Tyler Brûlé and Andrew Tuck launched Monocle in 2007 as a global, general interest print magazine. Many people were skeptical of a magazine going against the tide–launching print in the alleged digital age. But Monocle’s circulation numbers continue to grow at a fast pace. “As circulations were in decline for a number of magazines, we just grew,” said Brûlé when speaking at Ryerson University on November 10. “Even through the darkest hours.”

The magazine’s success is linked to the idea that people in the digital age still want the tactile experience of a physical book or magazine. Tuck referred to the science behind reading, and the way reading in hard copy is an entirely different experience from reading something on a screen. He said it’s this tactile experience that we yearn for, as it’s something that breaks us away from the norm. “There’s a really magical moment where we relax and say, okay, the book isn’t going away, magazines are not going away,” said Tuck.

Tuck tied this idea into the return of the record player. He talked about people going to work and listening to digital tracks on their phones but then coming home and putting on a record. As the world becomes more and more digital, it awakens a new hunger for the exact opposite. Tuck said you can’t only live in one of these worlds, so while people today are constantly depending on technology, they still want aspects of the world without digital.

Brûlé  and Tuck say that it’s especially young people who are seeking this escape from technology, this tactile experience. Brûlé said this pressure for magazines to go fully digital is mainly affecting older generations in the industry, who are afraid of looking out of touch and are trying to look current. But Brûlé said youth want a variety of experiences, and writing for print and reading magazines in print provides that opportunity for a tactile, more personal experience.

Though Monocle has a wide range of other elements in addition to print, such as travel books, cafes and conferences, it is not on social media. Brûlé  and Tuck say this strategy is to form a deeper relationship with readers. “It doesn’t feel like we’re hiding away,” said Tuck. “For our audience, it doesn’t feel like the right fit.” While other magazines have Twitter accounts for readers to reach out and tweet at them, Tuck said this strategy usually doesn’t connect readers to the editors. At Monocle, there’s a genuine community, which is based on shaking people’s hands and forming a personal relationship.

“It’s quite amazing that we’ve all been seduced by the digital era,” said Brûlé. But the magazine knows there is no expiration date on print, that there’s still a need for print in today’s world. “Monocle is one of hundreds of brands that are beginning to understand that, and don’t believe that there’s a tsunami coming that’s going to wash us all away,” said Tuck. “We’re going to be here, we’re going to make money, we’re going to tell stories and we’re going to continue to surprise people.”

Betty’s, a downtown Toronto bar, is all warm wood tones and squeaky floors, its seafoam walls barely visible through a collection of framed sports memorabilia. Last October, it was the site of a celebration commemorating the National Post’s 11th anniversary. Once the spoiled child of media baron Conrad Black, the paper had more extravagant parties in its infancy. The first birthday bash in October 1999 was a blur of the owner’s friends, advertisers, free booze and “freaking excess” at the Royal Ontario Museum. As one Postreporter recalls: “The thing was like a Roman circus.” At its second anniversary, half-naked newspaper boys posed for pictures to the delight of Black’s wife, Barbara Amiel.

Tonight’s event is considerably more low-key. Betty’s has 30 beers on tap and an open mic night every Wednesday. A dozen reporters and editors share an evening of laughs and a few pints. But there’s a half-empty glass of dark ale warming where the editor-in-chief should be sitting. Doug Kelly is on the sidewalk under a street light—smoking, pacing, scribbling notes and fiddling with his BlackBerry.

The guy running one of the country’s most troubled newspapers is fielding calls from corporate executives. The Post will transfer from its holding company, Canwest CMI (which filed for creditor protection), to the subsidiary Canwest LP (which is in a forbearance agreement with its lenders). In retrospect, this is the first sign of a seismic change. (The move will ensure that Canwest’s broadcast and newspaper assets are sold separately.) Other newspapers bank Post obituaries—and one headline on The New York Times website declares, “Canada’s Cheeky Conservative Paper May Close.” Kelly retaliates with a front-page editorial and the newspaper that seems to defy Darwinian law lives to see another day, even if that new day will dawn under new ownership.

A few weeks after the party, sitting in his office atop the Post’s three-storey low-rise in suburban Toronto, Kelly looks tired and slightly defeated while he fiddles with an empty Starbucks venti. (Full disclosure: I worked as an unpaid intern at the Post for four weeks in the summer of 2009, but did not meet Kelly until I showed up uninvited at Betty’s to report on this story.) Dressed casually in a Friday uniform of jeans and a black sportcoat, his hair silver at the temples, the pressure of the job shows. One Post columnist describes him as having the look of a second-term president. But if Kelly’s Post were a nation, it would be in a state of unrest.

And one with a checkered history. In the late 1990s, Kelly was assistant managing editor at the Financial Post. The weekly tabloid (then owned by Sun Media) struggled to compete with The Globe and Mail’s gold mine, Report on Business. The paper went daily in 1988, and 10 years later was making a modest annual profit of $15 million. Black bought FP in July 1998 to anchor his soon-to-be-launched broadsheet, confirming that his plan for a flagship national paper was more than just an industry rumour. By the time it launched three months later, Black’s paper had inherited a name, a profitable brand and a base of 100,000 national subscribers.

The Post started a newspaper war that cost the industry $1 billion to shore up newsrooms and marketing defences. A fierce competitor, the paper would pursue any story at any cost, sending reporters on the last flight of the Concorde, to India to ride the trains for a week and to Finland to attend a snowball fight. It once bought a plot of land on the moon.

Lunar real estate may have come cheap (at $10 an acre from moon-landregistry.com), but it wasn’t the best investment—the site no longer exists. And it wasn’t the only financial misstep. When Canwest CMI filed for creditor protection last fall, a court-appointed monitor released details of the company’s staggering debt, including that of its flagship national paper. The Post had lost $139 million under Canwest ownership.

Back in 2001, two years after graduating from assistant managing editor at FP to assistant deputy editor at the Post, Kelly became executive editor. It was a modest promotion with a superior sounding title—and one of the worst jobs in journalism. That year, the paper’s losses were $65 million. Canwest had purchased most of Black’s publications, including half of the Post, for $3.2 billion in 2000. In August 2001, Canwest took full ownership. Less than a month later, on “Black Monday,” 120 employees lost their jobs.

Promoted to editor-in-chief in 2005 (following a purge of upper management and severe downsizing), Kelly is first to admit he was never the heir apparent—it’s not a job he consciously went after. And it wasn’t an enviable position either; the Post had conceded the Toronto newspaper war and morale was dismal. The new editor’s default role would be caregiver.

But after years of hubris-induced debt, Kelly’s pragmatism might be exactly what the paper needs. Distribution has shrunk and thenews boxes are almost extinct, but Kelly is after a specific—and intensely loyal—readership. The one-time vanity project is finally running like a business venture and, according to the publisher, is closer to profitability than it’s ever been. Without a rich founder’s money and with the hype of the newspaper war behind it, the Post is defining itself by carving a deeper niche and establishing an identity that even Kelly admits won’t appeal to everyone. And if anyone is going to lead the paper into the black, it could be the dark horse whose appointment caught everyone by surprise.

***

 Splashy poster board displays of old Post layouts, some of which ran in a retrospective for the anniversary issue, crowd the corner of Kelly’s office. The furnishings are understated: a glass-topped coffee table, four white chairs, a plush grey sofa and a matching club chair, into which he now sinks. The faux living room set-up looks rarely used, but his desk is strewn with papers, both loose-leaf and newsprint.

Laughter outside his perennially open door suggests the morning news meeting has formed in the hallway. Normally Kelly would join them, but today he’s inside speaking to me, and my presence there, he says, would “make people act differently.” There’s that, and the fact that Kelly started the interview with a list of things reporters tend to get wrong: the process surrounding the paper’s transfer, its financial situation and the possible closure, for instance. With the Post getting so much bad press lately, it’s no wonder he’s loath to welcome outsiders.

“There’s very little hierarchy here—there’s very little politics,” says Kelly. “I know it sounds like Management Speak 101, but it’s true.” On his first day as editor-in-chief, Kelly stood in front of the newsroom and offered everyone an open invitation to his office. It’s since become a mark of his management style. One senior editor, who doesn’t want to be named, says, “In a typical newsroom, office politics are cranky and clannish, the top ranks addled by un-firable cronies and hangers-on who did their best writing in the Trudeau era, and everyone wondering who has been admitted into the editor-in-chief’s inner cabal. There is none of that at theNational Post.”

Still, Kelly is difficult to read. During our two-hour conversation, he is both pensive and defensive, as though he has something to prove: “You know I usually go to those meetings, right?” he points to the one taking place outside his office. It’s less a question than a statement. The meeting is about Saturday’s edition, which is mostly formatted already. The next day, the lead story will be: “Is Jesus a Capitalist?” Hardly a departure from the Post’s trademark irreverence. Regular readers will notice a surge of marginal science (“In Denmark, only three Muslim women wear the burka, study finds”; “Smoking cigarettes, low back pain linked in study”) and feature stories both charming and absurd (a five-part series on human memory; a two-page spread celebrating National Punctuation Day).

Staff call the paper alternative, niche, contrarian, a dissonant voice amidst conventional views in mainstream media. As the house organ for climate change skeptics, its 27-part 2007 series, “The Deniers,” looked at scientists who “buck the conventional wisdom on climate science.” Columnist Terence Corcoran maligns the Suzuki Foundation and its “big green lies” and when FP editor-at-large Diane Francis wrote a column defining the planet’s real problem—overpopulation—her solution was novel: In a paper that promotes less government interface in almost everything, she suggested the universal adoption of China’s one-child policy.

Elsewhere, columnist Lorne Gunter laments an excess of political correctness that “will be the death of Western civilization” and Barbara Kay calls Mattel’s Burka Barbie a “travesty of multiculturalism.” Women’s studies courses, according to an editorial, have “done untold damage to families, our court systems [and] labour laws.” And a study, funded by a Florida-based Evangelical church, that suggested homosexuals might be “reoriented” made the front page.

Kelly says “robust opinions” are part of what makes a great newspaper. And with four pages of daily commentary, the Post is provocative, but also divisive. “Some people think there’s too much commentary in this paper. I suspect they’re not our readers,” he says. “And I’m fine with that.”

Critics hone in on the paper’s pro-Israeli bent, which they say translates to an anti-Islam agenda. Postcolumnists scoffed at pundits who denied a link between radical Muslim views and the shooting deaths at Fort Hood, Texas, in 2009. One editorial referred to Naomi Klein and the entourage of celebrities who boycotted an Israeli film retrospective at the Toronto International Film Festival as “Palestinian Authority sock puppets.” Kay criticized Quebec politicians who attended a demonstration in support of Lebanon during its conflict with Israel in 2006. She argued that in a sovereign Quebec, “supporters of terrorism would find a place offering little resistance to burgeoning Islamism amongst its Muslim immigrants.”

