CBC is downsizing, once again, and there’s no plan to stop. The broadcaster’s latest strategy includes reducing the workforce about 25 percent by 2020. CBC estimates that 1,000 to 1,500 jobs will be lost over the next five years. This is in addition to eliminating 657 jobs because of a $130-million cut announced earlier this year. Before cuts, CBC has 6,994 permanent employees, 859 on contract and 329 temporary ones. On Sunday, thousands of people took to Montreal’s streets, protesting what is seen as an assault on the network. In Sherbrooke, Quebec, one newsroom refused an internal award from president Hubert Lacroix as a stance against the cuts.

According to an memo obtained by The Huffington Post Canada, the latest redundancy notices will be handed out very soon, if they haven’t started already. With them, 153 jobs will be gone by March 2015. We’ve broken down these latest cuts below:

Got something you want to see covered on here? Email the blog editor. And while you’re at it, you can follow our the Review and our masthead on Twitter.

Thanks to kris krug for the featured image. 

When a story like the Jian Ghomeshi saga gets as big as it has, it presents a challenge for media organizations: how to differentiate themselves. The Toronto Star is breaking the coverage, and everybody else is picking it up and often just repeating it. This week’s Alumni Essentials shows how important intelligent, contextual analysis is as a story unfolds like this.

Summer 2012 production editor Scaachi Koul’s “How Predator’s Get Away With It” uses her personal experiences as a student and working journalist as a call for the media to start speaking out against abusers. This is a reminder that this story is much bigger than Ghomeshi himself, as Koul details harassment from professors and her list of male media employees to avoid.

Focusing back on Ghomeshi, winter 2012 departments editor Carly Lewis analyzes the former Q host’s Facebook letter and the tactics he used in it to rally fans and admirers around him. Lewis—with the help of some experts—examines the careful crafting of each line in the letter and the science behind it to show how Ghomeshi set himself up as a victim.

As the story continues to unravel, journalists will need to find different ways to tell it—ways that add value to readers trying to make sense of this case.

It’s about to get bigger.

Do you have a post by an alumnus that should be showcased? Email the blog editor. And don’t forget to follow the Review and its masthead on Twitter.

Ricochet is the latest attempt to unite crowdfunding and journalism in Canada.

On October 2, Ricochet launched as an independent, interactive, investigative and not-for-profit online news outlet with a promise to embrace Canadian identity by producing bilingual content. Their campaign video was posted on Indiegogo on May 20 and managed to raise an impressive $82, 945 from 1,548 funders within one month. The ambitious video could be the reason for their crowdfunding success. In it, Ricochet cofounders and contributors label mainstream news as sensationalistic and conformist. They offer their utopian journalistic model as a replacement, while asking for money to produce it.

So far, Ricochet is living up to its promises. They advertised accessibility and delivered a simple web design that adapts to all devices. They promised a diverse range of topics and voices and delivered with in-depth stories that range from “Canada’s education apartheid” to “Female DJs tackle gender bias.” Readers can easily switch between English and French versions of the site and the content changes depend on what language they’re reading in. For example, on October 6, the English feature story focused on the environment, while the French homepage featured politics with focus on the Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement.

Ricochet was born out of the founders’ frustrations with how English news organizations covered the Quebec student strike and protests in 2012. In an interview with CBC, cofounder and editor Ethan Cox calls the current state of mainstream news a “cannibalistic system” dependent on unpaid or underpaid journalists. Ironically, Cox and 10 other Ricochet editors will not be paid. Divided between Ricochet’s Vancouver and Montreal offices, the editors will be volunteering their time and paying the bills with various communications jobs. All funding will go towards web development and paying their writers. Their tentative plan is to pay $100 for standard pieces, and anywhere from $500 to $1,000 for investigative pieces. It’s a noble model, but one that may be unrealistic. If Ricochet gains in popularity, it could be a race to whether the funding or patience of the volunteer editors will run out faster.

With a paid membership, they promise readers the chance to pitch their own story ideas (the application won’t available until November) and the ability to embed videos and photos into the comment section—just in case a web troll would rather flip the bird instead of write out their hateful ramble. They also vaguely tempt readers into membership with “exclusive offers,” without giving any idea of what they are.

Why would a reader pay $5 a month when articles are free to non-subscribers? And why would someone donate $300 for a lifetime subscription with no guarantee that Ricochet will still be producing content by the end of year? A belief in the vision is one thing, but consistently opening up wallets is another.

Incentives like a mention on “The Wall” or a free T-shirt may not be enough for those who are happy getting their daily news from any other free outlet. Buyouts and budget cuts don’t affect those who only have time to briefly scan the headlines while gulping down their morning coffee. Ricochet may only appeal to Canadians who regularly read investigative journalism and enjoy pieces of analysis.

I would like to say that Ricochet has the potential to compete with powerhouses like CBC and Radio-Canada. But realistically, their model doesn’t seem sustainable.

By  Harriet Luke

Five medical experts enter the Ideas Room on the third floor of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in downtown Toronto. They’ve flown in from Saskatchewan, Wisconsin and England to help tackle some complex data. It’s 9 a.m., and the glass-walled room provides a sense of openness as Anita Elash, an associate producer at The Fifth Estate, passes the experts notepads, and five-page booklets containing a few questions to consider. Their mission is to create the first national online rating system for Canadian hospitals. The idea is to give viewers the opportunity to go online and rate their hospitals in five categories: respect, communication, timeliness, cleanliness and whether or not they would recommend them.

There’s a quick demonstration of a similar Irish website, then the conversation flourishes between the experts and the CBC team. They discuss the availability and limitations of medical data. After 5 p.m., the meeting comes to a close, but the discussion doesn’t end there, as Elash will continue to relay emails and phone the experts with questions.

Rate My Hospital required one of the largest teams Jim Williamson, executive producer of The Fifth Estate, has ever assembled. Within 24 hours of the website’s premiere in April 2013, the online rating system had over 23,000 responses and plenty of comments—some positive, some negative. Along with the rating tool, CBC assigned letter grades to 239 facilities across the country. This was the part of Rate My Hospital designed to ignite conversation about the state of Canadian healthcare. Indeed, the grading system sparked the most controversy; the hospital report card was the bait that hooked Canadians and reeled them in to the website.

Creating new experiences that differ from passive TV watching keeps viewers interested and entertained—and news organizations relevant. Multiplatform stories are a matter of survival for broadcasters, says Williamson. But they’re also an opportunity: data-led investigative projects engage audiences and offer a chance to stand out in a noisy online world. Since stories can live longer outside the television set, producers are turning to interactive features and online experiences to capture and keep a loyal audience.

***

With the average Canadian spending 45 hours per month online, broadcasters face the challenge of keeping their audience’s attention. One way they can do this is by taking advantage of the fact that 50 percent of Canadians have a smartphone or tablet with them while watching television, and offering a “second screen” experience that lets viewers interact with a show via social media or a website. Broadcasters can also create interactive and multiplatform stories that offer audiences a way to consume information before or after the show. Interactive features encourage viewers to take part in the story, allowing them to leave the passenger’s seat and put both hands on the steering wheel.

As television audiences move online, the ability to connect with viewers means greater engagement and a larger community for the broadcaster. “The vast majority of creators, producers and broadcasters now embrace the fact that you cannot tell a story in a screen-based industry without reaching out on all platforms,” says Catalina Briceno, director of industry and market trends for the Canada Media Fund. The CMF is a public-private partnership created in 2010 by the Department of Canadian Heritage to fund and promote productions.

Over the past few years, the CMF has seen a steady increase in the number of applications from digital media. According to the organization, “funding to English documentary digital media components has grown . . . from $0.7 million in 2011–2012 to $5.5 million in 2012–2013.” Its 2013–14 budget is $360.7 million.

Rate My Hospital is one example of a multiplatform project. CBC aired the documentary segment two days after launching the online rating system. Throughout the show, host Bob McKeown reminded viewers to check the site and rate their hospitals, then see how the broadcaster graded each facility. This allowed the show to live past its air date, drawing viewers back to the website to see how other Canadians rated various hospitals.

What was different about this project was that the website acted as the first screen. Williamson says getting important information about hospitals out there was the priority. “For months I resisted assigning people to do the television show,” he says, noting that he wanted it to be largely an online story. Marissa Nelson, senior director of digital media for CBC news and Centres, wants her staff to continue to challenge the standard storytelling format. “I don’t think there’s enough of that in Canada,” she says. From a business perspective, this type of tool is about creating loyal viewers and an audience that will want to tune in week after week—and about getting people to stay on the site longer. “Maybe they stay 10 minutes instead of two,” says Nelson. “And they’re more likely to remember CBC news than any other competitor.”

***

Anna Mehler Paperny, senior producer of data desk investigations at Global News, works two desktop computer monitors, scrupulously analyzing Excel spreadsheets. What looks like the equivalent of an unfinished Rubik’s Cube is, to Paperny, a collection of patterns to be discovered and puzzles to be solved.

Senior web co-ordinators Patrick Cain and Leslie Young sit across from her. Cain is soft-spoken, but his hands animate as he talks about analyzing the data he deals with. He can tolerate repetitive work, but admits that when handling multiple spreadsheets, “It can be really easy to screw up.”

A bigger problem, though, is gaining access to data from governments and private companies. “When those bastards make it hard for me to get something, it motivates me even more,” says Cain, adding that the information he usually wants comes in PDF files—making it difficult to transfer the data into an Excel document so he can analyze it. But the team saves time by using software and templates from previous pieces.

The results are often worth the headaches. Young’s series The Gardiner: Trouble Overhead won the 2012 Radio Television Digital News Association awards for best in-depth and investigative series and best digital media series. For that look at Toronto’s slowly crumbling Gardiner Expressway, she created an interactive map that showed where concrete was falling. Along with the map, Global wrote a series of articles with embedded links via DocumentCloud to show that the city “downplayed Gardiner structural concerns.”

The data desk posts as much of the original data as it can. “People want to know where this information comes from,” says Paperny. David Weisz, a freelance digital journalist who has done work for Global, says, “You can run a print story with unnamed sources, but you just can’t do that for data.”

Created in 2010 to produce original pieces for the web and provide additional context for news stories, the data team originally worked at Global’s satellite office in downtown Toronto, but now sits in the centre of the main newsroom in the suburbs. The move came after executives realized just how important the team’s work is. “If we want to distinguish ourselves from other news organizations,” says Ron Waksman, a senior online director at Global News, “it is not enough to take what we do on the broadcast side and push it across to online.”

He says there’s a gold mine of undiscovered information that has sat untouched and he wants his team to dig into it. “Oxycontin’s gone, but Canada’s pill-popping problem is worse than ever” went up on Global’s website in March 2013 with graphs and charts that viewers could click for more information. This led the team to the November 2013 data-led story that showed deaths from opioid use had declined while those from other painkiller prescriptions had drastically increased. “Data can change from year to year,” says Paperny. “This means you can continue a story a month or a year later and people will still be interested.”

***

Armed with leaked financial documents that exposed offshore tax havens, CBC’s Special Investigations Unit decided to produce an interactive to make the complicated information accessible to everyone. But during the first couple of meetings for Stashing Their Cash, the journalists and tech team were speaking different languages. “I had no idea what was going on,” says Harvey Cashore, senior producer of the unit, and it took a few meetings for the two groups to understand each other as they brainstormed ideas. “We realized that my idea was far too complex and would have taken probably two years to build.”

This is not unusual. “A lot of the time I’m trying to get the person making the TV show to let go of their preconceived notions,” says Sean Embury, principal and creative director at Fulscrn, a company that helps networks with creative development and accessing funds. He believes this type of storytelling provides another level of comprehension that television can’t always provide, but broadcasters often underestimate how long it takes to produce a complex interactive story. Even the research for these ambitious investigative stories can take a lot of time; Rate My Hospital, for example, took about nine months to create.

Multi-screen experiences can be costly and can require hiring experts, as Rate My Hospital and Stashing Their Cash did. Fortunately, a lot of material and research that goes into a television show can also be used for its accompanying online interactive piece. Embury cites Truth and Lies: The Last Days of Osama bin Laden as an example of how CBC maximized its content. Interviews gathered for The Fifth Estate episode were incorporated into the online story. “I don’t want to spend twice as much telling my story five different ways or on five different platforms,” says Embury, “so a lot of it has to do with planning.”

Williamson’s team now has weekly meetings to discuss how best to communicate stories and on what platform. CBC won’t be able to do big projects all the time—Nelson says the network will focus on one or two a year and try to knock them out of the park—but the numbers make them attractive. Rate My Hospital has drawn more than two million page views and nearly 64,000 ratings on the patient rating tool. During the 2011 federal election, the Vote Compass tool, which asks users a series of questions and matches them with the most appropriate party platform, had almost two million respondents. And Stashing Their Cash, one of CBC’s most successful interactive stories, was shared on websites such as NYTimes.com.

***

Alex Bottle, an associate professor of medical statistics, arrived from London the night before the Rate My Hospital expert panel meeting. CBC wanted his advice on measuring and presenting the information gathered to rate the hospitals. Bottle spent weeks researching the Canadian healthcare system to prepare. While eager to be a part of the project, and knowing that CBC wanted to get it right, his initial concern was that this was being done for the first time in Canada—and by journalists.

