As winter turned to spring in 2014, journalists at The Hamilton Spectator worked to the sound of contractors drilling through concrete floors and reconfiguring the wiring. The “banana cream” yellow on the walls soon became grey and indigo blue, the Spec’s corporate colours. The paper moved the curved desks to create pods of four and six. The city and web desks took over the middle of the newsroom, with the general assignment, business and entertainment desks on one side and production on the other. And, glowing at the centre of it all, a Chartbeat monitor: a 40-inch television screen turned sideways to display the paper’s online analytics.

The new floor plan fosters creative conversations and connectivity. No matter which direction reporters walk through the newsroom, the digital team is within reach. The redesign—the paper’s most drastic in 20 years—emphasizes digital journalism. “It might have been at the centre in our hearts and minds,” says managing editor Jim Poling, “but it wasn’t at the centre physically—now, it’s physically there.”

As the industry changed over the last decade, many papers strategically rethought their newsroom space. The Toronto Sun and The Globe and Mail are both moving to new office buildings this year: the Sun to the new Postmedia building, and the Globe to a new building. Even papers that haven’t moved to new buildings, including the Spec and the Winnipeg Free Press, have undergone redesign. These Canadian newspapers are harnessing the newsroom’s potential as a storytelling tool for efficient, digital-minded journalism—an industry’s eagerness to adapt and improve, physically manifested.

Back in 1989, the Sun newsroom was a mess of paper piles and desks crammed together. Typewriters were stacked on top of filing cabinets in the wake of computerization. James Wallace sat beside Sun legend Bob MacDonald, whose ashtray was always overflowing with cigarette butts amidst mountains of paper. These newsrooms had a more colourful personality, says Wallace, now the vice president, editorial for Sun newspapers. But that smoky, papery geography has become a thing of the past.

The new landscape is an open sea of screens with a focus on how information flows from department to department. As the Free Press’s publisher, Bob Cox will sometimes pass a story idea on to an editor, who will pass it on to the city editors, and on it goes until it reaches the reporter. By the end of that line of transmission, the idea has sometimes changed considerably. This problem can be circumvented in part by the physical path these ideas take. At the Free Press, the editors, including copy editors, work in the centre of the newsroom, surrounded by the other departments in pods or clusters. Content is centrally gathered, stories are edited and then it flows out into web or print platforms.

At the Sun, the once-separate sports and general news reporters are now about 10 feet away from each other. The Toronto and Ottawa papers’ production staff are in the same area, cheek-by-jowl. To keep up with journalism going digital, the Sun also built a photo studio with broadcast lighting to do video hits and some sports coverage. Similar to the Spec’s current newsroom, the new Sun office will put the web team close to the national and local news desks, and will have a Chartbeat monitor.

Annick Mitchell, an interior design professor at Ryerson University, says a newsroom should promote and support journalistic creativity. In her experience, people are not creative in isolation or solitude, which makes collaborative spaces a crucial consideration for newspapers. The Spectator chose to put the web team in the middle to secure its place as a priority in the story process. Poling’s office is right across from the digital desks, where he can hear conversations and also jump in with his thoughts. That kind of openness, which invites collaboration, extends throughout the newsroom. Poling, who finds that some of the best ideas and stories arise from informal conversations at the heart of the newsroom, compares it to a natural news amphitheatre: “Like a big, digital whiteboard in the middle of the room.” Even the Spec’s formal news meetings take place in the open, and everyone is invited to gather around the glassy black table or listen in from his or her desk.

But Canadian papers haven’t had much structural redesign of their office spaces in comparison to papers such as The Guardian and The New York Times. Cox says that’s a result of a lack of investment. The Times had a brand new building designed from the ground up in 2007. The focus at Canadian papers has mostly been on moving furniture and people around—nothing structural. The interest Cox saw in newsroom redesign from four or five years ago has somewhat fizzled out. “Talking about newsroom design is a little bit of a luxurious conversation,” says Poling. Canadian papers bear the marks of media consolidation and the industry’s shaky financial situation. Before selling its building in 2010, the Sun had six storeys of office space. After the sale, it moved all operations to the second floor. Now, the paper is preparing for its move this year to the Postmedia building, which also houses the National Post. The Free Press’s 20,000 square foot newsroom has empty space at the back—wounds from editorial cutbacks.

No matter where a newsroom is or what it looks like, big stories still send adrenaline rushing through the space. The culture of chasing and telling stories, Wallace says, remains unchanged by the moment’s trends. Beyond a web desk or a hub-and-spoke office design model, that is the newsroom’s true, unchanging core.

A previous version of this story stated The Globe and Mail will be moving into the complex that the Sun currently occupies. The Globe and Mail will not be moving into the same building that the Sun currently occupies, but one nearby.

Russell Wangersky peeled away the cling wrap encasing the chicken, thinking of it sizzling on a barbecue. When he turned the bird over, he saw “a great honking fistful of still attached skin and fat” tucked in where the ribs should have been. Over six months, he investigated the meat-to-fat ratio of Newfoundland Farm Products chickens. Wangersky made several trips to the grocery store. Almost every purchase was “larded up” to increase the weight—and the price—of the chicken.

He shared his findings in a St. John’s The Telegram column in April 2009, and the comments confirmed that his readers had also been duped. But “Penney” wrote, “I can’t believe someone was paid to write this useless waste of an article…A true indicator of the abysmal state of journalism in this province.”

Wangersky, who also moderated comments at the paper, has seen much worse. He’d sift through close to 100 comments per day (a small fraction of what larger publications receive) and kill about 20 percent of them based on their racist or libelous nature. “I don’t know what it adds in the end,” he says. “Unless what you’re looking for is to establish that out there, among us, there are truly objectionable people.”

His is one of many voices in the growing call to remove online comment sections. But commenters and tech experts say it’s a short-term solution to a lack of accountability and engagement from both sides of the computer screen.

In December, the Toronto Star shut down its comment section, joining publications such as Popular Science and the Toronto Sun. The Star will now curate “the most thoughtful, insightful and provocative comments from readers” that it finds through social media, and letters and emails to the editor. “My fear is that they are just going to cherry–pick a few comments that they like and highlight those,” says Mathew Ingram, former communities editor for The Globe and Mail and now a senior writer at Fortune. He says the move will “reflect all kinds of inherent biases” and, in selecting individual comments, publications “will be more likely to avoid the topics or viewpoints that don’t fit with those biases.”

Popular Science axed its comment section in September 2013, stating that comments don’t belong within the realms of a science-based publication. That same month, Huffington Post did away with anonymous comments. Former managing editor Jimmy Soni cited the “online toxicity” of anonymity as an explanation. In 2014, Reuters closed comments on news stories but kept them open for opinion and blog pieces. It has no incentive to engage in criticism because its stories are “straight news,” says digital executive editor Dan Colarusso.

