| Full Text of the Lecture It's an honour to be here and to be introduced by David Spencer -- whom I salute as a fellow scarred and grizzled veteran of the Great Academic Administrative Wars... Twenty-six years ago, in a report to the Senate advocating the establishment of a Graduate School of Journalism, I wrote: "Although the proposed M.A. course is clearly professional in its focus, it must maintain a careful balance between practical and academic subjects. The latter: the philosophical and ethical concepts; the researcher's way of viewing the world; the communication theorist's approach to linking people and media -- these things will stay with the student long after the occupational skills and techniques become absorbed in his/her general professional persona. "That kind of a fusion took a lot of us who learned through apprenticeship in the media a long time to acquire. Our M.A. graduates should leave Western to begin their media careers where we left off. They should therefore go a lot farther -- to the benefit of society." The professional excellence and contribution to society represented by Journalism M.A. graduates here this weekend resoundingly bears out what I said -- and so I'd like to thank all of you for helping me get at least one thing really and truly right! Now I should pause here and apologize to those of you who have come to see David Copperfield, the famous magician. You see, this is the Great Hall. Copperfield is appearing -- and disappearing -- across the road at Alumni Hall. But don't be discouraged. Because I, too, have mysteries to unfold. I will reveal to you, here, tonight -- for the first time anywhere -- how the entire modern history of Canadian journalism was played in a condensed preview form, inadvertently and unknowingly, at the Toronto Telegram in the 1960s; I will tell you what significance this has for journalism and journalism education; and then I will disappear. All those years ago, our philosophical concerns tended to focus on newspaper closings, and destruction of the myth of Miltonian competition among contending voices -- upon which we had tended to hang our ethical fedoras with the press passes in the brims. We fretted about Thomson and Southam and monopoly, as we now do about Monty, Asper and Peladeau, and connectivity, commerce, and... convergence. I first understood and advocated media convergence 40 years ago -- although I'd never heard the word. John Bassett's Telegram, where I worked for 17 years in various capacities from nightside reporter to managing editor, was trapped in the classical competitive mass-circulation newspaper bind. The Tely was in many ways (on a good day) the best popular daily newspaper in Canada: innovative, most quoted, most National Newspaper Awards; exclusive bureaus all over the world; first action line; first TV magazine, first op-ed page, first, first, first... but, in terms of circulation, we were the country's second biggest paper. And, sadly, the first biggest, the Star, was the other broadsheet popular daily with whom we were engaged in the kind of head-to-head competition for the Toronto evening market that existed nowhere else on the continent, and reminded people of the legendary '20s in Chicago. All of the natural-monopoly dynamics of scale, reach, product size, revenue, profits to plow back into development, differing costs per thousand readers for advertisers... on and on... work against the smaller of two dailies competing for the same market with similar products. A simple example: People looking for work or help or cars or apartments buy the paper with the biggest classified section. People put classified ads in the paper with the biggest circulation. Classifieds equal circulation; circulation equals classifieds. We used to rip the Star's classified section out of their first edition and give it to a linotype operator to set and add to our section for the second edition -- and people were often pleased but confused to sell the house they advertised in the Star through the Tely. No charge, we used to say. Our pleasure. Could we interest you in a subscription? Innovation, therefore, was the name of our game. We innovated. The Star renovated. If one of our ideas worked, they copied it. If it didn't, they let us waste some of the money we did not have. It was actually a game at which we should have known we couldn't win. But so much fun! As I mentioned, we staffed a string of foreign bureaus of our own spread from London, Paris and Berlin and Moscow to Hong Kong plus Washington and United Nations. No other Canadian newspaper was doing anything like this. An insanely expensive venture for a single, independent Canadian evening newspaper. But it enabled us to claim an exclusive plus in the area of foreign coverage. We had what stands as one of the finest Arts sections ever produced by a Canadian daily in our weekly Showcase tabloid, edited by Barry Callaghan. At the other end of the scale we had the biggest promotion department in the country, which, in addition to the usual cars, boats, Hollywood trips and tickets to the Ex, ran the Hadassah Bazaar out of our offices; created such cultural manifestations as Elmer the Safety Elephant, The Ontario Medal for Good Citizenship (later taken over by the province), and Tely Trains to the new Stratford Festival -- on which every lady received a rose from one of our advertisers, Dales