Gary Teare, director of Quality Measure and Analysis with Health Quality Council Saskatchewan, was worried the journalists didn’t truly understand the limitations of the data they were looking at. “I’ve been doing this for years,” he says, “so I’m aware of how difficult it is.”

The holes in the data were not CBC’s fault; individual hospitals record information such as infection rates differently, and some hospitals aren’t required to report much at all. Elash was surprised by how little information is available to the public, and by the secrecy surrounding hospital data. Teare says CBC did the best it could with the information it had, but the “fundamental weakness in the analysis is the reliability of the underlying data to begin with.”

Because of this, some of the experts worried about the plan to rank the hospitals A through D. “I was less thrilled about the grading system,” says Teare, who attempted to put together an Ontario hospital report card 10 years ago. Back then, he and other medical experts had the same questions as CBC but didn’t create a “multiple-level grading system because the data wouldn’t support it.”

Elash says the report card was a way to start a conversation, and it did a good job of that. But some experts thought it was a way to get attention with controversial content. Sholom Glouberman, president of Patients Canada, says, “I thought the project was very dangerous. . . . What it did was it eroded people’s confidence in the healthcare system unnecessarily.”

He believes it also reinforced the notion that healthcare issues are the fault of individual hospitals and acute care, when the public should be focusing on chronic conditions and how well our system manages them. Yet it did start a conversation between the public and healthcare providers, and got people thinking about the way Canada’s system works.

Vote Compass also generated discussion. Heather O’Brien, a professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the university of British Columbia, used Vote Compass during the last B.C. election and says finding out which political party the tool assigns you became a hot topic among her colleagues. “It was sort of a game around the lunch table,” says O’Brien. “‘So what did you turn out to be?’”

Part of her research looks at what motivates people to use a particular website. When it comes to news sites, visitors value the various aspects of multiplatform stories differently. “For some people, the value added is the content, and other people really think about the value in the interactive components,” she says. “It’s a really complex puzzle of different users with different motivations.”

Some users had a problem with Vote Compass’s content. Brian Kelcey, a Toronto public policy consultant and former Conservative aide, argues the tool assigns values for voters based on their opinion of a party rather than on the party’s actual accomplishments; it shows platforms but doesn’t provide any links to past performance. “The CBC has access to this information,” he says. The interactive also doesn’t account for changes in policy during campaigns, which can cover decisive issues. Kelcey believes the tool is put up in a rush come election time, adding, “There’s such a race to get the Vote Compass engine out to draw clicks and users and page views into the CBC website and get everyone hooked on their election coverage.”

***

Technology lets producers link to more information and add more depth to the stories they tell, but interactive, data-led investigations are also changing the editorial direction. “The force used to be from broadcast to online,” says Waksman. But that isn’t what viewers want now; they want original reporting. “The future is not about commodity news, what happened today,” he says. It’s about going deeper into stories, investigating and providing analysis and context.

News organizations realize that smartphones, tablets and laptops aren’t necessarily second screens anymore. Waksman sees Global as a network, not a broadcaster, and it needs to provide its audience with a variety of ways to consume and interact with news. “You apply the medium that makes the most sense.”

Waksman plans to add to his data desk team and Elash plans to keep Rate My Hospital going. “It was a call to hospitals to be accountable, to be open, and I think you can’t call for that and go away,” Elash says. “You have to stay on the story.”

The former freelance health reporter and Toronto Sun staffer is working on meeting with her experts again. CBC will launch a new version of Rate My Hospital in the fall, and this time, the team will have a better sense of the challenges, says Elash. “We didn’t fully understand what we were up against.”

Larry Zolf is prepared for an ambush. A pair of thick, black-framed glasses sits atop his schnozz, the legendary nose that’s been described as his spare sex organ. A microphone clenched in one hand and a 60-pound Frezzolini news camera in the other, he stands on the stoop of a mansion in Montreal’s prestigious Westmount neighbourhood. It is winter 1966, and the light from his camera is so harsh it could make Mother Teresa look guilty.

Zolf hopes to shine that light on Pierre Sévigny, the former associate defence minister caught in the middle of the Gerda Munsinger affair, a scandal involving a German prostitute who seduced several cabinet ministers to obtain information for the Soviet Union. RCMP officers exposed Sévigny, who lost his leg during World War II, after detecting the thwack of his wooden prosthesis on surveillance tapes they compiled of Munsinger from 1958 to 1960. When Prime Minister John Diefenbaker caught wind of the scandal, he tried to handle it privately, asking Sévigny to resign and deporting Munsinger. But in 1966, the private matter became a public issue when the minister of justice under Prime Minister Lester B. Pearson brought it up during a tussle in the House of Commons.

Zolf is on the story as part of the team at This Hour Has Seven Days, a CBC news program that pushed boundaries using satirical sketches and ambush interviews. Doug Leiterman, executive producer of the show, instructs him to question Sévigny at his mansion with a warning: “He’s a hard drinker, and he’s got some unsavoury friends.” But when Zolf knocks on the door, Corinne Sévigny answers.

“He’s not here,” she explains, though Zolf can see her husband through the window, reclining in his easy chair with a drink in hand. He turns to retreat, the snow coming down hard. But before Zolf can leave, Sévigny appears on the stoop, motioning for him to return.

And then, suddenly, thump. The former politician swings his cane, hitting Zolf across his shoulders, which are, fortunately, padded by two winter coats.

“You fuckin’ cocksucker!” Zolf yells.

During the ensuing scuffle, he delivers a swift kick to Sévigny’s wooden leg, which flies into the front yard. All is silent. The Schnozz disappears into the blizzard.

That was classic Larry Zolf. The CBC Television personality, history buff and writer with a nose for politics died of kidney failure at the age of 76 in March 2011. He had a hell of a way of silencing people and he usually filled that silence with a barrage of one-liners. He never totally fit in, but as an outsider he had a knack for revealing the ludicrous in politics and culture. Always bold, he was respected by his peers and even the insiders he exposed. Perry Rosemond thought his long-time friend gave the best advice because of his logical thinking—and even used him as an inspiration when he created the Larry King character for the popular 1970s TV show King of Kensington. Zolf kept people’s attention with a combination of intelligence, passion and persistence, says Rosemond. “We would have long discussions as kids. At the end, I would always say, ‘It was nice listening to you, Larry.’”

All that talking paid off. Zolf earned a spot at CBC as an unlikely broadcaster: a loose cannon with a look unlike anyone else in the business. But it’s doubtful that he’d be able to talk his way into a job at the Mother Corp. today. “The CBC was much braver then,” says fellow writer Barry Callaghan of the 1960s and ’70s, when Zolf’s career reached its peak.

In its early years, CBC Television, which began broadcasting in 1952, had room for the outsider with the rumbling voice who couldn’t type or drive and certainly never played by the rules. Robin Taylor, who has worked as head of current affairs for CBC, says Zolf’s unique qualities managed to keep him relevant in Canadian journalism for 45 years. “He looked at the world in a funny way. He was loud, boisterous at times, but that was his style,” says Taylor. “He wasn’t a phony. He was a talker.” And what he said always had a substance, a wit and a unique charm that just can’t be found on the airwaves today.

When Zolf was born in 1934, the north end of Winnipeg was a hub for politically active Ukrainian, Polish and Russian immigrants. His father, Russian-born Joshua Falek Zolf, raised his youngest child to be a rabbi, although he was a writer as well (Falek’s autobiography, On Foreign Soil, was published in both English and Yiddish). Falek was also the principal at Isaac Loeb Peretz Folk School, where Zolf found his voice, memorizing poems by Jewish poets at just six years old and reciting them in front of engrossed audiences. By eight, he had features published in both Yiddish and 2012

English newspapers in Winnipeg and performed with Yiddish acting troupes visiting from New York.

His high school years were tougher, though. Because of his poor math skills, Zolf was part of the remedial class at St. John’s Technical High School. Some teachers believed he was more advanced than the other students; he scored the highest in his entire school on a Grade 11 English exam—but his overachieving father remained disappointed in his son.

Zolf proved his worth at United College in Winnipeg, where he would meet his three great loves: history, political science and Patricia—his first shiksa girl. Their first date was a screening of Lover Boy and the Sex Kitten Bandit in the basement of the Manitoba Legislative Building (the movie was in the process of being banned and they snuck in). She was beautiful, intelligent and bold. By 1958, to the disapproval of both their families, they were married and living in Toronto so Zolf could attend the University of Toronto’s Osgoode Hall Law School.

He dropped out of law after a year, but remained at the university to pursue a master’s degree in Canadian history. In 1959, Zolf started working at CBC after his friend Michael Nimchuk suggested a road trip to Louisiana to do a story financed by the radio program Assignment. The two pals went into producer Harry Boyle’s office to deliver their pitch, but Boyle rejected all of Nimchuk’s ideas. Even though they never made it to Louisiana, he asked Zolf to review a book on the history of Upper Canada and that led to more freelance radio work.

When his father died, Zolf lost focus in school, separated temporarily from his wife and his career stalled. But in 1964, he decided to audition for a reporting position with This Hour Has Seven Days. His specialties were ambush interviews and rapid-fire questioning. CBC management wasn’t ready for This Hour’s daring, irreverent and challenging brand of news and cancelled the show after two years. He then covered Parliament Hill for a TV program calledWeekend.

Zolf stuck around the CBC as a well-connected production consultant. But by the 1990s, his place at CBC was uncertain, despite several successful decades there. The network was hesitant to keep such a controversial character after his contract was up for renewal—the broadcaster was now a more organized, rigid bureaucracy and no longer saw the value of a character like Zolf. “He was underused and there were producers who didn’t really understand his talent then,” says Gordon Stewart, a former CBC producer. To make matters worse, Zolf was diagnosed with colon cancer and his 33-year marriage broke up not long after he recovered. Luckily, Taylor and others fought to help him obtain a permanent position at CBC in consulting—and he went from misfit to mentor. He also continued to freelance in his spare time. In 2007, he secured the final gig of his 45-year career: writing a regular column, mostly about politics, for cbc.ca.

Zolf managed to stay relevant in Canadian journalism for so long because of his willingness to speak his mind. The Dance of the Dialectic, his 1973 book about Pierre Trudeau, whom he grew to respect while working on Parliament Hill, fearlessly criticized the prime minister and his Liberal government. Zolf’s philosophical concept was that because everyone thought Trudeau would get elected, he did. But instead of being offended, the former PM actually requested more. A few months later, he asked Zolf to write a speech for the Press Gallery dinner, an annual event where politicians and the Hill reporters make fun of themselves at a raucous off-the-record gathering.

Trudeau dreaded the event—after all, he was not exactly known for his sense of humour—so the Schnozz crafted a speech that was a masterpiece of sarcasm. Unfortunately, the aloof intellectual read Zolf’s words as if he were reciting the phone book. “I have to take organ grinder lessons five days a week,” he droned, ruining a crack about what it’s like to run the country with a minority government. The speech writer watched in horror and drank every ounce of alcohol he could get his hands on. Years later, though, Trudeau learned to pause for his laughs—and Zolf finally forgave him.

His close relationship with politicians made some other journalists question whether he was biased. He eventually declared himself a Red Tory, but earlier in his career, he was known as a diehard socialist and pro-labour. For a while, there were even rumours that he was a Communist. (In fact, he had been intrigued by the ideology—but only for one day when he was 12 years old. Rosemond and Zolf auditioned for a communist camp in Winnipeg, both toting succulent corned beef sandwiches. Lunchtime came but, much to the boys’ dismay, the sandwiches went into a “sharing pot.” They pulled one sardine sandwich and one peanut butter and jelly. “That was our first and last day as communists,” says Rosemond.)

But any real or perceived bias was overshadowed by Zolf’s ability to ask the tough questions. During an interview with René Lévesque in 1964, he challenged the Parti Québécois founder: “You’re not concerned about the feelings of English Canadians outside of Quebec. What about those inside Quebec?”

His fearless interviewing sometimes got him into trouble, as it did with Sévigny, but it often created electric segments. A chat with feminist Germaine Greer for Midweek started out dull—until he accused her of not paying attention to class and ethnic differences among women. “You liar!” Greer fired back. “I cannot have you sitting here distorting my book for the people who are foolish enough to think that you know about things.” Zolf asked her what she actually meant in her book. Greer vigorously defended herself in what ended up being an entertaining interview.

Though his interview style could be blunt, he had a knack for talking his way out of the sticky situations his mouth got him into. In 1969, his colleague Peter Reilly (who would go on to be one of the first reporters on the fifth estate) was too sick to cover race integration in the South, so Zolf went in his place.

He was possibly the most Hebrew-looking reporter to ever cover the issue (which was, at that time, quite violent), but he talked his way through it. When the Ku Klux Klan was opening a separate high school in Mississippi, he showed up and charmed his way in. “Sir, I know you don’t trust me and I know why,” he told the school’s security guard. “I’m no commie, sir. I hate commies, especially Jewish ones. I’m a Canadian.” He succeeded, and the resulting news report was a compelling look inside the KKK.

Zolf sometimes needed the same techniques of persuasion in his personal life. He once came home to his first wife with a charred afro, stinking of women’s perfume. Although he concocted an outlandish story that he claimed Patricia bought, he’d actually been having an affair with a woman who loved to light dozens of candles when she made love and the flames ignited his hair. That was the night the Schnozz learned that perfume makes a very poor fire extinguisher.

But behind all of his chutzpah, there was hesitancy. “Although he was one of the guys who wrote it as he saw it, he somehow wanted people to like him,” says Norm Snider, fellow political journalist and friend. “He was all kinds of insecure, going back to being the big-nosed guy from Winnipeg.”

In his later years and in ailing health, Zolf began to lose confidence in his abilities. Though he masked his insecurities with wit, he couldn’t help but question himself, especially when he began writing a column for cbc.ca. Barbara Diakopoulou, his second partner (they never married), spent a lot of time encouraging him during those years. Before he submitted columns, he’d often flip through his Rolodex, ring up a friend and read the piece aloud. “He would keep you on the phone literally for forever and a day if you didn’t find a way to get off,” explains Bernie Farber, a friend and the head of the Canadian Jewish Congress. “And I could have listened to him all day, too. But you wouldn’t get a lot of work done that way.”

Entertaining as his columns were, working with him wasn’t always easy. After Saturday Nighteditor Robert Fulford assigned Zolf a short article, the piece came in months late—and more than seven times too long. But the magazine still ran it because it was too captivating to pass up. Though Fulford can’t remember just what the “lighthearted piece” on parliamentary affairs he assigned was, an article titled “The New Shape of Canadian Politics” from the December 1975 issue seems to fit the bill. Running 10 pages, it included quips on Canada’s government and politicians, including this gem: “For socialists, going to bed with the Liberals was like getting oral sex from a shark.”

The Schnozz may not have been keen on following instructions or playing by the rules, but he could always come up with a good argument and he couldn’t resist a good debate. His favourite person to argue with was Diakopoulou, who works with Elections Ontario. Not long after he separated from his first wife, Zolf spotted her for the first time in the middle of five Greek men—arguing. He watched as each man left, exasperated. Now that was a woman he could love.

Zolf also enjoyed picking fights with neighbours on Toronto’s Danforth, where he and Diakopoulou lived, and with the cab drivers who drove him home—while the meter was running. (The cabbies sometimes inspired his columns.) But friends say his tough exterior was just a part of his schtick. Really, Zolf could find a redeeming quality in just about everyone, even people Rosemond thought could surely have none. He was constantly asking, “Larry, are we talking about the same person?”

In particular, he loved William Lyon Mackenzie King, a prime minister who had a reputation for strange behaviour. But to Zolf, King’s eccentricities were his best features. He identified with the fellow iconoclast in a time when there were few left in the world of Canadian politics or journalism. In fact, Diakopoulou remembers that on one of their first dates, they passed by Mount Pleasant Cemetery, home to King’s grave. “I’d like to be buried here someday,” he told her. That way, he could spend his spirit life doing what he loved best: ambushing a politician and immersing himself in Canadian history.

Though he wasn’t quite as outspoken in his final days, Zolf collaborated with Barry Callaghan on his memoirs, The Dialectical Dancer, which came out the fall before he died. Now, this unconventional Canadian icon, the likes of which we’re unlikely to see, hear or read again, is six graves away from Mackenzie King and finally silent.

Andy Barrie pulls up in a taxi to the Front Street entrance of CBC’s downtown Toronto fortress at approximately 5:30 a.m. After settling the fare with his long-term driver, who jokes that Barrie has paid for at least 10 per cent of his mortgage, the king of morning radio grabs his copies of The Globe and Mail and Now, a Toronto alternative weekly. He shuffles toward the doors, letting a few flyers fall out of the papers. Then the soft-bellied man with pure white hair passes through the restricted-access interior gates. He takes the elevator up CBC’s tower to the third floor and heads to his desk. Amid family photographs, books, notes and a computer, there is a little black pillow with white lettering that reads, “Everyone is entitled to my opinion.” A large picture of Barrie as a young boy at Camp Skylemar in Naples, Maine, shows him wearing headphones, leaning over a microphone. As the camp’s radio host for “The Wake-up,” the nine-year-old played records, gave ball scores and led “camp chatter.” Barrie’s desk also boasts a plaque congratulating him for 10 years of “outstanding contribution to the success of Metro Morning.” These are not empty words of praise. He is the voice of the morning show ranked No. 1 in Canada’s largest city.

While Barrie flips through his morning papers, technician and associate producer Kim Holmgren is already in the control room. Sitting to his left is Gord Cochrane, a wiry, hunched-over man who rattles his knees incessantly. According to Barrie, Metro Morning’s studio director is one of the most valuable players on the “incredibly functional” morning team. The extent to which the show sounds fluid and relaxed, Barrie says, is largely due to Cochrane. The ever-smiling Jim Curran, who has reported on traffic since the show began in 1973, walks in not long after Barrie, carrying a cooler with milk for the crew’s coffee. Other team members, like producer Jessica Low, will trickle in later. At 6:12 a.m. Barrie sits comfortably in the studio with his headphones on, waiting for Judy Maddren to wrap up World Report. Then a red light above Barrie goes on to indicate ‘on-air’ and his voice unfurls like velvet over the airwaves with a leisurely morning greeting.

Across town and a few weeks later, in CFRB studios at the corner of Yonge and St. Clair, Ted Woloshyn entertains himself between on-air moments with cracks about a dating website he’s discovered. “We’ve lost him for the whole morning,” board operator Robert Turner says of Newstalk 1010’s morning show host. Meanwhile, producer Amy Allison chases a story about a Durham farmer who has been selling raw milk without a license and is on a hunger strike. She and Woloshyn disagree about what he and Globe columnist Christie Blatchford, a regular commentator, should discuss. When Blatchford comes on, Woloshyn goes ahead with his idea, ignoring his producer’s wishes. Allison rolls her eyes, huffing audibly. It’s near the end of November 2006, just a few weeks after Woloshyn celebrated his 10th anniversary as the show’s host. On December 15, he will unexpectedly resign, leaving management temporarily unsure of what to do with the show.

Two things are clear about Woloshyn’s departure: “It’s a major change for a major station,” says Brian Thomas, professor of radio news and media issues at Toronto’s Seneca College School of Communication Arts, and Barrie’s success will influence the new show’s direction. Woloshyn’s show was dry, in need of energy, Thomas says, and suggests that CFRB has been tuning in to Metro Morning. “All stations in town compete with each other in one form or another,” he says. “Barrie’s strengthening in the morning would affect CFRB — they’ll pay close attention to what he’s doing to get the ratings.”

So CFRB is fighting to reclaim a larger share of the morning audience with Woloshyn’s mic now in the hands of Bill Carroll. The station has flexed its marketing muscle for the new host with an ad campaign occupying almost 400 of Toronto’s billboards. None of this has anything to do with overtaking CBC though, says Carroll, because his listeners are “much busier, more active people” who would never listen to Barrie in the first place. After stints as co-host on MuchMusic, and news man on Q107 and then AM 640, Carroll joined CFRB as a weekend newscaster, then became news director, until 1999 when he started hosting his own late-morning show. Carroll’s hair and beard are the colour of fire and ash. The man is small but his personality is big and his opinions bigger. Industry veterans such as Jerry Chomyn, director broadcast media at Humber College’s School of Media Studies and Information Technology in Toronto, call Carroll an intelligent interviewer. “He has solid credentials as far as current affairs go,” he says. “His speed to be able to hear what the caller is actually saying and react is one of his strongest skills.” CFRB is using Carroll’s strengths with the hope that they will return the morning show to its glory days of a decade ago.

Perhaps, but back at the CBC building Barrie is safe in the belief that his audience is growing because people want more with their morning coffee than news-talk staples: a constant drumbeat of crime and highway carnage combined with open-line radio and aggressively opinionated hosts. “Private radio, and CFRB in particular, has gone seriously down-market,” says Barrie. “At one time it was an important current affairs station.” Former Metro  Morning host David Schatzky goes even further: “Compared to CBC, CFRB is mindless drivel.”

Metro Morning shot to No. 1 in the Bureau of Broadcast Measurement Canada’s (BBM) ratings, surpassing private morning shows, for the first time in summer 2004. Now nearly a quarter of a million listeners tune in to CBC Radio One’s Toronto morning flagship. But those numbers didn’t happen overnight. A series of changes, beginning in 1995 when CBC hired Barrie away from CFRB, perceptively altered the show’s tone and content.

CBC Radio Toronto launched the first incarnation of its early morning show on April 2, 1973, with a mandate strikingly similar to what it is today. The open-door studio at 509 Parliament Street sat in a former 450-seat cinema, built in 1913. The show was originally called Tomorrow Is Here, a title host Bruce Rogers thought too “hokey” to say on air. A year later it was renamed Metro Morning. Rogers left that same year and four other hosts led the morning show before Barrie. The late Harry Brown lasted from 1974 to ’76, followed by Schatzky from ’76 to ’79. Joe Coté hopped aboard in 1979 and took the helm for 13 years. Finally, Matt Maychak played host from 1993 to ’95 — when Barrie took over — after leaving his long-time position as host of his namesake CFRB show.

Hosts have come and gone but there haven’t been many fundamental changes to programming or ideology since the early 1970s, says Alex Frame, who started at CBC Radio in 1971 and was vice-president from 1999 until 2003. “Probably the description you read in ’75 is the same one you read in 2006.”

The basic elements of Metro Morning remain: news, weather, traffic and a range of interviews.  Reflecting on the original purpose of the show during Metro Morning’s 30th anniversary celebrations in 2003, initial host Rogers said, “The idea was to transform mornings across the CBC from DJ shows into programs reflecting their communities. In Toronto it would be multicultural and would make an effort to report on issues and events important to Toronto’s many neighbourhoods.”

But at the time, there were limits to how well the show could accomplish its goals. Schatzky says, “CBC hesitated to put someone on the air with an accent because they thought no one would understand them.” The show was trying, but not quite succeeding, to reflect the city’s diversity. This is where, in recent years,Metro Morning has truly shifted. “The sensibility of the program may have changed,” Frame says. “The consciousness changed.” Jim Carr, coordinator of the broadcast radio program at Seneca College and a habitual radio listener, picked up on the nuances Frame refers to. “I thought the show had changed, but I couldn’t put my finger on how,” he says. Now he’s better able to articulate the differences. “It sounds like you’re walking around in any one of the neighbourhoods downtown.” This was the effect Susan Marjetti, regional director of radio for Toronto, strove to create when she initiated Metro Morning’s revamp in spring 2001.

When CBC hired Marjetti, she immediately walked onto the floor, gathered up relevant staff and asked her “folks” if they thought Metro Morning reflected the fact that Toronto is the most multicultural city in Canada. The answer was a “resounding no.” Thus began a year of research in order to “move forward” and “become more relevant” to the city’s residents. Hosts, journalists, producers, as well as music and performance contributors met to discuss the gap between market research and what was actually being heard on the radio. The “transformation team” also brought in people from all walks of life and different communities to tell CBC about issues in their neighbourhoods. “I wanted to add music and performance under the same program values we’d choose for the news,” Marjetti says. They chose to “build a cast of characters around Andy,” regular columnists who host segments like “What’s Goin’ On,” or “Beyond Burgers,” bringing “new, diverse voices” and “fresh perspectives.”

The new voices make Metro Morning successful in “catering to a multicultural reality,” says Schatzky, although he’s less enthusiastic about how the changes have been accomplished journalistically. “Sometimes they do it through music and food, a softer approach,” he says. Schatzky laments, or perhaps nostalgically romanticizes, earlier days when the show had “harder hitting” content. “For the flagship current affairs morning show, it spends a lot of time telling people about new CDs and infotainment.” He wonders aloud whether taxpayer’s money should be spent on tips about consumer items, but acknowledges, “The ratings reflect that as a corporate strategy it has worked extremely well.”

For Metro Morning staff, the six columnists who have regular spots on the morning show are a part of how it better reflects Toronto’s diversity. Critics, on the other hand, might dub them leftovers from what Robert Fulford of the National Post calls “the year of trauma.” No one pointed out more scathingly how rough the show sounded during its makeover. In a 2002 Toronto Life, Gold National Magazine Award–winning column called “Mourning Show,” Fulford ripped apart the changes. “It sounded like Barrie was a guest on his own show,” he says. “It was so pitiful, so pathetic.” He explains, “People who grew up in Toronto and had pure Toronto accents, and poor Andy had to find a way to get them to say they weren’t white people.”

Frame defends the choices made as well as the challenges that ensued. “The move to be more contemporary is going to be rough for a while.” He says CBC’s ultimate job is to reflect the country back to itself. Toronto’s cultural make-up changed so radically over four decades — according to Statistics Canada, in 2001, 44 per cent of Toronto’s population was born outside of Canada — that Metro Morning had to change with it. The show moved “to tell the story from different perspectives, not just middle- class, white liberals,” he says. “Change and development is risky, but not changing is more risky. It would become irrelevant.”

Listening to the show now, Fulford says he doesn’t think many of the changes stuck and the show has reverted to the way it was before he wrote his cutting column. “The weird self-consciousness they developed about ethnicity is gone,” he says. But other than Priya Ramu, the senior producer who worked through much of the seven-month transformation process, and Natasha Ramsahai, a meteorologist Fulford called too “perky,” who moved on, Marjetti says the changes made between February and September 2002 have remained a part of the show and Metro Morning’s audience share has doubled as a direct consequence. “The track and path we’ve chosen has proven to be a good one,” she says. “Those changes actually catapulted the show to No. 1.”

Designed to help set advertising rates, BBM ratings play an even more significant role in the world of private radio. Pat Holiday, general manager of Standard Radio Toronto, which owns CFRB, says the 2006 fall ratings (the most important quarterly period) that placed Metro Morning at the top and CFRB in fifth place, don’t matter. He looks at trends, not specific periods. It’s hard to believe CFRB isn’t concerned about its morning show’s BBM position. The program used to be the No. 1 morning show back in fall 1995 and summer 1996, and even after that was well ahead of CBC, but its ratings have withered to the point where three music stations now stand between it and CBC.

James Cullingham, program coordinator in broadcast journalism at Seneca College, says the fact that CBC’s morning show is No. 1 “must just make the private stations mental.” He says he imagines they’re now looking at what CBC does successfully in order to move forward. Besides having the highest audience share in the 6 a.m. to 10 a.m., Monday through Friday, all-ages (12-years-old plus) category, what the ratings really say is that Metro Morning is winning the battle to stay relevant by giving the audience what it’s looking for. “People are starved for news content,” Cullingham says. “Despite what advertisers and private radio want us to believe, people are interested in a slower paced, more substantive morning show.” In addition, he says, CBC has “carefully tuned itself to a newer and rapidly changing audience.”

Seneca College journalism instructor Thomas, who attends a convention every year held by the Radio Television News Directors Association of Canada, as well as one in the U.S. held by the same group, says what invariably comes to the top of the agenda is that people want not only a fair, objective report of what’s happening, but more news. Unfortunately, not all news-talk stations have heeded the trend.

“The last few years, CFRB had its head in the sand about CBC,” says Seneca College’s Carr. He claims high-ranking people in private radio listen to CBC, even if they say they don’t. “It’s the dirty little secret in Toronto broadcasting. No one talks about counter programming with the CBC.” They may have been listening, but they failed to respond. Metro Morning is successful, Carr says, because “CBC has gone back to the roots of what radio is all about — local issues and stories.” Starting the morning show over with a new host gives CFRB the perfect opportunity to follow the public broadcaster’s example. Carr suspected the show would be “completely retooled.” Sure enough, it’s happening.

“What ’RB has done, if you listen carefully, they’ve reduced and repositioned the commercial load in the morning show,” says Humber’s Chomyn, who has worked in the broadcasting industry for more than 38 years. “The result is a nicer flowing show.” And there are other notable changes. Chomyn says, “We’re seeing a kinder, gentler side of Bill Carroll.” This is a big change for someone who has made a name for himself as an edgy, opinionated host. Lastly, Chomyn says, “You’ll notice there’s a team around Bill, it’s not just him.” The news anchors and other contributors constantly interact with Carroll on air. These transformations sound familiar.

Carroll goes on air at CFRB weekday mornings from 6 a.m. to 10 a.m. Right now it’s 8:30 a.m. and time to shift to the show’s open-line segment. Sitting in the studio in a high- backed leather chair on wheels, dressed in jeans and a button-up black shirt, he’s asking callers whether Toronto members of the Ontario Teachers’ Federation should be using union time to bring up Middle East issues. “The stronger my opinion is,” he declares, “the more reaction we get.”

Carroll pulls out his wallet, unprompted, to reveal a photo of his wife and two children. This is the new Bill Carroll, and perhaps why, according to Chomyn, he’s ready for the morning show, whereas a few years ago he wasn’t. Carroll is a family man now, more people can relate to him.

Eager to point out the show’s format changes, Carroll says there are “fewer regular features, fewer commercials, more opportunities for me to speak.” As for how his employer will handle the decrease in advertising revenue, he says, “The station makes less money, but in the long run you hope you’ll get more listeners and be able to charge more for the ads.”

Carroll has a specific strategy for gaining listeners. He says CFRB spent way too much time in the past competing against other news stations, so to recapture some of the lucrative morning audience he’s going after the people who tune into FM music stations. “I want John Derringer’s listeners, Erin Davis’s listeners.” The public broadcaster doesn’t come into Carroll’s crosshairs at all. “The CBC is too sleepy for me,” he says. “I don’t want to hear about Darfur, not for 20 minutes anyway. I’d rather know what’s going on in my backyard.” It’s a peculiar criticism directed at a show that owes its success to becoming more relevant and more local.

Apparently, CFRB’s ratings don’t concern the Metro Morning team either. Producer Jessica Low and her right-hand man, senior producer Nicholas Davis, who will be interviewed only in tandem, say it’s like comparing apples and oranges. “We’re CBC — we don’t have to cater to advertisers. Our mandate is to serve the public. We have two distinct operating principles,” they say over speakerphone, never interrupting each other’s answers. They attribute Metro Morning’s success not only to the way it reflects the audience it serves, but also to the way its stories have a strong impact on its audience.

Marjetti identifies another important factor that helped Metro Morning climb to “the top of the heap,” one CFRB won’t be replicating any time soon — CBC Toronto’s move from 740 AM to 99.1 FM in 1998. There is an obvious difference in sound quality between the AM and FM bands — the former sounds hollow, tinny and fuzzy, while the latter projects full and clear. But, according to Standard Radio’s Holiday, more than the improved sound quality it’s the increased number of people who tune in to the FM band. “If Metro Morningwasn’t on FM it wouldn’t be half the show it is because it wasn’t before it went to FM,” he says. “I’m not knocking the show — they still do a really good show.”

There is one last thing the Bill Carroll Show will never have, which is crucial to Metro Morning’s success: Andy Barrie. The show’s ratings have gone up with a host who even critics such as Fulford admit is “smooth” and “professional.”

The American-born Barrie studied theatre at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, hoping one day to be an actor. He volunteered at the student radio station, which quickly became his main outlet for performing. “You could actually get better and better,” he says. “Unlike an actor, where you might get a show every two years if you were lucky, you could be on every day.”

Although he was a conscientious objector, he was drafted into the U.S. Army during the Vietnam War. On orders to ship out, he deserted and came to Canada in 1969 — a past that surfaces on his show and contributes to his style. Now a Canadian citizen, he refers to himself on-air as an immigrant and is obsessively patriotic about his adopted country.

Still, CBC makes a mantra out of the cliché, “a station is more than the sum of its parts,” in a way that private stations don’t, which places limits on Barrie’s voice. “There are judgments I’ve made about what we ought to do on the show — everything from what kind of music we ought to play to who we ought to interview — that aren’t shared.”

But he plays ball with the team format, and attributes the show’s continued success to the entire staff, not just him. “I cannot claim, as I once could when I did my own program, that what you hear on that show belongs to me,” he says. “This isn’t The Andy Barrie Show, and I’m thrilled it’s not.”

Just after 8:30 a.m. Barrie signs off Metro Morning for the day. Following the requisite story meeting, he heads down to the ooh la la! café in the main atrium. He orders a BLT and a fruit salad. “My first love was puppetry,” he says, eating pieces of watermelon and berries with his fingers while still in line. He admits he thrives on having an audience. On Metro Morning, CBC is master puppeteer, the airwaves the strings and Barrie’s voice the puppet. They perform a show about a diverse city called Toronto for a very pleased audience. “There’s something wonderfully powerful,” he says, “about projecting yourself into a world where you can’t be seen.”

Late one morning last October, Carol Off, the new host of CBC Radio One’s evening flagship As It Happens, prepares to interview Zemedkun Teckle, spokesperson for the Ethiopia Ministry of Information. Ensconced in a recording studio in the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in downtown Toronto, she dons her headset. The wall behind her features a groovy 1970s AIH sign and photographs of past hosts such as Barbara Frum, Elizabeth Gray, Michael Enright and Mary Lou Finlay, who collectively have interviewed quirky oddballs alongside serious newsmakers for the past 39 years. Watching through a glass window in the control room, the producer and technician are thrilled with how clear the line is to Addis Ababa. Off has been to Africa many times as a reporter and knows from experience how to cover stories of war. Ethiopia has just sent military personnel into Somalia, ostensibly to train the fragile transitional government there. The goal is to prevent the Union of Islamic Courts, the group that has controlled the Somali capital of Mogadishu since June, from making headway into the country. Off is in her element.

 She grills Teckle about whether his government has mobilized forces into Somalia: “Along with these militias you say are just in there to train, have those Ethiopian militias gone in with any military hardware? Do they have tanks with them?”

“The military men who went in to give training to the Somali side have to be able to protect themselves,” says Teckle. “In that case, they may have taken some basic weapons.” “And tanks?” Off persists.

“I don’t think so,” says Teckle, chuckling softly. “I’m not going to comment on the details. I don’t have all the details.”

Off is enjoying this. She likes interviews in which she can hold public figures accountable for their actions. “Teckle is a warmonger,” she says later in her office. “He’s not taking any responsibility for what’s going to happen. And that makes me cuckoo.” (In late December, her suspicions were confirmed when Ethiopia launched a full-scale offensive, successfully ousting the Islamists and plunging the capital into chaos.)

For Off, hosting AIH is the right job at the right time, an opportunity that allows her to stay in one place after years of travelling while still providing a vehicle for her considerable experience and talent as a journalist. But at the same time, as the 40th anniversary of AIH approaches, the venerable radio program is part of a less innocent zeitgeist than when it was created in 1968. Televisions in the office are tuned to 24-hour news outlets, direct dialing makes sending flowers to overseas operators at Christmas unnecessary and the world is connected by email, cellphones and even satellite phones.

Still, the format of the show has barely changed — including the 38-year-old theme song, “Curried Soul,” by late Canadian jazz legend Moe Koffman — and to some it feels like a time warp. (One former producer, Lesley Krueger, says, “I get a shock of displacement when I’m out in the car somewhere and the theme song starts playing — what year is this?”) It also operates in a medium sometimes thought to be anachronistic in the era of the Internet, not to mention that CBC itself is under pressure from parsimonious federal governments.

There is no doubt that Off, when she started at AIH last September, was the latest in a long line of distinguished hosts, bringing a new energy and perspective to the show. The question is not so much whether this serious, hard-charging, ambitious journalist can shake up AIH’s “heritage” formula, but whether she’ll fall under the spell of its quaint and sometimes whimsical charms.

In the newsroom, Off launches into a pigeon impression. She flaps her arms around her head wildly and flashes a mischievous grin, a reminder that she has a reputation for having a lighter side, too. She has just interviewed a British photojournalist who snapped a photo of a pigeon struggling down the gullet of a pelican in a London park. Most of the producers have already seen an amateur video of the incident on YouTube.com, but they enjoy Off’s performance anyway.

Working at AIH brings out a different side of her personality, one that was rarely seen in her previous work. “There is absolutely no humour in filming the bodies of people being held up by branches in a river in the Balkans during the spring thaw,” says Margo Kelly, a reporter for CBC National Radio News, who has known Off since university. “It’s nice to hear her laugh.”

But she has another reputation to contend with. A long-time CBC producer who has worked at The Nationalsays she is a micromanager who wants to control every aspect of production. She would second-guess the producers and crew, telling an experienced cameraman how to light a scene, for example. “It got to the point where many of the producers just wouldn’t work with her at all anymore,” he says. He remembers her interviewing style — asking the same questions, sometimes for over an hour, until her sources gave in. Her tenaciousness drew both incredulity and grudging admiration from her colleagues.

Despite burning out some of her teammates, she has forged a highly successful career. She has reported from 40 countries, including war zones like Sudan, Bosnia, Kosovo and the Persian Gulf. She won a Gemini Award in 2002 for In the Company of Warlords, a documentary about Afghanistan that she made for The National. She has written three non-fiction books that explore sober issues surrounding world conflicts. Her most recent, Bitter Chocolate, tells the story of boys as young as nine who are forced to pick cocoa in the Ivory Coast, pointing out the tragic irony involved in producing the world’s favourite treat.

Her awareness of injustice started early. She grew up the third of seven children in a family of mixed Polish and British descent. Off spent her childhood in post-war northern Winnipeg, a working class community of immigrants and refugees that was home to Holocaust survivors. Her outrage at hearing their stories from the war — and on one occasion seeing a tattooed forearm — was supported by her parents, who had a social-justice bent. She decided to become a journalist while studying English at the University of Western Ontario in the late ’70s. After reading through an issue of Western’s Gazette, the student daily, she knew she could do better. She has been working in journalism ever since.

This level of determination was nothing new. After leaving high school, Off travelled across the country for almost two years before marrying an artist named Fred Harrison and settling in London. She gave birth to their son, Joel, when she was 21, and had to juggle university studies with caring for her baby. After graduating, she made the difficult decision to leave Joel in the care of his father — whom she had divorced — and move to Toronto to find work as a journalist. (Joel, now 30 and studying urban forestry in Toronto, sees Off weekly).

Off’s singular drive impressed her current husband Linden MacIntyre, host of CBC’s the fifth estate, when he first met her in the late ’80s (they married over 10 years later). “She wasn’t a glamour girl who got spotted and nurtured,” he says. “She essentially set out to invent herself and her journalism and did it bit by bit, seeing the world on her own dime, learning French on her own initiative and in many cases, coming up with her own stories and executing them against great odds.”

One dramatic example: in 1986, she sold most of her possessions to buy a plane ticket to Karachi. She planned to interview Benazir Bhutto, who was in jail at the time, and had pitched the idea to CBC radio showSunday Morning. When she arrived at the Karachi airport, she ended up being one of the only journalists in the midst of a bloody hijacking. With the airport shut down, she filed radio and television stories for CBC, along with major networks in the U.S. and Ireland. MacIntyre heard her reports from the scene and says, “I thought that was pretty gritty.”

By 2005, when she heard Mary Lou Finlay was to retire from hosting AIH after eight years, Off realized she was ready to throw her hat into the ring. The hiring process took over six months, during which time there was both a federal election and an Olympics, but CBC wanted to find the right fit. When Off finally won the job, she realized she was ambivalent about giving up her foreign reporting, which MacIntyre describes as addictive, but she accepted after much soul-searching. She doesn’t miss travelling as much as she feared. At 52, working at AIHallows Off a new level of comfort and security: “I’ve started to realize the degree to which folding myself into tiny airplane seats for 25-hour journeys to other parts of the world, and spending weeks sleeping in makeshift rooms, tents or ditches, is hard on the body.”

Her schedule today is more conventional — she has weekends off and dinner at home most nights — but the intense, sometimes daunting necessity to be prepared and effective for interviews that are scheduled at the eleventh hour is demanding in a different way. The new pace is relentless. Where she used to travel intensely for a month or so and then return to a more flexible timetable, now she gets up each weekday and reads all the newspapers to prepare for work. Often she reads all weekend, too, leaving little time for stacked-up errands and personal obligations.

When she arrives at the show’s open concept office in the mammoth, glass-enclosed broadcasting centre at around 10 a.m., the show’s chase producers, mostly in their twenties and thirties, are already absorbed in intense research behind their computer screens. At 10:30 a.m. she joins them for a story meeting in the alcove by her office — a cozy space with couches, a stereo and a giant fern. Leslie Peck, the executive producer, presides over the meeting like a den mother. The producers pitch their ideas according to categories, everyone listening respectfully before jumping in with comments. Peck has the final say about which ideas to chase and which to kill.

Back at their desks, the producers hunt down sources. Having scheduled interviews for Off, they write the times in dry erase marker on the storyboard, sometimes accompanied by little editorial cartoons, if they feel so inspired. (For one worthy but less-thandramatic story, a producer wrote, “Wheat Board: Manitoba,” followed by Zzzzzzz…). Before each interview, the producer handling the story gives Off a one-page research summary with a list of suggested questions. Then, at the appointed time, the segment is taped. Off goes back and forth from her office to the studio a dozen or so times on a busy day.

The brilliant illusion of AIH is that most listeners think it’s live. In fact, it goes out in waves across the country, reflecting different time zones, and airing from 6:30 to 8 p.m. in each one (except, needless to say, a half-hour later in Newfoundland). Off and veteran announcer and co-host Barbara Budd are not really together in the studio the whole time the show is on the air. Budd comes in at three, reads through the script and makes her notes. At 5:30 p.m. EST they introduce the show together to the East Coast. Budd then reads the transitions between each of Off’s earlier recorded interviews, which are edited for length and clarity. (It’s only on occasion that Off’s interviews are live, such as during a breaking news story). Then they pre-record the goodbyes during a newsbreak. Off heads home most days by the time the clock in the studio ticks around its green fluorescent circle to 7 p.m.

As important as the co-hosts are, the format of AIH is the real star of the show. It offers listeners an unusual mix of smart, in-depth interviews with current newsmakers and kooky ones about ordinary folks involved in unconventional situations. As former host Michael Enright puts it, “We always had a crazy vicar story. You know, some nutty Church of England vicar that came out in favour of ordaining white rabbits or something.” Within the first six years of her tenure as host, Barbara Frum had interviewed: the grower of the world’s largest cabbage (who was both hard of hearing and just back from the pub), “Bozo” Miller, who held the 1980 Guinness record for eating 54 pounds of chicken in one sitting, and a stuntman who planned to catapult himself across a river with a giant slingshot.

Over the years, producers have also reached Soviet dissidents at a clandestine meeting the night Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was exiled; the boxer Muhammad Ali after he talked a suicidal young black man down from a ledge in Chicago; Sir Geoffrey Howe, a long-serving member of Margaret Thatcher’s cabinet, in his bathtub; and a 17-year-old Dawson College student recuperating in a café after fleeing from a gunman in a trench coat.

In an age of high-tech gadgetry and the Internet, AIH has the same elements today as it had at the beginning: a telephone, a microphone and music. It’s a simple, relatively inexpensive model that so engages listeners, some report sitting in their driveways waiting to hear the end of an interview. In a Bureau of Broadcast Measurement report covering January to March 2006, AIH had a weekly reach of 895,100 listeners and captured an impressive 11 per cent share of the listening audience in Canada. Its popularity has grown to include Americans too, who tune in for a syndicated hour-long version in 105 markets in that country.

The origin of the show goes back to 1968, the brainchild of Val Clery, a former commando in the British Army, who devised the call-out concept. He used a new technique called “roller-coasting,” meaning the show would start on the East Coast and run for two hours in each time zone adding new, breaking material as it went along. It was completely live and ran for six hours, thus the name, As It Happens.

It was an era of experimentation in radio broadcasting. The all-night Radio Unnameable on WBAI in New York, for example, combined impromptu poetry readings with reports on the local Greenwich Village drug scene, all in an open format. But Clery’s idea to reach out globally was, in an era before digital and satellite technology, a technical nightmare. The phone system was so unreliable that Bell engineers had to be on hand for the first few shows and phone wires were rigged loosely around the studio. There were far fewer conversations and they lasted up to 15 minutes each, partly because it was so hard to reach people live. Guests would show up late, forcing AIH producers to play entire songs between interviews. It was slow and chatty, and ratings were terrible.

Luckily Margaret Lyons, a pioneering CBC executive, had a vision for current affairs programming and an eye for spotting talent. She believed CBC radio had become irrelevant to the average Canadian — the audience was so small in the ’60s that CBC thought seriously about shutting the network down — and she intended to change that. In 1970, she recruited Mark Starowicz, a 23-year-old ex-student radical who had been fired from both The Gazette in Montreal and the Toronto Star — as a producer. She wanted him to shake up the stuffy network from the inside, and put him to work on AIH.

So, in 1973, over one night during the New Year’s long weekend, Richard Bronstein, Starowicz and a technician reformatted the show. They more than doubled the number of items, making each one as topical as possible. They decided to use short stings of music in between items and engineered a mix of serious stories and lighter fare.

The premise — that you could start each day fresh and go around the world talking to newsmakers on the telephone — took a lot of chutzpah to execute. The staff was young and rebellious. “Our offices were next door to one of the middle-management types in radio,” says Alison Gordon, a producer from 1975 to 1978. “I remember at one point we took to playing on the turntable in our office an old marching band version of ‘O Canada’ before the morning meeting. Even though we knew it would never happen, we were hoping that he’d complain so we could then get the word out that ‘middle-management’ is anti-patriotic.”

In those days AIH was located in the radio building on Jarvis Street, a former girls private school at the turn of the century. It was “haunted in the best way by all kinds of radio ghosts,” says Karen Levine, a producer who fondly remembers working there despite its flaws. “It was falling down, there were mice, there were flies in the bathroom. It was just a dump.” Cigarette smoke filled the air along with the constant clacking of typewriters. Producers had three black rotary telephones in their offices, and there were three more in the studio with corresponding lines. When calling overseas, they would cling desperately to the line (a lot of calls got dropped accidentally) and holler down to the studio for a technician to pick up. They rifled through paper reports coming in from the wires. They had a Telex machine to message out, though it was glacially slow. They edited tape with razor blades and then hauled the reel onto an Ampex machine to listen (and they had to listen hard because three other producers might be simultaneously doing the same thing). They used overseas operators in Montreal for every international call and received every incoming call through the overburdened CBC switchboard.

Unlike Off and company, who simply walk along a hall to the studio, producers on Jarvis Street had many levels of stairs to navigate, which they did at increasingly breakneck speeds as show time approached. Tempers flared and on occasion a typewriter would fly across the office, but the creative intensity also gave rise to the feeling that they were part of a large, rowdy family.

In then-host Barbara Frum, they found a witty older sister with an unorthodox fashion sense. Alan Mendelsohn, a former producer who later went on to write and direct a CBC Life and Times documentary about her legacy, remembers people teasing her about her wardrobe of busy prints, plumes and faux fur. “She was very good at laughing at herself and being made fun of,” he says. “She did not have a thin skin.” The loud blouses became one of her trademarks when she moved to television in 1982 to host The Journal, the second half of the national newscast, which she hosted for 10 years before passing away in 1992.

Although she achieved greater fame with The Journal, the legacy of AIH still has Frum at its centre. With her co-host Alan Maitland — a much-loved announcer with mellifluous pipes — by her side, she created a legendary intimacy with her audience. She had the ability, so valuable in broadcast journalism, to sound as though she was representing listeners, asking the question they would have asked in her place. The personality of the show evolved around her style, and over the years, her name became almost interchangeable with the show itself, as in, “I heard it on Barbara Frum last night.”

It was Frum’s cheeky and irreverent comments that first caught Off’s attention when she was in university and growing tired of the same rock music on the radio. She liked how Frum challenged authority in her interviews and says, “I didn’t know you were allowed to do that on radio.”

As one of the few hosts to have a primary background as a field reporter, Off’s forceful style has changedAIH, but not the basic character of the show. Jennifer McGuire, executive director of programming for CBC Radio, says the show is not static. There was minor tinkering with pacing when Off came in, and there are plans to continue exploring ways to use new technology. (The weekly podcast, The Best of AIH, is consistently near the top of iTunes’s most downloaded list). But even though the voice of the show is different, CBC brass seem to have adopted the position that they shouldn’t try to fix what isn’t broken. “You’re not going to see it turn into a documentary show, or start talking about earthworms,” says McGuire. “It’s a heritage show for CBC. It’s an important anchor in our schedule and the face of CBC Radio to the world.” Of course, offbeat items like ones on giant cabbages or record-setting chicken-eaters are part of what makesAIH the show that it is.

Take this morning in late October, for example. Off interviews Clive Farrell, one of the foremost butterfly experts in England, who just happened to have a monarch butterfly all the way from North America land in his garden while he was eating lunch. Dara McLeod, the producer, tells Farrell to hold while she transfers him to the host. “He’s quiet,” she says to Off. “Be forewarned.”

Off, who today wears a skirt and a soft blue sweater, asks her guest to describe the butterfly (“excellent condition, it just had a tiny tear in the hind wing”), what he feeds it, (“fresh flowers everyday and a pad of cotton wool that I soak in a 10 per cent sugar and water solution”) and where he keeps it (“this particular greenhouse I’ve got is quite large and there’s a little stream running through it”). He explains that the butterfly likely migrated across the Atlantic on the jet stream, where the temperature is -50 C. It’s one of the few monarchs ever to land in Britain.

Beyond the glass wall, McLeod types a question on her computer: how can the butterfly go so long without being able to rest on land? Off instantly sees it on her laptop, and weaves the question in. McLeod gives her the thumbs-up sign. Listening intently, the tough investigative reporter with the fearsome reputation for grilling subjects gazes into the distance with a dreamy look on her face, imagining herself in that greenhouse. Once the interview is over, she turns to her colleagues and says: “I’m going to go live with Mr. Farrell.”

The toys look like muses. They line the office partitions, overlooking producers at their desks in this third-floor corner of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre: a small dinosaur, a baseball in a case, an uncompleted Rubik’s Cube, a shot glass, a tiny model space shuttle, two snow globes, a Pez dispenser, a model of an atom particle holding an egg, a mini basketball net, Albert Einstein and Sigmund Freud action figures, and seven identical yo-yos in various colours.

On Monday morning at 9:15, the muses watch Jim Handman — a short, bearded man with a cocky smile and a quick, perky stride — senior producer of CBC Radio’s Quirks & Quarks, meeting with colleagues Jim Lebans and Pat Senson. The three men sound like teenaged science geeks, swapping stories of new inventions and discoveries and talking excitedly about what to put on this week’s edition of the national science show that covers everything from dark matter to dinosaur sex.