Last September, the Sun eliminated the comment sections from most of its online stories. It says the move is only temporary, until the paper finds a “better and more accountable way” for readers to interact with the publication and each other. Comment sections “are a big part of our history and our culture at the paper,” says vice president of editorial James Wallace. “But we came to the conclusion that it wasn’t serving the interests of our readers and that there wasn’t a good or easy way to fix it while we figure out the best solution that will allow signed commenting.”

In November, CBC closed comments on all stories about indigenous issues. In a statement on its website, it said that while providing a “democratic space” for readers is important, there had been an influx of “hate speech and personal attacks.” Claiming it didn’t want a small minority of commenters to ruin the experience for everyone, CBC will be “taking a pause” until it finds the best way to proceed.

People who participate in debate to deliberately offend others are called “trolls.” Though they make up a small minority of the commenting community, trolls are the biggest catalyst of the comment section downfall. People who read negative comments below an article are more likely to view the information as less trustworthy, according to a 2013 study co-authored by Dietram Scheufele, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The study, “The ‘Nasty Effect’: Online Incivility and Risk Perceptions of Emerging Technologies,” used a fake blog post to gauge the change in reader perception after exposure to negative comments. Several news outlets, including Popular Science, have used Scheufele’s study as justification for eliminating comment sections.

Others, including Reuters and the Star, point out that reader discussion is happening on social media. Ingram says both of these reasons are simply excuses for laziness. “It requires more work to moderate, but at least the paper is exposed to points of view it might otherwise not want to listen to,” he says, adding that comment sections are a large part of building an online community, because they give readers a voice and make them feel engaged with a topic. Taking that away removes the conversation between author and audience.

Leaving comments to social media isn’t any better, though. When publications hand over the conversation, they’re taking traffic away from their own articles. And, according to a Pew Research study, trolling exists regardless of the platform.

So, what’s the solution? De Correspondent, a crowdfunded news site in the Netherlands, is expanding with a focus on writer-to-reader engagement. The founders, Rob Wijnberg and Ernst-Jan Pfauth, say their goal is engagement through in-depth digital storytelling. The member-based subscription publication allows only members to comment (or “contribute,” as De Correspondent calls it). It also holds live events where readers and writers can speak face-to-face. This creates a sense of real engagement and accountability.

Accountability, according to the Canadian Association of Journalists (CAJ), is what’s needed to make comment sections work. In a 2014 report, the organization’s Ethics Advisory Committee concluded that it’s the responsibility of journalists to “set the tone for the conversation” by contributing to the comment sections themselves. The report also pointed out that readers are “likely to be more engaged if they see other commenters and journalists responding constructively.”

While Wangersky and others would love to see comment sections—in their current form—disappear completely, it doesn’t seem likely. People will always have opinions, and providing a public space to air them is an integral part of a transparent news organization. Both Scheufele and Ingram agree that the trick to making it work is to be vigilant, ensure accountability and, above all, to engage. Because no matter what new form comment sections take, there will always be a Penney waiting to fan the flames of uncivil discussion.

By Luc Rinaldi & Abigale Subdhan 

In May 1976, three Mounties walked into Peter Worthington’s glass-walled Toronto Sun office with a search warrant. They wanted a leaked RCMP letter that contained information about Canadians charged with espionage and treason, which the Sun editor had recently mentioned in a column. He refused to hand it over. When they pleaded for a hint, Worthington replied, “Sorry, fellas, you’re on your own on this one.”

Over the next five hours, camera crews and Sun reporters—some sporting pre-emptive “Free Peter Worthington” T-shirts—watched as the Mounties searched the boss’s office. After looking through piles of books and filing cabinets, behind pictures and under rugs, the officers found the letter—in the top drawer of the desk.

Worthington’s refusal to co-operate shouldn’t have come as a surprise. The hard-nosed Sun co-founder, who died last May of a staph infection, was a staunch advocate for free expression, which showed in his gutsy, conservative journalism. Over roughly four decades as a columnist, he was fiercely opinionated and unfailingly controversial. “There was no grey. There was no mush,” says Rob Granatstein, a former Sun reporter and editor. “There was Peter telling you what he thought. Period.”

Unlike many of the columnists who came after him, whose branding depends on sensationalistic, knee-jerk panache, Worthington backed his views with hard facts and the experience he’d gained travelling the world, first as a soldier and then, for 15 years, as a foreign correspondent for the now-defunct Toronto Telegram. He brought knowledge—colleagues considered him the pre-Internet Wikipedia—where many of today’s right-wing op-ed writers offer reflexive anger; he earned a loyal following for his intelligent analysis, while contemporary pundits lure readers with outrageous claims that ignite the Twitterverse. Although he certainly inspired many of today’s Canadian conservative columnists, they’ve yet to live up to the standard he set.

***

Peter John Vickers Worthington was born in 1927, at Fort Osborne Barracks in Winnipeg. The son of a polished Quaker mother, and a father who was a major-general in Princess Patricia’s Canadian Light Infantry, he had a nomadic childhood, roving between different army camps. Early on, he took to mischief—the morning after a New Year’s Eve party, a four-year-old Worthington drained leftover bottles before wandering into the canteen and defiantly chugging a glass of beer—and to opinion. “[My father] tried to instil in us a feeling of independence and self-sufficiency,” he wrote in his 1984 memoir, Looking for Trouble, “and both my sister and I were encouraged to have opinions about whatever was being discussed at the table.”

Worthington followed in his father’s military footsteps. Rejected by the merchant navy at 15, he became the Royal Canadian Navy’s youngest sub-lieutenant three years later. He fought in the Korean War, interrupting an arts degree at the University of British Columbia that he would complete eight years after enrolling.

He then went on to study journalism at Carleton College, which later became Carleton University, on veteran credits. “The part of him that loved reporting was the same part of him that loved being a soldier,” says Worthington’s stepdaughter, Huffington Post contributing editor Danielle Crittenden. “It allowed him to go out and see not just areas of combat, but world situations that fascinated him. And he could be there on the spot to witness it.”

Worthington soon became a night reporter at the Telegram, a feisty afternoon broadsheet, where he earned $60 a week. Though he thought his military background would make him well-suited to international reporting, his editors refused his requests to cover the 1956 Suez Crisis. So he paid his own way and filed stories for the Tely free of charge, which led to a post as a foreign correspondent.

In his first years reporting abroad, Worthington began his trips by writing features, detailing interactions with locals and brushes with authorities, while learning the area’s politics and culture. He took risks (like venturing into a notoriously dangerous casbah in northern Africa), offered personal observations (writing “I saw” or “I was at the scene when”) and made stories relevant to Canadian audiences. An extreme example: while covering the Algerian War of Independence in 1962, he wrote, “If Toronto was Algiers—what would life be like? . . . At noon a car cruises slowly along Bloor Street between Yonge and Spadina, machine-gunning people as it goes. Six people lie dead on the sidewalk in a space of 10 minutes.”