of Brampton. We conducted an environmental program with the slogan: "We Unpollute!" -- Hey, it's good! I wrote it myself -- which collected so much waste paper that it plugged up the province's then inadequate de-inking paperboard mills and we had to accede to government pleas to shut it down. Toronto Comes Alive in The Telegram! we used to say. The Telegram Cares! Well, in our fashion, we did. The spirit was voiced one night by Frank Drea, first Canadian reporter to win the Heywood Broun Award for his muckraking expose of the terrible conditions and lack of safety standards under which Italian immigrant labourers were working (and some of them dying) in the construction of the Yonge Street subway -- another throwback to the glory days of the '20s. At this point Frank, later to become a provincial cabinet minister, and an adjunct professor of Journalism in the graduate school at Western (where one of his star students, who later became his assistant, was Janet Ecker) ran our pioneering Action Line. I had come upon him, after midnight, all alone in he shadowy light of a deserted newsroom (that lovely time and place of a reporter's nostalgia life) ...which newsroom, incidentally, is now something to do with the business office of the Globe, there's symbolism for you...And I said what one traditionally said in this situation: "What's the matter? Got no home?" "Yeah, I got one," he said. "But somebody's gotta find one for this old woman or she's on the goddam street." Sounds corny, but there it was. And she didn't end up on the goddam street... So what's all this got to do with journalism? Good question. As we went along trying to compete with the Star we broadened, without thinking about it, our definition of journalism -- a word we did not use, and an idea we didn't consciously have. We had to make ourselves more valuable to the newspaper audience of Metropolitan Toronto. We did an excellent job on the news, interpretation and informative/entertaining commentary -- but so did the competition. So what else did people need? How could we improve their lives? Well, we could explain things beyond the normal scope of a newspaper -- e.g. publish a series later translated into a dozen paperback books, on Canadian Confederation. Or -- we could listen to people; let them tell us their troubles -- particularly those relating to various levels of government; try to solve the problems, and then write about how we succeeded or failed. So this was a genuinely interactive use of information and knowhow, and it had the effect of helping the individual; warning or instructing other people involved in similar situations; exposing to public view inefficient or fraudulent practices by businesses and government agencies; and suggesting, to governments, areas in which public initiatives needed to be taken. That's connectivity for you! We plugged our readers into a whole network of resources developed and expertly operated by our Action Line journalists. Here's an example of Journalism writ large. In 1964, Jimmy Band, a pal who was deputy welfare minister of the province, told me about a horrendous surplus of adoptable babies warehoused in various institutions around Ontario. I visited one, the Neil McNeil Home near Wellesley and Sherbourne in Toronto and saw 300 babies aged zero to six months. There were several causes for the situation: jurisdictional boundaries between 50-odd children's aid societies, religious and racial barriers, prospective parents' attitudes about the adoption of older or "hard-to-place" children; Down's children; thalidomide children... We started a daily column that featured a child, or sometimes siblings, available for adoption, accompanied by their picture. This was a venture into a sensitive and untried field. The reporter I assigned, Helen Allen, was an experienced political journalist and feature writer, and the short profiles she produced were informative, compelling, humane and in no way remotely resembling the dreaded sob story, something the reporter was instructed to avoid on pain of transference to the fashion beat -- one of which we still had. The ultimate result of Today's Child -- which ran for years, was made available free to newspapers outside our circulation area, and studied and imitated by papers and government agencies across the continent and around the world -- was the breaking down of the barriers to adoption, a total shift in people's attitudes, an end to the situation it set out to remedy, and the direct involvement of a group of parents and children that I once estimated would populate a city the size of Kingston. Today's Child was finally taken over by the government. Meanwhile we were still in a circulation pickle -- despite a great paper featuring award-winning design with separately packaged News, Comment, Insight, Sports, Public Service and so forth foreshadowing the best of current newspaper layout, special in-depth tabloids every day, variously on Business, Lifestyle (we were the first to abolish the Women's Department), TV, Entertainment... So in 1970, Johnny Bassett proposed that he, Joe Garwood and I figure out once and for all how to get out of it. I think at this point I was retitled Director of Product Research and Development. Same content, different format. Despite the fact that he was a chartered accountant, the paper's Comptroller, Joe was in fact a man of great vision, which was later manifest in his role as a key executive of Bassett's CFTO and CTV. And Johnny was Bassett's mercurial, hugely talented -- and very funny -- elder son. The first thing we proposed was integration of functions between TV and print. We felt print was the best medium for explanation, features, in-depth examinations, and so forth. TV was a better medium for breaking news; but needed help explaining it. So we wanted Bassett to interconnect the newspaper and television news and ultimately the people who produced it so that, for instance, when CFTO broke a news story, the item would point people to a detailed analysis of the situation in the next day's Tely. Similarly, if we produced a takeout on, say, a dangerous situation in aircraft handling at Toronto International, we would point to and provide background material for a discussion of the issue by the experts and others in that night's TV newscast. It was a very modest proposal, but it didn't get off the ground, or the page, or on the air, because of Bassett's fear that cross-referencing his two media outlets would jeopardize his TV licence. We did integrate poor Fred Nossal, a wonderful reporter and correspondent who ran our Hong Kong bureau. Fred signed a contract to write news, columns and newspaper and magazine features for the paper and our syndicate, and to provide television coverage and specials for CFTO and the network and shortly thereafter had a nervous breakdown. Well, the theory was good. I guess it's a bit of nostalgic trivia to remember that there actually was a time when an independent publisher in a multi-outlet market was so sensitive about even a whiff of media monopoly that he hermetically sealed each enterprise from the other, to the detriment of both, and the ultimate demise of one. For that matter, it's kind of nostalgic to remember that there was an independent, competitive publisher! Bassett was just not a natural-born converger. He was born divergent. On his op-ed page ran a marvellous mish-mash of divergent opinions from Doug Fisher to Lubor Zink. There was no prevailing voice. He would say: "Page six is mine!" And that was where he propagated a mainly right-wing view of society. But that view emphatically included a strong belief in diversity of opinion. So over the gutter on seven, anything went -- and it confused the daylights out of a lot of readers. They would phone and say: "What are you guys in favour of anyway?" And they would point out that over at the Star, opinions were pretty carefully converged so that they didn't stray too much from a general Liberal-at-election-NDP-between sort of stance, with no errant Zinks wandering page seven to confuse people -- and erode circulation. The great Duncan MacPherson once thanked the Star, as he accepted his millionth cartoonist's National Newspaper Award (the only one that we could hardly ever win), for always giving him "Liberal freedom of expression." We all accepted the fact that a somewhat unfocused image hurt our circulation, and that this was a price we paid for embodying freedom of expression. But it still smarted when Bassett's conscience led him to end his support of John Diefenbaker -- whose remaining devotees in their thousands flooded our switchboard with cancellations. The point is that we offered a multiplicity of voices although we were only one paper. And the reason for that was that the publisher, who was a professional journalist before he was a businessman, felt a need to do so driven by his personal, professional ethic. Anyway, one of our problems was that the Internet, the obvious ideal cross-reference for both newspapers and television, hadn't been invented yet, so we had to think of some other antidote to our unstable situation. I was delighted to read recently that there are so many free newspapers being handed out to blow around the streets of downtown Toronto that wildpaper fires are causing delays on the subway. Well we looked seriously at the possibility of delivering the Telegram free daily to all 600,000 households in the Metro Toronto circulation zone. We described the new free Telegram as an all-day newspaper that would be delivered in the morning but have material in it designed to be read by various members of the family at different times of day. We thought that the Star would be forced to follow suit -- thus eliminating the circulation difference -- and that the Globe would give up all pretence of being a general Toronto newspaper and concentrate on its business readership. This was a huge gamble, which Bassett, to our collective amazement, didn't want to think about. So I went to Australia, to study the operation of the Australian, the national newspaper publishing simultaneously in Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane for same-day distribution throughout the country. And, in July of 1970, we recommended that the Telegram consider starting a sister national morning newspaper published and distributed daily in each of the five regions of Canada. We foresaw using our existing editorial talent in much the same process is envisioned in the realignments now transforming our media world. However, we proposed doing one key thing quite differently than the Globe did when it launched its National Edition 12 years later. We did plan to produce offset page negatives for the front (national and international) section in Toronto, and transmit them across the country by high- resolution facsimile. But in each region we thought we would establish a partnership with an independent local publisher, a printer with a publisher's baton in his or her knapsack, who would produce the inside (local news and classified) section, and print and distribute the entire final product in that region. Bassett was worried about the kind of a paper that would thus be competing in Toronto with his own Tely, and we suggested a morning, street-sale-only tabloid -- which I saw as being something sprightly, popular, thoughtful but intellectually vivacious... a Canadian Newsday. Bassett agreed but he added: "...such a paper, of course, would have a front page with the best news picture of the day, lots of sports, and a much lighter approach to the news, with lots more pictures than the Globe and Mail -- in other words, a sort of Toronto-New York Daily News." In the end, the national paper idea was just too big for a one-paper corporation to handle -- although we'd had hopes that the financial assets of Bassett's booming international television and sports empire might be brought to bear. Well, that was then... But in the meantime, Johnny and I and Andy Donato, artist, cartoonist and, in this case, newspaper designer, had gone ahead and developed Bassett's tabloid with detailed layouts, cost analyses, staff lists, and content scenarios, and, yes, it was the Toronto Sun, complete with name and logo, and, courtesy of Johnny, the Sunshine Girl -- which idea originated with his highly successful earlier kid tabloid -- After Four. We tried to persuade the boss to launch it as a all-day morning, street-sale companion to the family and service oriented Tely, but again, it was a risk that Bassett, by now pretty fully committed to TV and the Maple Leafs and the Argos, didn't want to take. We had no doubt that it would be a successful paper, but we only ever saw it as a way of making money for the "real" paper, the Tely. Bassett was worried about the effect simultaneous publication might have on the big paper, and in the event, the plans all stayed neatly stashed in transit boxes and super-stat folders until he solved the problem by converging the Tely with the Star. So there you are, the secrets of the origins of convergence and connectivity revealed. Significance to Journalism and Journalism education. To begin with, our naive, instinctive, and lilliputian tinkering at the Tely indicates that convergence of media is natural and inevitable. We just got there by desperate serendipity. Curly, Moe and Einstein. But the theory of a broadly defined Journalism mobilizing information, insights, knowledge and knowhow through whatever combination of media works best to meet a wide range of people's needs -- is a good one. We were never able to add the third "C" -- commercial viability -- to our various models of connectivity etc., but that doesn't mean that our grasp of the profession's ethical imperative was wrong. In more practical terms, the convergence instinct is based on the essential, self-interested media drive to increase the readership or audience of one's journalists. That's what it's all about. All of our botheration was for the purpose of having more people read, and see and hear, our journalists. Which would keep the enterprise afloat. Which would mean that the public would continue to benefit from the news and enlightening insights our people had to offer. One of our promotion ads said something like: "Here's a dozen good reasons to read the Telegram: Alan Kent, Dorothy Howarth, Ken W. MacTaggart, Phyllis Griffiths, Fraser Kelly, Elizabeth Dingman, Ted Reeve, Yvonne Crittenden, Ron Haggart, Pat Annesley..." and the next run of the ad would have 12 more names from our editorial staff list -- and so on. Similarly, the recent agglomerations: Thomson-BCE, CanWest Global, and Quebecor, all have as a principal asset, content: the editorial content of the newspapers in the mix. Or: Journalism. I wonder if I should use that word here. I get a vague feeling that journalism at Western, on this 25th anniversary of the first convocation of the first graduate school of journalism in Canada, has become The Discipline That Dare Not Speak Its Name! Certainly when I phoned the site of the former journalism school for a calendar the other day, the wonderfully efficient telephonic communications system, having pronounced the letter "z" as "zee", delivered me, robotically and eventually, through a series of what Gilbert described as "weary dances", to a destination whose name, although I can't remember all of it, did include a word I almost dare not speak: Technoculture. Sounds sort of like a garage band! Holy hot type! Technology doesn't have a culture. Cultures have technology. For instance, pipes are often buried in the ground. The pipes are media. But it's what's in them, surely -- water, oil -- that's important. The medium isn't the message. McLuhan was kidding! Trust me! The message is the message. The present faculty name seems to me a bit like having a Program in Medicine buried in the faculty of Pharmaceutical and Related Studies. Unfair comment? Sure. But I do sense a downgrading of the professional component in the structure of the faculty as it now exists. Granted the picture is somewhat complicated by the addition of the undergraduate program and its laudable goal of turning out people who are media and information literate. But my memory is that there's a constant drift, in universities, towards talking about things, rather than doing them. It's easier. Easier to theorize than practice. Easier to study than do. Easier to analyze the content of the Globe and Mail than to herd, drive and cajole a brilliant and less than totally compliant herd of Ibbitsons, Brunts, Fagans, Johnsons, Smiths and Regulys in the general direction of providing it... Here's an idea. Why not call the institution something that indicates it does both things: The Faculty of Journalism, Information, and Media Studies? JIM. Descriptive. Informative. Functional. People would read it and know what you do. Communicative.... Well, got that rant done. Journalism education. As with media convergence, I had an early, naive and ineffectual turn at faculty convergence. You doubtless know that Arthur Porter, a consultant, recommended, in the early 1970s, a federation, in Middlesex College, of Journalism; Library and Information Science; and Secretarial and Administrative Studies. I almost succeeded in selling the idea to Bill Cameron, dean of SLIS, in 1974 -- on the grounds that each of our relatively small stand-alone schools would ultimately have to go big or go home. But he opted for his own building, the former Elborn College, and that was the end of that for the time. We did make courses in each of our graduate curricula available for credit in the other, but the anticipated synergy between Journalism and Information Studies never really happened. My cursory reading of course and curriculum material from the current faculty indicates a continuing problem of cultural integration between Journalism, and Library and Information Science. For instance, one of the anthropological truths of the university species that I have observed, as a faculty member and student, in journalism and SLIS respectively, is a tendency for youthful academics -- and young university disciplines -- to over-value or misuse the Ph.D. degree. I don't want to play the horny-handed journalistic yobbo decrying the essential civilizing principle of academe. Although I will say that its awarding in the Arts and what are called the Social Sciences can be based on standards that are scandalously arbitrary, pathologically perverse, masonically arcane, and variable to the point of whimsicality or, worse, corruption -- a sort of academic Olympic ice dancing -- but that's another rant entirely. Incidentally, Betty and I once shared a table with Michael Ondaatje at a National Magazine Awards (another incentive of Western's Graduate School of Journalism, by the way) dinner, and he told us that he had been on the U.W.O. English Department faculty, but had to leave because he didn't have a Ph.D. The point is that judgment and common sense should be exercised. In our case, the appropriateness of a research-based Ph.D. as a main criterion for teaching, say, Information Science, should be balanced against the imperative need of significant media experience (in addition to academic qualification) on the Journalism side. Any erosion of the professional authority of the journalism program at Western is obviously a serious problem and I needn't labour that. Its basis is structural and therefore fixable. In taking an assimilationist approach to their marriage, Information Science and Journalism effectively insured that Journalism's voice would be relatively ineffective. Rather than a federation of departmental units from the two sides, there is simply one big faculty, which makes it certain that Journalism, the minority discipline, will be under-represented in all decision making. That this is not an appropriate approach would be attested to by anyone involved in one of the big media convergences. The guys at the phone company are not supervising the newsroom. But that, in effect, is what the university has caused to happen here. I presume there will be the customary review by an outside consultant during the current search for a new dean, and that this problem will be addressed. If not, then the organization of the Faculty of Information and Media Studies will be complicit in the carrying out, from beyond the bureaucratic grave as it were, the dark intention of the administrative Voldemort who tried to strike Journalism down seven years ago -- and one has to have some concern about the renowned reluctance of university administrations at any level to admit error -- in which regard they are very unlike my late publisher As luck would have it, a story illustrating the point appears, in somewhat mangled form, in a recent book about those days. Since I was the author's source for the story, I'll give you the accurate version. One day, Bassett's secretary summoned a gaggle -- in our case, perhaps more like a giggle -- of senior news executives to his office, where we found him pacing up and down on top of the first editions of the Star and The Telegram which were strewn around his floor. "This is a fine newspaper," he said, pausing with his heel on the Star's front page. "And this line story," he said, grinding his heel into the splash, "epitomizes this fine paper's enterprise, journalistic vision and flair.... "Whereas this," he said, tramping on The Tely, "this awful, travesty of an incompetent rag that I have the misfortune to own...but not for long, because I'm going to sell it and move to Nassau and I'll sit on the beach and think of you guys on the breadline up here, because you're all incompetents and you'll never get work again... "This godawful newspaper doesn't have that fine story on its page one. It's not on any section page either. It's not on page two. It's not buried in the Bile Beans ads... It's not anywhere in this terrible, awful paper, which I took the appalling trouble to read right through and--" At which point, I said: "We had it on Saturday." "What?" said Bassett.
And J.D. MacFarlane, no relation, the editor-in- chief, replied: "He says we had it on Saturday." Without pausing to draw breath, Bassett flashed his huge, Jack-Nicholson grin -- shining like the entire ice surface of Maple Leaf Gardens -- and said: "Happiness, gentlemen, is when the publisher is full of shit! Meeting adjourned." Right. I have now revealed the primitive and hitherto largely unknown early manifestation in Canada of the urges towards the agglomeration of commerce, connectivity and convergence. I have suggested that the process is as natural and instinctive as an old-time reporter reflexively grabbing the phone and yelling: "Gimme rewrite." And that it underpins the architecture of our developing virtual society, about which McLuhan was also wrong. It isn't a global village; it's a global city. And at the moment, the result, from a Journalism point of view, is an unfortunate over-citification of news and comment and values. There is, for instance, a vile knowingness pervading the writing of many journalists which perhaps comes from the top-down structure of chain media. Too many autoliterati whose ego-engorged work -- mainly devoted to self-definition -- was demonstrated at (one hopes) its grisliest during the media's mass first-person melancholia at the time of the recent Trudeau, um, event. I thought it was a fascinating sort of Dianization: hordes of the metropolitan press weeping and writhing in virtual grief with the enthusiastic abandon of crazed cargo cultists. But I digress. So, finally, if the reporter of the future is, my word in God's ear, a shade less self-centered, I think there's no doubt that he or she will be increasingly self-reliant.
Ever since the demise of hot type and proof readers, technology has increasingly placed the responsibility for what appears in print on the shoulders of those who write it. Videographers shoot and report. Liebling pointed out that, "Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one." In a dot-com world that includes everybody. I don't know, any more than Mr. Asper or Mr. Peladeau knows, what form the final product of a converged media structure will take, nor, indeed whether the handful of these megaliths will really monopolize media communications. I doubt it. They appear to me to be vulnerable to competition from direct-to-website journalism on the one hand, or to a new wave of locally owned quality weekly newsprint journals of news and comment. Then again, I'm the one who thought the Sun should be Newsday! In any case, whatever the form of the media in which they start their careers, graduates leaving Western's Journalism program must begin with a grasp equal to yours of the opportunity and obligation for professional journalists to do useful work in society. In my day we thought we knew what the role of media in society was. That is no longer true. There are no Mr. Bassetts tramping the front pages of the land to tell us. The received wisdom is as out of date as a lead slug. We know that our society, our communities, will be increasingly organized around, that people will relate to each other through, media. Journalists will move from the periphery, I think, towards much more involvement in this society. (I personally would be looking right now for a Frank Drea to start a national Web Action Line franchise but... Be still my beating heart!...) Peter Desbarats and Lynn Larmour and many others fought an exhausting and gallant fight to save the School of Journalism 1993. The result of that victory, along with the continuing development of the School's breadth of focus, particularly regarding new media, is I think, a greater achievement than any of us could have imagined at the time. The School, by whatever current name, has the opportunity of playing a significant part in the greatest social transformation of our time. It's a brilliant challenge, for Journalists, and their school, and I am sure they will meet it splendidly. Incidentally, I think that new patterns will emerge in the specific relationship between the professional journalist and a permanent university resource base: such things as continuing mentoring seminars on the one side and quick-response research teams on the other. Well -- just a couple of ideas for a revitalized Journalism Advisory Council to consider. It's a great prospect for Journalism and the School, the Faculty, whatever. And I congratulate all of us for having had the wit and strength to reach its threshold. There's a wonderful future ahead for Journalism. Be there! Thank you for your patient attention. Now, as promised, with a wave of my hand, I shall, before your very startled eyes, disappear. Good night! Note: Andrew MacFarlane passed away on April 23, 2002. He is sorely missed by former colleagues and students.
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