Before each week’s pitch meeting, the producers go through advance copies of Nature and Science cover to cover and scour more than 50 smaller journals and magazines to come up with the important news and the smaller, “quirkier” stories that have made the show famous. When Senson read about an invisibility cloaking device in Science, he knew it would be the perfect fit. As well as being a significant development, the idea of wearing an invisibility cloak is just plain cool. And it’s the cool stories that really get the producers — and the audience — excited.

Since the cloaking device is international news, Quirks won’t be the only outlet covering it — Discovery Channel Canada, CTV’s national news and even CBC.ca will be running stories on it. But the competition doesn’t worry Handman because rather than just reporting on science news, Quirks adds to it.

Besides, other shows don’t have host Bob McDonald. “He asks the questions that the listener wants to ask,” says Handman. McDonald represents the average Quirks fan: educated, but with no formal scientific training. After 15 years, McDonald combines the knack of a storyteller with a giddy, child-like love of science. “He invokes that ‘Gee Whiz’ aspect,” says Tim Lougheed, president of the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, who adds that McDonald never has an air of superiority. He’s like someone in Tim Hortons who’d say, “Hey, did you hear that they invented an invisibility cloak? Cool, eh?”

Even after 30 years, the ‘Gee Whiz’ of the show gives something unique to listeners. “You can get the science news in the newspaper,” Handman says. But the mainstream media focuses on how science might affect their audience: how medical advances will lead to a longer life, how a technological development will increase safety in the home, what climate change will mean for the ski industry. Meanwhile, Quirks is doing something different — it’s putting the wonder back into science — even if it means defending the show’s newsworthiness once in a while. Although reporting on science for science’s sake, telling a story just to say, “Cool, eh?” is what Quirks does best, it’s something others rarely do at all. And while it does face some critics, Quirks is too busy combining meticulous research, years of experience and genuine excitement to care.

Tuesday, 10:30 a.m.

For the invisibility cloaking device story, Senson went straight to the source: David Schurig in North Carolina. Producers always do pre-interviews with scientists to clarify what the story is actually about, determine how they will sound and discover what questions elicit the most interesting answers. At this point, Quirks becomes “Scientific Canadian Idol” — of about 15 pre-interviews, a third to a half won’t get past this stage. Among the cuts are scientists who can’t speak in layman’s terms, are boring or have difficult-to-understand accents. When the story is fabulous but the guest is
boring, or the story is marginal but the guest is fantastic, the producers will take a chance. But as on Idol, it might not make it past the next stage.

On its first episode, which aired October 8, 1975, Quirks explored a possible link between hair dye and cancer, and discussed chemical warfare. The show’s creator, Diana Filer, hired David Suzuki to be its first host after seeing him speak in Toronto. Suzuki, who later founded the David Suzuki Foundation, an environmental organization, and now hosts CBC’s The Nature of Things, promised to look at what excites and worries scientists, and told his listeners, “You don’t have to have a PhD to be interested in
science.” He also pointed out that, “You only have to look around your home to see that
science affects you in all sorts of ways in your daily life.”

When Jay Ingram took over as host in 1979, he wanted to make science even more popular, but recognized that being knowledgeable about the subject wasn’t enough to keep the audience interested. “Just because you express science well doesn’t mean they’ll care,” he says. He saw himself as the mediator between scientists and the public, asking the right questions to get the good answers. “I was not an editorial voice,” he says. Ingram continued to popularize science after he left the show, and now hosts Daily Planet, a science show on Discovery Channel Canada.

Quirks quickly became a favourite on the CBC Radio line-up. By the time McDonald came along in 1992, the show had won over 20 awards from the Canadian Science Writers’ Association, the International Radio Festival of New York and others. It had become a reputable venue for scientific discussion. But the discussion changed over time. McDonald remembers the generalized nature of science reporting when he was a child. “It was about neat experiments; isn’t the universe wonderful, and we’re going to the moon… The universe was open to us and we were going to do everything.” However, as the environmental movement gained strength in the 1960s and ’70s, science journalists began to shift from optimism to concern with the social and environmental implications of scientific discoveries. People reporting on science were no longer blind to the fact that these advances had repercussions. “It’s changed from neat things that people in white coats do in the laboratory, or daredevils do when they get on rockets, to things that we eat,” says McDonald. “So we’re now talking about science that’s affecting genetically-modified foods, or pills that we’re popping for our headache. And we’re saying, ‘Is that safe? Should we go down that road?’”

Wednesday, 10 a.m.

The uniform of choice for CBC’s resident “Science Guy” is a brightly coloured dress
shirt tucked into fitted jeans. McDonald walks around with a worldly swagger and an amiable grin made even more child-like by his crooked teeth. On his desk, a tray labelled “Quirks & Quarks Research” holds a pile of papers higher than his computer, leaning dangerously to one side and threatening to crash down on an antique teapot sitting nearby.

At university McDonald studied English and philosophy, but dropped out and dove into science in 1973 when he got a job at the Ontario Science Centre, which was looking for people to stand in front of a big audience and have fun with static electricity. “That was an opportunity to pursue two of my joys in life, performing and science,” says McDonald. His lifelong fascination with space exploration is obvious in his eyes, the flicker in his eyebrow and the twitch of his smile as soon as someone says “black hole.” In the ’70s he travelled to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California to watch robots land on Mars. McDonald gained media access by writing a request on Science Centre letterhead, but paid his own way. He later returned as a proper member of the press — all expenses paid — for missions to Saturn. And Uranus. And Neptune. “I’ve witnessed the primary exploration of our solar system,” says McDonald, his eyes lighting up. “Hitching a ride on Magellan’s ship, just to be there when they said, ‘Land ho!’”

So McDonald became a space expert, and when the media — including Canada AM and Global Television — called the Science Centre asking if anyone knew about Mars, he’d pipe up. “They all said, ‘Wow, you’re really great on camera, you wanna come back?’” In 1979, when he was 28, McDonald left the Science Centre to be a freelance writer. That year, he joined a group of people heading to Tanzania, to see an eclipse of the sun. “I saved up my pennies,” says McDonald. “But I thought, ‘Gee, why go half way around the world and come back the same way?’” So he took a half-year trip around the world and wrote a book in 2000 — Measuring the Earth With a Stick: Science as I’ve Seen It — about his travels. “The world is an amazing place,” he says. “And when you have a little bit of science behind you, you see more than just mountains and valleys.”

These days, McDonald is on call at CBC’s The National to explain science to Peter Mansbridge in a minute and a half. Mansbridge will tell others, “Do a Bob McDonald for me!” when he wants a clear explanation. McDonald also does documentaries for The National, and has a weekly spot on CBC News: Morning. Then there’s Heads Up!, a TVO show for children about space and the universe, which he writes and hosts. McDonald’s upbeat personality also landed him on the lecture circuit, where he is in high demand to speak all over the country. But science is not just a career for McDonald, it’s a way of thinking. “It’s kinda trippy, you know,” he says. “People take drugs to alter their perception of the universe, but science can do that as well. It makes everything you know much more interesting.”

Thursday, 10:30 a.m.
When McDonald arrives on Wednesday and Thursday mornings — he’s only at the show from Wednesday to Friday — he begins interviewing the discoverers, inventors and other movers and shakers of the science world. This is the next level of cutting: of the seven interviews they usually record, four or five get on the air. The studio is colourful and well-decorated: Genesis and Contact movie posters, a spaceship model, a photograph of Earth from space, and a cut-out of an astronaut with the word “lunch” hand-written in a voice bubble taped to its head. But the afternoon starts with technical problems. The system that allows them to interview scientists all over the world is acting up. McDonald and Senson keep losing the scientist from North Carolina — Schurig and his magical cloaking device, the top story of the week.

Now the technical problems are solved, but the nervous guest is shuffling his papers. “I know it’s difficult, talking to a disembodied voice,” says McDonald. “Just talk to me. You don’t need anything.” During the interview, Senson and McDonald ignore the new studio system that allows them to communicate via computer screens — they’ve got the hand signals down to an art.

McDonald also has chatting with his guests down to an art. “I don’t claim to be a scientist, and I feel closer to the listeners than to the scientists,” he says. “But I’ve been doing this long enough that I can speak the language.” Smiling, he mentions a phrase that’s become somewhat famous on the show: Let me see if I’ve got this right. If he doesn’t understand something, he asks. There’s no ego here.

And if a guest is too deep into scientific lingo, McDonald just stops him. “I’ll say, imagine you’re talking to your dentist. Your dentist is well-educated, but not in your subject. So how would you explain it if you were lying back in your chair before they’re going to put the novocaine in?” But McDonald also knows that clarity doesn’t mean stupidity. “I don’t like the term ‘dummy down,’” he says. The show’s approach: start at the beginning and move to an end, and for God’s sake, be entertaining.

The tricks seem to work, because scientists often come up to McDonald at seminars and conferences to say how much they enjoy Quirks. The show also gets a lot of feedback from scientists who say that they aren’t afraid to be a guest. That’s a sure sign of credibility — and a rarity given that the relationship between the scientist and the journalist has always been uneasy. “There can be tension there,” says McDonald. “Although it’s not usually between science journalists and scientists, it’s between news journalists and scientists. News journalists were assigned a science story and they don’t know the science, so they get it wrong or they misinterpret it or they’ll take a spin on it that the scientist doesn’t like.” The media too often want every story to be black and white and the headline to be: “Cure for cancer!” Handman says the real headline should be: “Maybe sometime there might be something!” With little science training and pressure from their editors, many reporters are at a disadvantage. This leads to what Handman calls the three sins of science reporting: simplifying, misleading and over-hyping. Even those journalists who do under- stand the science can’t always cover stories the way they want. “I have to sell it like it’s an adventure story, a disclosure story, an exposé, a personality story,” says Toronto Star science reporter Peter Calamai, who also points to the domination of medical stories today, because of how they directly affect the audience. “What I sometimes get back from editors is, ‘Don’t put too much science into it.’”

While some scientists still feel that journalists don’t understand the material — which can make the scientist look bad or skew the findings — many scientists have a condescending attitude toward the public and can’t (or won’t) speak simply. Handman has a comic strip taped up in one of the editing rooms: “Layman’s terms?” the befuddled scientist says to the reporter, beside a chalkboard covered in numbers. “I don’t know layman’s terms!” But publicity-hungry universities and research centres are pushing their scientists to talk to more reporters in order to gain recognition and funding. “They have no choice,” says Jean-Marc Fleury, executive director of the World Federation of Science Journalists. “They have to interact with them.” But as science has become more of a business, it’s harder for journalists to know if they’re speaking to a scientist, a businessman, a promotional manager or all of the above. “Many of them,” says Handman, “have an agenda.”

A growing but still wary trust has emerged between scientists and journalists. Calamai sees a generational change in the scientific community, making way for younger, media-savvy scientists. Says McDonald: “I think the [relationship] between the scientist and journalist has become copasetic because they realize that we represent them.” He adds, “And we are actually trying to make them look good.”

Maybe too good. Quirks often reports on science simply because it’s “cool.” But some observers wonder how far McDonald’s enthusiasm can take the audience. “They have
good ideas, they have good execution, they’re curious as hell,” says Calamai, but he’d like to see McDonald spend more time analyzing the news, instead of just being in awe of it — a criticism he usually holds for most science broadcasts. He worries that shows such as Quirks, which need high-quality guests, may stay away from aggressive questioning so they don’t scare them away. “They really are in trouble if they can’t get a voice,” he says. “They’ve gotta have somebody in the studio.” Handman counters that when a story is particularly controversial, the show will cover it with a documentary segment. The problem, says Calamai, is that every story is controversial. “There’s always somebody who says, ‘Well, that’s very interesting but that does not prove ‘x,’ or that doesn’t show ‘y,’ or they haven’t eliminated ‘z.’”

Friday, 1 p.m.

In the studio, McDonald wears a green shirt and looks slightly disheveled. The animated, fidgety man who was recording interviews yesterday is now calm and meditative as he
listens with his arms crossed and his eyes down, a veteran at hearing his own voice.

Thanks to podcasting, more listeners are hearing McDonald’s voice. Handman says Quirks has frequently been one of the top 10 shows on iTunes since the podcast started in 2005. Though the CBC is still working out the methodology for measuring online audiences, Handman estimates that podcasting adds 25,000 listeners to the show’s weekly audience, which is already at around 443,000. “How is that possible?” says Handman, laughing. “Who are these people?”

When McDonald does the show, he imagines those people are just like him. “Really, I’m the audience,” says McDonald. “I’m trying to understand it. And I have found that if I understand it, then our audience understands it too.” In terms of what he’s trying to understand, the name Quirks & Quarks says it all. The big, serious stories are the quarks — heavy, fundamental stuff, crucial to science. But the quirks — fun, peculiar, quirky stories that amuse both the producers and the audience — are also part of the show’s success. One show, McDonald will talk about fetal surgery; another show, penis preference in mosquitofish. And yet, the “quirkier” stories aren’t presented as novelties. Dr. Marlene Zuk, for example, works with the reproductive behaviours of animals and was pleased that the show didn’t make a joke of her work.