This brashness gives it a distinct identity, but the paper seems conflicted in its geographic loyalties. As the only Toronto presence in the Canwest chain, it has a heftier city section than the Globe and sometimes offers more inspired local coverage than the crime and car crashes in the Toronto Star. Last summer, for instance, Peter Kuitenbrouwer wrote a walk-across-Toronto series, a tribute to the urban experience reminiscent of Jane Jacobs. And the paper’s blog, Posted Toronto, regularly adopts creative local angles.

But as a national paper without its own foreign bureaus, the paper relies heavily on Canwest for international coverage, supplementing this with in-house commentary. It also cut distribution in Atlantic Canada in 2006, prompting jokes about the paper’s dubious “national” moniker. Kelly was more concerned with fiscal restraint and the ultimatum: risk offending East-Coast readers or “slash the newsroom again and weaken the product for the entire country.” NADbank’s interim report says the paper’s print and online readership increased by four percent between 2008 and 2009.

For all the bleak projections, none of the employees I spoke to expressed concern over the state of the paper, even when Canwest teetered on the precipice of bankruptcy. It’s unlikely they’re in a collective state of denial: The paper’s been in worse shape—many with weaker stomachs left voluntarily long ago. The hard-core staff that remains is intensely loyal. Toronto editor Rob Roberts has been at the Post since its launch, and there’s a special status that comes with such stamina. “‘Us against the world’ is probably too strong,” he admits, without offering an alternative. But even a loyal following needs a leader.

***

Doug Kelly was born in 1958 and raised in Scarborough, Ontario. His father was a firefighter; his mother stayed home with her three boys. Kelly’s brothers aren’t part of the Post’s target demographic. Ron Kelly, a counsellor in community services, is a devout Green Party volunteer. Brian Kelly is one of the founders of Pollution Probe, a 41-year-old activist organization. He’s also a consultant and director of the Sustainable Enterprise Academy at York University’s Schulich School of Business in Toronto—one of his specialties is climate change. Meanwhile, in a “Rethinking Green” series last year, Post headlines chanted: “Eat global, not local,” “Save the environment: Don’t take transit” and “How your blue bin hurts the environment.”

“I must admit I’m not a regular reader of the paper,” Brian jokes. “It’s not good for my blood pressure.”

Though he admits to “razzing” the editor-in-chief about his columnists, he’s careful (perhaps hopeful) to keep the paper’s ideology separate from his brother’s: “I suspect his heart is not entirely reflected by the views of the columnists,” he says, making a point of mentioning Corcoran.

Kelly became interested in party politics as a teenager in the mid-1970s. His close friend, David Hill, now an investment software consultant, remembers him as an NDP supporter avidly reading the biography of David Lewis, Tommy Douglas’s successor as party leader. Influenced by big brother Brian—already an activist—Kelly had a “fuck big American corporations” attitude that was fashionable at the time.

He was curious, but “wasn’t by any means the brightest kid in high school,” says Hill, who often helped Kelly with his homework. A veterinary school hopeful at the University of Guelph, Kelly dropped out after three months. (He’d gone on the advice of his guidance counsellor, who told him there were no jobs in journalism.) He then enrolled at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute where, as part of the journalism program, he interned at the Ottawa Citizen. The internship morphed into a full-time reporting gig. But since he pursued social antics more doggedly than his career, his colleagues underestimated him and editors assigned him accordingly. He earned the nickname “Shopper Doug” for his regular coverage of supermarket specials for the consumer section. And his general assignments were peculiar. “I call it the asshole beat,” says Kelly. “Every time they needed a reporter to embarrass himself, I, apparently, had a knack for writing that kind of story.”

When I ask him to name one, he leans back in his chair, hedging a bit. “Which ones do you know about?” he asks. Well, he covered an open audition for Playgirl magazine—by entering it. His audition photo ran on the front page.

He burnished that image out of print, too. One former colleague recalls a scantily clad Kelly jumping out of a cake at a birthday party. And there was an incident at the home of newspaper bigwig Murdoch Davis, a notoriously hot-tempered city editor who’d just taken charge of the Citizen’s early edition alongside Neil Macdonald. Kelly’s efforts to operate a hot tub without the host’s permission (it wasn’t a pool party) resulted in it splattering water like a blender without a lid.

A nice kid, if a little reckless—hardly a candidate to run a national newspaper, says Jay Stone, who was among the legions of former colleagues stunned by Kelly’s appointment as editor. Even Kelly says he’s never mapped out a career trajectory. “I wouldn’t describe myself as a classically ambitious person.”

But at dawn on March 12, 1985, he jumped out of bed when he heard an explosion. He lived across from the Turkish Embassy in Ottawa, where three Armenian terrorists had just wounded the ambassador, killed a security guard and taken 11 hostages. Kelly Egan, his roommate and fellow cub reporter at the time, went back to sleep, while Kelly rushed to the crime scene, arriving before the cops. Trapped within police lines before the ubiquity of cellphones, he couldn’t file his breaking story. He stayed to gather details from a prime vantage point and proved he could be quite enterprising, even if he did forfeit the front-page byline.

Egan, now a Citizen columnist, says there were other indications that Kelly aspired to greater things, including his decision to take the Canadian financial securities course, a prerequisite for stockbrokers—andFP reporters. Looking back, says Egan, it seems obvious that Kelly was preparing to move up in the industry.

And he met a girl: then-Citizen fashion reporter Nancy Gall, a stylish woman with quick wit and steadfast values—“conservative to the roots of her hair.” Even before they were married, Kelly dropped the leftist politics, took the proverbial lampshade off of his head and left suburban Ottawa to report on Toronto’s Bay Street. (For his part, Kelly denies that Gall had an influence on his political stance.)

***

In 1990, Kelly joined FP as a securities and Bay Street reporter. Five years later he was investment editor and, by 1998, when Conrad Black bought the paper, he’d already been named assistant managing editor. A year later, Kelly launched the paper’s own investment portfolio index. He expanded the breadth of coverage and helped define FP as an investor’s newspaper. This caught the attention of the Post’s founding editor Ken Whyte, who took Kelly to lunch one day. The pair came back walking elbow-to-elbow, Kelly adorned with a stupefied grin. Whyte had just made him assistant deputy editor of the newly launched paper.

Hand-picked by Black for the start-up, Whyte was widely respected in the newsroom. Despite a strident marketing campaign featuring cheeky billboards and cinema ads by the infamous theatrical producer Garth Drabinsky, the Post had difficulty securing initial advertisers. Still, thanks to Black, Whyte had a seemingly bottomless budget, lavishly bankrolled to the point that competitors were convinced rationality was no longer a factor in Black’s decision-making. Globe publisher Phillip Crawley was one of them. In interviews, he accused Black of pursuing his conservative political agenda instead of a business venture.

“The great thing about the Post at that time was that it didn’t want to be mired in rules or overly hierarchical and stuck in routine,” says Kelly, adding that it was also the paper’s weakness. “The operational stuff needed some work.” Assistant deputy editor was largely a thankless position—Kelly fired staff, tightened budgets and attended to administrative details.

Whyte left in 2003. His departure—along with that of his skillful Fleet Street import, deputy editor Martin Newland—left a management void. Few understood the new choice for editor-in-chief. Matthew Fraser was a difficult, acerbic man with little newspaper experience. By all accounts, he was not right for the job.

One Post insider says Kelly picked up the slack as Fraser’s executive editor, but by the time he took over as editor-in-chief in 2005, the paper was at the losing end of the newspaper war, hemorrhaging both money and talent. It had also burned through seven publishers in as many years (a period Kelly refers to as “publisher’s clearing house”), so it’s not surprising that he hesitated before accepting the job. The offer was oddly informal, like a scene from a mafia movie. Then-publisher Les Pyette “tugged on my ear, like this,”—Kelly grips his earlobe with a thumb and index finger—“and said, ‘You’re the guy.’ I told him I had to think about it.”

After a long pause, he clarifies, “Because it’s not a job that I’ve consciously gone after. I had to ask myself: ‘Is this in the best interest of the paper, if I’m editor-in-chief?’ I didn’t think long, but I didn’t say yes right away.” This loyalty to the institution, this company-man attitude, suited the Post’s circumstances exactly. “People were always coming up to me and asking me if I was okay, like I had cancer or something,” says religion reporter Charles Lewis.

Kelly took over a half-empty newsroom and, although the paper wasn’t doing any better financially, Lewis adds, “There was a palpable sense of relief, like, thank God.” For his part, Kuitenbrouwer told Kelly, “It’s nice to have a newsman back in the oval office.” Staff drank champagne at his inauguration, a throwback to all the free booze handed out over the years—the hair of the dog that bit them.

But the Post had lost the newspaper war, so did it even matter who was running the thing? Tim Pritchard,FP’s managing editor from 1995 until Black bought it in 1998, left acrimoniously (he sued for wrongful dismissal and won a settlement). He believes Kelly won the appointment by default. “At the end of the day you look around at who you’ve got. And there’s Doug Kelly, so let’s give him a shot,” says Pritchard. “He got where he is through a lot of stumbling on the part of the company.”

Apparently he gained his footing. After marking five years as editor-in-chief in February, Kelly has outlasted both previous editors (and three times as many publishers).

***

“Take faith,” says Kelly, unprompted. “Faith is interesting. It’s interesting intellectually, it’s interesting from a religious perspective.”

I’m sitting in his office at mid-morning on a Friday and I’ve just discovered that Kelly is more comfortable talking about the paper when he hasn’t been asked about it directly. Faith and religion are subjects the Posttackles regularly; in fact, it’s one of few Canadian newspapers with a religion reporter. One reader’s e-mail called the paper “a glorified national church letter” and Kelly relays the story with bemused pride. It’s a sign that the Post covers religion more fervently than any other mainstream daily. “The Star will do a religion segment on Saturdays and relegate it to one page with the Christian and the Jewish viewpoints,” he says. “I say put that up front.” An investigation at the Vatican involving the dwindling number of American nuns and a decision from Rome to allow Anglican practices in Catholic places of worship both made the Post news pages recently, the latter on A1. The paper’s online rendering of religion reports, Holy Post, bears the slogan “Get down on your knees and blog.”

Devoting a warm body to a specialty beat at an already shrinking newsroom is a risk, one with the potential to alienate secular readers—but Lewis has been the religion reporter since 2007. “A lot of people hate religion,” says Lewis. “Specifically, they hate the Catholic church. We recognize that a lot of our readers are religious, but we also recognize that these are important institutions. All the more reason to treat them seriously instead of like an oddity.” The religion reporter designation—as opposed to Stuart Laidlaw’s broader faith and ethics beat at the Star—is a testament to this, and to the paper’s traditional Western values. The Post ran a full-page image of the Virgin Mary and the baby Jesus on the front page last December 24. In the midst of political correctness during the “holiday season,” it was a blatant display of Roman Catholic iconography: religion with a capital R.

The Post is less tolerant of politically progressive faith—editorials regularly assault the United Church of Canada. When the Church’s General Council considered a proposal to support a national economic boycott of Israel, it touched on three of the paper’s pet obsessions—liberals, religion and Israel. In the following weeks, editorials attacked it even after the proposal had been rejected.

***

When I ask the Post’s longest-serving editor what his legacy will be, the weight of his thoughts seems to push him further into his chair, as if he’s never even considered it. “That’s a tough one…” Kelly finally says. “I think I’ve unleashed a lot of creativity… One thing I think we do particularly well is alternating story forms.” He gets up mid-sentence and, in three strides, retrieves today’s Post from his desk, spreading it out on the table and flipping through it. In his characteristic deadpan manner, he says, “Oh, too many ads, that’s a problem…”

He puts his finger down firmly on “Obama’s Options,” a page A17 headline about the United States president’s Afghanistan strategy. “Now, obviously Obama has a few options,” he says. “So we did this.” It’s a simple chart with bullet points outlining Obama’s alternatives, concerns and fears. The visuals are eye-catching and easy to digest, but hardly revolutionary.

Now standing and gesturing periodically, Kelly’s more animated than he’s been since we began talking, as if he’s making a formal presentation. “You can’t treat every story the same way,” he says, referring to a “sameness,” of which he believes the Post had previously been guilty. “Look back through the original issues. There are a lot of 16-inch stories. You can’t give everything equal weight.” Kelly reads the paper as if he’s standing over his own shoulder to determine which stories deserve a few words and which are worthy of extensive treatment. “Papers shouldn’t be a chore to read,” he says. “They should be surprising and heavily design-driven.”

In 2007, Kelly and his managing editor of design, Gayle Grin, revamped the Post in six weeks. And they did it all internally, which is, Kelly says, “the way we do things around here.” A cost-cutting measure, no doubt, since Conrad Black’s days of headhunting expensive, sometimes international talent are history. The redesign was the genesis of the paper’s front-page vertical nameplate, now a visual trademark.

The Globe’s last redesign, also launched in 2007, was two years in the making—and the Post has won more accolades for its unique aesthetic. It often resembles a magazine, which Grin says is the point. In a front-page feature about the hundred-mile diet, a huge tomato encroaches on the nameplate like a celebrity’s head would on the cover of Vanity Fair. It’s bright, simple and engaging. It looks like pop art.

Stephen Komives, executive director of the Society for News Design, says the organization gives the Postmore nods annually than it does any other Canadian paper—for substance as much for style. “Design is content,” he says. The Post is a paper “without a comfort level,” and risk-taking is something he notes while judging, in both design and storytelling. “They’ll blow out an entire front page for a year-in-review. They’ll go with one photo and few words,” says Komives. Sometimes they’ll use typography as art: A giant “0%” was the only graphic accompaniment to a front-page story about historically low lending rates from the central bank in the U.S.

***

Kelly’s seated again and I’m struck by the image of a psychiatrist’s office. There are plants in the window—part of the unobtrusive design—and a white-collar guy in a club chair staring into middle space while I sit, upright, taking notes. Kelly is alternately confessional while talking about layoffs (“There is blood on my hands and that’s something I’ll have to live with”) and defensive about corporate matters (“There are certain things I just can’t talk about”). The paper’s future is a sensitive subject that leaves him without comment, since it’s been only a few weeks since the transfer from Canwest CMI to Canwest LP. I ask him if there are any potential buyers. He says the paper isn’t for sale (officially), that it isn’t going anywhere. He tells me with a strange severity in his voice that he’s “genuinely optimistic.”

The Post has been subject to all kinds of apocalyptic predictions, each of them wrong so far. Before the official transfer, a procedural move already in place the night of the anniversary party at Betty’s, rival media jumped on one caveat in a 33-page court document relating to the move: the possible closure of Canada’s conservative paper. It was the first public admission from Canwest that the Post might not be around forever.

Two days after the media frenzy began, Kelly’s editorial appeared on the front page. “I usually don’t write editorials, but this one came out like lightning,” Kelly says. Entitled “The rumours of our demise,” it was a rant about the “firestorm of uninformed speculation” that, he believes, had subtext: Some news outlets wanted the paper silenced because of its conservative voice.

“I don’t begrudge the Star the right to seek an audience,” Kelly says, referring to the unapologetically liberal paper, which he argues would never invoke such positive feedback with its closure. Sure, the Star has critics (they’re probably Post readers), but there’s little evidence Canadians think they’d be better off without it. Kelly’s editorial, however, suggests the Post has a different reputation. It doesn’t appeal to everybody; it stirs antipathy. Some Canadians, he says, “didn’t want it to survive.”

But he can’t imagine the Post courting the widest possible audience. “Why would you want to do that?” he asks. “Aren’t we moving into an age of specialization? What you want is a loyal readership.” Make no mistake: The Post is not a general interest publication. That strategy, he says, makes little sense today. “The idea of speaking to a more select group of readers has been an anathema to the industry.” He cites FP Executive Blog, which showcases business practices, and Legal Post, which is directed at corporate lawyers. “That content doesn’t appeal to everybody, but it does appeal to a definable chunk of people and a desirable chunk of people.” Kelly says a discernable identity is crucial to online survival. “The Post is not in competition with the Globe or the Star. The Post is in competition, through the web, with all media. We’d better have a reason for being.”

Still, he believes the death of print has been greatly exaggerated, and the medium’s monetary value misjudged. The industry should charge more for subscription and single-sale copies, both of which have been “massively underpriced” for too long in order to boost circulation numbers. It’s a bold move to side with tradition in the face of massive shifts in the industry. Kelly won’t comment on potential paywalls, but says he plans to push more content online as readers migrate there. Web readership is up over 100 percent in year-over-year unique visitors, according to the paper’s vice-president of digital media. But, as Kelly points out, it’s a business of “not just how many, but who many.”

The Post has been carving a niche since its launch, when it targeted prime postal codes with free trial subscriptions. Former publisher Don Babick touted an early ad campaign for its irreverence—a dog peeing on a competitor’s newspaper box. He liked the ad’s message, saying, “If you don’t like us, piss on you. You don’t have to read us.”

The Post continues to court well-educated, affluent conservatives, now with more infamous editorials and fewer high-priced marquee names (former Post writers include Mordecai Richler, Mark Steyn and Christie Blatchford). Kelly plans to appeal to advertisers with the paper’s select audiences. At the business end, he and publisher Gordon Fisher are slowly salvaging a financial shipwreck. The last fiscal year saw single-digit losses of $9 million, which Fisher predicts will be less than $5 million by next year. It’s the best financial position the Post has ever been in.

During Kelly’s time as editor, the paper reduced its national distribution to focus on six major cities, reduced the number of news boxes on streets and temporarily struck Mondays from its publishing schedule to cut production costs. Like a low-profile antidote to Conrad Black’s grandstanding, Kelly has tried to maintain the original vision of the paper with none of the resources.

Still, there are skeptics. On the Post’s 11th birthday, I ask John Honderich, who was on the front lines during the newspaper war as publisher of the Star, if Canada still needs the Post. He laughs, and then goes silent before finally asking: “Well, how long can you run a money-losing paper?”

The Canwest papers are up for auction and by February there were a few suitors prepping bids for an early March deadline. After two decades at FP and the Post, Kelly will have yet another administration to contend with. That is, if he still has a job. After all, the paper has a history of revolving doors. For now, he remains stoic. “Everyone has a master, whether it’s a corporation, an institution, an individual or shareholders,” Kelly says. “So you have to operate within that. It’s out of our hands.”

Anxious to end a follow-up phone conversation, he asks: “Do you have many more questions? I’m trying to woo someone, job-wise.” He pauses and adds, “Yes, we do hire.”

***

On the Post’s anniversary at Betty’s, Kelly is a shadowy figure under the street light, balancing paper, a pen and a cigarette, smoke curling up toward his face. On his wrist is a Roots watch, inscribed: Your roots are at the Post. As Kelly scribbles away, he might be a stenographer, taking notes about forces beyond his control. Or he might be an architect, quietly drafting a blueprint.

Visitors to The Globe and Mail’s Toronto headquarters often comment on how sedate the place is—nothing like the frenzied, shouty bullpen newsrooms of pop culture. It’s more akin to a mid-sized corporate office; a grey and workmanlike place where serious people are engaged in serious work, putting together a very serious newspaper. So by Globe standards, the tempest gripping the office on May 25, 2009 is comparatively high drama. It’s mid-morning in the cubicle maze that’s home to the Review, Life and Report on Business sections. The loudest sounds are the click-clack of keyboards and hushed conversations. Suddenly, a gasp. And another. And another. The entire newsroom goes still for a few seconds as employees read the memo that’s just appeared in their inboxes.

“Eddie’s been fired,” one colleague explains hurriedly to another. “Stackhouse is the new boss.” Edward Greenspon, editor-in-chief for seven years, is out. John Stackhouse, a 48-year-old Globe lifer, is in. A few hours later, the paper’s writers and editors assemble in a meeting room, spilling out of doorways and into the halls, to hear his first pronouncements. The crowd is expectant and uncertain. Publisher Phillip Crawley gestures to the back of the crowd and chuckles because reporter Siri Agrell, who’s on maternity leave and came in just to hear Stackhouse, has brought along her baby. Agrell responds dryly, “I figured she wouldn’t be the only one shitting her pants.”

Everyone laughs and Stackhouse lets his face break into a brief smile, but it vanishes as quickly as it appeared.

The new boss has been at the Globe for more than 20 years, as a reporter, editor of the Report on Business section and editor of the national and foreign desks. Most of his colleagues assumed he was headed for the editor-in-chief ’s chair, but no one thought it would happen so abruptly or at such a turbulent time. In February 2009 the paper went through a huge round of layoffs and buyouts, cutting 10 percent of its staff. A few months later, tension was building between the union and management over contract negotiations and a strike appeared likely. Needless to say, the mood in the office wasn’t exactly buoyant. Reporter Michael Valpy, who’s been with the Globe off and on since 1966, says the last months of Greenspon’s tenure were a time of “tortured morale bruising” as the paper suffered one bad management decision after another.

After the switch came the gossip, all sotto voce, all focused on what led to Greenspon’s hasty departure. Possibilities included an overemphasis on Parliament Hill stories, Greenspon’s unpopular reassignments of several editors and columnists, his reluctance to confront the challenge posed by the internet, and even controversy over the Airbus affair. (The going rumour had it that Crawley was upset after Greenspon took it upon himself to fire off a letter to the Oliphant Commission. In it, he accused Brian Mulroney of offering to provide information to the Globe—on the condition the paper not reveal the former prime minister’s relationship with Karlheinz Schreiber. This came after Mulroney testified that the paper had suppressed a story sympathetic to him.)

But no one knew for sure what happened. The newsroom descended into as much chaos as the well-oiledGlobe possibly could—which is to say, barely perceptible to the average reader. “Reporters look to editors to tell them that everything’s going to be okay,” one former staffer says of those first few weeks. “No one had any idea who John was going to keep or let go. So you had reporters scared, editors who were scared, and everyone out for themselves.” And all that was on top of the general industry malaise. After all, Globejournalists aren’t the only ones shitting themselves these days. As the news business spirals deeper and deeper into uncertainty, everyone is feeling a little jumpy.

Not that Stackhouse will admit to any worries. In 2008, the Globe signed a $1.7-billion deal with Transcontinental Media, which includes access to the publishing and printing giant’s presses from 2010 to 2028. With a risky redesign in the works for the paper, Maclean’s senior writer Anne Kingston suggested the move could either be seen as shrewd, or “investing in state-of-the-art buggy technology at the turn of the 20th century.” But Stackhouse says he doesn’t buy the histrionics about the death of print. “The internet has been the best thing to happen to newspapers,” he insists —before quickly adding, “To good newspapers.” He’s convinced the way to confront the future is with a dramatic overhaul, and his vision is bold, especially for a 166-year-old institution: to become a multimedia news organization with a powerhouse web presence able to compete with industry leaders such as The Guardian and The New York Times, and a print edition that looks and reads more like a magazine- newspaper hybrid. It will be a high-end product for the paper’s high-end audience, and the stakes are enormous: The Globe’s business model is successful, if dated, and Stackhouse is betting the paper’s immediate future on an experiment. A carefully planned and calibrated one, but an experiment nonetheless. But in the face of the industry’s waning fortunes, he really has no other choice.

***

“I’ve been grooming John for this opportunity for a long time,” says Crawley. He’s less upfront about why the change came so suddenly, allowing only that it was time for a change after Greenspon’s seven-year run. “If you allow an editor to go on and on, it’s not good for the paper.” Rumours circulated that Greenspon appeared oblivious to what was coming as late as the National Newspaper Awards the Friday before his departure. Others reported seeing Greenspon leaving the newsroom holding his belongings in a bag and looking distraught. “You don’t want endless weeks and weeks of discussion and so forth,” says Crawley. “You’ve got to make a quick change and then move on with the new people in place.”

Historically, the Globe has always targeted Canada’s affluent “thought-leaders and tastemakers,” as its ad sales department boasts. Under Greenspon, there was a sense that the paper had been drifting by trying to appeal to “the whole reader.” The launch of the fluffy, faddish Life section in 2007 is an obvious example. But even the paper’s Ottawa coverage, traditionally one of its strongest suits, became softer, publishing whatMaclean’s columnist Paul Wells dismisses as “High School Confidential crap about which cabinet ministers weren’t talking to each other and what were the designs of the pumpkins at 24 Sussex at Halloween… Increasingly, the Globe decided it had to be stupid.” And unlike the National Post, he says, “It’s not even interesting when it’s stupid. It’s just stupid.” (Wells thinks that the paper has begun changing for the better under Stackhouse—though it still published a story about 24 Sussex’s pumpkins in 2009.)

Greenspon also made some deeply unpopular personnel changes. In November 2008, he moved features editor Cathrin Bradbury to news, hoping to jazz up the front section. But she was out of her element and left suddenly in August 2009. Queen’s Park columnist Murray Campbell, who had served the paper in one way or another since 1977, resigned last April after Greenspon killed his Ontario politics column and reassigned him to features. (He’s now director of corporate communications with the Ontario Power Authority.) He was an influential voice on provincial affairs and his departure wasn’t just a blow to the Globe, but also the press gallery at Queen’s Park. The move even earned Crawley a rebuke from Ontario Premier Dalton McGuinty. Then long-time Toronto city hall columnist John Barber, who’d been covering the beat since 1993, asked for reassignment. He was hugely respected, and any replacement was bound to pale in comparison—but Greenspon chose Marcus Gee. It wasn’t just the former international affairs columnist’s conservatism that worried critics, but also his lack of nuance. (In February, for example, Gee entreated the blustering, buffoonish Toronto city councillor Rob Ford to run for mayor.)

Ultimately though, Greenspon simply didn’t fit with Crawley’s vision for the paper. The editor was an old-school newspaperman who believed editorial, advertising and promotion shouldn’t cross paths; the publisher wanted the entire organization to work together on a common mission and to share ideas and staff across departments. Crawley said as much in a jargon-filled memo he sent to employees just after Greenspon’s departure: “Reimagination-inspired teamwork during the last four years has reinforced the value of a more collaborative way of managing our business. By drawing on the collective strengths of the team, we are all better able as individuals to contribute to the success of The Globe and Mail.”

***

Enter Stackhouse: a sober, serious journalistic workhorse who’d long seemed destined for the top job. (His first gig with the Globe was as a nine-year-old newspaper carrier. He saw an ad for the job at school one day and, since he was saving for a new bike, decided he wasn’t going to let any competition get in the way. He walked around tearing the remaining ads off utility poles outside the school.) His father was a professor, Anglican priest and Progressive Conservative Member of Parliament in Scarborough, Ontario; his mother was a public school teacher. Stackhouse grew up in what he remembers as a “mature environment,” a house full of books and politics. Even as a teenager, “there was nothing mischievous about him,” recalls Chris Liboiron, who worked alongside Stackhouse as a Queen’s Park page.

At Queen’s University, Stackhouse served as editor-in-chief of The Queen’s Journal, where he oversaw a major redesign, met his future wife and started on the path that would lead to the Globe. After one year in marketing and government jobs, he landed a summer gig at the Toronto Star. From there it was on to theLondon Free Press, The Financial Times of Canada, Report on Business magazine and finally to the newspaper itself in 1991, where he spent eight years as the development reporter in India. He’s also a two-time author (a hitchhiking journey from Saint John, New Brunswick to the west coast forms the narrative spine of his 2003 book Timbit Nation). He’s won a National Magazine Award and five National Newspaper Awards (NNAs)—including one for his “Living with the Homeless” series in 1999, for which he spent a week living on the streets in Toronto. The stories were controversial, earning praise but also condemnation for being gimmicky and demonizing the homeless (he wrote about alcoholism, the drug trade and panhandlers who maximize their incomes by fighting over lucrative begging spots). But it was also classic shit-disturbing Stackhouse.

Columnist Margaret Wente remembers her first impressions of him 20 years ago. “He was amazing,” she says. “He was exactly what you would expect. He was intense, committed and really, really smart.” FormerGlobe A-section editor Larry Cornies says, “John’s highly collaborative and very demanding of his staff.” He recalls that when Stackhouse worked as senior editor on weekends “the front-page lineup would be changing several times through the evening, to the great consternation of the copy editors, production editors, et cetera. We would tear down those pages and build them up again. It was frustrating, but it almost always resulted in a better paper.”

Stackhouse’s work ethic is legendary—as is his reputation for pushing others to similar extremes. Senior reporter Jacquie McNish remembers when he was in Indonesia in 1997, covering the Bre-X scandal (in which a Canadian mining company defrauded investors by claiming it had discovered vast quantities of gold). “He literally rented a boat to reach the mining site where this great gold scam was perpetuated,” says McNish. “He has that same drive as an editor. He expects all of us to get in that boat, to get into the heart of darkness and get that story.”

Things can be more difficult for those who don’t share his drive. One high-ranking former Globe staffer says that Stackhouse, for all his smarts, “has a problem dealing with people. He could make people feel like shit.” The same former employee says the editor lacks the empathy needed for leadership. “He can have trouble making up his mind. He lets the system produce stuff, then passes judgment on it.” Another former reporter describes Stackhouse’s around-the-office persona as that of a “scary, brilliant person who has won a bunch of NNAs.” Stackhouse’s reputation precedes him, and his office demeanour is a bit solemn, but let him warm up and his long, affably boyish face crinkles easily into a grin—especially when the topic of discussion is the future of the Globe. “A great newspaper needs to appeal to the brain, the eye and the hand,” Stackhouse says. “It’s got to be intellectually stimulating. That’s why we read it. It’s got to have a visual appeal that makes the eye dance when you turn a page. And it has to feel good.” His burning ambition, he says, is “to come in every day and say to my editors, ‘How can we destroy The Globe and Mail today?’”

***

Taking charge of the Globe’s most ambitious redesign in recent memory, Stackhouse must rework both the form and content of “Canada’s National Newspaper” in print and online. He jumped into the thick of it as soon as he took the top job, conducting a series of meetings with newsroom staff and flying out to the bureaus. Ottawa, for instance, now focuses more on policy issues and less on gossip. And the editorial department has been restructured so that business, features and news/sports are now the three pillars of the paper, each led by a section editor (Elena Cherney, Jill Borra and David Walmsley respectively). There are also three new groups— digital innovation, presentation (the redesign group), and recruiting and training—to break down the walls between the paper’s formerly divided departments.

But Stackhouse isn’t on a slash-and-burn mission. He’s a company man, after all, and he has a reporter’s approach to dealing with staff: curious and refraining from judgment until the time is right. An editorial meeting from November 2009 exemplifies it: Stackhouse arrives a few moments late to the boardroom. Inside, more than a dozen senior Globe editors fiddle with BlackBerries and shuffle through their notes. It’s a young, exclusive group, hand-picked by their new boss after he pushed out a number of old-guard senior managers to make way for “that sort of innovation we need desperately.” The new team includes Sinclair Stewart, a hotshot former business reporter and New York correspondent whom Stackhouse picked to be his national editor. Walmsley, formerly of the Star, CBC, Post and Daily Telegraph, is the new managing editor of news and sports. And Anjali Kapoor, just hired from Yahoo! Canada, is managing editor of digital operations.

This morning’s meeting begins with a presentation from Kapoor. She displays a spreadsheet on the projection screen at the front of the room, a compilation of the website’s most successful stories from the past weekend. Stackhouse listens carefully, taking notes occasionally, asking questions along the way. Tracking online readers is one of Stackhouse’s top priorities: who’s reading these stories, where the hits are coming from, when they’re coming in and from what kind of reader? While the redesign will move the print product in a more analytical and contemplative direction, the website’s mandate will be broader: breaking news, multimedia, archives and, yes, some balloon boy stories. One of 2009’s most-read stories was a piece about Natasha Richardson, the English actress who died while skiing in Quebec. (An editor called people.com and asked if it would like to link to the story.) Partnerships, formal and informal, are a major part of the new digital strategy: to get stories into the hands (and onto the screens) of “millions of new readers.”

Indeed, online readership is the only reason the Globe’s audience isn’t stagnating. The print numbers have been declining, as they have at most newspapers. The flagship Saturday edition, for example, lost 27,000 readers between 1998 and 2008.

The online numbers tell a different story: The year-over-year increases are dramatic. But more online readers won’t necessarily equal more money, as anyone who’s been paying attention to the news industry’s struggle with the web knows. That’s where high-end print advertisers come in—and faith that a viable online advertising model is forthcoming. What isn’t coming, at least in the short term, is anything like the paywall plan The New York Times announced in January. On the contrary, Stackhouse wants to develop more content-sharing partnerships, like the one with People. It’s all designed to push the Globe into a future that Crawley and Stackhouse are certain exists, the print-is-dead crowd be damned. “There are a lot of ideas from people who’ve never worked in the business,” says Crawley. “Many people have opinions and get some currency for them by putting them on their website, but a lot of them have never run a sweets store.” He adds that American and Canadian newspapers aren’t really comparable. “If you’re Clay Shirky in the U.S., you’re surrounded by a lot of papers that are not very good.”

***

Stackhouse’s strategy, simply put, is to be good. Maybe it’s premature to judge the Globe of the future based on the Globe of today, but there are hints as to where things are going. Any recent issue will do: say Saturday, January 30 of this year. On that day, the A section is solid—reporter Kirk Makin has a lengthy and intelligent dissection of the Supreme Court’s ruling in the Omar Khadr case, and Afghanistan correspondent Sonia Verma writes a detailed piece about the difficulty of negotiating with the Taliban. Report on Business is strong, with a lead piece on why Canadians have access to so little information when house-hunting. Focus & Books provides the brain food and think pieces, and Sports is looking good, no doubt due to a glut of Olympics coverage, but also thanks to Stackhouse’s concerted effort on that front. (He brought Roy MacGregor back to the sports beat, with an emphasis on hockey, and several other staffers have recently been moved to sports, including Hayley Mick, who came from the Life section; and Darren Yourk, now the paper’s first online sports editor.)

But the front page is only so-so, leading with an above-the-fold story by Gloria Galloway and Daniel Leblanc about the prime minister’s grip on the Senate. Below that is a stand-alone photo of Canada’s Olympic flag bearer, speed skater Clara Hughes (the idea being that the Vancouver Olympics are a more female-friendly event than past Games). At the bottom of the page is a story on Fetal Alcohol Spectrum Disorder by Anne McIlroy. At first glance it resembles Stackhouse’s “reflective and analytical” paper of the future, but on closer inspection it’s not a very attention-grabbing front page, and it’s not necessarily any more interesting or thoughtful than the competition. The same day, the Star runs a front-page story on the government’s handling (or mishandling) of the Omar Khadr case and a feature story on child kidnappings in the aftermath of the Haitian earth- quake. In Montreal, The Gazette goes with a think piece on Haiti’s decline from wealthy colony to destitute post-colonial emergency state. At least the Globe beats The Vancouver Sun, which has a similar photo of Clara Hughes and no stories on A1 at all, just teasers.

In the Toronto edition, Globe T.O. runs a lead piece by Greg McArthur on the city’s recent spate of car-pedestrian collisions. The paper calls it a “data crunch”—six little charts with info on six different factors in collisions including age of victim, time of day, etc. The piece highlights the strengths and weaknesses of experimenting with new story formats. It makes crucial information much more explicit than a traditional story—in this case, a reader can see from a simple graph that the January accidents usually killed elderly people, not reckless jaywalkers. What’s missing is the meaning behind the figures. Three days earlier, city police had launched a ticketing blitz, issuing fines to pedestrians. Nowhere does the story take this raw data and use it to suggest that such a strategy might be ineffective. But to McArthur’s credit, he does make the point that the media blew the car-pedestrian story out of proportion.

Over in Focus & Books the presentation is better, but once again there’s ample evidence of the Globe’s struggle with non-traditional story formats. Some work well, including John Allemang’s Q&A with an American journalist and media critic explaining why coverage of the Haitian earthquake was off-base. Less successful is “The Matrix,” which very closely resembles New York magazine’s almost identically named back-page feature and places various current events on a grid of significance and media attention. It’s funny but forced, as if the paper is trying too hard to be irreverent and youthful. And the Globe, for all its strengths, is neither irreverent nor youthful.

What it does have is an imposing roster of brand-name reporters and columnists to ensure the blood is still pumping through its grey old veins. Christie Blatchford’s writing, especially on crime and justice, inspires both loathing and devotion, but her opinions are confrontational and her writing is powerful (although less so when she writes at length about her beloved dog). Ian Brown’s idiosyncratic musings make him one of the paper’s strongest and funniest voices, while his wife Johanna Schneller’s honest, down-to- earth celebrity profiles inject some intelligence into an arts department that too often seems like an afterthought (though it also includes some excellent writers, including TV critic John Doyle and architecture critic Lisa Rochon). London-based Doug Saunders, charged with covering European affairs almost single-handedly, seems to be everywhere at once as he dispatches his lucid missives from Britain and continental Europe. Elizabeth Renzetti is equally adept at covering European arts. Stephanie Nolen and Geoffrey York have earned near-universal acclaim for their work in Africa, and Nolen continues to bring the same award-winning standards to India. Graeme Smith is the paper’s bright young star on the international scene, earning both an NNA and an Emmy for the multimedia series “Talking to the Taliban.”

Rex Murphy recently decamped to the Post, a closer ideological fit for the world-class curmudgeon. (The move means less colourful crustiness on the Globe’s editorial pages, but also less amateur climatology. Murphy made climate change skepticism a favourite hobby-horse—redundant, since the popular and provocative Wente already has that beat sewn up.) Less happily, Rick Salutin is in danger of becoming the anti-Murphy. A younger left-wing voice might be in order, one not beholden to the 20th century’s brand of ossified socialism. In April 2009, the otherwise-intelligent Salutin lamented the lack of alternatives to global capitalism—a fair point, until he expresses nostalgia for the 1930s, when Stalin’s Soviet Union “was socialist and the bloom wasn’t yet off that rose.” Maclean’s senior writer Michael Petrou excoriated the column as “deeply creepy.” Meanwhile, Leah McLaren continues to write lighter-than-air puff for the Style section, including recent columns on “butt obsession” and why she won’t be reading any of the books nominated for Canadian literary prizes, a backhanded way of complimenting herself on all the classics she’s devoured lately.

The overall talent is enviable, but it’s not a panacea for the paper’s challenges. “The best thing the Globe has going for it is its reputation,” says Murray Campbell, who nonetheless fears it’s resting on its laurels and in danger of becoming a second read. “Foreign coverage has become episodic,” he says, “and it’s hard to follow a story that way. The tendency now seems to be to have a big feature from Doug Saunders or Stephanie Nolen, with a big display, and then everything else becomes a brief. That strikes me as a change. You used to be able to follow stories day in and day out.” He also believes that if management pushes news to the web, it will have to re-evaluate the competition. “On Ottawa coverage, is it going to measure up to the Ottawa-centric websites and blogs that are out there? For international, will it match the BBC?”

The focus on American politics also seems to come at the expense of national coverage. Between December 2, 2009 and February 2, 2010, the Globe mentioned Barack Obama 21 times in front-page headlines. Stephen Harper had his name dropped only 12 times. And the American president appeared in four front-page photos while our admittedly less-photogenic prime minister showed up just twice.

In the Globe’s favour, Stackhouse brought John Ibbitson back to Ottawa from Washington. (Ibbitson had been the paper’s political affairs columnist in Ottawa from 2002 until 2007, when Greenspon moved him to Washington despite what Cornies calls his “dazzling work in the nation’s capital.”) National affairs columnist Jeffrey Simpson continues to weigh in with his temperate, intelligent perspectives on national affairs, and the paper’s Ottawa Notebook blog boasts eight contributors. Michael Valpy thinks that the overall quality attracts a “strong, progressive, intellectual audience,” though he thinks the paper could do a better job serving it. (As it is, the Globe’s editorial mandate is to focus mainly on advertiser-friendly mopes—managers, owners, professionals, entrepreneurs.) Despite all the strengths, the creative energy seems scattered. The paper certainly chugs along well enough, but the Globe’s focus seems to be elsewhere these days.

***

Mounted on the wall in Crawley’s office is a World War II–era poster that features a svelte blonde woman and three men leering over her. “Keep mum, she’s not so dumb,” it reads. “Careless talk costs lives.” Crawley and Stackhouse are indeed playing coy on details of this fall’s redesign. Different examples of what the new paper may look like have been tacked up on walls in the newsroom, attracting yays and nays from staff who have marked them up with comments and criticisms. And here in the privacy of his office, Crawley flips through the latest sample of what the redesign might look like. It’s a glossy, colourful sheet, a little shorter and a little narrower than today’s paper. A full-colour cosmetic ad takes up one whole page. “This is the kind of ad theGlobe typically wouldn’t get,” Crawley says. “Magazine-type quality and magazine-style print will enable us to attract advertising from sources that would normally go into a magazine.”

The Globe that readers can expect to see in the fall will have a variety of shorter and longer stories alongside more analytical pieces. It won’t deliver so much of what Stackhouse calls “classic institutional news.” Instead, it will assume readers already know about the basic issues of the day. It will embrace alternative story formats—charts, graphs, Q&As, lists, maps.

The idea, says Stackhouse, is to provide a “daily pause” of analysis and explanation, “that one time in a 24-hour period when we all need to stop and make sense of what the hell just happened in our world, our country and our economy.” He knows his paper increasingly competes on a global level, as Campbell suggests, and he’s also receptive to criticisms that the paper should broaden its audience. He maintains that “educated, affluent and influential consumers” are still the target market, but he’s also added a number of new beats—Jessica Leeder will report on global food, Valpy on ethics, Joe Friesen on demographics and McIlroy on neuroscience and learning— with the intention of widening the Globe’s appeal and offering that more analytical approach he speaks of so passionately.

