It’s hockey night in Windsor and the hometown’s Spitfires are hosting the Sault Ste. Marie Greyhounds in a Monday night battle at Windsor Arena. Nine rows above ice level, Scott Scantlebury is looking through the viewfinder of his Canon Hi-8 video camera. He could be the proud father of a player filming a home movie of the game, but in fact he’s a sportscaster and video journalist, or VJ, for CBET, the CBC’s Windsor station, on assignment for The Windsor Late News. Beside him stands the two-man crew from Baton Broadcasting, a reporter and a camera operator toting a Sony Betacam three times the size of Scantlebury’s Hi-8.

Ice level action is furious-a fight, a penalty-but no goals yet. Scantlebury can only stay for the first period-he’s got to get back to the station and put his sportscast together-and he’s counting on at least one goal to use as a highlight in his report. He picks up his camera and moves in behind the Greyhounds’ net-if the Spits score, he’ll have the best angle on the goal. The BBS crew stays put. The first period is half over when Scantlebury hurries back to his original position and rummages through the gym bag holding his extra equipment.

“My battery went dead. You should always carry a couple with you,” he explains as he shoves a new battery into his camera. He’s rushing back to his spot behind the Greyhounds’ net, camera in hand, when the Spits score. Scantlebury’s shoulders sag. He looks back at the BBS crew-still filming-and shrugs. There aren’t any more goals in the first period so he heads back to the station without the footage he needs.

For opponents of the VJ approach to news gathering, Scantlebury’s experience illustrates all that is wrong with the one-man-band method of television reporting.

Traditionally, most TV news was-and still is-covered by crews of two, three or four people: a reporter, a sound technician, a camera operator and maybe a field producer. VJs can get the story alone. While many television executives love VJs because they’re cheap, Cameron Bell, the former news director at BCTV, toldThe Vancouver Sun last spring, “The assumption that a guy can be a good cinematographer and a good reporter is debatable.” He thinks that some reporters could make the transition to shooting their own stories, but some could not. As critics argue, a reporter can get either great pictures or great interviews but never both. The technological responsibilities of the job distract the VJ from the story and the quality of the journalism suffers. That’s one reason VJs aren’t common in Canada; another reason is the unions.

Powerful unions like CEP-NABET and the Canadian Media Guild are worried, understandably, that if work done by a three-person crew can be done just as effectively by a VJ, a lot of camera operators and broadcast journalists may lose their jobs. Still, even the most ardent union supporters concede that video journalism is a rapidly growing part of broadcast journalism.

It’s like Kim Kristy, a VJ colleague of Scott Scantlebury’s, says: “It’s a natural evolution of what television is all about.” A lot of Kristy’s colleagues agree with this assessment. Among them is Nancy Durham.

Durham is a CBC foreign correspondent based in London, England. She’s worked as a traditional TV reporter for three years and toiled as a radio journalist for six years before that. Almost two years ago she started going on assignments by herself with a Hi-8 camera. One day in Sarajevo she walked right into the bathroom with a Bosnian woman. Durham aimed her Sony Hi-8 and filmed the woman putting on makeup by candlelight because the electricity was off. Later she recorded as the woman took water out of her bathtub, cup by cup, to fill her washing machine. And when the power finally came on for an hour, Durham filmed the woman rushing down her stairs to do a load of laundry.

“Journalism is more and more packaged and that’s another reason why this Hi-8 video journalism is a kind of salvation,” says Durham, who hates attending press conferences or doing prepackaged stories. “Its cheap, you can go out and gather yourself, get your own angle on a story.”

Foreign correpondent VJs like Durham go into war zones, they travel into restricted areas and they find the hidden story not despite being alond but because they’re alone. “You can get really intimate with people, into intimate places,” says Durham. “I don’t think you could do that with a crew.” There’s no way, for example, she could have crawled into a haywagon with Serbian refugees, as she did last fall. But by herself she traveled with the two women, capturing their journey to safety across the war-scarred landscape of the former Yugoslavia.

Durham’s only been a VJ for a couple of years, not like Sue Lloyd-Roberts, whom Durham describes as a pioneer of investigative video journalism. Lloyd-Roberts of the BBC began working as a VJ in the mid-eighties and in the spring of 1994 she hid a video camera in her bag and got the first footage ever shot in a Chinese forced labor camp. She’s been to Burma, Australia, the former Soviet Union, Eastern Europe and Iraq getting items conventional television news crews could never do. Last fall,she went to Eastern Europe for an investigative story on prostitutes during which she filmed the longest line of hookers ever, 400 standing shoulder to shoulder. She didn’t bring a camera operator and a sound technician with her. “They’d simply be lynched by the pimps, but it’s the type of thing you can film if you’ve got a small Hi-8 camera and a passing car.”

Of course, the solo television reporter has existed for years. Eccentric freelancers took their cameras to faraway lands, where they filmed, wrote and edited stories on their own. But these early VJs were rare and it wasn’t until the early eighties, when Toronto’s CityTV introduced its “videographers,” that new possibilities became apparent. While City’s VJs were mostly assigned to smaller feature stories, outside Canada the wider use of video journalists grew. In 1989 the world’s first all-VJ station opened in Bergen, Norway. Three years later, New York City became the home of New York 1, a 24-hour cable news station that armed its reporters with Hi-8 cameras and told them to cover North America’s biggest city. NY 1 has spawned copy-cat cable stations in Chicago, Washington, San Francisco as well as in England.

Will video journalism ever replace conventional news-gathering methods on daily news broadcasts? Norm Bolen, now the CBC’s head of TV news and current affairs, doesn’t believe so. “You can think of all kinds of situations where you’d probably want another set of hands,” he says. “It’s no panacea; you’re not going to immediately convert all national reporters into video journalists.” Dennis MacIntosh, a senior producer at CTV News, concedes that video journalism is a growing trend. But VJs haven’t come to CTV’s national news yet. “You get more pictures and better quality the more people you send out,” he explains.

Skeptics concede that VJs are useful for soft feature stories but question their ability to go out and get the breaking news day in and day out. The CBC decided to test the limits of video journalism and embarked on a two-year project that has been dubbed “The Windsor Experiment.”

In December 1990, CBC budget cuts led to the closing of Windsor’s TV station. Nearly 90 people lost their jobs and CBET took a station break that lasted more than three years. But on October 3, 1994 at 5:30 p.m.,The Windsor Evening News returned to channel nine in a slick new format driven by video journalists.

Norm Bolen, the CBC’s Ontario regional director at the time the station was resurrected, says that some CBC managers “thought that by doing an experiment in Windsor with new technology, new workplace methods, they might be able to bring in a budget and make it saleable to head office and get it back on the air.” Well, head office liked the idea it was necessary to convince the powerful, established unions in the CBC that allowing a reporter to pick up a camera wouldn’t put union jobs across the country in jeopardy. The Canadian Media Guild represents 3,500 CBC reporters and producers and CEP-NABET represents 2,500 technical employees like camera operators and editors. Mike Sullivan is a CEP-NABET repesentative who was heavily involved in drafting the agreement that put Windsor back on the air. “Early on in the negotiations we said let’s not get into video journalism in a big way, let’s just see if we can put Windsor on the air much smaller,” he recalls. Management insisted on using VJs and eventually the unions came on board. “So with some trepidation about the precend it might set, we sat down and worked out an experiment,” says Sullivan.

“The Windsor Agreement” allows reporters to use cameras, allows camera operators to do the work of reporters and makes it possible for fewer than 30 people to put together Windsor’s daily television news. There are now 10 VJs at the Windsor CBC. Five have technical backgrounds as camera operators or editors and five used to be reporters. Throughout the negotiations leading up to the Windsor agreement, both the unions and management agreed on one very important thing. As Sullivan says: “Whether it was an experiment or not, the CBC’s journalism had to remain the best there is.”

To achieve this. Cynthia Reyes, a top CBC trainer, was called on to whip everyone in Windsor into shape and to insure the maintenance of high journalistic standards. She studied the work of video journalists from around the world and designed a six-week program to teach camera operators how to report and reporters how to shoot. Although not everyone at the station is a VJ, every employee at CBET took part in the workshop. On October 3, 1994, Reyes sat back to see if “The Windsor Experiment” would work. It did.

“For me it was a combination of relief-that we actually had a professional-looking show-and a delight,” she recalls. Part of the training involved erasing any prejudices that reporters might feel toward camera operators and editors. “We greatly underestimated the talent and ability of our so-called technical people,” says Reyes. “I never refer to them as technical people, I always call them journalists.”

After nearly a year and a half on the air, the VJs at CBET reflect on the things they’ve learned. One lesson is that a VJ can do a whole lot but there are stories where more than one person is needed. “I think that people are embracing this as an answer to everything,” says Windsor VJ Pat Jeflyn. “It’s a mistake because sometimes you need three people. I mean, if the story’s really big, if there’s a lot of hostility involved, if there’s a lot of digging investigation, if there’s a lot of really tough technical work to be done or a lot of tough information to be dug out, you need two people.” The Windor VJs agree that press conferences, court stories, large symposiums and dangerous stories are best covered by two or three people.

But Jeflyn is quick to add that for many stories one person is ideal. She recalls her interview with an incest survivor who was very relieved not to face a room full of cameras, bright lights and people. He relaxed when he saw that Jeflyn was alone and it made for a better story.

Jeflyn, whos worked in both TV and radio, says she’s often asked if a VJ can produce good work: “I think if you’re a good journalist and you believe in what you’re doing, you’re going to keep the quality. I wouldn’t do it if I couldn’t.” Windsor VJs have proven themselves in the field?-former reporter Kim Kristy has sold footage to American companies, and one-time camera operators like Brett Morrison have become solid reporters.

Morrison doesn’t have any trouble shooting a story, but admits he agonizes over his script and, because he’s a little shy, he still often feels uncomfortable during his interviews.

Physical strain is also a factor, especially in Windsor, where all but two of the VJs use 20-pound Sony Betacams. A Windsor VJ carries a camera and a tripod-close to 50 pounds of equipment. Lighting equipment is extra. Jeflyn embarked on a weight-training program at the local Y to prepare herself for the physical rigours of her job and she and Kristy admit that there are days when they’re just too exhausted to move.

Only the confidence that comes with experience will help Brett Morrison and other VJs who find themselves learning new skills, but advances in technology are making it possible for VJs to use lighter equipment without losing very much sound or picture quality. Sue Lloyd-Roberts uses a Hi-8 and though she admits her pictures might not meet the high standards of the BBC’s technicians, viewers don’t complain. In fact, Hi-8 cameras produce pictures that are virtually indistinguishable from those shot on top-of-the line Betacams. And a Hi-8 is cheap, about one-third the price of a Betacam.

The sound recorded on a Hi-8 is excellent. “I sell the audio from my camera to the BBC,” says Nancy Durham, who adds that the technicians at BBC radio “nearly flip” when she tells them she’s managed to get such good sound with a little Hi-8.

The cameras are also user-friendly. Durham, having never touched a camera before, needed only two days of intensive training before she was ready to shoot pictures for the CBC’s national news.

Durham and the VJs in Windsor agree that their brand of journalism is going to become increasingly popular. In the very near future news directors are going to be looking for reporters who know how to use a camera. A number of journalism schools are preparing their students for this inevitability. Mel Tsuji teaches “videography” at Toronto’s Humber College. Tsuji’s course gives students the journalistic roots needed to be professional VJs. He stresses that the most important facet of the VJ’s job is journalism. “I think the prime condition of it is you have to be able to write a story,” he says. Tsuji’s been teaching the course for three years and a handful of his students have graduated and are already working as VJs. The course was created to help students adapt to “the changing nature of the business.”

Humber College is not alone in offering an education in video journalism. In 1992 Columbia University in New York City spent $75,000 on new equipment, including 10 Hi-8 cameras, and is credited with establishing the world’s first course in video journalism. Northwestern University, just outside Chicago, spent over $600,000 buying nine Hi-8s and upgrading its facilities in the early nineties to prepare its graduates for the new jobs in journalism.

Obviously, many journalism schools agree that VJs are a growing part of broadcast news. Sure, the work done by VJs will be criticized, but it’s like Paul Sagan, vice president of news and programming for NY 1 says: “I’d sympathize with the critics the way I’d sympathize with the owner of a buggy-whip factory who just looked out the window and saw a Model-T drive by.”

The item was legitimate news, there’s no argument about that. And it was also legitimately placed, well down in CFTO’s early evening line-up. If there was something “wrong” with the item, the viewers never knew it. But something was indeed “wrong.”

The story, as introduced by newsreader Tom Gibney and narrated by reporter Jim Wicks for CFTO’s World Beat News, involved the re-introduction of the I.5-litre pop bottle, which had been banned as dangerous two years before. The bottles exploded when dropped, shooting shards of glass like shrapnel. Now, as Wicks reported, a new, improved and safe version was ready to go back on the supermarket shelves. Wicks voiced over scenes of the new bottles being laminated with plastic, and tested by men in white lab coats. No explosions, even after assaults with a drill.

Wicks then came on camera, for the first and only time, and did his wrap-up. Back at the anchor desk, Gibney moved on to the next story.

What was wrong? Unlike the story that preceded it, and unlike the one that followed, the I.S-litre bottle story was not obtained by journalistic means. What was shown on the screen was a visual hand-out, bought and paid for by a very interested party-the Canadian Soft Drink Association. It was produced, not by CFTO’s news team, but privately. However newsworthy, the item was not news.

This fact did not deter Citytv that night either. CityPulse used the same visual hand-out, with Anne Mroczkowski reporting, and gave it a little extra-a quote from Tibor Gregor, the president of the Soft Drink Association, also thoughtfully provided. Once again, there was no journalism involved, no reportage.

The source of the safer bottle “story” was a video news release (VNR) created by a public relations company called Canada News-Wire (CNW). And the real importance of the story was that it marked a new beginning for TV news in Canada: When it ran, in 1982, it was one of the very first VNRs to be produced and aired in this country. Since that time, quietly, VNRs have become something of a growth industry, increasingly used by government as well as private industry, trade unions, charities, and cultural institutions. Video news releases are so close to journalism that it’s difficult to tell the difference. They have a news angle, a lead, and are done in exactly the same fashion as regular newsclips on TV news. But instead of a reporter directing the content, in accordance with journalistic standards, it is directed by the subject of the story, the client. This is what makes a VNR different: instead of aspiring for “truth” and “objectivity,” the VNRs goals lie essentially in sales and public relations. They allow an organization to put its ideas or products on air without being subjected to the trained journalist’s tough or embarrassing questions, without critique and without analysis. Zenith Data Systems Canada Ltd. paid CNW $5,000 to produce and distribute a TV news clip promoting, however subtly, its microcomputer, datasystems 2. The focus was on how the computers had become an important part of the first-year curriculum at Queen’s University in Kingston, Onto The “hard news” involved a new program in which the new computers were used. Zenith’s public relations firm, Argyle Communications, made the arrangements with CNW. The Zenith VNR, says Ryan Wilson, a senior consultant at Argyle, was designed to raise the profile of the company and to “educate” the public about Zenith’s project at Queen’s. CNW, after producing the newsclip, distributed it to 31 Englishlanguage news programs in Canada. “Seven or eight” news programs ran the story, Wilson said. (And more than that, Argyle succeeded in getting Zenith’s computers into the newsrooms’ libraries of stock footage, so if pictures of computers are ever needed, “they’ll use Zenith’s computers.”) Within the Zenith newsclip, the company’s name was discussed, and its computers shown. The chairman of the applied science microcomputer committee at Queen’s, Dr. David Turcke, was paraphrased in praise of the datasystems 2, and made a talking head appearance. Other than Turcke, only students were quoted, all positively. Zenith’s name appeared on the and on various boxes. The advertising was very subtle, which was precisely what the producer wanted. And when the “story” ran on the news there was, of course, no mention of other competing computer firms, and nobody was there to ask about any problems with the university’s new program. The goal was not to “inform” the public, it was to “educate.” “Essentially, it’s advertising,”says CNW’s associate producer Howard Kalnitsky, who made and narrated the Zenith piece. But the advertising aspect should be kept as subtle as possible. If it appears too much like advertising, no news director will allow it to appear on air. “We will not send clips if it’s a commercial. We have turned down major companies [for that],” says CNW’s vice-president and general manager Gordon Eastwood, an ex-Ottawa Journal man who nostalgically keeps an old Journal highway mailbox in his office. So CNW must carefully walk the territory between the advertising firm and the news operation. If it leans too much toward advertising, its VNRs will lose credibility in the newsroom and they will not be used; if it leans too far toward being news, CNW will lose its source clients, the ones who pay the bills.

As its pop bottle VNR established, CNW has successfully maintained its balance while walking that fine line. It has been making VNRs since 1982 and is currently Canada’s largest producer. During its first year CNW made about one a month: now it makes about one a week. (Its competitor, Bob Carr’s Toronto-based Newsroom Two, makes about one a month.) Although VNR production is a significant part of CNW’s operation, it has been well established in the print news release business for 25 years. It has 210 teleprinters in print and broadcast newsrooms across the country and distributes print news releases in the same way the Canadian Press distributes stories. These print releases account for most of CNW’s revenue. CNW is a private company, controlled by two Canadian firms-Public and Industrial Relations Ltd. and Tisdall Clark & Partners Ltd. CNW has offices in Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal, Calgary and Vancouver.

CNW and Newsroom Two each use freelance crews which, on a shoot, could easily be mistaken for a normal news crew. But because their allegiance is to the subject of the VNR, not to the consumers of news, they go very much out of their way to ensure the client and his product are looking their very best. After all, his company is footing the bill.

The cost of a VNR in Canada varies from $2,200 to $6,000, averaging out at $3,000. The total cost reflects the cost of production-a half-day shoot to a full-day shoot-plus the cost of distribution of sending it by courier to 15 or 30 news shows in one or two languages. The news stations don’t pay a cent.

In the U.S., usually a good place to look for future Canadian trends, the practice is more common, and more expensive (a VNR usually costs between $12,000 and $16,000 U.S. because of higher distribution costs). As well, there are companies there that specialize in the production of VNRs. MG Productions is one. Margie Goldsmith of MG was quoted in the Public Relations Journal as saying, “My clients come to me and say, ‘How can I get free air time’?’ I tell them about VNRs.”

Although public relations people are happy to talk about VNRs, news directors are somewhat more reluctant. Most claim they have never even heard of them. Carr attributes their reluctance to the fact that they don’t want to be seen to rely on outsiders to get their news. “You want people to believe that yours is a big, hustling news operation,” Carr says. CNW’sJim Warrick concurs: “They use our stuff quite a bit,” he says. “Of course, they’ll say they don’t use it.”

Stephen Hurlbut, director of news programming at Citytv, says simply, “We don’t use them.” He says the VNRs CityPulse receives will usually go into the library as stock visuals. The news director at Clobal, Reg Thomas, says they would use a VNR only in “extreme circumstances.” If control of the shoot is relinquished, he says, then “you’re just being a rewrite man.” Derwyn Smith, news director of CfTO’s World Beat Neil’s, says he treats a VNR with as much skepticism as any print news release. He would prefer not to use any of the footage, but would “if it was necessary.” And Ken Sherman, reporter for World Beat NeIl’s, insists “we want to be in control.”

“Many of the smaller stations which lack the resources to do the pieces themselves use the wrapped VNR as is,” says Carr. “It makes them look more professional.” One such station is CfTM-TV in Toronto. “We usually do use something from CNW because we’re a small station and don’t have the resources the larger stations have,” says assignment editor Renato Zane. “We don’t use them unless we have to, and when we do, we just try to use the visuals.”

Despite the apparent dislike of VNRs, they are used more often than news directors are willing to admit. Both Newsroom Two and CNW periodically monitor the networks to discover who uses their VNRs and how, but the results of this monitoring are used for internal and promotional purposes only. They are not shown to existing clients because, the producers say, it is too expensive to monitor for everyone. Most clients therefore hire a news monitoring company such as Bowden’s or MediaScan Inc. to watch the networks for them. The VNR producers also send out reply cards with their VNRs. This method of feedback, however, is not completely reliable; the stations are only asked ((they used the VNRs, not how. As a result of his monitoring, Bob Carr concludes that his success rate-the rate that his VNRs at least prod the TV news shows into covering his clients’ stories-averages about 17 out of 24 news shows for Ontario. CNW is less willing to estimate its success, which Gordon Eastwood says is entirely dependent on the nature of the VNR. Some get near total coverage, as did the Co Sensor, a device very similar to a smoke detector except it measures and responds to carbon monoxide in the air. Eastwood claims it got 99 per cent coverage.

This is not to say that all the stations aired the VNR intact. News directors are very reluctant to run VNRs in their pure, prepackaged form. They know that the same VNRs are sitting on all the other news directors’ desks and if every station ran them intact, they’d all look pretty cheap. As well, many news directors like to modify the clips to suit their audiences. More significantly perhaps, they are also under no obligation to use the VNRs as packaged by the producers. The producers, in fact, do everything they can to make it easier for stations to pick what they want from the package. Both CNW and Newsroom Two place the talking head (the interviewee) on one audio channel and the reporter’s voiceover on another. To further simplify the process, the VNR producers also send a timed script with every VNR so the journalists know the exact length of each visual and voice-over. The VNR producers try so hard to segment their VNRs because they know that by doing so, they are increasing the chance that they will be used. Most stations therefore only use segments of the VNRs. Often, even if the stations do not run any part of a VNR, they will use the story idea as a basis for one of their own reports. This in itself is considered an accomplishment by the VNR producers and their clients.

From their viewpoint, the goal of a VNR is to have something discussed on the news, something the client thinks is important. This makes a lot of sense: the news is the most credible air time on television. Exposure on the news-especially uncritical exposure-is worth a hundred times its weight in commercials. To have a Knowlton Nash say on air, “everybody should own a Cabbage Patch doll, I do,” is a public relations man’s wet dream.

Which is close to what really happened (although Nash was never involved). The 1983 craze for Cabbage Patch dolls was enhanced in the U.S. by way of VNRs. Appropriate mob scenes were recorded on video and little stories written about “those amazing dolls.” This led to “Cabbage Patch fever” and further, larger mob scenes, which were recorded again for subsequent VNRs. The public relations man behind Coleco’s Cabbage Patch dolls, Robert Wiener, would sum up the campaign with, “When Bryant Gumbel or Jane Pauley says ‘Here’s the season’s hottest item,’ it means more to consumers than if Cole co says the same thing. The credibility that achieves far outweighs an advertisement’s.” The media coverage achieved with the VNRs (and conventional press releases) was so good that Coleco abandoned its regular advertising campaign for the dolls fully four weeks before Christmas. Sales of the Cabbage Patch dolls were nothing less than phenomenal. The dolls set a sales record for a new toy, $60 million (U.S.) in 1983.

Another early VNR made by CNW, paid for by Timex, was aired during the “spring-forward” change to daylight savings time. The peg was the centennial year of internationally-standardized time zones.

The tight, short piece simply reminded the viewers to put their clocks ahead that night. But, since Timex paid for the item, all the clocks and watches featured were Timex products. There was, however, no mention of the company. Global and CKND (Winnipeg) used the pictures and rewrote the provided script. CFCN (Calgary) and CFRN (Edmonton) used both the visuals and the audio. Timex got its name before the public in a nice friendly fashion, for the cost of production and distribution of the VNR. And what did it really matter? Aside from the question of subtly promoting one clock-and-watch maker over others, not much.

Not every VNR, however, is as neutral as the one from Timex. On Oct. 17, 1982, one of Amoco Canada Petroleum Company Ltd.’s gas wells exploded. Sour gas covered Lodgepole, Alta. Quickly, Amoco commissioned a VNR in which two doctors, or “authorities,” were quoted as saying there were no health hazards connected with the gas; that all alarm was unfounded. But a year later, in Maclean’s magazine (Nov. 14, 1983),the Pembina Area Sour Gas Exposures Committee disagreed, arguing that the potential health hazards had been swept under the carpet.

Admittedly, the video news release is no more than a TV version of the traditional print hand-out, a package to “assist” news directors in covering what the VNR’s sponsor considers to be “news.” But there is a difference between rewriting and running print releases-a practice far from unknown-and airing VNRs intact. Television is, quite simply, a much more powerful medium than print. The 1981 Kent Commission on Newspapers released a poll that showed 54 per cent of Canadian respondents considered television the most believable source of news, fully 20 per cent more than newspapers. The poll also reported that television beat newspapers 53 per cent t029 per cent on the question: “What news source is most fair and unbiased’?,’ And Dr. Derrick de Kerckhove, co-director of the University of Toronto’s McLuhan program in culture and technology, says the two media, print and TV, have very different effects on an audience. The news in a newspaper is “already cleaned up,” and it forces an “intellectual involvement.” Television news tends to be “sensual and emotional; TV can reach an awful lot of people and give them a burst of adrenalin.” Television has impact. Despite the fact that he’s an ex-: newsman, Newsroom Two’s Bob Carr I defends the use of VNRs, charging the media shows “false pride” in criticizing them: he asks, for example, how a small TV news show is supposed to get pictures of the next space walk without visual PR help from NASA? “If there wasn’t some free input there wouldn’t be any news,” he contends. “The media couldn’t function without the input of others.” Gordon Eastwood argues that while VNRs present only one side of the story, they are accurate to that extent and don’t pretend to be the whole story. But, he admits, it’s “kind of deceitful” when news shows run a VNR with only minor cosmetic changes, letting the audience believe the story was “reported.”

This “deceitful” practice is unfortunately not uncommon within the Canadian television news circle. Because the VNR industry is so new to this country, the Canadian Radio-television Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) has not yet established any rules governing use. The television news industry itself has not established any guidelines either. The news directors are therefore under no obligation to run disclaimers across their screens denoting the fact that part of their “news” is actually an advertising supplement (a practice begun by some stations in the U.S.).

If the market continues to grow as it has, regulations and guidelines may become inevitable. But Bob Carr feels the industry will not thrive, or perhaps not even survive in Canada as it has in the U.S. There are, he believes, not enough stations to make production and distribution cost efficient for the client. Carr, in fact, fully expects he’ll be out of the VNR business, and that the industry will crumble within the next couple of years. There are so many other sources of news today, Carr says, journalists don’t need VNRs.

Eastwood, on the other hand, predicts that VNR production will flourish in Canada because “there’s a very open market.”

CNW, in fact, has already taken a large step toward expanding its own VNR production. On Feb. 18 it used satellite transmission for the first time in place of its regular courier service. It produced a VNR for Canada Safeway Limited, notified the client-specified news stations of what to expect, and then delivered the VNR to Satellite Delivery Services. For $1,700, SDS transmitted the video from its satellite dish to Anik D, a Canadian satellite, which relayed it to western Canada. Those stations wanting the item opened the appropriate channel and recorded. The two-to-three minute clip played over and over again for 30 minutes.

Satellite transmission has definite implications for the relationship between VNRs and television news. Because it is cheaper to send VNRs via satellite-reaching 82 English-language stations for one flat rate the VNR route becomes more attractive to I clients. Theoretically, anyway. So if Bob I Carr is wrong and Gordon Eastwood is I right, we have probably only seen the beginnings of a whole new media industry.

And now the word on (some of) their sponsors: the Ontario Ministry of Housing and Recreation, of Citizenship and Culture, of Natural Resources, the Canadian Ministry of Transportation and Communications, the National Gallery of Canada, HoneywelJl, Timex, Purina, Canadian Real Estate Association, Ontario Separate School Trustees Association, Sunnybrook Medical Centre, the Bank of Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada, Paul Masson & Co., National Dairy Council of Canada…

THE HANDOUT IS QUICKER

THAN THE EYE How the government makes ‘news’ without flak from the opposition.

One of the better examples of how governments can bypass or attempt to bypass the journalistic process comes out of a video news release commissioned by the Federal Ministry of Transportation and Communications. The subject was a policy paper, released by the government on July 15, 1985 (the same day as the VNR), on deregulation of the railway and airline industry. It presented one side of a highly contentious and controversial issue, supporting deregulation and never acknowledging that there are experts who argue forcefully that deregulation in the United States has led to a serious decline in airline safety.

Under the direction of Argyle Communications, the ministry’s PR firm, Canada News-Wire produced three VNRs at a combined cost of about $10,000. The minister, Don Mazankowski, was featured, but obviously no opposition spokespersons or critics of any description were interviewed. The hand-outs were distributed to 71 English-language and 33 French-language stations, and each of the three was aimed at a different region of the country. What follows is a transcript of the VNR distributed to Eastern Canada.

Suggested studio lead into story: “Canada’s transportation industry should be opening under a new set of rules within a year, says the federal government.”

Reporter’s voice-over on transportation scenes:

“A policy paper released in Ottawa today outlines proposals to reduce regulations governing the nation’s airlines and railways, freeing them to offer more services to travelling Canadians, along with more competitive fares. Trucking and shipping companies will also be affected. The new deal is said to offer special advantages to Atlantic Canada. Transport Minister Don Mazankowski had this to say about the government’s plans:”

Mazankowski:

“Essentially, the new policy will reduce the regulatory burden quite substantially, allowing the transportation system more freedom to move, more freedom to grow and freedom to compete, and thereby providing more innovative and more competitive services right across the board. Atlantic Canada relies very heavily on transportation services and again, with the competitive forces of the market place we’ll certainly give them a better variety of services at lower rates and ah, particularly in the area of air services ah, in the commuter and regional and transborder context. We believe by scaling down the regulatory burden, freeing access, ah, Atlantic Canada will be much better served by air services. “

Reporter’s voice-over on transportation scenes:

“The sweeping proposals to reduce regulations represent the biggest overhaul in the history of Canadian transportation, Ottawa says. New airlines will be able to start up operations, and existing airlines will be able to launch new routes simply by showing they are ‘fit, willing and able.’ Currently, they must prove public convenience or necessity. And airlines will be able to set their own fares, although the government will review fare increases with the power to roll back excessive hikes. The new legislation will bring a lot of changes to the way Canada’s railroads do business. Railways will be able to sign confidential contracts with shippers of manufactured goods or natural resources who qualify for special low rates because of high volumes. This will assist Canadian shippers and bring back transporter business lost to American railroads. And if you’re served by only one railroad, you’ll be able to transfer your goods to another line if you can get a better deal. Canada’s shipbuilding industry is expected to benefit by measures to reserve the coasting trade. ..That’s anything up to 200 miles off shore, exclusively to Canadian ships. But most of all, the travelling public is expected to benefit from better and more frequent service, more competitive fares, and more efficient shipping of goods. The new transport paper also calls for replacement of the existing governing agency, the Canadian Transport Commission, with a new regulatory agency. It could be de-centralized, with offices in Western and Atlantic Canada as well as in Ottawa. The new National Transportation Authority, says Transport Minister Don Mazankowski, will promote competition and encourage the transportation industry to be more efficient in serving Canadian travellers and shippers.”

Mazankowski:

“We believe that ah, transportation system is mature enough and it can provide the kind of innovative services right across the board and ah, and with the freedom to compete, freedom to grow, freedom to experiment and provide services right across the country that were not heretofor provided.”

Not even Saturday Night magazine, that hallowed journal of sombre thought, could resist getting in on the act. In a shamelessly patriotic and wistfully nationalistic review, playwright James C. Reaney waxed eloquent about the encyclopedia’s virtues. “I congratulate both editor James Marsh and publisher Mel Hurtig on producing such an effective mosaic of information for and about Canadians,” he wrote. “…The Canadian Encyclopedia is itself, in a very exciting way, a new communications satellite.”

Not that all the praise was unjustified: more than six years of research and preparation went into the three-volume, 2,089-page book. And Hurtig, who earlier last year had spent considerable time and money protesting an American icebreaker’s presence in Canadian waters, was able to whip the Canadian media into a nationalistic frenzy.

The book, he said, was “the first entirely new comprehensive reference work on Canada in 50 years.” So reviewers, dutifully slack-jawed, played cheerleaders to the nation. (You can get a lot of rah-rah-rah out of three volumes of me-me-me.) But what they missed as they glided through the glossy, $175 encyclopedia’s straight-shooting entries on hockey great after near-hockey great was how the Canadian media themselves are treated in the book.

The news is not good. (Or, perhaps more fitting in this hockey-crazed nation: the puck stops here.)

For the most part, the journalism entries are distressingly short and, in some instances, annoyingly smug. Who would have thought that June Callwood, long revered as one of Canada’s best journalists, would be tersely dismissed as a magazine writer who became “an activist for such social causes as homeless youth and drug addicts” and subsequently ghosted the autobiographies of American celebrities? (The one-paragraph entry, discreetly unbylined, mercifully neglects to tell us who these celebrities are.) Callwood deserves better than this anonymous, subtle putdown.

The Canadian media in general deserve better than they get in the encyclopedia. The main entries on the subject-journalism, newspapers, magazines and broadcasting-begin with definitions that are innocuous at best and patronizing at worst. Magazines, we learn, “are paper-covered publications issued at regular intervals, at least four times a year.” What do you call those paper-covered things that come out, say, twice a year? And journalism, we are told, is the occupation of “a diverse group of people who earn their living by writing or editing material of current interest for dissemination via print or electronic media.” Some of them even work for those paper-covered things.

The entry on radio and television broadcasting begins with this shocker: “In a northern land marked by long winters, vast distances and a fragmented population, the communication by Canadian radio and TV is crucial.” Let’s alert the media. Writer Frank W. Peers, a politics professor at the University of Toronto, continues: “Broadcasting has not only become a principal source of entertainment, it also links the citizen to what is going on outside the home and has helped to develop a sense of community.” And this citizen is grateful.

Encyclopedias are by definition accessible, easy-to-read collections of facts on a wide range of subjects. ButThe Canadian Encyclopedia, at least in its coverage of this country’s media, sacrifices some depth for accessibility. Many of the entries (such as Peers’ above) read like junior high school essays on “the Canadian identity” assigned by over-eager Grade 9 teachers.

In his introduction, editor-in-chief Marsh points out that contributors to the encyclopedia were asked to stress the Canadian aspect of their subjects. The encyclopedia was written, he says, “by specialists who were best able to explain the finer points of their subjects and could impart to the encyclopedia the distinctive quality of representing the country as a whole.” These are not merely writers here-these are protectors of the national image. This boosterish quality gives some of the entries a slightly insincere cast: they’re pep talks on patriotism. Throughout the entries, we’re reminded that what we are reading is of interest primarily because it is Canadian, not because it has intrinsic value. But given this, some of the articles manage to articulately give the facts.

The one on Canadian. magazines (despite its unfortunate opening paragraph, which also tells us “paid magazines are sold on the newsstands or delivered through the mails to subscribers”) is detailed and straightforward. Writer Sandra Martin gives us a lengthy history of Canada’s magazine industry from The Nova Scotia Magazine and Comprehensive Review of Literature, Politics and News (1789) to Recipes Only, which in 1983 became the country’s largest controlled-circulation magazine. Martin spends much of the article explaining how Canadian magazines have survived the onslaught of American publications in this country: she gives brief, clear summaries of the 1959 Royal Commission on Publications, the 1969 Special Senate Committee on the Mass Media and the 1973 Ontario Royal Commission on Book Publishing. But while she is thorough, Martin isn’t very interesting. Isn’t there the least bit of mud that could be flung at the Canadian magazine industry? Where are the colorful characters who pioneered publishing in this country?

The same is true of Ottawa journalist Tim Creery’s article on newspapers: he gives us the facts in a dreary, workmanlike way. Newspapers from the Halifax Gazette of 1752 to The Toronto Sun (which, we are told, added “right-wing populism to the tabloid formula of sex, sin and sport”) are dutifully documented, and that’s about it. Creery mentions the Royal Commission on Newspapers headed by Tom Kent but says little about the joint closings of Southam’s Winnipeg Tribune and Thomson’s Ottawa Journal, which sparked the investigation. What analysis we do get is really editorializing in disguise-Canadian newspapers, for instance, are characterized as hungry headline hunters lacking editorial identity. Apparently only The Globe and Mail, a “writers’ newspaper,” rises above the superficial scoop-seekers, having given skilled journalists such as Jeffrey Simpson and John Fraser “the opportunity to practise their craft.”

The condescending tone of many of the shorter entries on individual publications and personalities is similarly unnerving. Saturday Night, we learn, has “a dedicated snobbishness” and in the 1980s has “hovered uneasily between liberal trendiness and serious coverage of the Canadian scene.” The entry begrudgingly concedes, however, that the magazine, begun in 1887, has survived nearly a century. Similarly, the one-paragraph entry on Weekend magazine, flanked by “Weeds” and “Weightlifting,” says the publication was the most popular advertising vehicle in the country in the 1960s, without noting its value as a piece of journalism. AndMaclean’s, we are told, is successful because it is “a welcome supplement to the pallid fare in most newspapers.” (Newspapers are the ones that aren’t paper-covered.)

The Canadian Encyclopedia tries hard to please, but not hard enough: the publications and personalities that get individual entries seem to have been chosen arbitrarily. The Edmonton Journal (the major newspaper in the city where the encyclopedia was published) gets an entry, but the Calgary Herald does not. Margaret (Ma) Murray, who gained national notoriety as the out-spoken owner and editor of the Bridge River Lillooet News, doesn’t rate an entry; instead, she gets a sentence in the article on Lillooet, B.C., and two sentences and a photograph in the journalism entry. Other old-timers, such as broadcast journalists Matthew Halton and Norman Depoe, don’t even rate that. And even if they were mentioned somewhere in the encyclopedia, they’d be difficult to find-the index is infuriating.

It lists only subjects that don’t have their own articles; if a subject isn’t included, in an article on something else, you’re out of luck. This is most aggravating when you’re looking for something you’re certain must be in there, but you just can’t find it. Such was the case with information on Canadian broadcast journalism. Except for the statement in the main entry that the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation has “an excellent news service” and “a commitment to public-affairs programs,” the encyclopedia has remarkably little information on Canada’s growing telejournalism industry. Programs such as the fifth estate are mentioned, but Adrienne Clarkson is not. (Just because she’s now trying to sell Ontario to the French makes her no less Canadian.)This Hour Has Seven Days gets a passing nod, but nothing is said about its creators, Patrick Watson and Doug Leiterman.

As a final test of the encyclopedia’s coverage of the Canadian news and current affairs media, I looked for information on 10 important journalists, past and present. But to The Canadian Encyclopedia, apparently, the media is not the message. Of the 10, seven (editor Ralph Allen, broadcaster Barbara Frum, and writers Pierre Berton, June Callwood, Roger Lemelin, Peter C. Newman and Grattan O’Leary) have their own entries, though most are only a paragraph long. Allen’s entry, written by Doug Fetherling, says he was “one of the best-loved and most influential editors of his day,” who implemented “many editorial techniques and procedures still in use today,” but neglects to say just what his innovations were. The unbylined (again) article on Pierre Berton does little more than identify the man as a “journalist, historian, media personality” and give synopses of his books. The anonymous author does take time to tell us, however, that “patriotic verve” is one of Berton’s strengths.

Frum is cautiously described by Allan M. Gould as “probably Canada’s most respected and best-known interviewer.” Her achievements are crammed into a brief paragraph that is slightly shorter than the entry on Frederick Philip Grove’s 1933 novel Fruits of the Earth preceding it. It is two paragraphs shorter than the article on the “Fuel Cell” on the same page. Certainly Frum, through her work on As It Happens and The Journal, has generated as much energy across the country as the fuel cell. At least she rates an article in the encyclopedia: Montreal Gazette publisher Clark Davey, Globe and Mail editor-in-chief Norman Webster and former Toronto Telegram editor-in-chief J.D. MacFarlane are three prominent journalists who do not.

The Canadian Encyclopedia gives the country’s news and current affairs media shoddy treatment: it devotes too many pages to the troublesome amalgam of mounties, maple leaves and mukluks that make up Canadiana. There is even an entry on Canadian disasters. Yes, home-made catastrophes rate a quaking 29 paragraphs and flood almost two pages, more than broadcasting, Saturday Night and Pierre Berton combined.

Journalism in Canada, it appears, is hardly earth-shattering news.