While the “science for science’s sake” approach raises questions from both the scientific and journalistic communities about the newsworthiness of the show, McDonald and Handman are confident they have the right formula, and their guests agree. John Hoogland, who appeared on Quirks last fall to discuss prairie dogs and their predators, said that he loved McDonald’s let-the-scientist-speak method — and not just because he likes to hear himself talk. “They let the investigators do the talking,” he says. The listeners also seem to like it: Handman gets emails from them saying, “I just heard about that new science development in the news. I can’t wait to hear Quirks do it!” Lougheed agrees that Quirks does something different, especially when it covers news like the invisibility cloak. Reporting raw scientific data is easy, he says, but Quirks is telling a story. And Lougheed says the ‘Gee Whiz’ approach is deceptive. While it seems as though McDonald is dumming down the story, he’s actually just making it more accessible. “You’re pulled into it before you realize it’s complex,” Lougheed explains.

Saturday, 12:06 p.m.

Just after noon, McDonald’s steady, upbeat voice rings through radios across Canada. When listeners hear Schurig going over the fundamentals of invisibility, they can’t imagine McDonald sitting in the studio, trying in vain to hear the scientist’s voice. They can’t hear their host giggling with his hand over the microphone after trying to loosen Schurig up by enthusiastically comparing the invention to a Star Trek device and getting an unenthusiastic monotone “yes” as a response. They can’t see McDonald furrowing his brow, twirling a pen and darting his eyes around the room as though he’s watching a tennis match. But what his listeners can hear is McDonald’s curiosity, his sincere wonder and his concern that they think the invisibility cloak is as cool as he does.

When Quirks began, the human genome project didn’t exist. Most of the planets hadn’t been explored. Scientists didn’t know that the universe was speeding up. “We’re developing these incredible tools,” says McDonald, his eyes lighting up. “We can see to the edge of the universe, we’ve got these big colliders that are ripping atoms apart, we’re manipulating DNA, manipulating life, we’re going back in time with the dinosaurs. It’s an astounding time of discovery.” His listeners need to know about science not just because it could affect their lives, or their children’s lives, but because it’s an essential part of human knowledge and modern culture. As Ingram notes, “Saying you’re cultured without a science background? That’s appalling.”

McDonald hopes that his listeners are not just intellectually curious, but are interested in understanding the world around them in a different way. “We have our five senses, which actually aren’t that good when you try to look at the world,” says McDonald, sitting in his studio, looking around at his muses. “The perception of the world that our five senses give you is wrong. Science to me is like another set of senses.”

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.”

Among the posters that adorn the walls at CBC radio’s Morningside studio in Toronto hands one that depicts dozens of colourful pairs of woollen mittens. They’ve formally displayed on an old wooden rod, but there’s something distinctively homemade about the way they hang. The muted shades of red, blue and grey blend together as the limp, rounded thumbs dangle in the breeze. The label below reads “Hand-knit in Newfoundland.”

In a plush office chair beneath the picture sits Rex Murphy, 48, another Newfoundland export who has also found his way into the CBC’s posh Toronto headquarters. Although he’s dressed in a well-cut, dark grey suit and a simple, under-stated tie, Murphy still looks like a cross between Homer Simpson and Jean Chrétien. His thinning hair springs on end as if he has just come in from one of those windy Newfoundland days, and his pale blue eyes adjust their shape with every word he speaks. His voice has a nasal quality, like Preston Manning without the whine, and he pronounces his words thoughtfully, emphasizing each with a hint of an Irish background—each wun of his wurds has carractioor. Altogether, he’s the antithesis of Peter Mansbridge, Bill Cameron and the other high-profile on-air personalities, with their standard CBC smiles and central Canadian dialects. As they say in Newfoundland, “You can take the boy our of the bay, but you can’t take the bay our of the boy.”

On this Sunday afternoon in late October, Murphy is preparing for Cross Country Checkup’s 30th anniversary show. He earned the host’s seat two years ago, “the last of a long line of rogues,” as he puts it, after a one-time stint as a guest host. He usually travels to Montreal to do the show, but this weekend, his senior producer, Susan Mahoney, has commuted instead.

The show’s topic is whether there is a chill on free speech at Canadian universities. Fittingly, about the time that Cross Country Checkup debuted, Murphy first gained national attention while still a university student in Newfoundland. When the Memorial University student council president was unable to make a speaking engagement in Lennoxville, Quebec, Murphy, a fellow council member, filled in. In a provocative speech that was covered by the national papers, he characterized Newfoundland’s recent announcement of free tuition for first-year university students as a sham, saying that students did not really receive a free education, and called Premier Joey Smallwood’s governing style dictatorial.

Smallwood, who despised being upstaged, was furious. In a televised news conference, he told the headstrong youth not to come home. But upon his return, Murphy was elected student council president and the union boldly ran an advertisement in The Evening Telegram condemning the provincial Liberals. In a province where people treat politics like a sport, the premier grappling with an undergraduate was as entertaining as the Saturday night wrestling matches common in community halls across the province.

After student protests continued, the government eventually caved, offering free tuition to all, including those at the graduate level; students from St. John’s also received a monthly $50 living allowance while those from the out-ports got $100. This was the beginning of what would be an ongoing rivalry between the two men. Just as Smallwood was almost universally known as “Joey,” Murphy became simply “Rex” to his fellow Newfoundlanders. Now, with his national exposure on the CBC, Canadians across the country are also getting to know the boy from the bay on a first-name basis.

If you’re a CBC watcher or listener, it’s hard not to encounter the irreverent, passionate Murphy. Besides hosting Cross Country Checkup, the only national radio call-in show in Canada, he’s a weekly commentator on The National and on CBC Stereo’s pop culture program Definitely Not the Opera. In addition, he occasionally appears as a panellist on the program The Editors, a Newsworld program that examines how journalists cover issues and current affairs. In what’s left of his spare time, he worked on television documentaries for The National’s magazine segment.

While Murphy is certainly a talented speaker, the question remains: how did this sharp-tongued guy from the tiny fishing community of Freshwater, Placentia Bay, make it to the national airwaves? The CBC prides itself on delivering politically correct, objective reports to Canadian households while Murphy is at his best when he is sarcastic, clever and biting.

Murphy’s appeal stems from his ability to be so typical and yet unfamiliar at the same time. He has the irreverent Newfoundland sense of humour and delivery, reminiscent of the This Hour Has 22 Minutes crowd, who also rely on east-coast wit. Like his fellow Newfoundlanders, he loves debating politics and has an ability to consider the topic on a number of different levels: its importance, humour and outright stupidity. The use of allusion and examples in his narratives is also common on the Rock, especially at kitchen parties where story-telling skills are often honed over tea and biscuits.

But despite these down-home qualities, Murphy is not your average Newfoundlander. Canada’s newest province is known for its colourful dialect and language, but Murphy’s vocabulary would challenge even the country’s most accomplished lexicographers, and the polysyllabic phrases that roll off his tongue during one of his National commentaries are just as likely to be heard in a casual conversation. While he is a proud Newfoundlander, he also has an unsentimental clarity about his home province: “Newfoundland is remote, isolated, backward, cursed with the most desperate, heart-breaking climate on the globe,” he noted in a 1994 documentary. “It has no soil, its trees are dwarfs, we have fog for ozone. Our politics is incompetent mischief punctuated by outright corruption. It’s bare and stark and bleak, yet affection for Newfoundland is stronger than a chemical dependency.”

And while most Newfoundlanders are known for being gregarious, Murphy is shy, private and self-effacing. He would sooner have the life-size cardboard cutout of him that stands near an entrance of CBC’s lobby stolen than have to see it ever day.

As the two-hour radio program begins, Murphy leans closer to the mile, his head bobbing back and forth with each staccato statement, his eyebrows rising and sinking as if they are riding waves of thought. He appears serious, but a subtle wit underlies his formal speaking style: “My name is Rex Murphy, but then we all have a cross to bear…”

On the radio, Murphy is a friendly host and a good listener. No matter how heated the debate, he’s polite and respectful of others’ opinions. He is no adherent of the “shock-talk” that radio hosts are turning to at private stations. Today, for example, after a bit of verbal sparring with a long-winded caller, he courteously concludes, “Well, Mary, you make a very good point and the most solid point of this discussion. I thank you for it, very much.”

As the show progresses, it’s evident Murphy views the debate as if it were a game. He’s comfortable behind the microphone, smiling and rolling his eyes when talking with listeners. While he can be quick to disagree with callers, he’s also often supportive: “I think that you’re entirely correct,” he tells one. “I agree with every syllable that you say.” Checkup producer Susan Mahoney thinks he is a great host because he has an ability to be intellectual and down-to-earth at the same time. “I remember one show when Rex was debating a pretty serious issue,” she recalls, “but during the break, he called his brother to remind him to tape The Simpsons so he could find out who shot Mr. Burns.”

Hosting Cross Country Checkup is just the beginning of a typically hectic week. Two days later, Murphy’s back in the Toronto CBC building, taping his “Point of View” segment, which airs most Wednesday nights onThe National Magazine. It’s the week before the Quebec referendum and he records four minutes of insight and passion: “We outside Quebec feed ourselves on this fiction that the rest of Canada will simply say to Quebec. ’Well, you’ve chosen, go your way, we’ll go ours.’ Well, the rest of Canada doesn’t exist. It’s merely a cartoonist’s shorthand that Confederation as we have it ends when a quarter of its citizens leave. We’ll have to build it all again. The present Parliament will be finished, the bong markets will be like a pinball machine, confidence in our public administration will be desolated, incrimination and ill-will over the spoliation of a great dream will be inevitable. Please let it be noted, I’m only speaking of condition outside Quebec. If the citizens of Quebec think rejigging their destiny is a walk in the park and it’s business as usual with the rest of the country afterwards—same economy, same passport, voting in federal elections—theirs is a folly and a tragedy too deep to contemplate.”

Another week, his topic might be global warming (“I don’t really care what causes global warming, what I really want right now is to experience a little bit of it”), Valentine’s Day (“A celebration which exists on a foundation of Julio Iglesias ballads, cartoon hearts and some of the worst verse outside Mother’s Day”) or the antics of the Royal family (“Diana is responsible for more leaks than a second-rate cruise ship”).

He also does a weekly spot for Definitely Not the Opera, a four-hour pop-culture radio magazine program based out of Winnipeg that airs on Saturday afternoons. As the show’s television critic, Murphy displays the usual wit and wisdom in his look at what’s on the tube and what it says about society. “I love his commentaries,” says Opera executive producer C. William Smith. “He picks on an issue and in the end you realize Rex is talking about something much bigger.”

Then there are the documentaries, CBC TV producer Robin Christmas, who recently collaborated with Murphy on a project, says his colleague brings a unique perspective to the pieces: “Story is everything still. He has a tremendous original take on things. Even though Rex’s talents lie in the spoken word, he’s able to translate those talents to documentaries.”

Throughout his career, Murphy has worked on a number of documentaries. His efforts on topic relating to Newfoundland have received critical acclaim. In a March 1994 television documentary he did entitled “Unpeopled Shores,” his poetic description of overfishing off Newfoundland—a great big wharf—vividly articulates to inland viewers the severity of the collapse of the fishery: “Underwater strip mining, clear-cutting with nets. The dragger fishery of other nations and our own worked a biological meltdown on the east coast of Canada. This is what Chernobyl looks like when it puts to sea.” And why has the extinction of the northern cod stock been given little attention by environmental groups? “Cod aren’t cute, they don’t give good poster. There are more reporters in Newfoundland to follow the seal protest than followed Tonya Harding at the Olympics. The Grand Banks are not a rain forest, the cod are not dolphins.”

He is unafraid to say what he thinks and he has the talent to say it eloquently, thoughtfully and provocatively,. Murphy is able to successfully walk the fine line between journalism and personal commentary. While his unique features and lively vocabulary have certainly been attention-getting, it’s his ability to use the English language in a way and at a level that very few journalists are capable of doing that makes him so attractive. When most reporters are struggling to find the right words, Murphy can articulate his point as naturally as breathing. His words are rich, packed with allusion and symbolism. They force viewers to examine their perceptions and ideas about the world.

But when it comes to finding out about Murphy’s personal life, he’s more difficult to chase down than a Spanish trawler. Behind the cutting commentary and verbal acrobatics is a man not anxious to discuss himself. He can talk your ear off when it comes to Quebec sovereignty, the economy or religion, but turn the conversation inward and he appears nervous and unsettled. The long, winding sentences become short, winding sentences become short, abbreviated phrases that almost come to a dead end.

Murphy admits that he doesn’t socialize much and prefers to spend time with acquaintances outside the industry. His longtime co-workers in Newfoundland and in Toronto confess they know very little about his personal life. “I think he has three brothers and two sisters,” says one friend. “Two sisters and a brother,” believes another. “Two brothers and a sister, if I recall,” adds a third.

In fact, he’s the second of five children (two brothers and two sisters) of Harry and Marie Murphy, both now deceased. He was born in Carbonear, a historic fishing and commercial community 65 miles west of St. John’s and was raised in a traditional Catholic home. When Rex was 10, his father got a job working as a cook for the Americans at the Argentia Military Base, and the family moved to the nearby community of Freshwater.

