Indian Newspapers Thrive with Economy

The onslaught of digital media in the developed countries of the world regularly brings pronouncements of the death of the traditional newspaper. But this assumption of digital triumph misses out on the reality in countries across the global South.

As incomes rise and literacy levels go up, so does the desire to consume news and information. And while many are jumping straight to online and mobile phone sources, just as many are enjoying more traditional print media offerings like magazines and newspapers.

India boasts both a fast-growing economy and the largest number of paid-for newspapers in the world. The print media industry in India has seen phenomenal growth since 2005, with the number newspaper titles increasing by 40 percent to 2,700 (World Association of Newspapers). The two factors driving this growth in newspapers are rising literacy and a booming economy

The World Association of Newspapers found China leads the world for newspaper subscribers, with 93.5 million readers a day. India is second. It is estimated the Indian newspaper industry will generate US $3.8 billion in revenues in 2010, a 13 percent growth rate over the last five years.

Estimates place growth in the newspaper industry in the next four years at 9 percent a year, to US $5.9 billion (KPMG).

Part of the reason India is defying the decline in newspaper numbers and readership seen in developed countries is poor internet penetration across the country. Because of this, only 7 percent of the population uses the web for information. And the country’s high number of illiterates (just 65 percent of the population can read) means even if many could afford a newspaper, they couldn’t use it.

According to Amar Ambani, head of research at India Infoline Group, “Unlike the West where the internet publishing and advertising has significantly hit the print media, the Internet threat to print media is still in its nascent stage in India, given the low penetration of computers and adequate bandwidth across the country.”

Newspapers are also growing in a highly competitive market exploding with new television channels on cable and satellite and other media distractions like mobile phone applications.

The newspapers (http://www.world-newspapers.com/india.html) are a strong reflection of how much the economy has changed in the past decade. They contain advertisements for property, mobile phones, cars and dating services.

Cost is also a critical element in their success: at only four rupees each (US $0.09 cents), many Indians buy several newspapers at a time for their home. The publications are able to charge so little because of the health of the advertising revenue coming in. Newspaper advertising in India increased by 30 percent between January and Match 2010 alone, the quickest jump in ads for the Asia-Pacific region (Nielsen India).

There is a hierarchy in the newspaper industry: English-language newspapers attract wealthier readers and can charge the most for advertising. But rising literacy rates combined with increasing personal wealth is fuelling growth in regional papers written in local languages. India has 22 official languages and English as an associate language. The country as a whole has about 33 different languages and over 2,000 local dialects. Hindi newspaper circulation rose from 8 million in the early 1990s to over 25 million in 2009.

The Times of India (http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com) is now the world’s largest circulation English-language newspaper, with 4 million readers. It uses this success to charge 10 times what regional papers can for advertising. At present, the regional newspapers’ bread-and-butter is mostly government-paid advertising.

But if trends continue as they are, then the tables will turn on big beasts like the Times of India. Regional papers will grow as people look for an opportunity to read in their own local language.

Flush with cash and confidence, Indian newspapers are also innovating new ways to advertise untried in other countries. Talking ads attached to the actual newspaper’s back pages caused a great stir when they were trialled in India recently (http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/greenslade/2010/sep/28/newspapers-advertising). The talking ads for a car company delivered a sales pitch but also alarmed and annoyed many people because the talking ad wouldn’t stop talking.

Ambani puts the success of the Indian newspaper industry down to five factors: the economic boom in semi-urban and rural India; growing local content; more opportunity to grow the number of readers; rising advertising spending; and rising literacy as a result of rising secondary school enrolment. He believes students aged between 10 and 15 are getting the newspaper habit and they represent huge future growth in newspaper readers.

By David South, Development Challenges, South-South Solutions

Published: October 2010

Development Challenges, South-South Solutions was launched as an e-newsletter in 2006 by UNDP's South-South Cooperation Unit (now the United Nations Office for South-South Cooperation) based in New York, USA. It led on profiling the rise of the global South as an economic powerhouse and was one of the first regular publications to champion the global South's innovators, entrepreneurs, and pioneers. It tracked the key trends that are now so profoundly reshaping how development is seen and done. This includes the rapid take-up of mobile phones and information technology in the global South (as profiled in the first issue of magazine Southern Innovator), the move to becoming a majority urban world, a growing global innovator culture, and the plethora of solutions being developed in the global South to tackle its problems and improve living conditions and boost human development. The success of the e-newsletter led to the launch of the magazine Southern Innovator.  

