the region. But Saltscapes was no late-night brainwave. It was the result of 18 months and $150,000 of research by Linda Gourlay, who holds an MBA. She and her husband, Jim, spent a further $500,000 on a subscription drive that netted them 11,000 subscribers by the time the first issue appeared in May 2000. Those readers received a full-colour, oversize glossy with a $3.95 cover price and 96 pages featuring stories about Frenchy’s, a chain of popular second-hand clothing stores; Mike Duffy; the P.E.I.-born newscaster, and the eastern cougar.

On the cover was a lovely image of two Adirondack chairs on a deck overlooking the sea, but, though there was some beautiful photography, the inside layouts resembled ads. Much editorial space was devoted to inoffensive items like gardening, birdwatching, and recipes columns, although there was a feature on Newfoundland’s shrinking coastal communities.

Jim Gourlay looks like Santa Claus sans the stocking cap but the resemblance ends there – he’s much more worldly than the jolly old fellow. He is unapologetic about his magazine’s romanticized view of Atlantic Canada. “I come from a hard news background and it’s really frustrating for me not to get into that stuff, issues, controversies, but the market said we want a feel-good magazine and that’s what we’re giving them.”

As a displaced East Coaster who loves Atlantic Canada and magazines, I wonder whether sweet but shallowSaltscapes is the best Atlantic readers can hope for. Some of Canada’s best music comes out of the Maritimes, but it seems the region’s magazines are destined to suffer from a lack of capital and vision. Still, I do cheer the indomitable Maritime spirit that prompts people to keep trying to publish magazines in a historically hostile territory.

The brainchild of Bill Belliveau, an advertising guy from New Brunswick, Atlantic Insight hit a peak circulation of 65,000 but never achieved profitability during its decade-long existence. “The first year and a half was wonderful,” Harry Bruce says wistfully as he reminisces about the beginning of Atlantic Insight. Bruce, the celebrated writer and editor who now writes the “Back Porch” column for Saltscapes, was the inaugural editor, stepping down after 18 months when financial problems arose. He remembers how, when Atlantic Insight was first launched, Charlie Lynch, a New Brunswicker and a political columnist for Southam Press at the time, paid it the back-handed compliment of describing it as “too slick for Maritimers.”

In a January 1983 piece for Canadian Business, Kimber wrote that Belliveau had had a good idea but not enough money. Some bad business decisions, a devastating six-week postal strike in 1981, and a downturn in the economy forced Belliveau, in 1982, to hand over Insight to ad salesman Jack Daley, who in turn peddled it to book publisher James Lorimer in 1985. As the money woes mounted, circulation slipped, and the magazine’s once creative and comprehensive coverage of the Atlantic became a jumble of civic boosterism articles with a few recipes thrown in. Still, Kimber remembers that readers felt almost a proprietary interest in the magazine. “It filled a hole. Frankly, there hasn’t been anything like it since.”

Not that Shaw and his partners didn’t try. “Coastlife was offering something different. It was more literary, visionary, with less rug-hooking,” says Catherine Salisbury. She and her partners even briefly considered using the name Atlantic Insight for their magazine because they wanted to recapture its essence and its readership. As Shaw recalls, “We were romantic, passionate and intuitive, and business-wise we knew the loss we could handle. We were willing to run at a loss.” Shaw’s magazine publishing philosophy definitely is along the lines of print what you believe in and the readers and advertisers will come. “We had a quality magazine with a long-term business strategy, attracting people to quality,” says Shaw.

To Gourlay, though, romantic ideals have no place in publishing “This leap of faith that says, ‘I’m a journalism graduate, therefore I can run a business called magazine publishing’ is bullshit,” he told a King’s journalism school reporter in 2000. To be fair, Shaw had been successfully publishing The Coast for five years before launching Coastlife, but it seems his passion and intuition weren’t enough to keep the magazine from being sunk by Saltscapes.

But Shaw is pretty passionate in expressing his opinion of Saltscapes. “What does Saltscapes mean anyway?” he asks as he agitatedly rolls around on his office stool. “Self-congratulation isn’t interesting.Saltscapes has all the bad traditions, old and not challenging and not interesting, even for their demographic. I guess their demographic doesn’t want to be challenged.” Shaw and the staff at The Coast often derisively refer to Saltscapes as ” S-scapes,” replacing “salt” with numerous words beginning with “s.” Shaw feels that Atlantic Canadians settle for less when it comes to their local magazines. “The market isn’t educated enough to diversify itself. No one knows about magazines here,” says Shaw.

Gilfoy is very pulled together in a dark grey suit, a very light grey dress shirt and a medium grey silk tie. His grey curly hair, parted in the centre, springs off his head, but the rest of him personifies what his publications are all about: wealth creation. But before the Lexus (leased, he confides) and the elegant clothes, Gilfoy spent some hard-scrabble years as co-owner, with Jim Gourlay, of a decidedly more downscale title.Eastern Woods & Waters, launched 18 years ago as an Atlantic Insight spinoff, is what the trade calls a “hook and bullet” book.

Gilfoy and Gourlay started the magazine in 1985, amicably ending their partnership in 1993. Gourlay stayed with Eastern Woods & Waters and Gilfoy left to start upAtlantic Progress (now just Progress).

“TOP 101” is the licence plate on Gilfoy’s black 2002 Lexus ES 300. He throws over a copy ofProgress‘s 2002 Top 101 special issue, which ranks Atlantic Canada’s most successful companies. “That’s the biggest issue of a business magazine in the past four years in Canada,” he says curtly. “Page count, 210, 60 per cent ads.”

Advertising is what keeps most commercial magazines afloat, and it’s particularly critical for controlled-circulation titles. Out east, Saltscapes is the only larger magazine that has a substantial subscriber base: 33,000 of its 40,000 circulation.The 10-times-a-yearProgress, with its 27,000 controlled circulation, is more typical of magazines in the region.To Gourlay, that means a larger investment than other publishers.”With all due respect to my associates in the industry, we’re the only paid circulation company, so we’re doing the hard work,” he says.

Stephen Kimber knows hard work. He produced Cities magazine, aToronto Life for Halifax published 10 times a year, out of his home from 1987 to 1989. As he leans back in his office chair at King’s he’s counting up how much money he lost when the magazine went under. Even though the second to last issue of Citieshad the most advertising ever, he and his remaining investors were in so much debt that the banks came in and said enough. “I think I was personally on the hook for $30,000 for the magazine itself, the printer didn’t get paid in the end, altogether around $70,000 in total. It doesn’t seem as much now, but it was when you had a mortgage and kids,” he says with a hint of pain.

And Kimber is also pained by how magazine publishing on the east coast has been affected by advertising, or the lack thereof. “Atlantic Insight made a lot of sense editorially but commercially it never did,” he says. One of the main problems is that the region’s population is too geographically dispersed. Its 2.2 million residents are spread through four provinces with only three Cities having a population over 100,000.

To survive, regional magazines need both retail and national advertisers, but retail operators don’t want to advertise too far away from home: why pitch your Halifax clothing store to readers in St. John? And national advertisers? “For them this is always a discretionary buy. In good times they will put money into down here to increase the penetration in this region, but as soon as the advertising market contracts, they pull back,” observes Kimber. So is Atlantic Canada’s population just too small to support more than a few magazines? “I think there’s some truth to that,” says Kimber, “although you look at magazines like Saltscapes and it seems to be doing reasonably well right now.”

Gilfoy also acknowledges that Atlantic Canada is a tough place to find advertising. “The regional advertising community here is not mature enough to be at a stage where they are consistently supporting a vibrant and growing magazine publishing sector, and Atlantic Canada is not sufficiently attractive to the national advertiser. The perception is it’s not big enough. It’s frustrating,” says Gilfoy with a resigned shrug. However, he concludes, “We can’t be worried about what people in Toronto or Ottawa think.”

Shrewdly, the Gourlays did worry about the Upper Canadians. “Linda did something very smart,” says Gourlay. “In the work up to Saltscapes she went to Toronto and pleaded naïveté and engaged some of the movers and shakers in the advertising community in Toronto. She asked for their help in putting her marketing plan together and gave them ownership. When we were ready to go, they were there.”

The East Coast diaspora also represents another advertising problem. Kendra Thompson and her husband, Dan, grew up in Rothesay, New Brunswick, just outside of Saint John. They’ve come to the Big Smoke to make some money with the intention of moving home to raise their yet-to-be children. Kendra, a private school teacher, is sitting in her newly painted taupe living room. On the low coffee table in front of her are pieces of Maritime pottery and piles of magazines, including Saltscapes. “Saltscapes is great. It’s a piece of home,” says Thompson, who receives the magazine as a gift from her in-laws.

Gourlay says people regularly buy eight to 10 gift subscriptions of his magazine, many of them for friends and family living away. “It’s an interesting problem to have,” he observes. “We’re having to work quite hard to keep the in-region subscription levels in line. Advertisers are buying Atlantic Canada from us. They don’t want to buy Ontario. There’s a tolerance level but we’re pushing it.” The most recent circulation figures for the magazine indicate that 16 per cent of the readers are out-of-region, a level that may indeed test advertisers’ tolerance.

the highlands links golf course in cape bre-ton has been ranked the best golf course in the country. Or, according to Neville Gilfoy, “The most spectacular on the planet.” He and a friend played there this past September with a man they’d just met from southern Ontario. There were foxes, eagles, and two moose out on the course that day. “Along about the 10th or 11th hole he said, ‘I’m going to tell you guys something,'” relates Gilfoy. “‘You have no idea how good you guys have it here. The people in Upper Canada have no idea what goes on here.’ And I said, ‘John, I’m going to tell you something. We know exactly how good we have it here. We just don’t tell anybody because we don’t want fuckers like you coming here all the time.’ We had a great laugh after he asked me if I was dead serious or not.”

Gilfoy is certainly dead serious about his business. Atlantic Progress became just Progress this past January so that he can begin to expand to other markets, including New England, which is also a region that Gourlay is looking at. Both Gourlay and Gilfoy have long-term business plans for their publications and are willing to wait to branch out at the right time.

This should be good news for Kimber and his students, but he still wishes that Atlantic Canada could produce more magazines with less formulaic content. “We have students atProgress, graduates atWhere, the associate editor at Saltscapes is from here,” he says. “I don’t think they are doing what they are capable of or what would be really interesting.” Kimber shares Shaw’s sentiments about Saltscapes. “You’ll get tourists who buy it, people who are from here and are away who will buy it, but there isn’t much in it to excite anybody.” Still, Catherine Salisbury, one of Coastlife‘s creators, admires the Gourlay’s financial commitment to Atlantic Canada. “You can shit on their content but it’s pretty commendable what they’ve done. We didn’t do it,” says Salisbury. And Shaw admits, “Saltscapes had a business plan, they rented mailing lists, did direct mail. We didn’t go for any of that.”

Though Shaw and his partners tried to raise the bar on Atlantic Canadian magazine publishing they didn’t have the money. Shaw might try again some day, but as he remembers his grief and relief at Coastlife‘s demise, the chances look slim: “I learned everything there is to know about magazines. Reading them is fun. Writing for them is mostly fun. Producing one’s a big pain in the ass.”

Life‘s editor at the time was John Macfarlane, who’s currently at Saturday Night. When he headed there, we talked on the telephone. He promised he’d be calling me-that it wasn’t a matter of if, but when-because he needed good writers. He’s never called, but then he’s been real busy publishing Canada’s most important whatzit against all odds and good judgment, and I’ve been out a lot. Moral: stay by the phone, and you will get to profile bureaucrats, bagmen and cabinet ministers of the hour, at whatever length you please.

But I digress. Let’s see how the piece you’re reading came about. Marq de Villiers, Life‘s present editor in excelsis, decided a couple of years ago to savage his regular contributors, and quite naturally turned to me. Many people have flirted with the idea of a Life parody, but nothing’s ever come of it, and just as well. Readers might not be able to tell the difference-and if by chance they did, the magazine might not recover. In any case, DeV, having regained his senses or lost his nerve, depending on how you look at it, decided not to run these gems of wit. They sat in a drawer until last October, when he realized that one of his upcoming Ryerson journalism classes (Penmanship and Advertorials 101; batteries not included) was bereft of content. In desperation, he seized the manuscript, summoned his failing powers, and treated his youthful charges to what I’m told was a spell-binding recitation. Several of these golden lads and lasses happened to be putting this publication together, and moved with agility to cook up a piece labelled “parody of magazine writing styles” by someone named Ed Haylwood. But they too had second thoughts-prompted I suspect by Don Obe, a.k.a. the Gloomy Chairman of Ryerson’s journalism school. Perhaps he figured that to float a bunch of sorry pastiches without permitting readers access to the originals might push everybody’s luck, and (considering that he previously occupied DeV’s office; the piano wire and leg-hold traps have since been removed) be a mite incestuous to boot. So it was that I got a very nice note from Janet Crocker, this issue’s editor (who’d meanwhile bothered to check my name), asking for a fast 1,500 words on whatever tickled my fancy, in return for $200. News Flash: Ryerson has been transported back in time to the fiscal year 1973; you read it here first.

I therefore propose to amuse myself by writing about how so-called freelancers paint themselves into corners, and reflecting on the nature of one such small pond. You all know Toronto Life-the last bastion of lucite bidets, the Magazine for the Whining Rich, and so on. You’ve heard that it demeans a noble calling, grovels at the feet of powerful interests, and in general compromises all and sundry to various points of the compass. Come on by any time, and you’ll find once-upright human beings knocking off the latest light-weight atrocity, and cackling the while. One has only to survey the editorial pecking order to grasp why matters have reached so dire a pass. DeV governs the whole enterprise by osmosis, ably abetted by Steve Trumper, who should return without delay to his former duties as a police dispatcher, and Jocelyn Laurence, who secretly mainlines glue. All the work, such as it is, gets done by scrofulous juniors, who drudge for pitiful wages and photostat their resumes when no one’s looking. Worse yet, Peter Herrndorf (the publisher, and welcome to it) prowls to and fro like a superannuated elf, patting luckless bystanders in a bizarre, post-est fashion, the better to further dilute their Journalistic Objectivity.

Well, now. As Hunter Thompson (to whom we turn more and more frequently for solace in these unsettled times) has remarked, the only example of truly unbiased reportage he ever clapped eyes on was an antishoplifting camera in the general store in Woody Creek, Colo. Let me rephrase that. The camera’s a fine and private device, no question about it, but Life is a cabaret. In other words, I can’t think of anyplace I’d rather (albeit loosely) be, warts and all.

Mind you, I’ve been elsewhere, mostly to no good end. I’ve written for magazines too fierce to contemplate, mumbled away on the radio, ghosted books and churned out stage revues-anything to keep jail and craziness at bay. The only National Magazine Award I ever won was for something that appeared in Quest, affording Michael Enright, its former whatzit, his sole moment of glory at last year’s dog and pony show. That was interesting, because I’d submitted the piece myself, on a bet. The entry fee was $25, which paid off 400 times over. Moral: aggressive promotion, if nothing else, permits otherwise dormant editors to behave like a jack-in-the-box. A string of famous victories, to be sure! But somehow I keep returning to the Front Street fern bar, for one very simple reason.

Why do you think the Life parodies worked? Because the magazine attracts Canada’s best writers, who bring to it their best efforts, knowing they’ll be treated accordingly. Some, it’s true, tip-toe to the brink of excess, but that’s OK. I’m talking about skill, substance and infinite variety, not to mention the modicum of trust, affection and respect that exists between traditionally warring parties. Whenever I stumble across yet another tedious diatribe bemoaning the death/dearth/demise of general interest publications, I wonder where the author’s parked his/her criteria. Does nobody read Life when it’s firing on all cylinders?

Maybe not. Maybe even the so-called readers don’t. Would they derive equal satisfaction if Life were solid ads, relieved only by the odd puff piece on up-market indulgences? I hope not, which is why I take photo captions to five and six drafts, just in case. It’s my belief that widespread misconception (only a lifestyle mag in a gilded cage) hinges on context; that if you took Life‘s editorial content and put it somewhere else. unbuttressed by high-priced shoe stores and million-dollar condos, its merits would shine more clearly. Of course, if the shoe stores weren’t footing the bill for said merits, we’d all be out of a) luck, b) work, c) town. Check one, then let it pass.

But no one is guiltless, let alone me. For better or (quite probably) worse, I have become identified with Gomorrahon-the-Newsstands. I have published hundreds of thousands of words in Life‘s glossy pages, speeding the development of a house style known as Urban Glib, and anonymously rejigged an equal number. (My delight is to see a patchwork piece in nomination for the Mag Awards; a short list is available on request). I have watched the passing of several editors, for whom I’ve harbored degrees of regard ranging from qualified to zip. I have walked out once, and on occasion objected to the balance tilting too far toward what seemed to me real triviality. I am not fond, for instance, of laundry lists, to which Life is prone. The most recent example was last year’s journalistic “inner circle.” I was there, along with half the masthead. branded a “top stylist” and “bona fide curmudgeon,” both of which struck me as a premature obit and raised the time-honored question: Where do I go from here?

Maybe that’s the problem. There ain’t a better hole, which is why I sit brooding over projects of extreme complexity, pocketing vast sums, and flaunting my contributing editor’s credit card in posh bistros. (In fact, Revenue Canada alternately sends me flowers and forms inquiring why I’ve never had a job, retainer or dental plan). But what the hell! Because I lurk about, fomenting mopery and doom, I’ve become a quasi-fixture, like the acoustical dividers. My eccentricities are largely tolerated; my copy (which would otherwise be hacked to bits by fevered guardians of Good Syntax) is usually waved on through, despite its manifest lapses. A cosy arrangement, you’ll admit-but not necessarily a healthy one.

So I have an idea. Trumper got all enthused about my writing this piece (although he had no idea what I was up to). “Wow!” he chirped. “The Ryerson Review is read by lots of influential people!” Well, if so, let’s indulge in a test case. I place on record the fact that I’ve felt a tad restless at Life, ever since they suppressed dwarf-tossing contests. So I’m sporadically available, just for a change of pace. Anybody who wants fifth- and sixth-draft hack work is welcome to call. But fair’s fair; if you place an ad, you pay the paper. That’s why I hereby pledge to forward to a Ryerson scholarship, or any other fund designated by the School of Journalism, 10 per cent of all monies that stem from this announcement in the year following its appearance. Plus, I’ll write a follow-up piece (no charge) for next year’s issue, detailing what if any offers arise. But where, I hear you chorus, should prospective benefactors be in touch? Care of the Front Street fern bar is bound to reach me. In case you hadn’t noticed, that’s where good writers tend to congregate, uttering languid, incestuous cries, and scribbling their names over and over, in the hope that someone, someday, gets them halfway right.

But sometimes they don’t. Perhaps they arbitrarily change the writer’s words in such a way that a sentence, a paragraph, or even the whole story is distorted. Perhaps they change the writer’s point of view. Or perhaps they rewrite the article completely, taking away the writer’s most important contribution-her authorship. She may then demand that her name be taken off the story-or, as a last resort, that the whole story be withdrawn from publication.

Wendy Dennis is just one of a number of writers who have had to make such demands of Chatelainemagazine. Dennis used to contribute to Chatelaine fairly regularly-until last summer, when she had what she calls a “unique and horrifying experience” with the magazine.

She was asked to do a story in March, 1985, about Wendy Crawford, a 19-year-old model who was left a paraplegic after a car accident. Crawford had been on her way to the Toronto airport for a flight to Tokyo and her first big modelling job when a drunk driver rammed his car into hers. Dennis researched the story, wrote it and sent it in. She was asked to do it over again, but she admits this first rewrite was her own fault: she had mistakenly written the piece in the first person, as if she herself were Wendy Crawford telling her own story. “That was my mistake,” she says. So this first request to redo the piece didn’t surprise her.

And the long letter that followed the rewrite asking more questions and suggesting more changes didn’t surprise her either. Each of Chatelaine‘s four senior editors had gone over the story, and it seemed to Dennis that each was vying with the others to “out-fix” the story. “But that goes with the territory at Chatelaine,” she says. “I was prepared for it.” But she was not prepared for what was to follow.

She did the second rewrite and got it back a few days later. The editor who had assigned the piece had attached a note asking if this “condensed version” would be acceptable. The piece had been completely rewritten by the Chatelaine editors. Not only were Dennis’s style and voice gone, but her point of view had been changed. Dennis notes the irony of this: in one of her first letters from Chatelaine, the assigning editor had written, “I think the pathos of her situation would come through much more strongly seen through your eyes.” But in Chatelaine‘s version, most of Dennis’s personal observations and insights had disappeared. “All the feeling, all the humanity in the story had been squeezed out,” she says. In her estimation, the magazine had taken a dramatic and compelling story and turned it into a “computer printout.”

“They might have been writing about 10 Christmas gifts,” she says. There were huge cuts in the story. Many of Wendy Crawford’s own words had been removed-quotes that in Dennis’s view would have made the reader’s heart ache for Crawford. Dennis says the Chatelaine version would have hurt Crawford. “It made her look like a widget.” She told Chatelaine she would simply withdraw the piece unless they went back to her version of the story.

A couple of days later, she got the story back again. It was her own writing this time, though still with massive cuts. Enclosed was a two-page letter with still more questions. The assigning editor was asking for more points clarifying exactly what had happened at the scene of Crawford’s accident. One request particularly shocked Dennis. The editor wanted to add a dramatic detail to the description of the accident-a detail Dennis knew was highly questionable.

Wendy Crawford had been pinned in the car after the crash. Her lifeguarding experience told her she definitely had a serious spinal injury-she had lost almost all feeling in her body-and that she should not move. The smell of leaking gas was only one of many things that overwhelmed and terrified her. She was afraid she was going to die. The Chatelaine editor wanted to clarify and substantiate Crawford’s fear of death by saying that rescuers had used blowtorches to try to cut Crawford out of the car: she was afraid the torches would ignite the leaking gas and the car would explode. The editor then suggested taking it all out if the fact-checker found it to be false. Dennis refused. Nothing in her extensive research had suggested the use of blowtorches. In a letter to Chatelaine, she wrote, “I have written for several major publications, both in Canada and the United States, and never have I encountered a situation in which an editor requested that I invent a fact….”

It was not until August that Wendy Dennis and Chatelaine reached an agreement. It was a compromise,” says Dennis. The magazine agreed to publish, more or less, her version of the story, with her thoughts and her point of view. “They wanted that piece-it was their story. They might have realized that if I had pulled it, I could have sold it somewhere else.” Dennis hasn’t seen the final galleys yet-she agreed to publish the piece only after approving them-but she knows this will be her last story for Chatelaine.

Dennis is not the only writer who has balked at Chatelaine‘s treatment of freelancers and their writing. Over the last eight years or so, many writers have smarted under or rebelled against the magazine’s editorial methods. They include such established bylines as Carroll Allen, Norman Snider, Sandra Martin, Carsten Stroud and Terry Poulton. They also include some well-known freelancers who would not allow their names to be used for fear of losing a good, if difficult, market (Chatelaine pays up to $2,500 for a major article). One such writer wrote her last piece for Chatelaine three years ago. “Chatelaine has a house style,” the writer says. “And the magazine tends to browbeat writers into that style.” She adds, “Chatelaine doesn’t trust writers and doesn’t give them enough leeway.”

Her last story for the magazine was on female heroes. The editors told her to write the story from her own perspective. “It would be me talking,” she recalls. Or so she thought.

She wrote the story. But before the fixing and rewriting began, the assigning editor she was working with abruptly left the magazine. “The new editor told me I had to cut 100 lines from a 600-line galley,” she says. “Besides, I was told, there was too much personal stuff in the story that had to come out anyway.” The writer said she would take out 50 lines and no more. The editor said that wasn’t enough. So the writer pulled her byline. The story eventually ran, under a house name. “What they wanted was not the story I had been contracted to do,” the writer says. “I would assume that because a magazine asks me to write a story for them, it wants my style. But you can’t make that assumption at Chatelaine.”

Chatelaine‘s editors have a standard reply to most writers’ objections: they point to the magazine’s huge commercial success-the end that justifies the means. If their logic is questionable, their success is not. Every month Chatelaine comes out about 200 pages strong: fat, glossy and full of ads. It’s a packaging marvel, with a total readership of 2,919,000-one in three Canadian women.

Cathy Wilson of Chatelaine‘s advertising department says the magazine can’t sell any more copies than it does now. If it sold even 200,000 more (it now sells 1,106,597 copies with about 2.6 readers for each one), the number of readers per copy would simply go down. The total audience would stay the same and advertising rates would have to go up because of the added cost of printing those extra issues. And higher ad rates could mean fewer advertisers. Already a full-page, four-color ad on a one-time basis in Chatelaine is a hefty $23,410. The same ad in Maclean’s national edition costs $19,010. In Saturday Night, it’s $6,640.

The woman behind Chatelaine‘s success is Mildred Istona, the editor. She is the epitome of a top business-woman: bright, attractive, well-dressed, and in full control of the magazine’s operations. Other than that, most writers know little about her (she refused to be interviewed for this article). She is probably the most private magazine editor in the country. She keeps her home life-she’s married-very separate from her work, which takes up most of her time. “She gives her work 110 per cent,” says Lynda Hurst, a feature writer at The Toronto Star. Hurst worked as a copy editor and staff writer for two years under Istona, then editor of Miss Chatelaine (now Flare). Hurst says, “I always felt she was doing so much more than me, no matter how much I did. She always worked very hard, but then that’s her obsession with details and perfection.” Hurst says that many people may criticize Istona, but nobody wants her job.

Istona rarely, if ever, deals directly with writers. Wendy Dennis mentions that during all the time she wrote forChatelaine, Istona never once asked to meet her. Dennis thought that was a little odd. “Most magazine editors want to know who’s working for them, “she says.

Istona’s intense concern for detail is reflected in Chatelaine‘s editing process. Every story that goes into the magazine is worked over minutely, often by all four senior editors, though only one works directly with the writer. Each story, with its lists of criticisms and suggestions attached, is handed over to Mildred Istona. It is she who has the final say. “Mildred has veto power,” says Ontario Living‘s editor Liz Primeau. Primeau worked at Chatelaine as a senior editor for about a year in 1981. She agrees there is nothing wrong with having an editor who gets involved with various stories. “You have to have one strong person at the top,” she says. But, she adds, Istona tends to get into the nuts and bolts of basic copy editing. That’s what the other editors are there for. Istona can be a tough editor, but because she seldom faces writers herself, the four senior editors often end up as go-betweens, running back and forth between Istona and the contributors. Editing like that not only frustrates writers, it also makes the writing itself, as Lynda Hurst puts it, “dull, flat prose. You can put 20 different bylines on it, but it’s as if it’s all come out of a computer.”

Even so, not all of Chatelaine‘s contributors are unhappy. There are some whose names appear regularly in the magazine who are anything but. One is Rona Maynard. She has been contributing to Chatelaine for about three years. “There have been occasional problems,” she says. “If I had taken a shorter view I might have gotten more upset, but I always negotiate. It’s been a satisfying experience.

“Chatelaine is good with feedback,” she says. “They always respond to a story very quickly. At some other magazines you hand in a story and you don’t hear from them for six weeks, and then they tell you they’ve lost your invoice. Another thing I really appreciate about Chatelaine is that they pay more quickly than any other magazine I know. And they pay top rates.” Maynard adds, “I’m not going to say Chatelaine never makes mistakes, because they do. But it upsets me greatly to see writers overreact to what goes on at Chatelaine.”

Sidney Katz is another writer who appears frequently in the magazine’s pages. “I’m well aware of problems other writers have had with Chatelaine. I respect their point of view and I appreciate it,” says Katz. “I think my experiences with Chatelaine have much to do with the type of work I do for them. I specialize in behavior and health, and there’s not much room for disagreement. And usually when I’m assigned a story, I know quite a bit about it because I’ve been working in the field for years. I think the editors at Chatelaine realize that I know more about the subject than they do.”

Writer Winston Collins finds the Chatelaine editors easy to work with as well. “I’ve heard of problems,” he says, “but I get along well at the magazine. They’re quite demanding in the amount of research they want for a story, but they’re very prompt in responding and in payment as well.” Collins admits that sometimesChatelaine‘s idea of a story doesn’t leave much room for the writer, but he feels that’s also true of other magazines.

Allan Gould also does a lot of work for Chatelaine. He says he doesn’t like the way magazine takes all the “Gouldism” out of his work-“but Chatelaine has been very good to me. They’ve thrown stories my way and they’ve paid me well.” He says that one year his earnings from Chatelaine made up 80 per cent of his income.

But for writers who have a run-in with Chatelaine, money becomes secondary. For Terry Poulton, it came down to a matter of personal ethics. Poulton is now a columnist for The Toronto Star‘s Starweek magazine, but she used to be a regular contributor to Chatelaine. In 1982, she did a story for the magazine on single mothers, women who had had children out of wedlock and had chosen to raise them by themselves. In the story, she focussed on three women. They talked to Poulton about their experiences. Yes, they said, there were problems they had to deal with-how to explain the word “daddy” to the child, for instance-but, on the whole, they weren’t all that badly off. They had jobs, they loved their children dearly, and they had an optimistic outlook on life. But that’s not what Chatelaine‘s editors wanted.

“The magazine wanted me to diminish the strength of these women,” says Poulton. “These mothers were very proud of what they had accomplished, but Chatelaine wanted me to focus on the idea that they weren’t as lucky as everyone else; that they didn’t have a man to help them.” Poulton felt very strongly about the piece. She felt that if she wrote the story the way her editors wanted her to, she would betray these women, as well as the whole essence of the article. The story was not about how poorly these women were doing (though not all single mothers are as successful) but about how surprisingly well they were handling their lives. Chatelaine didn’t agree.

But Homemaker‘s magazine did. Poulton pulled the story from Chatelaine and sold it to Homemaker‘s, which printed it almost word for word, including Poulton’s original lead and ending, both of which Chatelaine had rejected.

Carsten Stroud is another Toronto writer who wouldn’t accept Chatelaine‘s editing demands. When the magazine approached Stroud in 1981, he had never written for it before. But the story idea sounded reasonable: a piece on male-female relationships in the ’80s. After discussing the idea with a Chatelaineeditor, Stroud went out, did the interviews and wrote the story. “It was a very anecdotal, atmospheric piece,” he says. “I tend to write with more emotion than hard fact. I don’t like to rattle off a lot of statistics.”

When he brought the story to Chatelaine, he was told it was unacceptable. What the magazine really wanted was a story emphasizing the “weaknesses of men’s love.” Stroud reluctantly went back out and did more interviews, but he could not find a case to prove the magazine’s point. He did a rewrite, which eventually landed on Istona’s desk. When Stroud got the manuscript back, he found it had been severely edited, with much of his writing style and personal insight removed. “All Chatelaine wanted was my name,” he says. They had formulated their opinion of what the story should be, and they wanted me to go out and prove it. They wanted none of my voice or style.” Stroud wrote a letter to Chatelaine expressing his frustration. He also pulled his byline, and has not written for the magazine since.

Even writers who seem to have had a fairly good run with Chatelaine can leave expressing some sort of dissatisfaction. Judith Timson was a columnist and contributing editor for almost a year and a half. Timson does not go into great detail about the magazine, but she does say that toward the end of her time there, she began to feel unappreciated. Her final comment is: “I used to work there, and now I don’t.”

Still, for all the flack Chatelaine takes, and all the problems it’s had with writers, it pushes steadily on. It’s a Canadian institution. It’s been around since 1928, and it looks, from its current success, as if it’ll still be kicking 50 years from now. As Lynda Hurst says, “Other magazines have gone down the tubes, but notChatelaine. It’s unassailable.”

And so, it would seem, are its editing methods. Charlotte Gray has been writing frequently for the magazine for the past six years, and she says: “You have to adapt to Chatelaine‘s style. You have to write for its audience. It’s got a large circulation, and it can’t take too many risks. Chatelaine is an editor’s magazine, not a writer’s magazine. If you accept that fact, you’ll find it easier to work for them.” Undoubtedly so, but for some writers, the fact that their individual styles, their voices, their points of view are of little value is impossible to accept.