Can the mainstream print media successfully reinvent itself to become as relevant to news consumers in the digital age as it used to be back in the days when readers looked to their morning newspapers for authoritative coverage of the previous day’s events?

The question arises in the wake of Tuesday’s surprise announcement by Alberta Premier Ed Stelmach that he is stepping down as leader of the provincial Progressive Conservative party and will not seek re-election when his current term expires.

The news first broke on CBC Radio at 11:00 a.m. Tuesday, half an hour before Stelmach was due to hold a news conference announcing his resignation. At about the same time, a “breaking news alert” flashed across the Calgary Herald home page and across the web pages of other newspapers in the Postmedia network. The Herald‘s chief political columnist, Don Braid, offered a short teaser saying there was a “fuller” story to be told and that he would “lay it all out” in his column the following day.

However, with all due respect to Braid, a respected and well-connected print journalist who has been writing about Alberta politics for more than 25 years, what he served up today tasted a lot like yesterday’s leftovers. Other mainstream news organizations such as the CBC and The Globe and Mail, and political bloggers like Dave Climenhaga, had already provided the main ingredients: Stelmach was coping with a palace revolt over budgetary concerns and unfulfilled promises similar to what one of his predecessors, Social Credit Premier William Aberhart, had to deal with back in 1937. However, instead of facing down his cabinet opponents as Aberhart had done, Stelmach chose to quit.

Dave Hedley, a web producer at calgaryherald.com, wrote in a recent column about the challenges the Herald faces as it transitions from a traditional print news operation to a digital, multi-platform operation. Using the recent death of a newborn tiger at the Calgary Zoo as an example, Hedley tracked the progress of the unfolding story from the moment he first learned about the tiger’s death to the time the published newspaper account appeared on Herald newsstands. First came the “breaking news alert” on the Herald website, ending with the now-standard “more to come.” Then came a more complete story for the Herald website with photos and backstory links. It was followed by an update for the Herald‘s iPad edition after a news briefing at the zoo. By the time the most complete and most up-to-date version of the tiger story appeared in the newspaper the following day, Hedley had updated the website a couple of more times and added video content, while Herald columnist Val Fortney had written a companion piece about the emotional turmoil felt by zoo staffers after the mother tiger abandoned her sick cub.

The Herald‘s director of online content, David Blackwell, explained to Hedley that the Herald newsroom now has to “catch up with the audience” as it reorients itself around a multi-platform identity: “It’s not just a matter of skills, but also learning how to relate in a very different manner than many staffers were accustomed to back in the day when the local paper was the only real authoritative voice about what was happening in this city.”

The Herald‘s blanket 12-page newspaper coverage of the Stelmach resignation included, along with Braid’s exposing-the-entrails column, the predictably traditional mix of editorial commentary, quoted reaction from the Alberta business community and from political rivals, word-on-the-street blather, and some solemn analysis of the Stelmach “legacy.” Most of this wall-to-wall coverage was about looking back. The only looking-forward story was the inevitable speculative piece about potential successors. If “catching up with the audience” was the object of this exercise, the Herald trailed badly.

Climenhaga, Alberta’s best-read independent political blogger, was as usual ahead of the pack. Let others in the media occupy their time trying to winkle out the gory details of the Stelmach resignation, Climenhaga said in his Wednesday posting. The more important question to be answered now is where his resignation leaves the upstart Wildrose Alliance, which has been offering itself as an attractive right-wing alternative to the ruling Tories while rising steadily in the polls.

Could there be a lesson here for the Herald and its traditional mainstream print comrades? With such online powerhouses as The Daily Beast and Huffington Post now providing the daily news and commentary fix for a growing number of journalism junkies, and independent bloggers like Climenhaga showing that it doesn’t take a big newsroom budget to produce timely and informed journalistic commentary, the landscape is rapidly changing. Can the old newspapers change focus, leave some of their hidebound ways behind, and reposition themselves to connect more immediately and more engagingly with readers who quickly have their fill of what happened yesterday? So far, there is little sign of this happening.

Calgary Herald columnist Don Martin offered an unfortunate comment during last night’s broadcast of “At Issue,” The National‘s equally unfortunate political affairs panel. Discussing the Conservatives’ plunging poll numbers, Martin derided the “line of pale male faces, with one exception” on their parliamentary front bench. He was sharing the screen at the time with three other white guys and a woman. None had the presence of mind to look embarrassed.