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New student group seeks 30 percent tuition hike

Coalition hoping to be the “responsible” campus alternative

By David South

Now Magazine (Toronto, Canada), December 17-23, 1992

While the provincial government’s decision to eliminate most student grants has many students worrying about meeting the increasing costs of higher education, a new student group is lobbying the province to hike tuition.

The Ontario Undergraduate Student Alliance (OUSA) is a coalition of executives from student councils at the University of Toronto – the biggest in Canada – as well as Queen’s, Brock, the University of Waterloo and Wilfred Laurier.

Those councils used to be members of the Ontario Federation of Students (OFS), the province’s major student organization, representing more than 200,000 students at 31 colleges and universities.

But there have been disagreements within the OFS over its policy that tuition fees be abolished. The five dissident student councils got together last month and launched OUSA to address what they say is “the worst underfunding crisis in recent memory.”

The group calls for a 30-per-cent increase in tuition over the next three years, an about-face from the stance of most mainstream student organizations, which call for, at the very least, a tuition freeze. Both the OFS and the Canadian Federation of Students have a zero-tuition policy.

“Until now, student groups have been whining, but our approach is reasonable,” says Farrah Jinha, president of U of T’s Students’ Administrative Council, which left OFS a decade ago. “OUSA is setting a limit on how much tuition can increase and with very specific conditions.”

OUSA’s plan calls for the provincial government to match, dollar-for-dollar, any increase in student fees. In conjunction with a 5-per-cent increase in private sector contributions, this would infuse an expected $360 million into higher education, says OUSA.

Political lobbyist Titch Dharamsi – a former vice-president of SAC and high-profile organizer for the Liberal party – has carried over his lobbying duties to OUSA.

Gimme gimme

Dharamsi says OUSA isn’t out to rival OFA and is just being “realistic.” “The public likes our ideas. They are real, workable solutions. We recognize the province’s fiscal problems. It’s not just ‘gimme, gimme’ anymore.”

Jinha says the policy positions of the OFS don’t have much in common with everyday student concerns.

“People felt it wasn’t worth the money,” she says. “Many students across the province were frustrated with OFS taking stands on non-student issues like abortion, decriminalizing marijuana or the Gulf war. We wanted a group which would focus more on issues like teaching quality and accessibility to funding.”

OUSA claims to represent 85,000 students. Staff have been hired and equipment purchased for the group’s unmarked office in the suites of a University Avenue law firm. “We are in this for the long haul,” Dharamsi says.

OUSA has caught the eye of colleges and universities minister Richard Allen, whose party shares a zero-tuition policy with the OFS. But now that the NDP finds itself governing during a recession, Allen’s views sound more like OUSA’s.

“The party policy on tuition is symbolic,” he says. “It says we want to address barriers to post-secondary education.”

Student quits

One student representative on U of T’s Students’ Administrative Council, Jason Zeidenberg, resigned when SAC decided to join OUSA.

“The process hasn’t involved students,” says Zeidenberg. “It is a policy for student politicians, not students. OUSA has no constitution, no financial structure, no mechanism for individual students to bring questions forward. It is an undemocratic, fly-by-night institution.

“Until they justify their expenditures, they are under suspicion of being a front group to legitimize policies like raising tuition.”

OUSA isn’t legally obliged to incorporate itself or provide a constitution or accountable executive. The group operates much like a club, with member council executives making decisions collectively, and funds coming out of member unions’ budgets.

Joining OFS requires a student referendum, but because of OUSA’s quasi-ad-hoc status, no such vote is needed to join the new group.

Dharamsi says this approach is cost-effective and flexible. He says OUSA has spent around $10,000 to date, but can’t offer a fixed budget.

Zeidenberg hs organized several college and faculty student unions at U of T to demand that SAC hold a referendum about membership in OUSA.

Craft doesn’t feel that OUSA is a threat. “I’m not losing sleep over it,” he says. “We’re considered the representatives of students in Ontario.”

Recently, however, the University of Western Ontario pulled out of OFS and is currently negotiating with OUSA about joining. Western’s departure takes another 20,000 students and precious dollars with them, and funding cuts have led OFS to lay off staff.

Read the original story here: New student group seeks 30 percent tuition hike

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This cover is by great Canadian political cartoonist and illustrator Jack Lefcourt. Always funny, Jack captures well the corporate take-over of the country’s universities and the introduction of the catastrophic debt culture that leaves so many students in a financial pickle. It was also Id’s first student issue. Id Magazine: Student Issue, “The guide to the zeitgeist”, Ontario, 1996, Features Editor: David South.

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© David South Consulting 2021

 

Undercurrents: A cancellation at CBC TV raises a host of issues for the future

By David South

Scan Magazine (Canada), April/May 1997

The screensaver on an Undercurrents researcher’s computer terminal bears a maxim that might strike a chord in a lot of CBC units these days: “Only the paranoid survive.”

The quirky media and technology show will fade to black at the end of March. Its cancellation raises a host of issues for a CBC deeply troubled by budget cuts, an ageing audience, a dearth of alternative programme concepts and an inability to plan for a future.

In the show’s pilot, Wendy Mesley – Undercurrents’ host and progenitor – set the tone for this accessible look at the relationship among technology, media and society: “Like it or not we are living in a wired world where OJ Simpson, Big Brother, even your bank machine, all converge … we’ll explore all the issues, the undercurrents of the information age.”

To those who loved it, Undercurrents was a program that satisfied a vital public need, and an ambitious concept for a public broadcaster that some say had grown a little musty. The show promised avant-garde production and investigative journalism that critically explored today’s new media and technology culture. Youngish researchers and producers were hired from outside the CBC. They brought with them experience and new ideas from specialty channels, TV Ontario and CTV. Some came straight out of journalism school.

Critical reaction to the first programs was mixed. John Doyle, a critic with the Globe and Mail’s Broadcast Week, lauded Undercurrents when it launched, calling it “a superb example of  solid CBC-TV journalism and original reporting.” Others were less flattering. The Toronto Star’s Greg Quill accused the show of “flirting with infotainment.” At the Vancouver Sun, Alex Strachan wasn’t impressed by a report on a weekend conclave of computer geeks in the California desert for a kind of Hackerstock. “It sounds interesting,” he wrote, “but it isn’t.”

What hurt more was schedulers playing musicial chairs with the show’s slot. Switching Undercurrents from Tuesday at 7 pm to Friday at 7 pm midway through its life left viewers confused and sent ratings plummeting just as network programmers were casting about for places to apply a whopping 30 percent budget cut. As a result, some feel the show never had a fighting chance.

In the end, it was the show’s precarious financial arrangement that killed it. Undercurrents was never funded from the general current affairs budget. Instead, it drew on a special reserve of cash created by the network. When it came time to mete out the cuts in December, the special funding bubble burst. Rather than cut further into the budgets of flagship current affairs programs, executives chose to drop Undercurrents.

Executive producer Frances Mary (FM) Morrison acknowledges that gratitude for her program’s special funding obscured a recognition of its fragility. “That was really our Achilles heel,” she says. “We were just this little orphan that didn’t have its own money. We weren’t adopted into the larger family.”

With the network funding gone, Undercurrents’ budget (rumoured to be over a million dollars per season) was nowhere to be found. Discussions about chasing a corporate sponsor went nowhere because the show needed more money than any sponsor could have provided. “It was never an issue of $100,000 or $200,000,” says Morrison. “It was the issue of our entire budget. [CBC] would still have had to come up with the rest of it.”

CBC TV’s news, current affairs and Newsworld director Bob Culbert and former current affairs head Norm Bolen both say they wanted the show to stay on the air but couldn’t find a way to fund it withou seriously hurting programs like The Fifth Estate, Marketplace and Venture.

Bolen, now VP of programming at the History and Entertainment Network, says it came down to choosing between The Health Show and Undercurrents. The Health Show won because it had a “bigger audience, a broader demographic and was bringing in revenue from sales of programming to the specialty channels.”

Mesley has another theory. “The majority of people who worked on this programme are not traditional CBCers… They can’t bump, they don’t get huge severance packages. Of course, if you want a future, those are the wrong reasons for letting people go.”

With its intensive focus on issues like the abuse of computer-morphed images, surreptitious “data-mining” of consumer purchase records, or media “freebies,” there’s no question that Undercurrents has met a need in this media-saturated world. But controversy over the cancellation centres on the age-old question of CBC and the youth audience.

Morrison and Mesley both say they intended the show to appeal to a younger-than-usual CBC audience. But CBC executives weren’t convinced it was an audience the network could, or should, go after. According to Culbert, a youth mandate was something the production team brought to Undercurrents. “It started as a media ethics show targeted at a classic CBC audience. Nobody sat around one day and said ‘let’s invent the show that will go after younger viewers.'”

Bolen expresses a profound lack of faith in the under-30 audience. “People under 30 don’t watch information programming, okay? Let’s get that straight. I sure wouldn’t spend the rest of my life trying to get an audience that doesn’t watch a certain genre of programming. This is a business where you pay attention to reality. People under 30 watch trashy American sitcoms, which I’m not in the business of doing, and which the CBC isn’t in the business of doing.”

“I think that’s bullshit,” says Reid Willis, producer and director of CityTV’s Media Television. “People under 30 are interested in what’s going on in the media. The 20 to 30 group is more media savvy than the generation that preceded them.” But Willis thinks the lack of information programming pitched at a young audience is down to a lack of interest from advertisers.

Mesley and Morrison remain convinced Undercurrents did appeal to a younger audience, but felt it was sabotaged by the schedule shuffling. In the show’s first slot, Tuesdays at 7 pm, its average audience was 499,000. The biggest night came on Sunday, October 22, 1995 when a repeat aired at 9:30 pm got an audience of 865,000. But Undercurrents’ debut in the 96/97 season in its new 7 pm slot on Fridays was demoralizing for the crew. Morrison reports the audience for the season opener at 438,000 and 434,000 for a strong programme the following week.

She says the numbers built as audiences found the programme’s new location, peaking at 678,000 on December 6. According to CBC audience research figures, average minute audience for the 96/97 season to February 2 stood at 518,000 viewers.

“Friday at seven was not a good place for Undercurrents,” claims Morrison. “It’s an older audience. In fact the audience for Air Farce [which followed Undercurrents at 7:30] is quite old, surprisingly old. I was actually astonished to find out how old that audience was.”

CBC audience research bears Morrison out, reporting that the 18-34 demographic for both Air Farce and Undercurrents has been identical this season – a mere 14 percent of the total audience.

Fridays at seven is also a heavily competitive slot packed with overhyped American tabloid TV shows like Entertainment Tonight, Inside Edition, Hard Copy and A Current Affair. Morrison says focus groups told her that audiences in that time period surf around looking for stories they like and then switch around with no loyalty to a particular programme.

“People build a menu. We took a leaf out of the tabloid book in terms of our presentation in order to survive in the seven o’clock environment.”

Undercurrents’ jerky camera work and flashy graphics didn’t endear itself to everyone, a fact the show’s producers recognized early on. “I can point to stories where we sabotaged ourselves with stylistic extremes,” admits Morrison.

But Mesley bristles at accusations the show was all style and no content, or a clone of Media Television. “We are the antithesis of Media Television. Obviously everyone has adopted their style from rock videos.  But they get nearly all their video as handouts. We are not saying, ‘This is hip.’ We are not saying, ‘This is the latest consumer thing you can add to your collection.’ We are saying ‘Think about this.'”

Undercurrents’producers express pride in the show’s innovations. They cite its lead role in web page design at the corporation., its efforts at promoting a more playful visual presentation, and its success in promoting an acceptance of media stories elsewhere in news and current affairs. But what seemed to enliven everyone interviewed for this story was a love of the public broadcasting ethos, where stories are told because they are important, not because advertisers say they are important. Many of the young researchers and producers at Undercurrents had done time at the privates, and appreciated the freedom and extensive resources offered by the CBC. But they felt they had come to a CBC whose values were in peril.

“It will be like C-SPAN here,” quipped an Undercurrents freelancer who has done time at the specialty channels.

Others who thrived in the upbeat atmosphere at Undercurrents say they’re not too keen to look for work elsewhere in the CBC. One such is 25-year-old researcher Bret Dawson. “It’s not a happy place,” he says.

It’s not clear what, if any, programming will replace Undercurrents. If the current trend prevails, it looks like any new programming will have to survive on a smaller budget, generate outside income and prove it can draw in viewers in short order. Under those conditions, people at Undercurrents and elsewhere wonder how long CBC’s commitment to innovative new programming  can hold out.

Scan magazine was published in the 1990s for Canadian media professionals.

CBC TV's Undercurrents host Wendy Mesley.

Undercurrents in Scan magazine 1997.

In 2021 Wendy Mesley commented on the story in a Tweet.

More from Scan Magazine: 

The Big Dump: CP’s New Operational Plan Leaves Critics With Questions Aplenty

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© David South Consulting 2021

The Big Dump: CP’s new operational plan leaves critics with questions aplenty

By David South

Scan Magazine (Toronto, Canada), June/July, 1997

Gloria Galloway is one of two Canadian Press staffers holding down the Ontario desk one Friday evening in May. She has the jumpy manner you’d expect from an acting news editor entangled in deadlines at the national wire service. She cheerfully describes how cooperative the Northern Ontario newspapers are in filing stories on the federal election campaign. But the reality driving that cooperation is not so cheery. As a result of staff cuts, the only CP reporters available are tied up covering government announcements at the Ontario legislature.

It has been nearly a month since CP’s board of directors gave final approval to a plan to revamp the service. The plan caps a crisis-filled year during which many feared the agency would go belly up. But do the changes make CP’s future any more secure?

On her computer screen, Galloway pulls up a long list of stories filed that day by various member newspapers. It’s an impressive list that suggests the ‘New CP’ concept might work. Certainly Galloway has the stoic, ‘we have to make it work, it’s our job’ attitude that’s common at CP.

Attitude isn’t everything, though. There are serious gaps in the plan that continue to leave CP vulnerable to a future crisis. The new plan calls for CP to rely on its owners – the nearly 90 member papers – to contribute the bulk of its stories, leaving CP acting more like a traffic cop than a traditional wire service. This Faustian deal means a reduced role for CP as a newsgatherer, with a restricted mandate to cover stories newspaper editors can anticipate, like press conferences and court decisions, as well as breaking news.

Beyond that, the plan is short on details. It fails to offer any coherant timetable for its implementation, nor does it address the likelihood, due to declining newspaper circulations, of further reductions in the fees CP’s members pay next year. CP already dropped its fees 25 percent for 1997 to keep Southam Newspapers from leaving the cooperative. The rollback precipitated major staff reductions at CP.

The deal’s most significant achievement is a pledge by all member papers to work with CP to ensure its survival and save everyone money.

Newspaper editors will have to tell CP a day in advance what stories they are covering and who has been assigned. Using this information, so the theory goes, it will be possible to avoid assigning several reporters from competing papers to cover a story when one will do. A reporter will not only be working for his or her own paper that day, but for every CP paper, and will be expected to file updates throughout the day to a CP editor, who in turn will write the story that is then ‘wired’ to all the members. That way, it is hoped, no superfluous stories will be going out on the wire. Member papers will still file analytical and feature stories to CP but, as is the case now, they are under no obligation to give away their prized family jewels – exclusive stories – to other CP papers.

In practical terms, the new approach has been creeping into CP’s way of doing things by stealth rather than command. CP has been increasing its reliance on member papers to pick up the slack when CP reporters aren’t available. The most recent example was the federal election campaign: only one CP reporter was assigned full-time to cover the whole campaign. The rest of the coverage was handled by a combination of CP bureau staff and member paper reporters.

While many smaller papers are dependent on CP for their provincial, national and international stories, the bigger papers, who are the main sources of these stories, can afford to be blase’. Their willingness to co-operate will decide the success or failure of the member-exchange component of CP.

Southam’s vice-president of editorial, Gordon Fisher, maintains his papers will support the plan because it will save his company approximately $2.5 million a year. “We pay a significant amount of money towards this cooperative,” he maintains. “A member exchange is one of the more efficient ways we can find to deliver news without incurring a huge amount of expense.”

“What is CP needs a story earlier than a reporter normally files?” asks managing editor Jane Perves of Halifax’s Chronicle-Herald and Mail-Star. “Theoretically, they should be spending all their time doing the story for our paper.”

Jane Purves is an enthusiastic supporter of CP. Nonetheless she wonders if CP editors will be caught in a contest of wills with editors at member papers. She would like to see a reporter’s CP obligations involve simply calling in a quote or raw data. She would have a problem if a reporter working on a major story for her paper was distracted by CP’s needs.

The Globe and Mail is conidering hiring a full-time co-ordinator to handle the heavy volume of stories that paper generates for CP. Newspaper managers elsewhere are split on the question of whether the plan will increase workloads. The extent that it does so will be a crucial test of their commitment.

Not only will editors need to regularly ‘loan’ reporters to CP, they will have to change how they do things on a daily basis if the plan is to work. Editors will have to file an assignment list one day in advance to CP, a task that could get easily overlooked when papers get hit with multiple big stories.

“It’s pretty minor stuff,” says Perry Beverley, the co-publisher of Brockville’s Recorder and Times. Although the Recorder and Times is an afternoon paper where copy is edited in the morning, Beverley has no plans to switch an editor to an evening shift to fit CP’s deadlines.

Deadlines are a particularly thorny question in a country that spans six time zones. Newspapers on the East coast can file stories at the end of the day and still meet CP deadlines that are pegged at Toronto time. The problem is with newspapers west of Ontario; they will have to file stories well before the end of the day. In the case of B.C., filing will have to be done in the morning so that stories picked up by CP will be ready in time for East coast papers.

The copy will have to go out to CP unedited.

At the Edmonton Sun, editor-in-chief Paul Stanway isn’t sanguine about sending out unedited copy. Stanway had editorial deadlines pushed back to 6 p.m. 18 months ago as part of a re-organization at the paper, but they still mean copy would be sent straight from reporters to CP, where copy needs to be in between 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. Toronto time. Stanway is concerned the CP staff will not have the time to fact-check stories to weed out mistakes, which would reflect poorly on his paper.

The anticipated deadline crunch has been nicknamed “the big dump” in CP circles: a tidal wave of material hitting the wire service’s desks all at once, leaving editors scrambling to do re-writes before newspapers are put to bed.

CP general manager Jim Poling, who vacates he job in June, believes this problem will be solved by the restructuring, not exacerbated by it. “The volume of copy has already dropped significantly,” he says. “We are hoping for a wider spectrum of deadlines. Hopefully you are going to get your copy spread out over a longer period, instead of over the course of a couple of hours. You might not need a massive shift of people to a certain time.”

Poling claims the resolution is in better planning which will result in fewer unwanted stories. Fewer stories, so Poling maintains, means more time for editors to re-write.

At CP’s Winnipeg bureau, Canadian Media Guild vice-president Scott Edmonds is sceptical. He isn’t convinced the slimmed down CP will have the staff to handle what he sees as an increasing workload.

“It sounds like the meatgrinder approach to journalism,”says Edmonds. “There is no way these desks are going to be able to cope with any degree of thoughtfulness with this copy. The pressure is going to be too great.”

Edmonds also sees a bigger problem in staff moral. “The majority of people working for Canadian Press don’t want their career to end up as a re-writer… It will require a lot more attention on the desk for this material, so we will be taking resources away from reporting. In other words, taking somebody away from doing the story to redoing the story.”

CP’s raison d’etre is its ability to turn out stories written in a homogenous national voice that can be tailored for a specific paper’s readers. Another important asset is the agency’s ability to quickly add knowledge and background to stories, drawing on the experience of its reporters and editors. According to Martin O’Hanlon at CP’s Ontario Desk, cut-backs have compromised this ability. Three business reporters have been poached by the Financial Post, including Ian Jack and Sandy Rubin. Over 40 talented reporters and editors took buyouts in the fall of 1996.

This means CP isn’t as well equipped as it once was to turn raw copy from reporters into high-quality journalism that can draw the respect and admiration of its subjects.

“Our reporters are not trained to write for a national audience,” emphasizes Jane Purves in Halifax.

Scott Edmonds doesn’t believe member contributors are a substitute for CP staff. “I’m very concerned about attempting to replace quality staf-written material that caters to a national audience and is written to uniform standards, with material picked up from newspapers that in some cases may be very good, but in some cases may not be of the same quality.”

There is a great deal of confusion over when the plan is supposed to kick in. One camp, which includes Jim Poling, sees it more as a gradual, evolutionary change that will take several years to fine tune. There are others who want to see trial runs. Still others believe there will be a date set for a total national switch-over.

Perry Beverley favours test sites and single switch-over date.

“Once that D-Day time is chosen for the switch-over into the restructured CP,” she says, “there will be an appointed person in the newsroom responsible for sending the schedule to CP.”

Purves favours a gradual switch. “A shot-gun approach might backfire. I’d rather have a gradual approach providing we had a starting date and an aim.”

“We don’t have to have a roll-out day,” says Poling. “But if all the managers and staff rise up and say ‘shit, we need test sites,’ then I will listen. Anybody who is waiting for a date will be disappointed. All of this started a long time ago and is a continuing process that will take a couple of years to get everything in place.”

Seven regional news committees will co-ordinate and oversee this new approach, each one staffed by representatives from member papers and CP. According to the plan, these regional news committees will act as enforcers for the new regime. They will work out the logistics of member exchange and use fines to penalize papers that miss deadlines or obstruct exchange.

How such an approach would work in practice is still up in the air. “At some point everybody is going to act against the interests of the co-op,” maintains Purves. “They will be wondering, ‘will I be fined for this?'”

Nobody contacted by SCAN could tell us what these fines would be, how violations would be investigated or what constituted offences. Purves wondered what deterrence value the fines would have if a paper thought it had acted in its best interests. If paper X decided to hold back a juicy scoop that was supposed to be that day’s CP story, a fine of $2,000 might be worth incurring if it sells more newspapers. It was generally agreed none of these committees would meet until after the federal election at the earliest.

For now, Poling is generally optimistic (though he won’t around past June and a replacement has yet to be found). He is talking about raising salaries for the first time in five years, about hiring new staff, about stabilizing life at CP.

The lower fees have lured back one newspaper group, British Columbia’s Sterling. A trial use of CP stories started at the beginning of May. It remains to be seen whether New Brunswick’s Telegraph Journal/Times Globe papers will return, after pulling out of CP in 1993 and hiring more of its own reporters with the money saved. Publisher Jamie Milne remains coy as to his interest in returning to CP, but Poling thinks a deal will be worked out by the fall.

And what about the mood of the man charged with overseeing CP’s transition? Jim Poling, as some CP staffers like to mention, is losing that cautious reserve managers usually have for talking to the media. He isn’t happy with the state of the print media in Canada.

“There has been a lot of cutting in this industry,” says an audibly frustrated Poling. “The fact of the matter is this: cutting isn’t the only answer to having an efficient operation. There has to be some money available to allow journalists to walk around a bit. People who walk around and poke at things and stare at things write good stories.”

With phones ringing all around us, Galloway begins to think out loud about possible wrinkles in the new CP plan: how newspaper reporters at trials will have to keep leaving the courtroom to file updates for CP, how stories written for local papers will translate for national readers, how hard it can be for local, non-CP reporters to cover elections when they don’t know what questions have been asked elsewhere on the campaign trail.

But Galloway has to get back to work. She has to push the Toronto Star to file a story early so the Hamilton Spectator can pick it up.

Scan magazine was published for media professionals in Toronto, Canada in the 1990s.

"The Big Dump"

Breaking the news to CP staff.

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Top reporters offer military media handling tips

Ryerson’s course on handling media has raised eyebrows

By David South

Now Magazine (Toronto, Canada), November 12-18, 1992

The whimsical Certificate of Military Achievement hanging in the offices of the Ryersonian newspaper at Ryerson journalism school is testament to the warm relationship between the armed forces and one of Canada’s top journalism schools.

But a two-month crash course in journalism for military public affairs officers hosted by Ryerson this summer has left a bad taste in the mouths of some participants and critics.

The course, which involved 18 soldiers, included two weeks of classes in each of print, radio and TV journalism, wrapping up with two weeks of “crisis management” training. The 60 instructures included such prominent journalists as Ann Medina and Pamela Wallin.

According to an administration newsletter, the course netted Ryerson more than $350,000. Organizers say the course was merely an exercise in familiarizing soldiers with the needs of working journalists. But given the often conflicting roles of the military and the media, some fear journalistic ethics may have taken some collateral damage.

“The course had nothing to do with national defence or the armed forces,” says course teacher and organizer Shelley Robertson. “They just wanted to understand the roles of journalists from the other side. The military didn’t ask us to teach what we teach our students.”

Robertson says the course also benefited the participating journalists by giving them contacts in the military.

But according to media critic Barrie Zwicker, the exercise blurs what should be the distinctly different interests of journalists and the military. “It’s similar to press and politicians. By getting close to the politician, journalists can get information they couldn’t normally obtain. The negative side is that the media can get sucked in and lose a larger perspective. The same tensions exist with covering the military.

Managing media

“It’s up to the media to break the rules and try and get the story. The military always wants to hide its victims. If a Ryerson journalist strikes up a friendship with a public affairs officer, will the reporter be true to their journalistic tradition?”

Colloquially known as spin doctors, hype-meisters and flak catchers, public affairs officers perform much the same tasks in the military as their civilian counterparts in industry and government – including managing information that gets to the public or media.

In the past, Canadian soldiers had to go to the US for special training at the Defense Information School at Fort Benjamin Harrison. But, according to Robertson, the armed forces were looking for a Canadian spin.

With 4,600 Canadian peacekeepers now stationed around the world, including a contingent in the dangerous and volatile former Yugoslav republics, the chances for conflict – and casualties – have increased.

Lieutenant-commander Glen Chamberlain, who helped coordinate the course, says the military’s increased profile means that the forces have to become more adept at media relations. “There is a great desire among Canadians to know what troops on peacekeeping duties are up to. We have a wonderful story to tell.”

Chamberlain says he works on journalists’ behalf with stubborn military commanders. “The armed forces are finding there is a real benefit to having specialized PA officers. We want to help journalists to tell our story well.”

The crisis management section of the course offered participants a hands-on approach to managing journalists. The officers were presented with two scenarios – a murder at Moss Park armoury and a highway helicopter crash – and then practised handling a group of journalists investigating the events.

Course lecturer Kevin Donovan, who covered the Gulf war for the Toronto Star, remembers the effectiveness and sophistication of PA officers in the field.

“When I was in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, I walked into a hotel and on the wall were pool reports – news briefs written by US military public affairs officers – that journalists were encouraged to use for stories. There were some journalists going out into the field to cover stories, but a huge number just sat in this beautiful hotel.”

Stop information

Donovan feels uncomfortable about teaching on the course.

“I was asked by Ryerson to give a talk on my experiences in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Iraq,” he says. “My initial reaction was no. I hate the existance of public affairs people with a passion. Their job is to stop information.

“I’m uncomfortable with Ryerson being hired by the department of national defence. One officer in the course got very upset when I told them to make contacts with the media and leak stories.”

Course organizer Clive Vanderburgh admits organizers had concerns about conflicts between the role of journalists and military officers. “There was a lot of discussion concerning the potential for conflict – especially that the people hired to teach might think they were there to help the department of national defence to avoid the media

“But we were trying to give a general understanding of the media’s needs. We didn’t sell the country down the drain.”

Another teacher was Robert Fulford, the well-known writer and lecturer on journalistic ethics. “I don’t have a problem with Ryerson teaching the military,”says Fulford. “It’s a way of spreading journalistic technique to people in the DND. It seems to be a natural extension of the work of Ryerson.

“Canadian journalists are ignorant of the military and could do with getting closer. You almost never find a full-time journalist in Canada who knows anything about them. The more you know about the military, the less you will be manipulated.”

But Gideon Forman, coordinator of the Canadian Peace Alliance, fears Ryerson may be helping the military mislead the public.

“Why do these guys practise handling the media so much of there’s nothing to hide? This is just better packaging for the military so they can get what they want from the public.

“I have problems with public money being spent teaching the military to be more effective with the media, while other organizations have their budgets cut or eliminated.

“Is there a similar program for food banks or women’s shelters?”

"Top reporters offer military media handling tips": Now Magazine, November 1992

Note on story context: This story was researched and written after two key events involving Canada's military: the first Gulf War from 1990-1991; and the Oka Crisis in 1990, where the Canadian Armed Forces confronted an armed group of Mohawk "Warriors" in Oka, Quebec.  

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