He skipped two grades in primary school (“Grade one and either two or three. I never did find that out from Marie”). He finished high school at 15 and completed a BA in English at Memorial University by the time he was 19. As an undergraduate, Murphy became student council president in 1965 and led a group of politically active council members that included a young Brian Peckford. (A few years later, at a local radio station, he would also work with a 20-year-old Brian Tobin, who was hired to do odd jobs.) Murphy was named to the John Lewis Paton Society, an honour given to the brightest students, and was on the debating team, was chair of the student union building committee and participated in the student parliament. His active involvement in campus life was the start of a lifelong passion for politics. In 1968, he left to study law at Oxford as a Rhodes scholar and later returned to Newfoundland to enrol in a master’s program in English, but he didn’t finish. “I wrote the thesis on 17th-century poetry,” recalls Murphy, “and I have revised it several times since then, except for the footnotes, and the footnotes killed me—I never did get around to that.”

Now in his early 20s, Murphy taught English and cultural studies to American children and teenagers at the Argentia base, then moved to St. John’s the following summer to “mess around.” This included lending a hand for an hour and a half one afternoon in the newsroom of VOCM radio, a privately owned station known for its connection with the average working-class listener—it’s rumoured throughout Newfoundland communities that the station’s call letters stand for “voice of the common man.”

News director Elmer Harris, who had heard of Murphy when he was a student leader, was so impressed that he hired him to write daily five-minute editorials as well do some reporting. “He could pick up on the mo0d of the public and be able to tap into that,” says Harris today. “I hired him because of his vocabulary and his ability to twist a phrase.” The editorials were actually broadcast by the station manager, Bill Williamson, but while the messenger had the golden voice, it was the message that got the people’s attention. Murphy’s editorials on the decline and fall of the Smallwood era in the spring of 1972 were made into 45 rpm records and sold across the province. “Now, Joseph, having kept watch over his people for three years and twenty, shepherding his flock and fleecing that of the others, grew weary,” the first one began. “The people are not content with me, my spirit falters and my forces are much diminished. My house is not my house, behold [Frank] Moores and his rebels mount the steps.’

“There shall be defections and rumours of defections, and there shall come a time when they shall say Frank shall be overthrown, but be of good faith for the government is with him. To him is the civil service, the Twin Otter and the Chrysler Imperial. Nor is this all, for there have been polls and the polls are with him… and the first born of every house, having passed his eighteenth year, taking heed, applied to their cars the bumper sticker, “I voted Tory. The time has come.”

Murphy got the chance to front for himself when Harris asked him to fill in as a host for the station’s call-in show (the experiment was short-lived, since the program went to air at 9 a.m. and Murphy was admittedly not a morning person). Soon after, he was offered a position as political commentator and interviewer by the local CBC TV outlet. The station had just introduced Here and Now, a daily supper-hour news and current-affairs program that was broadcast throughout both Newfoundland and Labrador; Robin Taylor, the program’s producer, was searching for a strong interviewer.

“He’s a fierce debater,” says Taylor, who became a close friend. “He never intends to pursue anybody maliciously, but when it came to interviewing politicians, he could be quite devastating.” During his 10 years, on and off, at Here and Now; Murphy took on premiers, labour leaders and other newsmakers. Once the camera was on, Murphy became a fearless interviewer who got to the heart of issues, sometimes leaving his interviewees gasping for words. Here and Now’s former executive producer, Bob Wakeham, recalls and interview Murphy did two years ago on a special segment of the program entitled “Rex.” He was talking with an environmentalist about the east-coast seal fishery and completely discredited the antisealing supporter. “I’ve seen the people whom he’s carved up,” says Wakeham. “It’s more with a scalpel than a sledgehammer and sometimes they were unaware he was slicing them up.”

It was also during his days at CBC that he met and married a fellow journalist. The relationship was short-lived but produced a daughter. Both Murphy and his ex-wife remain tight-lipped about this period in their pasts. These also appeared to be trying times for Murphy. It was known among Newfoundland’s media community that he would have one too many drinks on occasion. Liquor was very much a united force among local newsmen, and seeing reporters gather at a local pub or around a kitchen table for a few drinks was common. Now, Murphy doesn’t touch any alcohol, but does consume “gallons of coffee,” according to CBC producer Robin Christmas. “That’s what keeps him going,” he says. “I think his not drinking at all is an important part of what gives him his energy.”

After nearly a decade of ranting about Newfoundland society and interviewing “everyone that could be interviewed at the time,” Murphy flirted with the “mainland” media. He moved to Toronto in 1974 to work onUp Canada, a current-affairs television program that took a hard-edged but satirical look at issues. The humorous skits surrounded a serious centre segment, almost a 22 Minutes ahead of its time. On one occasion, Murphy dressed as an angel and dangled from a rope in a piece about the celebration of the birth of the founder of Eaton’s. When the show was cancelled after two seasons, he returned to Newfoundland and the local CBC.

But despite his interest in political commentary, he also longed to be in the game himself. “It’s a fever that gets in your blood,” he admits. “Some people get it worse than others. I think I’ve had it all my life.” In 1981, Murphy won the federal nominations for the Conservatives in St. John’s, but after Trudeau delayed the election for year, Murphy gave up and went to work as an assistant to provincial Tory leader Frank Moores. In 1985, he tried again at the provincial level, this time running for the Liberal seat in Placentia. After losing by 70 votes, he took on a research position with the Liberals that involved helping party members prepare for question period in the House of Assembly.

Murphy believes his two years away from the industry were crucial in helping him become a better political commentator. “I would put a law in place that anyone who does political journalism should be sent to another jurisdiction to work for six months with a real political party,” he says. “I got the cleanest insight on a trust level of how a party functions. When you’re working for a political party, you’re privy to things you wouldn’t see as a journalist. The gap between journalists and politicians is immense. Journalists think they know politicians but they don’t they know about 70 percent of the game, while politicians have no idea what journalists really do.”

In 1987, Murphy returned once more to the CBC in St. John’s and continued doing commentaries and documentaries as well as the odd piece for The Journal. He freelanced there until 1994, when Cross Country Checkup came along. Given that Rex is as familiar to Newfoundlanders as Gzowski to the rest of Canada, it’s surprising that it took nearly 20 years for the national network to really embrace his work. The CBC vice president of English language programming, Jim Byrd, who is also a Newfoundlander, doesn’t think Murphy was intentionally over-looked because of his different approach to journalism. But Byrd acknowledges that there was a period in CBC’s history where the corporation brass felt it had to be even-handed about issues to avoid conveying a particular point of view. “I think now all of us feel the real value of television is to lead discussions of public issues a little farther along the path,” says Byrd. “Rex can clearly articulate events in a way that prompts Canadians to think about issues.”

Murphy says he approaches each topic by focusing hard on what he thinks about any given issue. “I make it a rigorous exercise to figure out what bothers me about this or pleases me about that.” He avoid scientific subjects because he feels he does not know enough to offer credible commentaries and won’t delve into gossip or people’s personal lives because he says it’s counterproductive to a good debate. He has no specific research technique except for paying close attention to what’s happening and reading as much as he can about issues.

His passion for reading, especially classics, began in Grade six. Murphy still has a voracious appetite for books and spends a lot of time frequenting bookstores in Toronto. He says he tries to read about six hors a day (recent books included The Special Cambridge Edition of Milton and Harold Bloom’s The Great Canon). But it’s his knowledge of classical literature that he considers the foundation of his journalism. He also reads and immense amount of literary criticism and says it adds an extra dimension to his work. Understanding how classical works are analyzed can only contribute to a journalist’s attempt to examine and discuss current issues. “Literary criticism is the most useful tool because, in most cases, it is on subjects that don’t have any current weight,” he believes. “It’s discriminating and rich, it awakens your mind to verbal expression.”

Murphy also loves poetry and classical music. Former crime reporter and long-time friend Mike Critch called him the “intellectual in residence” when they worked together at VOCM. He says the pair would spend many evenings drinking rum and listening to records. “Rex would arrive on the scene with his precious Yeats records. I had a small phonograph and we would sit and listen for hours and drive my wife stark raving mad.” Murphy loves music so much that when he was 13, he taught himself to play classical piano after sending away for a home-study course. “People in journalism should know one of the arts,” he says. “Journalism isn’t current affairs alone. Current affairs has as much of books, music and painting as any other thing. Any journalist, to be serious, needs that equipment to work with.”

Another component of his journalism is his almost professorial delivery. “I think there is a certain courtesy involved in expressing yourself in a formal manner when you are talking in public,” he says. “That’s as much an element of manners as it is a personal quirk.” He admits that speaking to a national audience is challenging because he is not as familiar with the viewers and listeners as he was on the Rock. The inside jokes and nuances that are funny on the east coast are lost in the west, and he finds easterners are better able to appreciate politics on a number of different levels. At The National, Murphy still has the freedom to comment on what he likes, as he did in Newfoundland, but he now has a bigger congregation to address, which in a sense limits what he can talk about. He is also serious about being accurate, as much as commentary can be accurate. “It’s important to say what you think is involved in a situation so people have a clear read,” he says. “They might agree or disagree, but it helps distil the discussion to the points that count.”

If he has one criticism about his work, it’s that he doesn’t go far enough. He says he has never regretted any commentary he has made, but it bothers him greatly when he doesn’t hit an issue as hard as he should.

For some, though, the problem is not what he says but the way he says it. A CBC viewer responded to a recent commentary by saying, “With your hot air, thesaurus Rex, global warming may be upon us sooner than you think.” Even Checkup’s Susan Mahoney admits him questions can get a little long and torturous. “He’ll ask a question that takes about two minutes to get out and then the caller will pause and say, ’Could you repeat that?’” In its recent book, the comedy troupe Double Exposure spoofed Murphy’s robust vocabulary. Below a picture of two men surrounded by a host of old-fashioned radio gadgetry is the caption: “CBC news technicians use state-of-the-art machinery to decipher Rex Murphy’s commentary.”

Jim Byrd argues that Murphy’s distinctiveness is what makes him attractive as a commentator. “His language forces people to think about an issue in a different way than if, say, I went on to talk about it. It’s one of his gifts.” It’s assumed that the CBC’s audience is more educated than the average Canadian and can better understand Murphy’s vocabulary, but he also had a large following on VOCM, in a province where formal education standards aren’t as high as in the rest of the country. Murphy himself is quick to deny that his way of speaking is even an issue. “Anybody who thinks I’m speaking at a more precious level than anyone else is the one being left behind. Even in broadcast, the only thing you can come home to is the damn language.”

Media critics agree. “He has a marvellous way with words; he didn’t short of an opinion or two; he’s witty and he talks funny,” Chris Cobb wrote in an Ottawa Citizen article in 1994. Greg Quill, The Toronto Star’s television critic, believes those who think Murphy overuses the language envy his talent. “I love the guy. He could be Canada’s Larry King. He’s an extremely bright man and he knows exactly the right words to use. That is pure communication to me.”

Murphy’s ability to communicate his opinions has national audiences listening. The National’s executive producer, Tony Burman says while the show doesn’t have specific figures on Murphy’s effect on audience share, CBC has noticed a sizeable increase in phone calls, faxes and letter since he’s been doing the regularly Wednesday night rants. Some have been negative, but most are highly supportive. “We’ve learned he has a loyal audience,” says Burman, “and people get annoyed with us when we, for whatever reason, haven’t put him on Wednesday nights.” According to Susan Mahoney, Cross Country Checkup’s ratings have increased two share points since Murphy joined the show, vaulting the audience from 220,000 to 350,000. The amount of mail has also progressively increased, and while she attributes part of this to an earlier time slot and the creation of an e-mail address, a good deal of the mail indicates that while listeners don’t always agree with Murphy, they appreciate his approach to issues.

Perhaps where CBC television has failed is in limiting Murphy to commentary and documentaries. While he does conduct interviews for features, his proven ability to take the hard line when interviewing newsmakers could be put to better use on a national level. Murphy would be a formidable challenge for Lucien Bouchard, Jean Chrétien or Preston Manning, and his first-hand knowledge would bring the skills of political interviewing to another level. Just as the CBC was slow to bring Murphy to the national stage, it is equally slow in using his skills to the fullest. Burman, however, disagrees that Murphy is underutilized: “It’s not a question of his not being allowed to do interviews,” he responds. “We value him for his unique ability to analyze and present opinion and bring real journalistic power to his documentaries. Why would we have him do interviews when we have people here who do interviews?”

Whatever the CBC has in store for Murphy, it’s evident that he continues to attract a loyal and equally vocal audience. Murphy says he still enjoys doing political commentaries and documentary work but admits he’s toying with the idea of—what else?—writing a book someday. But whether or not you appreciate his style of journalism, Murphy has displayed a certain quiet courage over the years, not unlike that of his forefathers who, for centuries, braved the icy North Atlantic. He chose a life as a professional freelancer in a province where getting full-time work is second only to winning the lottery and voiced opinions in a place where conformity is encourage and anonymity is impossible. And after two decades of ranting, he still has that spark that causes heated response from his audience. Murphy has always gone against the tide. Now it looks as if the boy has also gone beyond the bay.