And there may be other, more urgent reasons to widen the scope. Mathew Ingram, the paper’s former online communities editor, says “the whole concept of mass media is antiquated.” He praises the Globe for being “near the front of the pack” in terms of journalistic quality and internet savvy, but is unsure about the narrow demographic focus. “It makes no sense to think about our readership as having any common denominators at all.” Ingram’s work as communities editor—using the tools of the web to better engage readers—was innovative for the Globe. The policy wiki, a reader-edited website created in partnership with The Dominion Institute that invited readers to debate policy issues and propose solutions, was one attempt. Ingram also put together a more easily navigated site for mobile devices such as iPhones and BlackBerries. But he left the paper in January to work as a senior writer for an American technology blog network called GigaOm, and the paper has yet to fill his position. “I don’t think the Globe is mentally where it needs to be, and that’s one thing I regret about leaving,” he says. “I still feel as if we’re trying to pave cart paths, like we’re taking all the stuff we did before in a totally different medium and doing it online, and that doesn’t work. We have to fundamentally change the way we think about what our job is online.”

Ingram is far from alone in that assessment. Paul Sullivan, a Vancouver-based new media expert and strategist (as well as former managing editor of The Vancouver Sun and a former Globe western editor who still writes a regular column for globeinvestor.com), praises the paper for its journalistic excellence, and for being more progressive online than any other Canadian newspaper. But he says the people who run it haven’t really accepted the new reality of the news business. “They’re crazy about presses and buildings… They think of themselves as a newspaper based on Front Street. If they could just stop thinking that way, and think of themselves as an information wellspring based anywhere, they might find it a little easier.”

Maybe. The only things in greater supply than uncertainty in the newspaper business these days are cocky predictions about how the future will play out. Dilbert creator and occasional tech blogger Scott Adams predicted in 1997 that newspapers would be basically extinct by 2002. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said in 2008 that within a decade, “there will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form.”

But it’s probably far too early to really know whether experiments such as the Globe’s will succeed or merely stave off the inevitable; whether the $1.7-billion Transcontinental Media deal will indeed look like an investment in “state-of-the-art buggy technology” a decade or two from now, or whether the medium can be adapted, tweaked and made relevant for the future.

***

On a rainy evening in downtown Toronto, Stackhouse is a few minutes late for a panel discussion called “What’s Next For News.” Onstage, Clay Shirky compares journalism to ice harvesting—his point being that both are obsolete professions. Ingram and web critic Andrew Keen, author of The Cult of the Amateur: How Today’s Internet is Killing Our Culture, round out the panel. There are a couple of VIP seats cordoned off for Stackhouse and Crawley, but the editor slips unobtrusively into a seat near the darkened back of the room. Stackhouse is expressionless, balancing a small pile of paper on his lap and occasionally checking e-mail on his BlackBerry. He rests his head in his hand, rubs his chin, stifles a yawn or two. “My advice for young journalists?” Shirky booms from the stage. “Don’t work for The Globe and Mail.” Stackhouse looks up, the corners of his mouth lifting. A brief smile plays across his face. A few minutes later he rolls up his notes, tucks his BlackBerry into his palm, and makes for the exit.

With reporting from Ann Hui.

Michael Cooke stomps around the newsroom, asking anyone who will listen, “Are we pictured up?” TheToronto Star’s editor-in-chief will hold a front-page story if it has no art. He’ll barge around spouting his catchphrase, his doggedness bordering on absurdity. In April 2008, police charged Christine Bedford with assault after she threw coffee in a man’s face on a commuter train. A year later she pleads guilty and Cooke wants to play it big. Obsessed with finding the woman, he wants her photo, and he wants it now. Her story will represent the angry face of the recession in Toronto. Perfect.

So begins the summer of the photo desk’s discontent—the photographers have only a vague idea of what Bedford looks like, which will make picking her out of the downtown crowds nearly impossible. “Every day someone was assigned to the Coffee Lady,” says a veteran photographer. “It became a mission. But I don’t think you’ll find a photographer who would understand why we were still chasing Coffee Lady.” And the chase continues for weeks. Each day, a photojournalist and Dale Anne Freed (the only reporter who’d seen a police photo of Bedford) stake out her high-rise condo downtown. The story runs June 2, 2009 on A1 without Coffee Lady’s photo. But Cooke still wants that picture. So the stakeouts continue. At nearly every morning news meeting in June, Cooke asks, “Are we pictured up?” until someone finally nails Coffee Lady. But the shot never appears in the paper—the story is long forgotten. “For me,” one Star insider says, “the biggest question was really: What the fuck has Honderich done?”

Cooke is an unusual choice to lead the proudly liberal Star, Canada’s largest-circulation newspaper. Conrad Black says the 57-year-old Brit’s a jaded, second-tier tabloid editor, whose conservative political views are at odds with the Star’s social justice slant. (Ironic, since Hollinger employed him for much of his career.) TheNew York Post mocked him for his alleged women’s shoe fetish and nicknamed him the Cookie Monster (which prompted Gawker to paste his head on the Muppet character’s body). Driven by unbridled ambition and a fierce competitive streak honed through nearly 30 years of rugby, Cooke has spent the bulk of his career running major tabloid dailies such as the Chicago Sun-Times, the New York Daily News and Vancouver’s The Province. He packed them with short investigative features, splashy display and human-interest fare—and watched readership numbers rise. Now, he’s brought his tabloid journalism instinct to his own broadsheet.

In fall 2008, after the failures of back-to-back editorial regimes in the previous four years, chair of Torstar’s voting trust (and former longtime Star editor and publisher) John Honderich decided it was time to restore stability to his beloved newspaper. “We’ve been joking in the newsroom for a couple of years, the only constant is change,” says city editor Graham Parley. Honderich first tapped publisher John Cruickshank, who then convinced the most influential person at Torstar (the Star’s parent company) that Cooke, his longtime partner at the Sun-Times, was the one to reinvigorate the venerable institution.

Cooke expects to fight—and win—the protracted Toronto newspaper war for a slice of the shrinking circulation pie in the age of internet ascendance. When he arrived on March 2, 2009, staff were understandably skeptical about him. A polarizing presence in other newsrooms, he was aggressive, blunt and played hard, but also brought contagious energy. The Star became an exciting place to work again. Showing off his feistiness and flair for eye-catching presentation, he devoted half-pages to single photographs. Traditionally quirky Toronto stories got even quirkier, less local and arguably less relevant. But an expansion of the investigative unit paid off, with the paper regularly embarrassing governments into action. And then, on November 3, 2009, morale plummeted. Management announced that to save an estimated $4 million per year, the Star intended to shed nearly a third of the newsroom by eliminating some or all of its copy desk and outsourcing editing. The Star’s readership was on the upswing before the new team arrived: numbers perked up 2.6 percent in NADbank’s interim 2008-2009 report, not easily achieved in today’s newspaper market. It’s too soon to tell whether Cooke’s formula of mixing crusading journalism with lighter stories will keep readers hooked.

His friends and colleagues say he lives for a challenge but, really, he lives to win. Still, strife in the editorial department may make that difficult. After years of infighting and lagging in the race for online innovation, his hiring was a coup for a paper traditionally restricted by hierarchy and ego. Cooke is a showboating editor accustomed to attracting attention to himself and his newspapers, and the Star might well be his last championship run—provided his team stays standing behind him.

***

Cooke grew up in Lancashire County’s Nether Kellet, a northern English village (population: 646) and developed skin tough as steel. “Whenever we get to cross paths,” says longtime friend and newspaperman Garry Steckles, “we don’t spend our time reminiscing about playing in grim back lanes or having to use outside netties [toilets] in the middle of winter.” Born to a sailor and quarryman father and housekeeper mother, Cooke’s formal education came to an abrupt halt at 16. After failing his O-level exams, he was asked not to return to grammar school. He then worked for a month without pay at the Morecambe Visitor, a small weekly, until the paper hired him. But, ever the boundary pusher, his insolence later got him fired. He went on to Bristol’s Western Daily Press for five weeks before escaping in the middle of the night because he was afraid to give his resignation to the paper’s fearsome editor. He worked casually on Fleet Street for the Daily Mail, The Sun and Sunday Express. On a London street in 1972, a young, barefoot, redheaded art student in an ankle-length fur coat glanced his way. He’d later write that he saw the faces of his three unborn children in his future wife’s eyes that day. Even later, he would write about her in the Sun-Times, recalling a rainy “wet night” they spent together when he was 19 and Barbara was “all tossed red hair and pout.” During a vacation to Toronto in 1974, the young editor visited the Star on the recommendation of Bob Hely, a colleague at The Sun in London. The visit turned into a few trial shifts on the copy desk, which turned into a job. Three years later, Cooke left Toronto for Montreal to become assistant city editor of The Gazette.

***

He grinds his cleats into the slick grass, shoes squelch in the mud. It’s the October 1984 championship game, and Cooke is hooking for the Town of Mount Royal, Quebec. He licks his lips, wipes rain from his dark eyes. The first law of rugby is go forward. Head down, plow through. Run. Glance back only when you’re far enough ahead you can’t lose. Cooke scowls, his chubby, pugilistic body holding firm, bare legs streaked with dirt. There’s an up-and-under coming his way. Where the hell is the fullback? This is the second time.Cooke’s blue-and-yellow striped form shuffles backward to match the faint arc traced by the ball flying through the air. The second law of rugby is support.

Spectators mock him from the line. Glancing at the four grimacing opponents charging toward him, Cooke stiffens and raises his eyes to meet the lingering punt with his name on it. It’s a sucker punch of the worst order: the promise of a rib-rattling tackle if he can make the catch. And if he can’t? The other team might score, and that’s a fate worse than death. He’s not the biggest, or the fastest, or the best. But he has guts. And losing’s not an option. He staggers. Knocked backwards, ribs cracking, stomach in his mouth for a split second. He chokes, catches his breath, spit and iron sticking to the walls of his throat, gasping with laughter before he’s crunched to the ground, ball at his chest. Broken rib? Nah. But it’ll bruise tomorrow. He leaves the field a happy warrior. A winner. Cooke’s own photo appears on the front page of The Gazette’s sports section where he later writes about the game.

***

In January 1988, Cooke sauntered into a Concordia University classroom, banged his black briefcase down and rolled up his sleeves. The 25 students in his copy editing class watched him pull out a copy of USAToday. “I love this newspaper,” he said. “It’s an editor-driven paper. A paper conceived and imagined by editors. Very clear. Very high concept.” One month later, Cooke launched the Sunday Gazette, designed to be a light weekend read full of quirky features and first-person journalism. He shaped his team after the British model, running the Sunday paper as its own entity equipped with a roster of writers and editors chosen by—and reporting directly to—him. It succeeded in stamping out the competing Montreal Daily News, but newsroom critics dismissed it as too irreverent. “The Sunday paper was designed to block a tabloid so it was designed to be a tabloid,” says Maclean’s columnist Paul Wells, who was then one of Cooke’s favoured feature writers. “Young serious reporters would clip out stories they didn’t like and bring them to weekly development sessions. I heard a lot more criticism during the time Michael and I overlapped at the paper than ‘Thank God we’ve got Michael Cooke.’”

In 1992, the Edmonton Journal recruited Cooke as managing editor. He stayed three years before becoming editor-in-chief of The Province in Vancouver. Beginning in 1997, Cooke also commuted to Hamilton as part of the team selected by Conrad Black to launch the National Post. After several years of bitter sparring with The Province’s union over his divide-and-conquer leadership, Cooke was frustrated—and not beloved in the newsroom. (“He was trying to be some kind of Pied Piper,” says deputy news editor Janet Ingram-Johnson. “Those who were not his acolytes would be discarded and treated quite poorly. He was very vindictive if you posed any threat to his management style.”) That’s when Hollinger executive David Radler offered him the job of a lifetime: editor-in-chief of the Chicago Sun-Times. Vancouver Sun editor John Cruickshank would be his co-editor (and eventually his publisher). The Province newsroom cheered at the announcement, but Radler was confident. “Since we put a duo in Chicago and we had the dull Cruickshank,” he says, “we had to have a more exciting presence. Cooke brings a flair to any job that most editors in this country don’t have.”

A half-decade later, his career took another leap forward. He left the Sun-Times in 2005 to become editor of the New York Daily News, one of the most-read newspapers in the United States. “What he accomplished at the Sun-Times and the Daily News is extremely rare,” Wells says. “Someone from a Canadian newsroom making it to that level—it confirms the faith some of us had in him.” But it was apparent upon Cooke’s arrival that he wouldn’t really be running the Daily News. He fought with editorial director Martin Dunn and constantly placated billionaire owner Mort Zuckerman. “From the minute he walked in the building,” says Caitlin Kelly, a former Daily News reporter, “it was never clear to anybody who exactly ran the paper.” As before, Cooke tried to surround himself with people he trusted. He offered Globe columnist Christie Blatchford a job. He gave former Sun-Times columnist Neil Steinberg a column—written from Chicago. (“Why do you have a Chicago columnist in a New York newspaper?” one observer close to Cooke asks. “It was seen as a real slap in the face.”) The newsroom revolted, and Steinberg was fired.

Undaunted, Cooke courted publicity by approving, and starring in, a documentary series about the Daily News for Bravo called Tabloid Wars. He met all the right people—Harry Evans, Tina Brown, Arianna Huffington—and went to all the right parties. But his heavyweight pals couldn’t assuage the barrage of gossipy New York Post headlines about him. The Post accused Cooke of reprinting nearly identical stories he’d written in past papers (which he did) and taking an expensive trip to England from a public relations representative who he wrote was a friend. And, after coming across a column written by Sun-Times columnist (and Cruickshank’s wife) Jennifer Hunter calling out her “former editor” for his women’s footwear fetish, thePost ran with it. (Hunter declined comment for this story.) “That’s absolutely business as usual, for the Post to be pissy just because they can,” Kelly says. “But Cooke was like, ‘Oh my God, it’s open season,’ because he had made some missteps and had some real enemies.” At Cruickshank’s request, Cooke headed back to theSun-Times at the beginning of 2006, as senior vice-president of editorial, to oversee the company’s 100-plus titles. Post editor Col Allan sent him a pair of red women’s boots as a parting gift.

Cooke’s not camera-shy, nor is he shy about playing favourites—star players shouldn’t sit on the bench, after all. For years, he’s fostered the careers of exceptional journalists, nurturing their professional growth. Back at the Sun-Times, he convinced “fraidy-cat” front-page editor James Smith to appear on Oprah to discuss the tabloid’s much-lauded Barack Obama covers after the U.S. presidential election in 2008. “He e-mailed me and told me, ‘This is what we’re doing,’” says Smith of his leap from small-town designer to front-page editor at the Sun-Times. “When he tells you you’re doing something, you really don’t feel like you have a choice. You know he’ll back you up.” Cooke’s talented new hire became one of the chosen few saved during a massive round of last-hired, first-fired layoffs—a decision that infuriated the newsroom. Wells says his former boss’s penchant for picking superstars was controversial at The Gazette. “He always played favourites,” Wells says. “If you were one of them, it was a wonderful place to be.” And if you weren’t? “There’s no time to flatter people who can’t help you put out a paper. He doesn’t like hand-holding.”

***

Meanwhile, the past five years have not been kind to Torstar. Revenues from the company are a prime income flow for the five families—including the Honderiches—that make up its voting trust. But the company’s fortunes now mirror the newspaper industry’s decline. As dividends eroded, tension between the families heightened. The younger generations no longer stood united behind the unwritten rule: the Atkinson Principles trump the bottom line. These six governing editorial tenets are modelled after influential editor Joseph E. Atkinson’s advocacy for social justice, the rights of working people and a strong, united Canada. “It’s not Mao and his Little Red Book,” says managing editor Joe Hall. “We don’t go around chanting. It’s almost instinctive—you know what’s wrong.” Critics say the principles are noble in theory but fungible in practice, conveniently bending to be everything to everyone. When Torstar is making money, they are easier to embrace. But in 2006, a Merrill Lynch report bluntly expressed the glaring conflict between the profit motive and the Atkinson Principles: “The content of the newspaper is constrained to report in a manner that reflects the Principles, and this puts a potential cap on the audience size.”

Torstar makes much of its profit from publishing Harlequin romance novels. (Will a plot line of the dashing Fleet Street reporter sweeping a barefoot, fur-clad lass off her feet soon appear?) The bodice-rippers steadily pick up the slack for the company’s media holdings: a 19-percent stake in British Columbia’s Black Press, a 20-percent stake in ctvglobemedia, the Metroland empire of community newspapers in southern Ontario’s Golden Horseshoe and of course, the Star. Without Harlequin and Metroland, the flagship wouldn’t have nearly the same resources at its disposal. Torstar’s profits have decreased substantially in the last five years. It reported a net loss of $180.5 million in 2008, due in part to an investment in ctvglobemedia. That’s down from a $101-million net profit the year before, and even that’s far from its $124-million profit in 2003.

***

David Olive sits in a circle with about 20 colleagues. It’s spring 2007 and Toni Antonellis, a consultant from Atlanta-based TSA & Company, is leading a training session in a room adjoining the Star newsroom. She says they’re going to play a game that will help them work better as a team. “It was as though it was a preschool class,” says Olive, a business columnist. “For God’s sake, this is three hours out of my day.” The consultants crawl all over the newsroom. “Whenever the consultants come,” he says, “it means management doesn’t know what the heck they’re doing.” Fred Kuntz was the editor at the time. When then-publisher Jagoda Pike appointed him in 2006, staff welcomed the change. The previous administration of publisher Michael Goldbloom and editor-in-chief Giles Gherson had lasted just two years. In contrast to Gherson’s outside experience as Report on Business editor at the Globe and editor-in-chief of the Edmonton Journal, Kuntz was the ultimate insider, with more than 20 years experience at the Star and Torstar’s regional papers. Although the newsroom celebrated then, within a year, confidence drained. “Fred was just so tightly wound and the whole newsroom was tightly wound and people were scared,” says Kevin Donovan, a 25-year veteran who leads the investigative team. During Kuntz’s second year—the year of consultants, confusion and budget cuts—a much-publicized disagreement between then-ceo Rob Prichard and Honderich led to divisions on the Torstar board. Because Prichard had installed Pike as publisher, and Pike had installed Kuntz as editor-in-chief, there was fealty in the hierarchy. Senior editors were told not to speak to Honderich. If someone went to dinner with him, for example, staff would snitch to upper management. Then the axe fell on Pike and Kuntz, and then Prichard, who received a controversial $9.6-million severance package.

The paper desperately needed stability after five years of rotating-door management and declining revenues. “There had been blood on the floor right up to the publisher and chairman’s office,” says Rosie DiManno, columnist and 27-year veteran. “We just wanted somebody to come back to us who knew newspapers.” The glorious appointment of Honderich—the Star’s “captain, my captain”—as chair of the board, which officially took effect May 6, 2009 but in practice happened months earlier, re-established an energy that had faltered after the arrival of the consultants. In late fall 2008, Honderich phoned John Cruickshank, who’d been at his specially created publisher position at CBC News for just over a year. It took little coaxing to get Cruickshank interested in moving. Hindered by bureaucracy, things were moving too slowly for him at CBC.

Cooke, still at the Sun-Times, moved to the top of a short list of potential editors. “This was certainly John Cruickshank’s preferred choice,” Honderich says. After dinner at a Florida crab shack, Cooke and Honderich left with an understanding. “I came out of the conversation a complete believer that he was the one,” he continues. “He was going to bring life, fun, humour, the traditional great old-fashioned investigative reporting—a newspaper that was going to make a difference and have fun doing it.” Finally, staff would have an editor who used the newsroom bathroom along with the closer executive one—an editor who would crusade for the working people, just like the Star.

***

Cooke rips his glasses off and tosses them carelessly on the table in front of him. He fidgets in spurts: tapping, gesturing frenetically, his eyes darting from kitchen to ceiling to floor, running his fingers through his hair. He’s distracted. He sits at a table near the front door of the Jamie Kennedy Wine Bar, an upscale restaurant in downtown Toronto. He’s slanted forward, leaning in, listening intently. He sips his glass of red wine. He’s forgone his usual rum and coke for something a little more refined tonight. It’s March 1, 2009, and Cooke’s dinner companion is Mary Vallis, a National Post reporter for whom Cooke has been a professional mentor. He’s new again to the city he left more than three decades earlier. And tomorrow is his first day as the editor-in-chief of the Toronto Star. He’s not talking about tomorrow. Trying not to admit he is nervous, trying not to admit that he cares—a contrast to his call-it-like-it-is instincts. He stands, asks: “Vallis, what shirt should I wear tomorrow?” “Pink,” she responds. He thanks her. She wishes him luck as he walks out of the restaurant.

***

Cooke stands in the newsroom before nearly 100 people. He’s rolled up the sleeves of his shirt. (It’s not pink.) He’s talking war. “Look,” he says, “there’s nothing wrong with these newspapers you keep hearing about. It’s all the debt that was taken on by the clowns who bought these newspapers. And we are going to win. If there are going to be deaths among papers in Toronto, we are going to be the last paper standing.” Then he goes looking for recruits. He lands Pulitzer Prize winner Paul Watson, who’d left the Los Angeles Times, to start an Arctic bureau—a “romantic” notion for the local paper that left some staff scratching their heads. He woos back high-profile columnist Jennifer Wells, who’d left the Star for the Globe a year and a half earlier. He picks Gazette editor Andrew Phillips to lend his business section credibility. He refuses to let freelance reporter Sonia Verma go to the Globe without a bidding war. And he hires his good friend, former boss and running buddy, Murdoch Davis, to become his executive editor responsible for exploring outsourcing options and coping with the aftermath. To hire Davis, perhaps best known for writing Canwest’s notorious national editorials, Cooke had to make a personal visit to Honderich, who’d spoken out publicly against the editorials. Honderich had such reservations about Davis becoming a Star man that he insisted on interviewing him personally. Cooke, with the full blessings of Honderich and Cruickshank, had settled into a new rhythm, and despite some reservations about razzle-dazzle and “picturing it up,” he brought a renewed sense of stability to the place. “Prichard, Pike and Kuntz alienated Honderich from the newsroom and they paid with their scalps,” says Dan Smith, book editor and longtime union steward. “Clearly he’s made a decision, for better or for worse: It’s Cruickshank’s newspaper and Cooke’s newsroom.”

***

Cruickshank is the Star’s steady guiding hand who wears the mantle of long-term visionary. A philosophy and politics junkie in Harry Potter–style glasses, he is soft-spoken and pauses pensively before speaking. He first met Cooke in the Gazette newsroom in 1979. Both men were married without kids, exploring the city on double dates with their young wives. Later, as the pair weathered the dot-com bust and Hollinger’s collapse during their eight years in Chicago, they spent their lunch hours walloping the shit out of each other. “There was absolutely no money—we were cutting staff and having issues with Radler—so we played highly competitive Ping-Pong. We probably both threw racquets at various points.” The pair parted ways briefly in 2008, when Cruickshank left to become publisher of CBC News. “Michael and I have had a professional relationship that has been as deep as any friendship,” Cruickshank says. “If a friend is someone you trust with your life and have great faith in, then Michael and I are truly friends.”

In contrast to his publisher, Cooke is the million-ideas-a-day “squirrel on coffee.” He’s the brash but charming Englishman who never tires (provided he’s had eight hours of sleep). Doesn’t leave work before
poring over the front page. Knows what readers want. Makes instinctive decisions. Hooked on BlackBerry. “The attention span of a fruit fly” (Smith). The “master networker” (Davis). “The most fun person I’ve ever met” (Blatchford). A Cooke party anecdote: “Ever tell you about that time Obama saw me naked at the East Bank Club gym? He was in a towel…” (A White House spokesperson could not confirm.)

Cooke has endeared himself to readers—and opened himself up to scrutiny—in part by writing deeply personal travel pieces and columns. One was about his best-man speech at his brother Frank’s wedding; he called the bride by Frank’s ex-girlfriend’s name (the marriage didn’t last). Another was about being tricked into pressing sheep’s testicles to his ear at 11 years old. A third was about a family video diary he, his wife and his three children kept in the 1980s. Cruickshank is certain: “Michael has an innate ability to connect with newspaper readers.”

***

Standing in the third-floor auditorium at One Yonge Street, Cruickshank is hosting a town hall meeting in July 2009. As his PowerPoint slides flick by, the publisher announces options the board is considering for the Star. The first involves keeping the paper more or less the same, with a smaller team producing content for both the paper and the web, provided advertising revenue goes up. The second explores the idea of producing niche publications in much smaller numbers and with content selected based on demographics such as teenagers or women. The third option: phasing out the paper entirely. He flips to a slide reading: “Death of print: 2020.” “I think Cruickshank thought, ‘Why aren’t they hearing me?’” Smith says, adding that the publisher never definitively said the paper’s last print edition would be published in 2020. Nevertheless, the newsroom woke up that day—the journalists were outraged.

***

On November 3, 2009 Star management announces its plan to outsource copy editing and offer a voluntary severance program to employees. That night, Cooke heads to the Air Canada Centre for a hockey game. He’s invited 15 employees, all managers but one, to the Torstar corporate box. It looks bad, and he knows it, but he can’t cancel the fun. How would that look to the other two guests he’s invited—directors of Pagemasters North America, the editing firm the Star might hire? He planned this weeks ago. He didn’t choose when the announcement was coming. He wants his managers to meet them in a social setting, give them time to ask questions. The following week, Cooke stands with Davis—whom staff have taken to calling “the man with the axe”—in the Star cafeteria. He reads from a prepared script about how outsourcing copy editing can work.  Smith, the union veteran, calls out: “If you’re actually serious about waiting for the union alternative, why did you go out drinking with Pagemasters on the night you announced it?” Cooke runs across the room at him. The two men square off, nose to nose, both just shy of five-foot-eight. “Oh yes, that’s right,” Cooke barks sarcastically. “We picked the worst possible thing we could come up with to show our contempt for you and everybody that works here.” Three weeks later, Cruickshank publicly announces the plan to use Pagemasters to replace nearly 80 editorial employees. Staff show up to work wearing black t-shirts emblazoned with “dead editor walking.” But in early January, management and the union reach an agreement to save most of those jobs. The Star never makes the deal with Pagemasters.

***

The Star’s challenge is to be everything to everyone. Its demographic is regionally limited, in contrast to the rival Globe’s more affluent, highly educated readership. Still, an average weekday edition of the Star boasts 974,000 readers, more than twice any other Toronto-area paper. And thestar.com’s weekly readership also grew by 15.6 percent in nadbank’s interim 2008-09 report. Sparring with dailies is one thing—taking a swing at everything is quite another. Cruickshank says his paper no longer competes with just the Globe and theToronto Sun. It faces the same vertiginous test as every other news outlet—going up against the rest of the world. “We’re competing for people’s attention.” That’s why, he says, the website must become the focal point as its print publication services an ever-smaller group of niche readers. Of course, he admits, that requires an online business model that pays.

Despite Cruickshank’s talk of becoming a web-based organization, nearly every writer and editor interviewed for this story calls last year’s website redesign a work-in-progress at best. Although thestar.com is the most read newspaper website in the Greater Toronto Area, it trails theglobeandmail.com in online innovation. Cooke is the first editor to run both the print and online branches, and Cruickshank speaks vaguely of more centralization to come. This unknown future platform strikes fear into the hearts of print-centric journalists, but even Smith thinks the Star needs a stronger web presence. “This should have been done 10 years ago,” he says. “To give Cooke and the people who run the place credit, they recognize that and are trying to get there quickly.”

In the meantime, Cooke has moved two more reporters, Diana Zlomislic and Moira Welsh, onto the investigative unit to ensure that the  “i-team,” led by editor-reporter Kevin Donovan, publishes more frequently than in years past. Enter the quick-and-dirty, and cheeky, journalism that earned Cooke both readers and revulsion in Chicago. Donovan says he’s thrilled to finally work with an editor who understands the value of high-profile reporters such as Rob Cribb, Dale Brazao and David Bruser. In December 2009, Cooke approved a $12,000 Freedom of Information request in seconds, telling Donovan: “Pay it. Get the story. Appeal.” And when he’s enthusiastic about a story idea,  the boss e-mails, “I want to have your children!”

In September 2009, Zlomislic wrote a story about going undercover to get a fake diploma certifying her as a health support worker. Cooke ran a photo of the slim blond reporter splashed across the front page. The province responded with legislation to monitor career colleges. The i-team has also garnered government attention and forced policy change from stories on maltreatment and exploitation of foreign caregivers, the mishandling of green bin waste and exporting stolen vehicles. Cooke believes in self-promotion, and pieces tagged with “The Star gets action” are now a regular page-one fixture—so often, in fact, that the tags are straining credulity. “We might be using it a bit too much,” Donovan muses. Either way, the paper’s getting results.

Nicknamed “Fluffy” to his Gazette co-editor’s “Stuffy” in the 1980s, Cooke is yet again part of a Fluffy-Stuffy duo. Prizing readability over relevance, the paper’s water-cooler stories are often the most popular on the website—though they’re less popular with some editors. Often penned by writers such as Cathal Kelly and Lesley Ciarula Taylor, staffers have coined them “Barbies.” On any given day, the paper and website will be peppered with stories (some Star and some wire) about New York City residents protesting skinny models, the killing of a transsexual prostitute in Italy and Peruvian police fabricating a tale about thieves draining humans of fat to sell to cosmetics companies. Not to mention the column Catherine Porter wrote about her son and her placenta. Intended to offset the seriousness of the i-team stories and get people talking, Cooke and other editors champion these pieces for their human interest, not to mention schadenfreude—Tiger Woods’s infidelity mea culpa, for instance, landed A1 above the fold. “The secret to Cooke is that he is a great and unapologetic scavenger,” says Martin Newland, former deputy editor of the National Post and current editorial director at the Abu Dhabi Media Company. “He sees something in another paper, he steals it, adapts it and moves on.”

***

Grande skinny vanilla latte. Michael Cooke across the table in Starbucks. Arms crossed. Leaning back. Purple and white striped shirt. Grey jacket. Grey slacks. Rimless glasses nestled in dark hair, grey streaks markedly absent. Face shifts with feeling, save for steady eyebrows, peaked rooftops, like circumflexes. A man who laughs a lot, obviously—all the right lines creased on an otherwise-youthful face. After five months, two e-mails, five phone calls and one attempt to accost him in the newsroom (foiled by his executive assistant Lorraine Campbell), Cooke agrees to meet me. Confident. Doesn’t give an inch. Work speaks for itself. Print and online teams should work seamlessly. Should have the best website in the world—knows they have work to do. Should get more action—should have more, more, more “Star gets action” tags. Globe editor John Stackhouse’s brain, “big as a basketball,” can’t beat Cooke’s all-stars. Not the Toronto he remembers. Not the Toronto of the 1970s. Doesn’t matter—his squad could take Stackhouse’s any day of the week. “If you take any successful sports team—and I don’t do sports analogies, okay?—they know what they are,” Cooke says. “We are an attacking team. We are a team that beats people up. We throw the ball and we beat people up. We have a brand and we have a mission and everybody buys into it.”

He stops. Above us, beside our table, hovers a man in a worn green winter coat, mumbling incomprehensibly, eyes pleading, snot running from his nose, crusting on his face. Cooke looks up, turns to me. “This is going to be a test,” he says. “To see how you’re going to handle it.”

“How I’m going to handle it? The story’s not about me.”

He pauses.

“Sorry, mate, we haven’t got a penny between us. Come back in an hour,” he says firmly. The man slams a toonie and a loonie down on our table, still mumbling. He wanders away.

“You see, this is what you get when you sit with me,” Cooke says with a laugh and a look of surprise (the eyebrows do move after all). “Has that ever happened to you in your life? I didn’t fix this up. This is what happens. Write that down!”

Cooke slides the coins to the empty table beside us. The man drifts one more time around the coffee shop before pushing the door open and shuffling into the cold. It’s not the Toronto he remembers, but Cooke is just the same.