Here’s a look at the wall of white that greets you on the “At Issue” website:

Lotta testosterone happening there, too. But just as strikingly clueless is The National‘s practice of rousting Andrew Coyne (he of Maclean’s), Chantal Hébert (she of the Toronto Star), and Alan Gregg (he of whatever it is he’s doing now) from their various central Canadian redoubts each week and then tossing in, usually, one guest panelist from not Central Canada. This is how they prove they’re a national newscast, y’see.

It’s kind of like Survivor and other reality shows, only here, instead of your token gay guy or black woman, you have your token westerner or Maritimer. Mind you, sometimes one of the Coyne/Gregg/Hébert troika will be visiting the colonies — Gregg in particular seems to get around — in which case they get to fill the role of regional correspondent that week. It’s all much more pleasant when it can be kept within the family compact.

The funniest attempt by the “At Issue” producers to appear national without actually having to be national occurred when they took the show out to Vancouver for an extra special panel discussion from the Chan Centre at UBC. This, of course, was an example of the CBC fulfilling its mandate: Getting out there amongst the people! Taking the temperature of the nation! Reflecting Canada to itself! So, did they, say, use the opportunity to bring on four B.C. pundits? No — instead they flew Hébert, Gregg, and Coyne (or “Chalandrew,” as I like to think of them) out to Vancouver as well, there to instruct the locals on matters of state and entertain their questions. On this occasion, the role of regional ringer was filled by Kirk LaPointe, who was introduced as the managing editor of The Vancouver Sun and “adjunct professor right here at UBC.” LaPointe is both those things; the fact that he is also the ultimate example of a Canadian parachute journalist, having arrived at the Sun in 2004 after a few decades spent in newsrooms in and around Toronto, was, naturally, rather too much to get into.

With a militant regionalist occupying the Prime Minister’s Office, and a family from Winnipeg running most of the country’s media, it’d be unseemly for those of us outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal vortex to feel hard done by. It’s just not necessary at the moment. What’s nettlesome, then, about CBC’s “At Issue” panel is its absolute tone-deafness to the changes in Canada over the last 20 or so years — not just the spread of political power to the West, but also the increasing place of what used to be called “ethnic” communities in our national affairs (communities that have become so central to the conduct of the country that the ethnic label, like the old “The West Wants In” slogan, is simply irrelevant now.) And yet here they are, Coyne, Gregg, Hébert, and their hapless sidekicks, still floating about the airwaves like the unsettled ghosts of the old Morningside political panels of the 1970s. It’d be appalling — if it weren’t so inadvertently entertaining.

The “At Issue” panelists have left personal video messages on the show’s website. Inspired, I’ve created this special plea to the “At Issue” producers:

They’re all doing it now but still I have to wonder: Why are Canada’s daily newspapers encouraging their opinion columnists to simultaneously blog on the papers’ websites?

I used to think — like media observers elsewhere — that newspaper blogs were meant to be dumping grounds for material the papers could not, or would not, accommodate on the page. Jeez, we can’t put this turkey in the paper; let’s find another home for it. Thank gawd for that Internet thing.

That still holds true, it appears, for some Canadian newspaper blogs. Edmonton Journal columnist Cam Tait, for example, recently devoted not one but five lengthy posts over six days to minute-by-minute descriptions of an amateur hockey series arguably of no interest to people other than diehard fans of the Canadian Junior A Hockey League. Would any of this stuff have made the regular paper? Hardly.

At the National Post, gossip columnist Shinan Govani seems to have notebooks full of throwaway celebrity trivia because he has taken to doing the same kind of name-dropping routine in his blog — except for the video insertions that the newspapers cutely dub “web exclusives” — that he offers in the pages of the paper. The Toronto Star‘s hockey columnist, Damien Cox, uses near-identical phraseology in his blog (“. . . takes turns stirring up trouble and chuckling at the foibles of the sporting world”) as he does in his regular column in the paper (” . . . loves to stir up trouble while chuckling at the foibles of the sporting world.”) Which makes you wonder why he is doing both. Wouldn’t one or the other suffice?

