Your feckless Media blogger has been off cheating with his other mistress — theatre, of all things — which is why this section has been quiet as a dying newsroom lately. While I was away, Canada lost one of its few genuine sources of shit-disturbance, