In his book Mass Disruption, John Stackhouse writes extensively about the effect of the digital revolution that’s been raging for the past decade. “If newspapers [are] to survive… old school [needs] to meet new school in a hurry.”

Unfortunately, the industry doesn’t seem to be doing so well, what with La Presse and Nanaimo Daily News ceasing print earlier this month and Postmedia Network shares dropping 50 cents. Not a huge drop, sure, except for the fact that RBC cut the price target to zero dollars.

In a Business News Network video eerily foreshadowing the bloodletting across the Postmedia chain last week, Paul Godfrey said, “You’ve got to eliminate duplications throughout the organization.” He wasn’t talking about the debt the paper’s in (over 50 percent of it in American dollars) but the actual gears in his organization’s news clock.

Stackhouse warned: “The news media [needs] to adapt to the age of Google, staying light when it [comes] to costs, identifying audiences and following them and, perhaps most critically, giving voice to those audiences, even as we [ask] them to pay for our journalism.”

According to Godfrey, all his papers are still making money. How much, he doesn’t say, but he admits it’s not from print revenue. He calls it the “Google effect”. It’s understandable: North American newspaper revenue fell over 20 billion dollars from 2006 to 2011. In Canadian newspaper advertising, the revenue is almost a billion dollars less than it was a decade ago.

“Nobody’s exempt from this,” said Godfrey. It’s just the way the trends have gone; most people absorb and curate their news feeds by swiping and tapping, not turning pages. That said, Postmedia bought the Sun chain in April last year and saw an increase in gross revenue. Godfrey assures it was not an emotional decision (he was once the CEO there) but a business one.

“Our shares don’t sell,” he said dismissively of the price drop. “Most of them are owned by hedge funds in the States.” He’s looking for revenue in other places.

Now, it’s about containing costs.

Dear Canadian journalists,

It’s time we have a serious talk. Yes, you are in trouble.

It’s not you, it’s the Paul Godfreys of the world. They have pushed a noble profession closer and closer to falling into a black void of unemployment and no value, the Mount Doom for our seemingly cursed pens (or keyboards, if you want to be accurate). One overpaid CEO to rule them all. One overpaid CEO to save them. One overpaid CEO to take them all out and in the darkness fire them.

At some point, the epic saga about the survival of journalism became overburdened by the weight of our empty wallets. We stopped fighting back, or, at least, we became complacent in accepting the ruling iron fist of money. We mourn our lost brothers and sisters in arms. We write about it, we rant about it, we scream it from the depths of the Twitterverse. We just haven’t done anything about it.

Journalism is not dead, because news can never die. It has been shared long before ill-fated financial aims merged with the informative superpowers of the newsroom. We’ve forgotten that we still hold the pens (I mean, keyboards), and with that we can figure out a way to survive, and thrive.

We can only do that if there’s belief and hope–idealistic terms for the most part, but a lot has been built and done on these two abstract concepts. We’ve spent over a decade trying to retain these ideals, desperately navigating the murky waters to try and figure out why journalism is in trouble, what led it there and what to do to fix it.

I’m writing this from a journalism school among future journalists who believe that there is something invaluable journalism has to offer–stories, information, truth, analysis, depth, understanding. We wouldn’t be paying thousands of dollars of tuition (and student debt) if we didn’t believe that.

Over the past year, every class has started with a professor emphasizing the changing landscape of journalism. This isn’t done as a negative portrayal of the profession, but as a reality we need to accept and learn to navigate. It’s certainly a bleak reality, but, as a friend and fellow journalism student pointed out yesterday, “All industries shift and downsize and change and sometimes grow.” Where there are ups, there are also downs; fluctuations, after all, are a natural economic occurrence, one the journalism industry is not immune to.

There is a future of journalism. More importantly, there is a present of journalism. Instead of crying wolf on the death of our professional identities, let’s figure out a way to rebuild. It’s time to stop talking about our woes, buy some bandages and a pair of crutches, and fight harder to tell the news.

With the warmest of regards,

Paul Godfrey’s next target

Election day is finally, finally upon us, but the longest campaign in Canadian history since 1872 didn’t end quietly for the country’s print newspapers. If anything, it ended nonsensically.

Questions of who controls newspapers’ editorial voice haunted the final week of #elxn42 as print media outlets published their editorial board’s federal election choices. Some internet media, including the RRJ, questioned whether such endorsements are a practice worth keeping.

“For us, it seems a bit outdated,” said BuzzFeed Canada’s Emma Loop, while speaking to The Current on October 9. Although BuzzFeed does weigh in on particular issues, Loop said, the organization will “stay away from the partisan element” of politics by not endorsing a candidate.

Kathy English, public editor of the Toronto Star, was on The Current with Loop. She maintained that newspaper endorsements still have a place. “The Star is an institution that dates back over three centuries. Every day, it takes stands on issues that matter to the community,” said English. “It would be a cop-out not to do so in an election campaign.”

That morning, the Star published an editorial endorsing the Liberal Party of Canada. Two other Torstar papers, the Hamilton Spectator and the Waterloo Region Record, also endorsed the Liberals on October 15 and 17 respectively.

But it was the Postmedia endorsements on October 16 that made noise on Twitter as paper after paper in the national chain published an editorial endorsing the Conservative Party of Canada. The endorsement wasn’t by the editorial staff, however, as Edmonton Journal writer Paula Simons said in a tweet:

And yes. Before you ask, this was a decision made by the owners of the paper. As is their traditional prerogative.

— Paula Simons (@Paulatics) October 16, 2015

On Saturday, the National Post itself followed suit. Its editorial board’s pronouncement was also at odds with the opinions of columnists at the Post and other Postmedia holdings whose columns appeared on Friday and Saturday. Even Conrad Black himself weighed in, favouring a Liberal minority and referring to Stephen Harper as a “sadistic Victorian schoolmaster” who doesn’t know when to leave office. And one column was notable in its absence from the Saturday edition: that of Andrew Coyne, head of the Post’s editorial board.

According to Canadaland, Coyne’s column would have endorsed somebody other than the Conservatives, unlike the editorial endorsement he signed off on for the Post.  He has not spoken out on why his column did not appear, and his usually voluble Twitter feed has fallen silent — though Ricochet’s Ethan Cox noted that Coyne has disappeared in similar circumstances before.

UPDATE: Coyne has resigned from his post as editor

So anyway… I have resigned as editor of Editorials and Comment for the National Post, effective immediately. I will remain a columnist.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

2. Postmedia executives and I had a professional disagreement. Their view was that the publication of a column by the editorial page editor…

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

3. … dissenting from the Post’s endorsement of the Conservatives would have confused readers and embarrassed the paper.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

4. My view was that that was what I was paid to do as a columnist: give my honest opinion on issues of public interest.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

5. I don’t see public disagreement as confusing. I see it as honest. Readers, in my view, are adults & understand that adults can disagree.

— Andrew Coyne (@acoyne) October 19, 2015

Numerous Postmedia properties were also notable for their front pages in the last days of the election campaign: full-page, bright yellow wrap ads from the Conservatives bashing the competition. The ads appeared on the covers of the Penticton Herald, Vancouver Sun, Calgary Sun, The Province, The London Free Press, Ottawa Citizen, and 24 Hours Toronto. Most were aimed at the Liberals, but the Penticton Herald ad targeted both the Liberals and NDP. Curiously, the Friday edition of 24 Hours Vancouver, also a Postmedia property, featured an NDP wrap ad. While it isn’t a new practice, one reporter noted that these ads were a step up from the norm.

@belindaalzner Never seen one in such big papers, either, but correct me if I'm wrong

— Selena Ross (@seleross) October 17, 2015

Meanwhile, back at The Globe and Mail‘s offices, editor David Walmsley spent an hour fielding questions on Facebook about the paper’s unconventional endorsement of the Conservatives without endorsing party leader Stephen Harper. 

“The half-heartedness is a sign of the weakness of the political candidates,” Walmsley said in response to one questioner. “It would be great to find a clear, obvious winner the country could unite behind, but we don’t have that at the moment.”

In response to the Globe’s ambivalence, some Twitter users channeled their inner political humourist with the hashtag #MoreGlobeEndorsements.

Globe endorses BLT: hold the bacon, hold the lettuce, hold the tomato. #MoreGlobeEndorsements #elxn42

— Jeff Meldrum (@jeffmeldrum) October 16, 2015

The Charter of Rights and Freedoms, without the rights and freedoms. #MoreGlobeEndorsements

— Justin Mathews (@JustMath19) October 16, 2015

The Walking Dead. But no zombies. We have enough of them on our editorial board. #MoreGlobeEndorsements

— Erynn Watson (@erynnwatson) October 16, 2015

Here at the RRJ, we endorse newspapers, but we’re on the fence about newspaper endorsements.

Anne Marie Owens marks her arrival as editor-in-chief of the National Post with a laugh. It’s not a giggle, nor is it quiet. It is guttural and warm, a comforting capital-H Ha-Ha-Ha. It shakes her frame, all five feet, two inches of her. It comes out often. Post colleagues hear the laugh around the corner from their desks and from within glass-enclosed offices. Anyone who knows Owens knows her laugh. It seems to say: Yes, I am here now. I am laughing. Together, we can thrive.

The Post hasn’t had much to laugh about in recent years. Parent company Postmedia Network Inc., which owns 15 newspapers across the country, has endured tens of millions of dollars in quarterly losses, though it has pushed to cut costs over the past three years. That has led to layoffs and decreased circulation—but the turmoil was anticipated. The Post has teetered on the edge of death for years. In 2009, it almost succumbed when Postmedia went bankrupt, only to be revived by U.S. investment firm Silver Point Capital L.P. (the same company that saved Twinkie manufacturer Hostess). The newsroom of 110 journalists services nearly one million weekly print and digital readers. But the Post has turned a profit in only the last three of its 16 years.

In response to the company’s financial unrest, executives have committed to what president and CEO Paul Godfrey calls a “radical transformation.” It began in 2011 when Postmedia rolled out online paywalls for Montreal’s The Gazette and Victoria’s Times Colonist. Within two years, readers required a digital subscription to see more than 10 online articles a month for all Postmedia papers. “Newspapers around the world are realizing you can’t spend millions of dollars on content and give it away for free,” Godfrey said in 2013. By 2014, executives had created their latest attempt at salvation, a four-platform approach now known as “Postmedia Re-Imagined.” The plan will be released in its entirety by spring 2015, and incorporates new tablet and smartphone versions of the Post with the pre-existing web and print editions of the paper. Executives hope it will boost the Post’s weekly digital readership far past the current 240,000 per week mark and, in turn, increase ad sales.

In Owens, executives want an editorial ringleader who can find the balance between producing a profitable publication and maintaining the “Post spirit,” a loose term higher-ups use to reference the “good old days” of “fearless” print media. They have placed their faith in her energy and optimism to lead the Post through the final stages of its transformation into a digital-ready news organization. If it’s successful, Owens will have good reason to keep on laughing.

 ***

During her walk-through of the 11th floor of Postmedia’s office in Toronto, Owens comes off like a celebrity: in each room she enters, she receives a Cheers-like welcome. Everybody knows her—and her nickname, “AMO” (pronounced “ammo”). Colleagues stop their conversations to say hello; she always waves back. Even elevator rides are punctuated by chats with staff. “When I walk through like this,” she says, “it makes it seem like I’m everyone’s friend here.”

When I first meet her, Owens buzzes like a hamster on Red Bull. She is a fast talker and her sentences often begin with a convoluted “I think–but I–you know–.” When they aren’t in the air, her hands are drawing imaginary diagrams on the table in front of her. During our interview at the Post’s Collaboration Café—a cafeteria resembling an oversized Starbucks—she picks her hands up and slaps them back down so often that the table wobbles on its steel legs. She bobs her head, too, in time with her hands; the gold hoop earrings she wears dangle and tap her cheeks, moving like a metronome.

Owens’s predecessor Stephen Meurice was, as he says, “let go” from the Post last March, despite working for the paper since day one in 1998. After his departure, Post executives, including Gerry Nott, who assumed the role of interim editor, were desperate for a fast-moving leader. They sought someone who could take the reins and immediately begin forming the skeleton of a more organized and optimistic newsroom—someone who felt the same sense of urgency in kick-starting “Postmedia Re-Imagined.” Once hired, Owens moved quickly, taking four months to restructure her leadership team. After five managing editors left their positions, she appointed a single deputy editor: Julie Traves, who had been Focus section editor at The Globe and Mail. The managing editors were given more responsibilities for both digital and print, and became symbolically known as “executive producers.” The shift also included hiring Erin Valois from theScore. She brought experience in tracking how readers consume news to her new role as executive producer of digital. The former managing editor of features Benjamin Errett became director of strategy, a role that oversees the execution of the four-platform plan. The restructuring communicated a clear message: to survive, the Post can’t think of itself as a print product.

Much of the restructuring, it appears, is thanks to financial losses. Little more than a week before Owens’s first day on the job, Postmedia announced a quarterly loss of more than $20 million despite its three-year restructuring program that meant job cuts. In 2010, Postmedia slashed 500 full-time positions, followed by 25 additional cuts in 2012. Later on, job losses included some of the Post’s biggest names and most talented journalists: just two months before Meurice was let go, the paper laid off seven editors, including social media editor Jeremy Barker and sports editor Jim Bray. In March 2014, Postmedia terminated 48 jobs in the Calgary advertising sales office. Newspaper circulation also took a hit: the Calgary Herald, Edmonton Journal and Ottawa Citizen all lost their Sunday editions, while the Post hasn’t published on Mondays in the summer since 2009. Still, the losses kept coming. In January, eight months after Owens started, Postmedia reported a quarterly loss of $10 million.

To deal with the financial pressures, Owens has focused her attention on management. Five months into the job, she has yet to unpack all of her belongings in her office. “Nothing in there really says much about me,” she says. Instead, she has been training her leadership team to take on their new roles. When she isn’t in meetings, she’s usually whirling around the newsroom before deadline—not unlike the cartoon Tasmanian Devil.

Owens starts every day with a two-hour commute from Waterdown, Ontario, southwest of Toronto. She attends daily story meetings at 10:30 a.m. and 3 p.m. and usually leaves by 7 p.m. to head home to her husband, a teacher, and their four teenage sons. She spends her evenings refreshing her email to see proofs. All of her weekdays are the same: rinse, repeat.

When describing Owens, most of her colleagues paint a starry-eyed portrait of an energetic, happy-go-lucky editor. One goes as far as to call her efforts “superhuman.” Energy and dedication, however, aren’t enough to pull the Post out of its financial slump. During our interview, Owens puts a positive spin on her work, bouncing from idea to idea. When I probe about the survival of the Post, she acknowledges that Postmedia is financially unstable compared to her previous employer, Rogers Publishing, but then quickly changes the subject to reflect on how wonderful an opportunity it is to be editor-in-chief. After an hour, Owens ends our conservation to attend a meeting. I bank my follow-up questions on the stability of the paper.

Many of these questions, however, go unanswered—at least by Owens. While I spent the next four months analyzing the Post’s future under her leadership and asking dozens of her former and current colleagues what she’d bring to the paper, Owens never granted me another interview. Though she initially agreed to let me shadow her on the job, she later dodged my weekly requests to do so. In October, following another request to spend a day with her at the paper, I received my last response from her: “This is a bad week for me.” Perhaps she was just too busy—at the bottom of an Everest-sized to-do list as the paper undergoes its digital transformation. Or perhaps she just wasn’t interested in talking about the Post’s financial future under her reign.

***

The Ottawa Citizen first tested “Postmedia Re-Imagined” in May 2014. Five months into the trial, company vice-president Lou Clancy dubbed it a success: readers were now spending 18 percent more time with the paper, largely, he claimed, because of its mobile accessibility and new smartphone and tablet editions (Postmedia has yet to break down the increase by platform). According to an introductory post on the Citizen’s website, the move was backed, in part, by a Postmedia-funded 2013 Ipsos Canada survey that found the company could reach several demographics through different platforms. Younger readers were more likely to read the news on their smartphones, while middle-aged readers preferred tablets and older readers favoured the printed page.

For the company’s executives, the Citizen’s results were encouraging. But how the strategy will hold up on a national scale is unclear. In the U.S., The New York Times similarly fragmented its audience in April 2014 by releasing several digital niche editions of the paper targeted toward different demographics. In October 2014, the organization experienced a third-quarter loss of $9 million, compared to an $12.9-million operating profit during that same period in 2013. It also announced the elimination of 100 newsroom jobs by the end of 2014. The Times might be able to afford the experimentation; Postmedia cannot.

Perhaps that’s why these efforts have moved so slowly with the Post. The paper’s most notable moves toward digitization were in 2011. At that time, 30 percent of Canadians were relying primarily on the internet for news consumption, according to a Canadian Media Research Consortium study. “Providers that fail to focus on providing content for computers, tablets and smartphones will be left behind,” declared the study’s co-author, Darryl Korell. In response to readers’ shifting tastes, newsrooms began to consider online paywalls. Consequently, one of Meurice’s big tasks was to overhaul the Post’s website. The digital focus reeled in profits for the first time. But then Meurice was let go. Though executives never told him exactly why, Meurice speculates they wanted “a fresh set of eyes on the paper.” He adds, “I was too invested in the old ways of the Post.”

Meanwhile, Owens, the effervescent former Postie, was at Maclean’s, helping launch a tablet edition and redesign its website. She quickly discovered she had a knack for digital thinking. In March 2014, the national newsmagazine’s online pageviews increased about 35 percent, and the popularity of its app helped Rogers Publishing reach one million downloads for all of its publications’ apps.

Owens says she never had a plotted job trajectory. Her career in journalism began in January 1988, when just eight months into her graduate degree at Western University in London, Ontario, (where classmates described her as a “great drunk dancer”), she landed a job at the St. Catharines Standard. There, she commuted three days a week between St. Catharines and London until she graduated and became a full-time reporter. Owens held multiple titles at the Standard—from education reporter to columnist—but her coverage of the case of serial rapist and murderer Paul Bernardo in 1995 gave her byline recognition. Realizing there was little room for more career growth at the Standard after the trial, she joined the Post’s inaugural masthead in 1998, anticipating big-city opportunities.

She worked her way up to general assignment reporter, often writing features, where she stayed until 2006, when Meurice nudged her into editing. “She had the kind of vision we needed with features,” he says, “and with dealing with other reporters.” Eventually, Owens stopped writing altogether and became features editor. From there, she moved up the ranks. By the time she jumped ship to Maclean’s in 2011, she was the Post’s managing editor of news.

Following Meurice’s departure, Postmedia senior vice-presidents Nott and Clancy handpicked Owens to fill the vacant spot. Her hire suggests executives saw a more versatile leader in Owens, someone willing to take digital risks, though Nott says it wasn’t a “him-versus-her situation.” Yet when I ask about her motivations for accepting the role, Owens’s answer surprises me. Rather than talking about multimedia innovation, she immediately lands on another, far different subject. “The job itself is great,” she tells me. “But the opportunity to be the first female editor of a national paper is pretty huge, right?”

 ***

Owens has always been a proponent of feminism and equality in journalism—something John Ibbitson, now writer-at-large at the Globe, learned on his first day of journalism school in 1987. The class of 40 had a simple task: interview your deskmate and write a brief story about his or her life. Paired with the gregarious Owens, Ibbitson anticipated an easy assignment. “Anne Marie Owens is an energetic, perky 23-year-old,” he typed, satisfied with his description. Upon reading the story, Owens was enraged. “Perky? Perky?” she exclaimed. Her voice went louder: “What man would ever describe a woman in all of human history as perky?” Ibbitson recalls the day with shame, even some 20 years later, and now admits, “I never used the word ‘perky’ to describe anything again in the rest of my career.”

Being a female journalist has informed much of Owens’s work as a reporter and editor. While at the Standard in the early 1990s, she and Marlene Bergsma successfully fought for the use of gender-neutral language in the paper. Around the same time, she purchased a Non-Sexist Word Finder at a small bookstore in Port Dalhousie, Ontario. It was her parody of a writing bible until 2011, when she jokingly passed it on to Meurice before she headed to Maclean’s. (Inside the book’s front cover, her signature remains in black ink.)

Not everyone agrees Owens’s gender is a big deal. When asked for his thoughts on her appointment as the first woman to run a national paper in Canada, Toronto Star editor Michael Cooke said, “It doesn’t matter.” Cooke, along with many of Owens’s male colleagues, says Owens being a woman has little effect on her ability to move up the ranks. Even the Post’s homepage editor and assistant managing editor, John Racovali, says that she landed the position on her own merit, so calling attention to the fact that she is the first female editor at the paper is “a hollow accolade.”

Yet, to say so is to ignore the male domination of the news industry. Ann Rauhala, a professor at Ryerson University’s School of Journalism, examines women’s roles in newsrooms. She points to a slew of reasons women aren’t often appointed to top-tier positions. For one, women who are juggling domestic responsibilities with their careers feel that their employers are not supportive. For another, executives want to hire journalists who are just like them, who reflect their values. “That translates to white guys hiring nice, young white guys,” she says. That Owens is heading a national paper is just not the norm—according to Newspapers Canada’s annual report for 2014, of 111 daily newspapers, only 18 have women in the top job.

But Owens’s feminist values won’t mean the end of the Post’s staunch, right-wing political commentary—or even define her reign as editor. Though the Post has come a long way from its origins as a “tits-and-analysis paper,” as the Star’s former executive managing editor James Travers once described it, right-wing columnists are part of the Post’s brand and are there to stay. “The Post,” stresses Owens, “is not sexist.” Well, not quite. Even with a self-proclaimed feminist at the helm, the Post still runs headlines such as “Feminist Video Turns to Child Abuse to Send Distorted Message.” And in December 2014, a Rex Murphy column denounced the efforts of mainstream feminists. “In an era when college students under the mighty sway of heteronormative patriarchy have conjured up the concept of ‘micro-aggression’ and stamped their books with ‘trigger warnings,’” he wrote, “there is surely nothing too silly, too intellectually vacuous, for educated feminists to embrace.”

At a time when anti-feminist columns like Murphy’s fare well with Post readers, it’s far easier to imagine Owens’s commitment to the digital overhaul shaping her legacy as editor, and her gender fading to an afterthought.

***

Rob Roberts knew he had a winning story on his hands when he assigned a piece about an avalanche to Post writer Joe O’Connor. It had all the right elements: a charismatic, hubristic main character, death, conflict and a Canadian backdrop. For Roberts, the executive news producer, a typical page three spread—several column inches dedicated to a longform feature—was in order. He slated it to go to print ASAP. But Owens said no. Go further, she instructed. The result was an interactive online feature, complete with high-resolution portraits of snow-covered mountains, on-camera interviews with O’Connor’s main character and infographics depicting the anatomy of an avalanche. The team published “The Day the Mountain Fell” in September 2014 and it soon garnered hundreds of thousands of pageviews. The Post has also published several popular multimedia stories that fall outside the realm of daily news, including Adrian Humphreys’s “Hacker, Creeper, Soldier, Spy,” a 15,000-word online interactive profile of a former U.S. military man seeking asylum in Canada (which began the model), and “Gangland Confidential,” his multimedia coverage of Canadian mafia ties in Italy.

Turning ordinary print features into interactive stories is a tactic Owens hopes to employ more frequently as the Post undergoes its digital makeover. As Roberts puts it, the focus is shifting from filling tomorrow’s paper to telling good stories in different ways—and, with the addition of smartphone and tablet editions, on different platforms. Owens isn’t the first to go forth with such a plan, and for most Canadian newspapers a move toward multimedia seems inevitable. By 2017, Canada’s newspaper industry could see revenues decline by up to 20 percent, according to a 2013 report by international financial firm PricewaterhouseCoopers. Anticipating that number will prove true—and could be even worse—many traditional news organizations have turned to web and tech-forward platforms, reframing a scramble to stay financially afloat into a bold and innovative path.

“Users are going to mobile—they’re often consuming their news on various apps via their mobile devices as opposed to any other platform,” says David Silverberg, editor-in-chief of Digital Journal, who has been following trends in the industry since 2009 through his Future of Media events in Toronto. In 2014, close to 60 percent of 18- to 34-year-old and 40 percent of 35- to 49-year-old Canadians consumed news on mobile devices or computers, according to a Media Technology Monitor report. The company also found 45 percent of anglophones now own a tablet. But, Silverberg adds, publishers need a good plan in order to successfully market their multiple digital platforms: “They can’t just take content and slap it onto a tablet or smartphone app.” Reformatting this content and giving it added value can help papers improve their chances. Often, that’s through interactivity, additional visual content such as infographics or presenting it in a prettier package.

Publishers must also confront what David Skok, a 2012 Nieman Fellow and current digital adviser at The Boston Globe, calls “disruption theory,” a term coined by his Harvard Business School professor Clayton Christensen. The theory refers to a dynamic whereby newer, more agile firms disrupt more established companies stuck in their old ways. During his fellowship, Skok and Christensen applied this theory to the journalism industry. While sites such as The Huffington Post (its parent company, AOL, is worth $3 billion) and BuzzFeed (worth $850 million) are successful, much of their revenue is generated through clicks on low-cost listicles and branded content. Still, news organizations can reinvest their clickbait revenue into features and harder-hitting news stories.

Yet under Owens, there is little room for for BuzzFeed-esque quizzes or viral videos. In fact, it contradicts her plan for “great storytelling and voices,” and it could be the core flaw in the digital strategy. Producing smart journalism across a series of platforms is great in theory, but it costs money and it’s unclear where the funding—especially at a publication that took 13 years to make a profit—would come from. Papers that have succeeded at rolling out multiple editions of their product over a series of digital platforms have invested millions in doing so. Montreal’s La Presse tablet app, for instance, cost $40 million and three years worth of research—money the notoriously poor Postmedia would be hard-pressed to match. La Presse has also announced it will eventually replace its print newspapers with an all-digital publication—something that seems unlikely at the Post, which has many older readers who still rely on paper and ink.

Owens did not tell me how she plans to balance the need for good content with the paper’s current financial state. Talking about her move to Postmedia from the financially stable Rogers, she said she appreciated the “experimental” nature of the Post. “All the tumult and all the uncertainty,” she says, “it does mean that you have a good environment for trying new things.” But company executives have never mentioned a back-up plan if the great “Re-Imagined” experiment fails. And if there is one, I never had the chance to ask Owens about it. During our brief interview, Owens said she would focus solely on the Post’s needs within the immediate future, planning for “whatever comes in the next six months and whatever comes in the year after that”—suggesting, perhaps, even she doesn’t know what will lead the Post into financial stability.

 ***

It’s a cold November night, and Owens is standing out in the “smoking patio” of Toronto’s Opera House, a shoddily taped-off barrier between the sidewalk on Queen Street East and the venue. Inside, hundreds of media professionals and news junkies are in attendance for Newzapalooza, an annual “battle of the bands” charity event during which journalists take on the role of rock stars for the night. Though she isn’t smoking, Owens is standing among a group of young women who crowd around her. Out here, she is the star.

This opportunity to mingle with Owens outside the newsroom after weeks of chasing her is rare and golden. And she is beaming with excitement: the crowd loved the Post’s band, Conrad Black Sabbath. But she ignores me for a while, turning her back toward me, until I say hello.

“Oh, gosh, are you still looking for colour for your story?” she asks me. She laughs. I ask again if I can shadow her, but the question hangs in the air as she re-enters the Opera House, disappearing into the thick of the crowd. It’s the last time I ever see her.

It reminds me of our interview. When I pressed her about where the paper is headed under her direction, Owens dodged the question in a different way: she pretended to be forthright. “If you ask, ‘What is the National Post going to look like five years down the road?’ I don’t think anyone can honestly say,” she said. Then she whisked on to the next subject. At the end of our only chat, she laughed that signature, booming laugh, as if to assure me: I have it all under control. This paper will thrive.

Illustration by Tony Healey

This story was updated to reflect changes to female editors at the helm of Canadian newspapers, including the departure of Janice Dockham at the Leader-Post and the appointment of Heather Persson at the StarPhoenix. The story also previously incorrectly stated that Adrian Humphreys’s “Hacker, Creeper, Soldier, Spy” was published after “The Day the Mountain Fell.” The Review regrets the errors.

By Gin Sexsmith

It’s 1972, and the scent of cigarette smoke and stewed coffee acts as a backdrop to the clack clack ching of manual typewriters inThe Globe and Mailnewsroom. Men’s voices fill the room—asking questions, bouncing ideas off one another, laughing at crude jokes. About 15 men in ties and white shirts are seated around a large, horseshoe-shaped desk—the “rim”—situated in the middle of the room. Inside the horseshoe sit a slot editor, an assistant slot editor, and four news editors. Off to the side, there is a smaller rim for the Report on Business section.

Both rims are cluttered with pens, paper, coffee cups, ashtrays, style guides, dictionaries—and, of course, copy. Once a reporter has written a story, it goes to a news, or back desk, editor, then a traffic handler, who looks it over before assigning it to one of the rim men. He pores over it, looking for clarity, factual and grammatical errors, and spelling mistakes before sending it along to the copy chief, who gives it a once-over. The senior news editor will give it a final read once it’s in proof. In total, the copy is seen by at least six people on its journey from notepad to newspaper.

Today, a story may be vetted by three sets of eyes, some of them belonging to staff at out-of-house “copy mills.” It’s not uncommon for online stories to be posted after being reviewed by just one person. Errors that would have had the old rim denizens squirming have become more and more common. In late 2012, the Toronto Sun misspelled “correrction” in correction note, and early this year, a headline described owner Quebecor Media Inc.’s CEO and president as “influencial.” Also, last year the Ottawa Citizen stated that the Titanic sank in 2012, and in a restaurant review The Hamilton Spectatormixed up the name of a restaurant, Sarcoa, with sarcoma.

Meanwhile, last September, the Globe published the headline “Egypt Siezes the Day at UN” on its front page. As Greg O’Neill, one of the longest-serving copy editors at the Globe, explains: “Naturally, when you take away a safe system, you’re going to have an increase in errors. We try, everyone just tries to be more intense and focused so some of those errors don’t happen, but they do.”

Some blame outsourcing for the decline in copyediting standards. Paul Morse, president of the Southern Ontario Newsmedia Guild, belongs to this group. “It makes no sense to take part of the process that makes the product as best as it possibly can be and try to send it out to some lower-wage, boiler-room kind of place,” he says. “Readers are content consumers; they notice that stuff. If we blow it in a story, when an obvious mistake or even a not-so-obvious mistake happens, readers let you know. Copy mills are not something that we want. It just drags down the overall quality of the journalism that we believe in.”

But in reality, things are more complicated.

Greg O’Neill’s manner embodies what I imagine when I think of an old-school newspaper guy. He’s outspoken, with a take-no-shit attitude, his voice gruff from years of smoking. With his shoulder-length, greying brown hair and grey handlebar mustache, he projects an air of cool nonchalance with a side of don’t mess with me. He takes off his leather jacket to reveal a white button-down shirt with no tie, unlike the norm at the Globe when he joined the copy desk in 1978.

Back then, the newsroom was louder; in those computerless days, copy editors relied more on one another to get things right. While editor-reporter exchanges could escalate into a fist through a wall, O’Neill describes typical conversations about usage or style as “determined discussions.”

“When I first started, all you did was come in and copyedit; they had a separate layout desk,” Beverley Spencer, a Globe copy editor from 2002 to 2009, recalls. “The first move was merging the copy desk and the layout desk. One of the disadvantages was that it gave us less time to work on the copyediting itself. You caught the big stuff and you had enough time to check spelling, tidy up grammar, and tighten up the sentences, but there was increasingly less time to really look at the story and go to the reporter and say, ‘Is this what you really meant when you said this?’”

Eric McGuinness, who spent 33 years at the Spectator, agrees that the biggest change in terms of quality occurred when copy editors started taking on pagination roles. “There was a great emphasis on production, getting the technical part and the layout right at the expense of grammar, accuracy, and content quality,” he says. McGuinness, who took a buyout from the Spec in 2010, now works four days a week at Postmedia’s editorial hub in Hamilton. Ironically, copy editors and paginators there stick to their different tasks.

Recently, copy editors have taken on even more roles. Angela Hickman, who worked as a part-time copy editor and backup A1 editor at the National Postuntil this February, became accustomed to having multiple responsibilities. Not only did she edit and write display; she was also responsible for the layout and a degree of art direction.

At the Citizen, the title “copy editor” is more a technicality in the contract than a reality. As of last August, about 95 percent of the paper is edited and laid out in Hamilton. The exception is the local content, which includes the national section, because of Ottawa’s national capital status, and pages one and two. Editor-in-chief and publisher Gerry Nott says that outsourcing has allowed in-house employees to focus purely on creating local content and has removed the “burden of production” from the newsroom—although he admits that the move was partially done to save money.

As Steve Ladurantaye, the Globe’s media reporter, says, “Papers are losing a shitload of money. By cutting today, they can publish tomorrow.”

It’s hardly news that the industry in North America has been shaken by a series of developments, starting with the hollowing out of classified ad sections due to the advent of Craigslist and its imitators. Then sliding circulation translated to lower ad rates. The recession that hit in 2008 meant further losses. Papers have responded by cutting employees, and the hit lists frequently include a disproportionate number of desk staff. “No other job classification has suffered so many losses as the news business downsizes,” Merrill Perlman wrote in a commentary for CNN last year. Perlman, who spent 25 years at The New York Times, added, “Given the choice between having to give up reporters or give up copy editors, reporters will win nearly every time because they provide ‘content.’”

And so the “burden of production” now increasingly falls on remote editorial outlets.Pagemasters North America, for example, based in downtown Toronto, promises to deliver pages “to your newspaper’s specifications and high quality standards at a fraction of your current production costs.” It offers copyediting, headline writing, layout, and page design services. Started in 1991 by two Australian journalists, it has expanded to New Zealand, England, and, in 2010, Canada. Here, the company is a subsidiary of The Canadian Press, which is partly owned by Torstar Corporation and the Globe and Mail Inc. Not surprisingly, the Globe and Toronto Star are both clients, along with a number of smaller papers.

Overlooking King Street East, the Pagemasters newsroom’s only resemblance to the glory days of the desk is its circa-1980s furniture. Clusters of desks are set up so the copy editors face one another. The room is a large, airy space, and the banks of windows looking down upon Toronto’s King and Victoria streets keep it bright. Many of the copy editors are in their mid- to late 20s. A handful of older copy editors once worked at dailies and have now landed here post-buyout, often as part-timers.

Brian Christmas, a 61-year-old former Globe copy editor, is one. He currently works at Pagemasters three days a week and makes considerably less than what he earned before taking a buyout in 2009. Though he considers this “pocket money,” he’s at the high end of the wage scale: the rate for agate editors starts at $16.83 an hour, while other copy editors’ base is $20.19. In early March, the Star announced announced it was laying off 32 editorial staff, including copy editors, saying it was sending work to Pagemasters instead. A top-level copy editor at the Star makes $87,000; the same person at Pagemasters would earn $48,000.

The pay may be sharply different, but Christmas says that the workload is the same, about eight stories per six-hour shift. But this time he’s remote from the Globe’s newsroom, even though he primarily works on its ROB section, just as he did four years ago. The arrangement has left him feeling like a second-class citizen at times. “Sometimes a good banter with a reporter gets the juices flowing,” he says.

Some reporters miss the interaction, too. Ladurantaye says he values the human contact that happens between reporters and editors, something that doesn’t exist when stories are zapped over the internet from in-house editors to remote copy editors. Before, he says, “You could have face-to-face conversations; there was accountability that if a copy editor changed your story and made a mistake, there was somebody you could talk to about it.

Postmedia Editorial Services in Hamilton is located in a nondescript one-storey building, sandwiched between two fast food restaurants in the gritty west end of town. The workroom has rows of desks and PCs—“It’s what you expect for a page factory,” says one employee. A free, brew-it-yourself Bunn coffee maker and a 50-cents-a-cup Tassimo brewer fortify the 170 employees, particularly those working the late shift.

“By delivering high-quality finished pages at a reasonable cost, Postmedia Editorial Services frees journalists from production roles that detract from their ability to focus on their core competencies in content creation,” is the service’s pledge. Some editors spend their eight-hour shifts jumping back and forth between papers, editing a couple dozen stories, while others focus on entire pages for one paper. An experienced staffer here can make about $35 an hour. Above the copy editors are the quality-control editors, or “QCs” for short—the contemporary version of the slot. There is a QC and assistant QC for each paper, and it’s their job to control the workflow and ultimately sign off on the copy.

McGuinness, who’s been at the Hamilton hub since February 2012, now works four days a week, primarily on Citizen copy. He says there is a lot of back and forth between Hamilton and the other papers; he adds that because most of the copy editors previously worked at one of Postmedia’s papers, there is usually someone to answer local geography or style questions. In his time there, he has only seen a few departures, but a lot of hiring. He doesn’t blame outsourcing for a decline in quality, but, like most, does not think the desk process is what it once was. “To some extent, it’s asking fewer people to do more work,” he says. “The amount of time devoted to a story has been reduced. I think we used to have the luxury of more people and more time.”

More training, too.

David Climenhaga is a former copy editor and reporter for the Globe and the Calgary Herald. He gets quite heated when discussing the “dirty little secret about the newspaper business in the last 20 years.” “They’ve always talked a great line about training, always talked a great line about quality, but never gave a damn about it from pay cheque to pay cheque,” he says. “All they cared about was trimming the bottom line.

At the Globe, O’Neill once trained the new copy editors when he was copy chief. One of the practices he’d warn against was what he calls “robot editing.” “There are rules that we have to follow, but you have to use your good intellectual judgement to follow those rules. When you don’t, you’re a robot; and you’re not a good copy editor.”

The combination of highly experienced senior editors with time to help out younger colleagues, and more time in general to focus on editing, is a fond memory for people who worked in the industry in the late ’70s and ’80s.

These days, just giving the story a rushed check to make sure there is nothing terribly wrong is sometimes all there is time for. When Angela Hickman moved from The Gazette to the Post in 2011, she was the greenest person on the desk; in under a year she was training the new copy editors. “Because there’s no job security, it’s really difficult to attract anybody with any experience, so we end up hiring a lot of people who have never copyedited before,” she says. “The most experience they’ve ever had at a newspaper is maybe a six-week reporting internship.”

Although he doesn’t think that the desk is dead, Ladurantaye regards it as an “endangered species.” It’s not that copy editors don’t care. Sue Grimbly, who left the Globe last September after working there off and on for 20 years, says forcefully: “Everyone is doing their level best to make sure it’s just as smart as it always was. They care bitterly; they don’t want to see mistakes get in.” Christmas is equally passionate about the craft: “It serves a vital function. Not just as a guardian of the language, but also to push back against reporters, urge them to dig a little deeper. I think that role, if it dies away, will be sadly missed.” Perhaps the future of copyediting is the editorial hub. Patti Tasko, the managing editor of Pagemasters’ Canadian outpost, regards it as an outlet where copy editors can shine (albeit at bargain-basement wages).“[Copy editors] are going to be in a position of authority because it’s all we do,” she says. “We want the best skilled people to rise to the top.”

Hickman was fully aware that her position as a Post copy editor was on its way out. Because she now works for the Financial Post section, she’ll get to keep an in-house job after the Post moves much of its copyediting to Hamilton this spring. She’s heard that as much as 25 percent of the papers’ pages will stay in-house, but doesn’t know if that will actually be the case.

“You get the sense that it’s a dying art,” says Hickman, audibly sad. Although not all reporters value copyediting, senior editors do. Many started as copy editors and want to keep the process in-house. She remembers the catches she’s made. “Sometimes you end up with great writers, but they spell someone’s name wrong or a different way every single appearance in the story. It’s their main character and there’s seven different spellings of their name. Even if the story is great, no one reading it is going to be like, ‘This is a great story.’ They’re going to be like, ‘This guy doesn’t even know what he’s talking about; he can’t even spell.’

O’Neill remains optimistic. He recalls a day late last year when his shift ended and he was totally bushed; he looked at the co-worker next to him, who was beat, too. “It still shows that there’s a value in my job,” he says. “If two people are that exhausted doing their work, then we do have a use and a future.”