So, aside from the advantage of being able to hold an unlimited number of words, what is the rationale for these newspaper blogs? Are they meant to encourage dialogue with the readers? If so, then clearly they are not working. Just count the number of comments at the bottom of the posts — often zero — and you can see that the readers, for the most part, don’t care enough to respond. The letters pages in the newspapers are generally filled with correspondence from readers eager to comment on what they have just read in the papers. But the newspaper blogs — for whatever reason — are drawing very little response.

The Montreal Gazette‘s Editor-in-Chief, Andrew Phillips, has a blog, “Ask the Editor,” in which he invites readers to pose questions about “what goes into putting out The Gazette every day. A similar feature on The New York Times website, “Talk to the Newsroom,” often attracts thousands of questions and comments from readers. A Times article questioning Senator John McCain’s judgment over potential conflicts of interest prompted more than 4,000 e-mailed questions and more than 2,000 comments from readers, many of them critical of the paper’s handling of the issue. Editor Phillips’s blog, by comparison, has drawn such a small number of questions and comments that he has taken to filling his space with bits and pieces of news and commentary about the newspaper business in general.

There are exceptions, of course, to this apparent lack of public interest in Canadian newspaper blogs. Montreal Gazette political reporter Elizabeth Thompson’s behind-the-scenes look at the shenanigans on Parliament Hill often generates up to a dozen or more comments whenever she has something juicy to pass along. The Toronto Star’s always provocative Antonia Zerbisias gets almost as much reaction to her feminist blog on women’s issues as she did to her now defunct and much missed blog about the Canadian media (See my previous take on the latter here.) But you always get the sense that these newspaper blogs would make for much better reading if they were posted somewhere other than on the websites of the newspapers employing the bloggers. You only have to compare the gently whimsical blog of autobiographical memories and emotions that the very readable Todd Babiak compiles for his own website to the still entertaining but often restrained and predictable cultural affairs blog that he produces for his employer, the Edmonton Journal, and you can see that the most affecting stuff emerges when columnists are not trying to second-guess what the bosses expect of them.

The most widely read and respected blogs by Canadian journalists are not written for newspapers or magazines. If they were, you would see links to them posted on such media sites as the Canadian Journalism Project “Town Hall” blog or the Bill Doskoch: Media, BPS (Big Picture Stuff), Film, Minutiae blog. But these sites only link to the blogs of freelance journalists, or to those of writers such as CanWest News Parliamentary reporter David Akin and Maclean’s national editor Andrew Coyne who, while they do work for major media organizations, produce blogs independently.

As I see it, the biggest single problem with many of these Canadian newspaper blogs is that they lack a sense of immediacy or urgency. They are allowed to sit without updates for days and sometimes weeks on end. The whole idea of a newspaper blog, surely, should be to provide information and comment sooner. The American newspapers have apparently figured that out because they now make political blogs an integral part of campaign coverage, bringing to them a mixture of gossip, commentary, and trivia along with serious reporting produced at lightning speed. In Canada, a newspaper has to produce new content daily, yet the blog postings on that newspaper’s site are often allowed to stagnate before being refreshed. The newspapers have the technology and the talent to do things better. They should make use of it.

“Scribe of the stars” means that during the past 20 years in particular (not 50 years, as suggested in the headline) Portman has earned his living primarily by doing deferential pieces on the celebrities of stage and screen. A quick database search reveals that in recent months his subjects have included David Strathairn (The Bourne Ultimatum), Christopher Mintz-Plasse (Superbad), Chris Tucker (Rush Hour 3), Alan Alda, Claire Danes (Stardust) and Josh Hartnett (Resurrecting the Champ). The prolific 71-year-old has also covered the seasonal theatrical offerings at the Stratford and Shaw Festivals, as he has done annually since the 1960s, and caught up with the latest must-see shows on Broadway and in the West End. But he hasn’t written a word about cultural sovereignty, government arts policy, the function of public broadcasting in Canada, or the travails of former Heritage Minister Bev Oda. In fact, it has been more than 10 years since Portman wrote regularly about the role of the arts in Canadian life. More’s the pity.

Portman has a long history of involvement with the arts in Canada. He fell into theatre criticism at age 23 in 1959, while working as an editorial writer at the Calgary Herald, when the paper’s regular reviewer went on vacation. Portman volunteered to fill in, and took over the arts beat shortly afterwards when the regular reviewer left the paper. Portman combined reviewing with writing about politics and other non-arts-related subjects until his Herald bosses decided he should focus exclusively on entertainment coverage.

During the 1960s, Portman played an important role in Calgary arts journalism, documenting the evolution of the amateur Workshop 14 theatre company into the professional Theatre Calgary. A man of eclectic cultural tastes, he also wrote about opera, ballet, classical music, films, and books. In his weekly opinion column, he wrote about issues of interest to the local arts community. When the Herald started adding writers to its entertainment section in 1971, Portman became the section’s first editor. Four years after that, he replaced Dave Billington as national arts correspondent for Southam News (the predecessor of CanWest). Portman continued to write from Calgary, but he travelled extensively and his pieces now appeared in newspapers from Montreal to Vancouver.

As national arts correspondent, Portman functioned simultaneously as a reviewer of Canadian theatre, music and dance, and as a cultural watchdog keeping an eye on how the federal government was doing in terms of funding for the arts. He played this dual role for about 10 years until he decided he would fulfil his mandate better by functioning more as a cultural analyst and advocate than as an arts reviewer. In 1987, his Southam bosses moved him to Ottawa, explaining that it no longer made sense for him to be writing about government arts policy while based in Calgary. At the same time, they wanted him to make movies the central focus of his entertainment coverage. The entertainment editors of the Southam newspapers had indicated they were more interested in the latest news from Hollywood than in Portman’s coverage of the Blyth and Lennoxville theatre festivals.

The move to Ottawa, as it now turns out, marked the first step in the transformation of Portman from influential cultural commentator into Canada’s answer to Bob Thomas of the Associated Press A respectable change of assignment, no doubt, but one somehow felt that Portman had made a more important contribution when he lobbied for increased funding for the arts than when he started writing about the bee-stung lips of Molly Ringwald.

His CanWest bosses obviously valued Portman’s writing because they kept him on the job for close to seven years beyond the normal retirement age of 65. But one wishes that more of that writing had been about the inability of the Canada Council to meet the needs of younger artists and less about the fact that Esquire magazine named Jessica Biel as the sexiest woman alive.

Brian Brennan is a Calgary author and journalist. His latest title is How the West was Written: The Life and Times of James H. Gray.

Now that the merry pranksters at Frank magazine have been outed as the satirists behind the http://www.supportlordblack.com hoax, it behooves us to ask who does support Conrad Black, and why? The March 12th issue of Maclean’s magazine offers an answer: Mark Steyn, a right-wing columnist described by Peter Preston of the London Observer as an “American-based neo-con ranter.”

Steyn, whose by-line also appears regularly in such conservative publications as the Western Standard and the National Review, writes in Maclean’s that Lord Black and his wife, the columnist Barbara Amiel, have been “good for readers and good for newspapers.” He doesn’t elaborate, but we presume he is referring to the fact that Black gave Canada The National Post — a national daily to compete with The Globe and Mail — and that he ran a media company, Hollinger Inc., which owned most of the country’s other major dailies. Were these papers good for readers when Black was at the helm? Sometimes. Black believed in spending money on journalism, and newspapers often put out a better product when the editorial budget is increased.

But was Black good for the newspapers? More specifically, did he provide good leadership for the people who worked at the newspapers? Let me speak from experience here. I worked as a staff writer at the Calgary Herald for 25 years. For more than 20 of those years, I couldn’t have asked for a better job. We had salaries and benefits comparable to those in big newsrooms across the country. We had bosses who encouraged us to do quality writing and photography and respect the intelligence of our readers. My job as a features writer and columnist took me across Canada and beyond in search of good stories. It was one of the best gigs I ever had.

Our winter of discontent began in 1996, a few months before Hollinger assumed a controlling interest in Southam, the company that owned the Herald. With a workaholic publisher in charge, the newsroom turned into a white-collar sweatshop. Reporters were ordered to produce more and more copy, which was then arbitrarily rewritten by newsroom managers to conform to the publisher’s expectations. Dignity went out the window along with respect. We often opened our newspapers in the morning to find our stories altered beyond recognition. “Drive-by editing,” we called it. Many of these editorial changes, done without consultation with the reporters, resulted in errors, and readers demanding printed corrections, apologies, and retractions.