As a foreign correspondent, he covered everything from the Dalai Lama’s escape from Tibet to riots in Belgium, from the Vietnam War to kidnappings in Zambia. He was the only Canadian journalist to witness the shooting of Lee Harvey Oswald, John F. Kennedy’s assassin, on November 24, 1963. (“Oswald . . . suddenly came through the doors,” he wrote in the next day’s Tely. “He looked into my eyes briefly but intently. He was white-faced, tight-lipped and held his head high and defiantly.”) Andy Donato, a Sun cartoonist and Worthington’s friend of 50 years, says, “I can’t name a country in the world that he hadn’t visited at some point.”

***

When the Tely folded in 1971, Worthington co-founded the Sun with general manager Don Hunt and publisher Doug Creighton. As editor, Worthington could usually be found chatting with Donato, gossiping with the women operating the switchboard (“They worshipped him,” says Crittenden) or, most likely, sitting at his desk writing. He could churn out a column in 20 minutes, filing seven a week—12 if you really needed them—according to Granatstein, who adds, “He drew on his experiences, and nobody had the experiences Peter Worthington had.”

Whatever the topic, the columns had a common thread. “Peter was always a defender of conservatism,” says Sun columnist Joe Warmington. “He was a defender of the unpopular.” He trod familiar right-wing ground—standing up for the likes of Margaret Thatcher and Don Cherry, criticizing the CBC and Jack Layton—with uncommon critical intellect. When questioning the true value of arts grants in a May 1977 Sun column, he referenced their 14th-century origins and failed Soviet counterparts, and was more concerned with creating better art than saving taxpayers money: “As a national make-work scheme for needy artists, Canada Council may be an answer. But it doesn’t—almost can’t, by the very nature of its being—contribute to excellence in ‘art.’” Lamenting the United Nations’s hypocrisy and inefficiency, he offered globe-spanning examples of slavery left unchecked to back his protests. On abortion legalization in 1988 (surefire fodder for a controversial columnist), Worthington asked, “Why are there so many men in the ranks of the anti-abortion movement? . . . I would trust female attitudes toward it more than male.”

He drew criticism for his stance on homosexuality while he was Sun editor—in 1981, he threatened to publish the names of gay men found in future bathhouse raids—but his views on the issue seemed to evolve over time: in a 2012 Sun column, he wrote, “I suspect most people (like me) don’t give a damn who marries whom.”

And when he tackled politics, no party was sacred: the Progressive Conservative government of Brian Mulroney—a politician who “wants popularity more than realistic solutions,” he wrote in the mid-1980s—was as common a target as Trudeau (first father, then son).

His avid readership was another constant. “If we had stopped running Worthington, we would have had a revolt on our hands,” says Granatstein, the Sun’s editorial page editor from 2006 to 2011. “I’m surprised readers didn’t complain after he died that we weren’t running him.”

Worthington had an on-again, off-again relationship with the paper. He resigned several times on principle—over advertising qualms, the paper’s mayoral backing, its sale to Maclean Hunter—before being fired in 1984 for publicly criticizing the Sun chain’s news coverage. “The Edmonton Journal, Calgary Herald, the Toronto Star and The Globe and Mail are going to inform people as to what’s happening far more than any of the Suns,” he said in a book tour interview. “If I was in Edmonton, I’d read theJournal if I only had one newspaper, no question.”

He bounced between a handful of publications before ending up back at the paper he helped launch. “[Firing him] was one of those things that really didn’t mean shit,” says Christie Blatchford, a former Sun reporter and long-time friend of Worthington’s. “Peter never really left the place.”

***

In 1982, during one of his breaks from the Sun, Worthington ran as an independent in Toronto’s federal Broadview-Greenwood riding. But he didn’t campaign with the same audacity he brought to writing. “He was the worst campaigner,” remembers Crittenden. “He hated asking people to do things for him.” She canvassed while Worthington waited uneasily near the street. “Sometimes I’d have to go down the walk and trudge him along up to the door.”

Worthington narrowly lost the race to the riding’s NDP candidate, which was perhaps for the best; colleagues say he wasn’t restrained enough for party politics. A politician “is someone who is circumspect, who watches every word, who hesitates to speak his mind,” says conservative journalist and analyst David Frum, Crittenden’s husband. “In that sense, Peter was a very impolitic person.”

A political life could also have robbed Worthington of his reputation as a newsroom prankster. At the Sun, he would often call his assistant, Christina Blizzard, from elsewhere in the building, with thick foreign accents. “It only became a problem,” she says, “when I would hear from legitimate callers who I thought were Peter.”

Back in the Tely days, Donato arranged to have the cover of The Naked Gourmet—a cookbook Worthington wrote with journalist and cartoonist Ben Wicks in 1970 that featured recipes they had picked up reporting in Africa—airbrushed to show them in the nude. “An artist painted in male genitalia,” says Donato. “He painted Ben resembling a donkey and Peter a little cherub.” Donato hung a proof of the retouched photo in the newsroom. Initially, Worthington went ballistic—he thought it was going to be the actual cover—but laughed when Donato explained the joke. Worthington later got his revenge by surprising Donato with a banana cream pie to the face.

“I used to joke that when my mother remarried, I didn’t just get a new father, I got a new younger brother,” says Crittenden, whose mother, Yvonne, married Worthington in 1970. “He was spiritually about seven years old—maybe 10.” He was always home for dinner, after which he never failed to play baseball on the street or shinny with teenagers at the local rink. “Pete was nothing if not playful,” says Frum. “There was nothing that would make him happier than a fistful of jelly beans and a BB gun, and nothing more horrifying than a black-tie dinner with three different wines.” As a prominent journalist, he would often have to attend those types of functions—but, Frum says, “Never very happily.”

Worthington was also an animal lover. His family joked that it was a greater privilege to be one of his dogs than one of his three children or six grandkids. He was “insane” for Jack Russell terriers; they fit his personality perfectly, says Blatchford. “If Peter was a dog, he would be a Jack Russell: small, wiry, tenacious, fucking ferocious and just a formidable opponent.”

***

On a cold night in the fall of 2003, a 77-year-old Worthington bounced along an Afghan mountain road, riding in the open roof hatch of a light armoured vehicle. The oldest journalist on site with the military in Afghanistan, he offered a signature mix of hard news and colourful description. He gave context for the reader, explaining what the Afghan elections meant for politics back home. “It was an arduous physical journey,” says friend and Postmedia international affairs columnist Matthew Fisher. “Peter handled himself well, of course.”

More than 20 years earlier, Worthington had faced danger with a similarly cool attitude. In 1978, sitting at his Sun desk working on a column, his chest began to hurt. He was having a heart attack.

He casually broke the news to his assistant and headed to the hospital. Later, he had a triple-bypass operation, but was playing tennis three weeks after that; in three months, he was hang-gliding. Crittenden says, “He’d been this sort of superman until he was 82.”

In his final years, though, it became difficult for him to walk. He had to stop every few feet to rest. “He just paused and chatted and pretended that he didn’t notice,” Crittenden says. “But he really hated it.”

Worthington was 86 when he died. His obituary, published the next day in the Sun, had an unusual byline—he’d written it himself: “If you are reading this, I am dead. How’s that for a lead? Guarantees you read on, at least for a bit.”

After his column appeared, someone stuck a giant “-30-” sign on his office door.

By Gin Sexsmith

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

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

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

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

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

But in reality, things are more complicated.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More training, too.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

On the night of Tuesday, September 19, Toronto Sun city hall reporter Rob Granatstein heard something that upset him. Please say it isn’t so, wrote Granatstein in an email to Jim Jennings.

Right now, I’m still your editor-in-chief, replied Jennings. Wait until 10 a.m. tomorrow morning. Then we’ll talk.

At 10 a.m. the next morning out it came: Jennings had resigned. “It was like a funeral in there,” says Granatstein. Jennings was a respected editor. He fought for the newsroom. “You don’t want to see someone like Jim Jennings leave.”

The news spread quickly and hit most people hard. One person had even heard about Jennings’s resignation before they got to work and called in “sick.” Granatstein says, “It was not good.”

Sun Media Corp., which owns the Sun, was quick to deny any connection between the top editor’s resignation and rumoured layoffs. “His resignation was his choice, and we respect that,” said publisher Kin-Man Lee in several articles, “and had nothing to do with a cost reduction or restructuring exercise that we have here at the Sun.”

Jennings stood for certain kinds of newspaper values. “Our goal is to produce a useful, relevant and compelling newspaper which closely matches your—our readers— needs and that champions our community with pride and passion,” he wrote in the Sun on December 2, 2005. As one former employee says, “Jennings is not the kind of guy who would do a hatchet job.”

But Jennings’s values have faded into the background in the time since that declaration, and he has left a troubled newspaper, an anxious newsroom and a corporate parent fearful that unless the Sun adapts to the aggressive force of the Internet, its papers might not survive.

Just four months after Jennings laid out his goals for the paper in print, his ultimate boss, Quebecor Inc. president and CEO Pierre Karl Péladeau told the Canadian Media Directors’ Council, “Everyone in this room would agree that newspapers are not, and cannot remain what they used to be—the newspaper formula must change.” This is the same Pierre Karl Péladeau who more recently told a Report on Business magazine reporter: “My daughter is on the Internet already. Will she one day read newspapers? There’s a good probability she won’t.” The problem with Quebecor’s latest solutions for change at the tabloid newspaper chain it owns – more cuts, more rationalization of resources and more consolidation of editorial sections – is they may do more than fight the Internet’s pull, they may accelerate Sun Media’s decline.

Quebecor’s call for a new formula to retain eyeballs is a familiar refrain. Change for Sun Media in the 21^stcentury has meant substantial cutbacks more than once. In 2001, Quebecor – which purchased the group of tabloids in 1998 – eliminated 302 positions across the chain. Last June, there was another round of layoffs at Sun Media that meant another 120 jobs lost, including 30 at the Sun in Toronto. This move alone will save the company $4.6 million a year. Now there are worries of yet more layoffs across the board. “I was told it’s a fact,” says a former staffer. “The rumours are about when and who.” Many employees are already looking for work elsewhere.

“Right now we’re waiting for the second shoe to drop,” says Maryanna Lewyckyj, unit chair and associate business editor at the Sun. She says it’s like a hockey game: it’s harder to score when you’ve got fewer players. “We’ve already been trying to play catch up.”

After the June 20 layoffs, 137 unionized editorial staff members remained at the Sun. While the paper has never had as many editorial employees as its cross-town rivals – The Globe and Mail currently has about 350 and The Toronto Star has about 400 editorial staff – fewer reporters and editors, fewer sections and a greater advertising-to-editorial ratio all suggest the reductions are now affecting the Sun newsroom’s ability to compete effectively with the other paid dailies.

However, Quebecor believes these cuts will actually help the Sun. They’re applying the money saved towards a $7 million restructuring plan “to improve the quality of content in its newspaper operations as part of a plan to introduce new technologies and streamline production of newsgathering,” according to a press release from June 20. But Lewyckyj is unsure this is the best way to achieve journalistic integrity. She says critical coverage of the Sun in 2002 questioned the paper’s ability to bounce back from reduced circulation numbers and devastating layoffs. “It hasn’t gotten any better,” she says.

When the Sun began in 1971, it had one goal. “Surviving,” says founding editor Peter Worthington. “We were going to be Toronto’s other voice.” But the tabloid upstart has passed through the hands of five owners since inception, and the emphasis is bound to change over time. Now, with Quebecor at the helm, Worthington says its main goal is not so much to be the other voice, but to make money. “Which is valid,” he adds.

Luc Lavoie, executive vice-president of corporate affairs at Quebecor, wouldn’t disagree with Worthington’s assessment. He says the problems at Sun Media newspapers are not unique to the chain, but rather industry wide. “Our philosophy is that we want to win the game,” he says. “The solution is not in nostalgia – it’s in the future.”

For Lavoie, the future means new products and new ideas. One of those new ideas is Sun Media’s “Centres of Excellence.” According to Lewyckyj, the model was created when the chain combined all of its individual circulation customer service call centres at one central location in Kanata, near Ottawa. The goal was to serve people better, but Lewyckyj says too many calls were left on hold or simply dropped. The thinking is that these centres will now be adapted to editorial environments. On October 12, Sun Media announced the appointment of Glenn Garnett to a newly created position of executive editor-in-chief for Sun Media’s English papers, with the task of consolidating the chain’s resources. Each of Sun Media’s papers would be responsible for providing content in particular departments on particular days, then sharing its content with the sister papers. The life section has already been consolidated. Production of Lifestyle pages are shared by the chain, and then reproduced across the chain – and it shows. On Monday, October 9, a story called “Tie the knot or hit the pub?” appeared in the Lifestyle section of the Toronto Sun. That Sunday, the same article popped up in the Ottawa Sun. Even on the Toronto Sun’s website many Lifestyle stories are linked to a Lifewise section hosted by Quebecor’s nationwide Canoe Network.

Producing homogenous content across the Sun Media chain might be thrifty, but the strategy could accelerate the death of local news coverage. With Toronto’s demographics – more than 200 ethnicities speaking about 125 languages – a paper without a sense of community just won’t cut it, especially since its chief competitor, the Star, announced in September that it intends to expand its GTA section. “That doesn’t bode well for the future of the Sun‘s circulation in a big city like Toronto,” says one observer.

Lewyckyj calls it “cookie-cutter journalism.” The same information will appear in all Sun Media papers, with a smattering of local news from each individual community. “It’s a really boring read because there is no local news,” says a former Sun staffer. The consolidation of news is demoralizing editorial staffers who feel they’re losing ownership of their own newspaper. As section after section is taken away from them, editorial staff feel less and less connected to the paper.

According to one source, morale is already low in the newsroom. “People complain openly,” says a formerSun employee. Staff are frustrated by Sun Media’s changing philosophies and about the persistent rumours of another round of layoffs. According to Pat Currie, president of the London City Press Club, Sun Media’s cuts and consolidations are driven by one motive: profit. “It only benefits the suits at Quebecor,” he says.

Once upon a time, there was a great grey lady of the financial press. Prim, pedigreed, if a trifle sheltered and old-maidish, she was a respectable broadsheet, born of leisurely and writerly ways, contemplative and conservative in her nature. Every week (more or less at the same time, depending on the whims of Canada Post), her collected thoughts on investing reached the doorsteps of her readers. Her name was The Financial Post, and her servants were loyal for life. ‘@’ But life for The FinancialPost changed irrevocably in 1987 when her father, Maclean Hunter Publishing, arranged a marriage of convenience between the paper and a most unlikely suitor: the brash, ballsy, somewhat boorish, big-bucks tabloid, The Toronto Sun. The union was not a happy one. But by wedding the financial depth of one with the hands-on experience of the other, they gave painful birth to The Financial Post daily-and caused the death of the old Post tradition. ‘@’ It was a slow death, with many casualties. Post people-those who remain, that is-don’t want to talk too much about it. But four and a half years ago, on the day it was announced that the Post had been sold to the Sun, one longtime senior manager confided his fear to another, and in doing so, prophesied the future: This isn’t a merger,” he said. “It’s a take over” The weekly Financial Post was founded in 1907 by John Bayne Maclean to guide investors safely through an unscrupulous market. It exposed nefarious investment schemes like stocks in peat bogs, and oil wells in the Peace River. Through diligent, if sometimes ponderous reporting, it won its reputation as a financial bible. It grew successful enough to become the foundation of the Maclean Hunter publishing empire.

Staff were a loyal cornerstone of that foundation. “Maclean Hunter was a solid company to work for,” recalls Bea Riddell, who did 20 years as a reporter, then editor at the Post, “sometimes stodgy, but a benign, good company.” In those good old stodgy days, Riddell’s byline had to run as “B.W. Riddell” because women then didn’t write about business. (When her gender was eventually revealed to Post readers, 10 cancelled their subscriptions.) What made the Post special through those years was its editorial depth as a weekly, she says. “We were trying to run away from the pack, not with it. We looked for added value on everything we gave. We were trying to give analysis.”

In 1977, another Post lifer, with a mere 17 years under his belt, assumed the title of editor. Much as Neville Nankivell revered the tradition of an insightful weekly, he had long dreamed that the Post should make the progression to a daily. He explains: “You can’t just be a business paper for the elite.”

In the late seventies, coincidentally at the same time as the Post redesigned its format and began to print on the more modern Toronto Sun presses, Nankivell proposed some strategies for a daily Post to Maclean Hunter. “Nothing much happened,” he says. And he got the same reaction when he tried again in 1984.

Meanwhile, on the edge of the city’s financial centre, the risk-taking Toronto Sun was becoming a power in its own right. Planted firmly in the ashes of The Toronto Telegram, the Sun was decidedly working-class, with scantily-clad women posing on a color Page Three, right-wing editorials, pages and pages of sports and opinionated columnists, and miniscule business coverage. In other words, a success. In April 1981, Maclean Hunter bought a 50 per cent controlling interest.

Nobody in their wildest imaginings figured that the investment would lead to the odd coupling of the Post and the Sun six years later. Hartley Steward, a diehard Sun boy, who from 1980 to 1984 published and fine-tuned the corporation’s newest progeny, The Calgary Sun, neatly sums up the Sun view of the Post in the eighties. “When all the things were piled up on my desk to read…I almost never got to The Financial Post weekly. It never had a sense of urgency for me,” he says, then adds with incredulity: “I couldn’t believe the circulation it had. A weekly business paper delivered by mail!” Urgency wasn’t high on the list of Post employees either, according to Steward. “We used to print the weekly,” he says. “Sometimes they would miss their deadline by five or six hours. That used to cost them.”

Maybe so, but there were benefits to the Post’s gentler approach to publishing. “It had the reputation of being a good place to work,” says Tracy LeMay, who came to the Post from The Globe and Mail in 1984 to bolster its personal finance coverage, and is one of the few from those days who still remain. “Newspapers some’: times can be very brutal, fast-paced, but the Post wasn’t like that. It was a civil place, civil because it could afford to be.”

Dunnery Best left the Post over a hiring decision in 1987, just before the news of the Sun takeover, but he too recalls his seven years of reporting as mostly golden. “The Post was a writer’s paper and we had a number of name journalists,” says Best, now managing editor of The Financial Times of Canada. “In 1985-86, our circulation was over 200,000 and we were making money. It was a profitable book. It had no identity crisis, and could compete with the dailies.”

Such was the Post on the eve of the Sun buyout-relatively content, successful, harmonious, and in no way prepared for the power plays to come. While Neville Nankivell may have long dreamed of a daily Financial Post, it took the CEO of The Toronto Sun Corporation, Doug Creighton, and the head of Hollinger Inc., Conrad Black, to start those presses. “Creighton and Black had been talking about the need [for a Canadian financial daily], and said ‘Why don’t we talk to Maclean Hunter,'” recalls Nankivell. He got a call in August 1987, from the same bosses who had turned him down three years earlier, saying “Can you revive the plan and put it together in two weeks?” With a few trusted staff members, Nankivell went immediately into secret Saturday meetings to begin fulfilling his dream. In what ex-Poster Dunnery Best describes as “selling from one pocket into another,” Maclean Hunter facilitated the finances for a daily Post while diluting the risk to itself. It sold 100 per cent of the Post to the Toronto Sun Corp. in exchange for an increase of Sun stock, to 62 per cent from 50 per cent. The Sun then sold 25 per cent of the Post to The Financial Times of London, and 15 per cent to Conrad Black’s Hollinger Inc. At the time, a good deal for everyone.

In October 1987, at Maclean Hunter headquarters in Toronto’s College Park building, The Financial Post staff were shepherded from their desks and offices on the sixth floor to a large empty room on the fourth.

There were no chairs for the audience and no fanfare. Just a few people sitting behind a long table, and a podium. One by one, they went up to the podium-among them, Creighton for the Sun, Ron Osborne, president, for Maclean Hunter, Nankivell for the Post-and broke the news to the staff. “I t was short and sweet,” says Ron Mitchell, who on that day was with the Toronto Sun Corp. and with no editorial experience is now publisher and CEO of The Financial Post. “There were no questions.”

Maybe that’s because most listeners were stunned-less about the implications of going daily than being bought by the people famous for Page Three. “It was a shock,” says Bea Riddell. “The big surprise was the relationship with the Sun.”

When the news went public, the Sunshine Girl jokes began. Riddell was not the only staffer to be teased about the Post having a little T & A alongside its stock quotations. What wasn’t so funny was whether a Sun run Post could pull off a miracle and launch a paper in four months.

The amount of work ahead to create a daily tabloid, while maintaining the weekly edition, demanded more bodies. The first to arrive were the Sun’s number-crunchers, Mitchell and Tom MacMillan. They spent time at the Post learning about the environment, talking to the staff about what they could expect from switching to another corporate system (payroll, benefits, etc.) and as Mitchell puts it, “getting to know what we’d bought.”

It didn’t take long for them to size up the situation. In order to get a daily out, the Sun clearly had to move in. At the time, Hartley Steward was stationed in Europe on Sun business. Creighton asked him to be the point man on the daily launch. Steward hasn’t forgotten his first impressions of the Post’s original weekly staff, nor the impression he made on them: “I was ‘the guy from the Sun,’ and it was difficult for them to realize that a tabloid guy was their boss.”

Steward hired an outsider, Steve Petherbridge, to create and head the news desk. As ex-managing editor of The Toronto Star, Petherbridge had what everybody else on staff lackedexperience in getting out a daily. “It didn’t seem to have occurred to them that you couldn’t put out a daily in the same way as you could a weekly,” he says. “They had very antiquated systems and notions about how to move copy for a deadline.” He began to motivate them by iron fist, often using it to pullout his hair, but his gruffness rubbed many of the Post people the wrong way. As Eric Reguly, who is now running the daily’s New York bureau, says, “Steve wasn’t the best-loved man.”

The culture clash created all kinds of friction. Almost immediately, two camps began to develop in the newsroom; on one side were the new employees hired by the Sun management, and on the other the old staff accustomed to Post ways.

“It wasn’t only the clash between the daily and the weekly,” notes Petherbridge, “it was the clash between the old virginal Financial Post and the nasty rough Sun, which’ people found hard to take. I mean the old Posters, as they came to be known, really had trouble getting used to the notion that they were owned by a tabloid newspaper that had semi-naked women on Page Three. And Sun people thought that Posters were effete old snobs who weren’t used to hard work. I mean, there’s some truth to both attitudes.”
The differences were on every level-ideological and practical. “The Sun didn’t understand our concern with accuracy and providing something more than the news,” says Bea Riddell. “They didn’t understand our need to have experts.” And some of the differences were irreconcilable. “A lot of people left,” says Tracy LeMay, “who might not have wanted to work for a daily or because of the culture clash. The first couple of weeks I’m surprised we survived.”

The only person who downplays the problems with this “merger” of corporate styles is Neville Nankivell, then editor-in-chief and publisher of the Post operation: “I suppose some noses were out of joint. There were certainly some personality clashes. But some of the best weekly people turned out to be the best daily people.”

More power to them, because the place was in chaos. LeMay says understatedly, “I don’t think people were having a whole lot of fun-in at eight in the morning, out at eight at night, and hardly having any time to eat.” It didn’t help that while the Post was busy reinventing itself into a hard-nosed, ahead-of-time news business tabloid, the stock markets crashed. Ron Mitchell says ruefully, “Timing in life is everything, and we picked the wrong time.”

Not only was it the wrong time, but there was so little time to think before the February 1988 target date, says then-editor John Godfrey, that he was picking new staff almost on the basis of “the color of their eyes.” To save money, the Post hired cheap-many of the recruits were young and inexperienced, some right out of journalism school. Besides adding to the already divided feeling of the newsroom, this contributed to the confusion of new faces. Nametags were worn, mistakes were made. Such was the pandemonium, that Bea Riddell approached a man wearing a nametag and asked him if he’d finished his story. He replied, “Listen lady, I’m just here to install the phones.”

Hartley Steward had bigger problems to fix. Worried about the pace of production, he devised the idea of doing dummy runs of the paper. Every day for two weeks before the launch, stories were written, edited and laid out as if they were being published for circulation. Steward stood in the centre of the composing room with a stopwatch, and at deadline yelled, “Time!” at which point whatever was available was printed. In the first dummy run about half the paper was empty, or stories were missing leads, photos or cutlines. But with each successive run, the paper got closer to being filled.

The night before launch day, February 2, 1988, The Financial Post’s timing again proved unlucky. A major snowstorm effectively stalled delivery of the all-time thickest, 96-page Financial Post daily. Sun CEO Creighton wasn’t delivered a copy of his launch issue at all.

Those who did lay eyes on the historic launch paper saw a product closer to the Sun’s style than the Post’s. It was short and snappy, could be read on a crowded subway, and gave news analysis over to a pack of right-wing, pro-business columnists such as Diane Francis, Barbara Amiel, and Peter Worthington. American and international coverage was strong. Obviously vying with its major competitor, the Report on Business section of The Globe and Mail, it carried a higher story count.

The body count was higher too. In the Post’s struggle to be noticeably different, it became famed for its “revolving door.” Hard to say whether the turnover was simply because of the suddenness of change or because of poor management, or maybe an unsettling combination of the two. When Hartley Steward was called away by the Sun to start up another paper in Ottawa, he left an operation staggering to fill its own pages and prepared to eat its young in order to do so.

“The newsroom had never been geared to producing copy to strict deadlines,” says Petherbridge in defence of their survival tactics. “It didn’t even have an assignment desk as such there were incredible bottlenecks. There was no order of system to it. I think after a couple of months it became apparent to the Sun people who were involved in the long run that it couldn’t go on like that, that some drastic changes were needed. So we had this quick reshuffle.”

The “reshuffle” catapulted Petherbridge from news editor into the newly created position of executive editor, over the head of editor John Godfrey, as well as the heads of the existing Post managing and deputy managing editors. All retained their titles, but lost their clout. Effective control of the newsroom was taken from Godfrey, whom the Post had hired in 1987 although he had no working newspaper experience.

Ostensibly the changes were made to streamline the daily process. A memo to the “grunts” circulated downwards from on high, read, “This is the end of lunch as we know it.” Petherbridge admits that serious differences in attitude wouldn’t be resolved by one memo on too-long lunches. “A lot of these problems were not solved until some people left and new ones came” And more and more of those new ones came from the Sun.

It’s January 4, 1992, and The Financial Post has just marked another major launch. The weekend broadsheet, the last hold-out from old Post days, has become a tabloid.

It bursts with characteristic Sun energy and noise, boasting four-color cover, splashes, and a pumped-up schizophrenic “Spectrum” section that includes cooking, all kinds of commentary (from Preston Manning to Allan Fotheringham), a feature on William Burroughs, and a business travelers’ guide to London, England.

The old Post staff has traveled almost as far as the paper. Neville Nankivell is now carrying the specially created title of “editor-at-large” in London, heading the Post’s bureau and keeping an eye on its European division. N ankivell says he chose to divest himself of the power and titles he had accumulated over 30 years “because I wanted to do the writingYou can’t just hang on forever.
Things change, roles do change.”

Indeed they do, and none more significantly than when, in 1991, Sun transplant Ron Mitchell was quietly appointed publisher of the daily paper that Nankivell had dreamed so long of and fought so hard for.

John Godfrey, editor-at-large for his last seven months at the Post, was delighted to move on to the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. He chose to jump instead of getting the push. Dedicated 30-year-plus Post editors Carlyle Dunbar and John Soganich were fired without warning January 30. Soganich received a retirement package, but 61-year-old Dunbar did not. “At this age, it’s rather unlikely that I will find another full-time job,” he says.

Eric Reguly still heads the bureau in New York City, but as one who’s weathered all of five years from pre-Sun to daily, feels like a relic from the Ice Age. “Very few of us old weekly people survived.” Even those hand-picked by the Sun proved expendable, such as Steve Petherbridge, who was fired last year for not vetting a story critical of a major Post advertiser with senior management. Replaced with a transplant from The Edmonton Sun, Petherbridge thinks the decision “signals that the Post is prepared to be a lot more accommodating to its business constituency, maybe to soften stories that might offend major businesses who potentially might be advertisers.”

If so, you might excuse it as the kind of desperate measure a desperate company might take to outlast the current brutal recession. But all along, the Post under the Sun has paid an uncommonly high human cost.

More visible, however, at least to the Sun’s shareholders and media buyers, are the stunning financial costs the daily has incurred, a steady hemorrhage of dollars that continues to debilitate the Post. This past December, the Toronto Star reported Financial Post losses to date at $55 million and counting, not including the original $45 million investment to go daily. Ron Mitchell calls the Star’s figures “pure speculation,” but neither confirms nor denies their accuracy. Rumor puts the losses higher.

Media buyers are closely watching to see whether the Sun/Post marriage can be saved. “This is clearly a make-or-break year for them,” says Patrick Walshe, vice president of Harrison, Young, Pesonen & Newell Inc. “This is the year they need to start to show some black ink.”

Readers have mixed views about the four-year-old daily, now that it has come so far from the business views and voice of the Post of yesteryear. “Competition has inspired The Financial Post and The Globe and Mail,” says Chuck Winograd, chairman of the brokerage house Richardson Greenshields, who reads both: “The dark side is that perhaps it has forced people to do more sensationalization.” A source well-established in the Toronto business community, says the Post is doing too much “rumor mongering” in its rush to scoop the competition. Nor, reports the source, is Bay Street impressed with the recent appointment of Sun columnist and business journalist Diane Francis as editor.

If said to her face, these comments wouldn’t faze Francis. She’s Sun material through and through-brash, ballsy, and shooting for big bucks.

The Financial Post has never known a healthy economy in its daily form, nor are papers expected to show profits for their first five years. But you have to wonder how much longer the Toronto Sun Corporation will continue to suffer the bitter pill it swallowed for its ambitions to tabloidize the Post. It is too late to go back to the old ways. But, of course, there was never any intention of preserving those ways. Whatever the daily’s future, it deliberately left in its wake another newspaper’s tradition, values and philosophy.

Francis makes no apology about the rising of the Sun and the setting of the old Financial Post. “It was a sort of stodgy place before. Now we have drink-ups and people don’t take themselves so seriously.” Then, as if we didn’t quite get the picture, she says, “The takeover is complete.”

Journalism is about power. From the stories we choose to cover, to the way we present them, to the conflicts between writers and editors-every aspect of the industry assumes some type of control over our audience, our subjects and ourselves. More and more, journalists are seen as sources of information, “experts” on whatever subject they are reporting. Broadcasters interview panels of other journalists to get their interpretations of current issues. Educators and politicians use newspaper and magazine articles as reference material. Among the general population, the phrase “I read it somewhere” becomes justification of fact.

The written word has a lasting effect. I’ve known it since the third grade when my teacher caught me passing a note in class and made me read it aloud. It said, “Tracey likes Ron”-a horribly damaging statement to a nine year-old girl. For the next week, the class teased Tracey, never once questioning the accuracy of my pronouncement. It was the power of the pen in action.
That power is no doubt the reason most of us are in the field of journalism. I’m skeptical of those who say they are in it for the love of writing. If that is the sole motivation, why bother to be published? It is the thought of being read that is so seductive. Then the force of the reader comes into play; we want praise and approval as well.

That is journalism, power from all angles, and it’s what this Review is about. The power of tough city columnist Rosie DiManno, who touches a nerve and brings attention to herself. Our country’s critics and reviewers, who have the power to kill-or breathe life into-a restaurant or play. The corporate power of The Toronto Sun, which imposed its culture on The Financial Post. The long-lasting power of magazine editor Ralph Allen on those who worked with him. The struggle for power between The Windsor Star and its employees in a labor arbitration case. The question of abuse of power by the press toward the Prime Minister. You can decide if they have wielded their power wisely, by reading this magazine. That is the small power that is ours.

(FLASH) “Right hand a bit lower on your bum Suzie.” (FLASH) “That’s it, head up, smile.” (FLASH) “Good now turn a little to your right and show us what you’ve got.” (FLASH) “Fantastic!”

The studio on the second floor of the Toronto Sun building is small, dark and cool. But the air is filled with energy that smells of coconut, sounds of mellow music and looks like Suzie. She is 19. Eventually she wants to be a model or an airline stewardess but today, through the practised eye of Sun photographer Michael Peake, she is transformed into a Sunshine Girl. The tropical smell comes from Suzie’s tanned body which is coated in a rich, shiny oil. The quiet music comes from a stereo receiver hidden in a cupboard near the door. “Mood music” Peake calls it.

Clad only in a string bikini, patterned after a leopard’s spotted skin, Suzie moves like a professional though she has never done any modelling before. She is the eighth Sunshine Girl Peake has shot this year. Half-an-hour and three rolls of film later it is all over. Suzie gets dressed and Peake takes the film across the hall to the photo department for developing.

It was a simple and fun shoot but a photojournalist’s days are not all filled with sunshine (or Sunshine Girls) even when he or she works for The Toronto Sun. Under the searing heat of the Colombian sun, the air filled with the stench of thousands of rotting corpses, Peake slogged through the mud that had buried the town of Armero after a nearby volcano erupted. His Nikon recorded images of a disaster-the frantic efforts of rescue workers, the bloated bodies of children, the shock-dulled survivors. “It was the hardest thing I have ever done.” It was also the only thing he could do, during those brutal aftermath days. But unlike many other photojournalists, Mike Peake does not separate himself from the reality he covers. He would never stand by and take pictures of someone in a life threatening situation, he insists, not if he could help.

But even then, sometimes, journalistic instincts take over and the journalist keeps taking pictures. A recent shoot in Toronto’s High Park had all the elements of a Sun production: a beautiful girl in a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes, walking through the snow towards a huge Siberian tiger that lounged in the foreground. No one knew, not even the trainer (who stood just out of camera range), that the tiger was in a playful mood. As the motor drive on Peake’s camera whined, the tiger sprang up and threw itself on the girl. The trainer threw himself on the tiger. Peake threw himself into his work and kept his finger on the shutter button. It was allover in a few seconds, the tiger calm, the girl cold and shaken, the trainer very embarrassed.

“It happened so fast there was no time to think,” Peake says, unsure that he had captured the action until the film was developed. “I don’t remember taking the pictures, just lowering my camera after it was allover because I felt self-conscious.” Peake will get about $2,500 out of the shots, which were picked up by papers around the world. “It was a slow news week,” he says. Like a great deal of photo journalism, the “lady and the tiger” had been a question of being in the right place at the right time which was also a factor in bringing Peake to the Sun 11 years ago.

In 1975 he was in his final year of the journalism program at Ryerson Polytechnical Institute. As well as being the photo editor on the campus paper, he worked as a freelance photographer for the Sun. Though he did not graduate, (“never was scholastically inclined”) he was lucky enough to be home one day the following summer when the Sun called and offered him a job. “Since then I have only worked about four shifts that I have not had to take a picture.”

For the photojournalist the pictures not taken are often as important as the pictures taken. Peake recalls the time he was asked to photograph a woman as she answered the door of her home, what’s known in the trade as a “grab-shot” “But, when I got there and she came to the door, I asked if I could take a picture. She refused and I left. The editor tells me what he wants. But he gets what I give him.”

Still, Peake has had to make some compromises over the years. In the past, for instance, he would never “arrange” a photograph, preferring to shoot things as they were rather than how he or an editor would like them to be. Today, especially when shooting people, he has no problem with moving them around to make better pictures. “Knowing what you want and getting it tells the story much better than taking what you get, just as long as you tell the real story and not a new one.”

Peake loves his job. He loves the freedom and the adventure of iL He has photographed mountain climbers in Tibet, followed the Pope throughout his visit to Canada and covered the Barrie tornado disaster. When not working for the Sun he writes, publishes and illustrates Che-mun, the newsletter of Canadian Wilderness Canoeing. Peake is an avid canoeist and spends his vacations traversing the many rivers of Canada compiling stories for his newsletter. He took over Che-mun, which is Ojibwa for canoe, almost two years ago and uses the facilities at the Sun to produce the newsletter which goes out to more than 200 paid subscribers-including Pierre Trudeau. Last summer, Peake, his brothers Sean and Geoffrey, and three friends spent 55 days canoeing more than one thousand miles through the Northwest Territories. The trip resulted in a two page centre spread in the Sun and lots of interesting copy for Che-mun. Peake speaks with enthusiasm about his work. “Once you have lost that,” he says, “it is time to quit” And after II years, he’s still excited by the certainty that anything can happen. On a few hours notice he may find himself half-way around the world. The downside is that he’s probably there because a lot of people are suffering, or someone important has died. But then a photojournalist is just a journalist, the camera is his pen and the pictures are his words. And having to deal with the realities of the world “is just part of the job.”

So why did that same Saturday edition of the Star run a travel section titled “Mexico, land of the sun”? And why did the next day’s edition of The Toronto Sun also run a travel section on Mexico, while the paper’s front-page headlines screamed about the ravages of the earthquake? Both travel sections contained stories and ads promoting tourism in places such as Acapulco, Puerto Vallarta and Manzanillo. After the stark, front-page headlines, the travel sections came as a slap in the face to readers. The Mexico on the front looked like Dante’s Inferno, while the Mexico in the back looked like the Garden of Eden.

George Bryant is travel editor at the Star. “This is one of the perils of preprinting,” he says. “Any major newspaper that preprints faces the same risk.”

The Star-especially the Saturday edition which has 10 sections-is too big a paper to print on the day it appears. The presses can’t handle it, which means that some of the sections must be printed in advance. Travel, for example, is printed on Thursday morning, along with other sections such as New in Homes. Entertainment is printed on Wednesday night. Only the hard news sections go to press just before the paper comes out.

The Toronto Sun also pre-prints, though only for its Sunday edition and 92 of 200 pages for the Boxing Day edition. “No presses can handle all the sections of a weekend paper at once,” says Mike Burke-Gaffney, theSun‘s Sunday editor. The Sunday Sun‘s Showcase and Going Places are printed early Friday morning. Comment/Lifestyle and Homes/Classified are printed Friday night. The Sun‘s TV Magazine is printed on the preceding Monday or Tuesday, and the comics are printed two weeks before publication, in Buffalo (most Canadian papers get their comics from U.S. syndications). And all of it goes into the same paper.

The Globe and Mail pre-prints as well. “As news sections grow,” says Lazzlo Buhasz, assistant editor, “the other parts of the paper have to be pre-printed.” The Globe pre prints its Saturday Travel and Saturday Homes sections. Both of these hit the presses Thursday night. The food and recipe section, Shopping Basket, which comes out on Wednesday, is also planned and printed in advance, on Monday night.

The whole process is a race against time: get the story, get it printed, and get it to the reader-fast. By the time the news sections of the paper are printed, other sections such as Homes and Travel have to be done and ready to hit the streets.

But maybe once every 10 years, something goes wrong. For The Toronto Star and The Sunday Sun it was the Mexico story. “But we’re talking about an act of God here,” says Star ombudsman Rod Goodman. “Can you suggest a solution?”

“I am as sensitive as anyone to something like this,” says the Star‘s Bryant. “I feel bad-though helpless is more the word to use. But it’s done, it’s fact. You just have to go on and do the next weekend’s section and hope nothing happens in the Caribbean.”