In October 1998, editorial staffers voted to join the Communications, Energy, and Paperworkers Union (CEP). For the first time in 115 years, the Herald newsroom was certified. But two years of Hollinger ownership had failed to fix the problems caused by the previous management. In fact, things had gotten worse. Aside from the drive-by editing, there had been indiscriminate firings. Senior writers were dismissed for the flimsiest of reasons. We needed protection from the madness. We became CEP Local 115A. We spent a year trying unsuccessfully to negotiate a first contract. Then the company locked us out. We were on the picket line for eight months.

In March 2000, Black came to Calgary to attend a Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce shareholders’ meeting. Some of the locked-out workers confronted him in the lobby of the Westin Hotel. He told us the Herald had improved as a paper since the start of the lock-out. The paper’s dwindling circulation said otherwise. Union leader Andy Marshall asked Black why he was insulting his once-valued employees. “We’re not,” responded Black. “We’re amputating gangrenous limbs.”

The lock-out ended on June 30th, 2000 with the union being decertified and most of the 93 workers still on the picket line taking buyouts. I was one of those who took the money. My job as a columnist had been eliminated and many of my friends were looking for employment elsewhere, including a number of national-award winners who had once combined to make the Herald one of the best dailies in Western Canada. With them gone, I could see no reason for going back into the building.

So, was Conrad Black good for the Calgary Herald? When union leader Marshall said in March, 2000 that the Herald needed us back in the building to restore its status as a quality paper, Black replied: “We’ve got one. And it’s getting better all the time.” Seven years later, I still beg to differ.

Brian Brennan is a Calgary author and journalist. His latest title is How the West Was Written: The Life & Times of James H. Gray.

Update to story below: CBC Radio announced on January 18 that it is cancelling the pop-culture show “Freestyle” effective mid-March and replacing it with an as yet unnamed daily arts magazine program hosted by Jian Ghomeshi. A CBC executive told the Globe and Mail “this does not mean an increased emphasis on pop culture.” I’m still trying to figure that one out.

Some time around the end of December, 2006 — there was no announcement in the mainstream press about this — Kelly Ryan quietly left her post as co-host of “Freestyle,” the weekday Vancouver-based afternoon chit-chat and pop music show on CBC Radio One. She was replaced without fanfare by Marsha Lederman, previously featured on air as a national arts reporter for the radio network.

There had been some surprise expressed in Canadian newspaper columns during the Fall of 2005, when Ryan took on the “Freestyle” job, because she had earned her stripes as an investigative reporter. Why, asked the columnists, would a seasoned journalist who had led the radio network’s reporting on such cases as the Swissair Flight 111 crash and the arrest of alleged serial killer Robert William Pickton want to squander her broadcasting talents on a fluff show billed by the Corp as “water-cooler fodder at its finest?”

Ryan explained that she needed a break from the hard-news reporting. But one got the distinct impression she was gritting her teeth during every scripted exchange with “Freestyle” co-host Cameron Phillips, a former television actor who actually did seem to enjoy yapping about the playful habits of dolphins and the litter left behind in movie theatres after the patrons finished their fizzy drinks and buttery-topped popcorn.

Loyal CBC Radio One listeners reacted with predictable outrage when “Freestyle” first aired in November, 2005. It came on as a replacement for “The Roundup,” a show that had lost its focus after veteran host Bill Richardson left in 2004 to host a short-lived weekend Radio One program called “Bunny Watson.” The expression “dumbed-down radio” was prominent in most of the 144 negative phone calls and 173 negative e-mails received by the Corp during the first two weeks of “Freestyle.” So were such expressions as “white bread” and “banal chatter.” The listeners pointed to such other CBC programming aberrations as Brent Bambury’s “GO” and Jian Ghomeshi’s “The National Playlist” (now mercifully put to death) as further evidence of the Corp’s limp attempts to lure a youth audience by moving in the direction of dumb and dumber.

The CBC stuck to its guns with “Freestyle” and so did Kelly Ryan, who gave the show a year. Her bio on cbc.ca now lists her credits as an investigative reporter, but makes no reference to the time spent on “Freestyle.” Fine. Time to move on.

What still galls, though, is the spectacle of those print columnists claiming the high road while CBC wanders down the low.

To hear them tell it, the press alone now functions as an oasis of intelligence and serious coverage in a desert of pop-culture banality. But is this, in fact, true? Let’s pick a random date — Tuesday 2 January 2007 — and turn to the entertainment section fronts of some CanWest newspapers to find out: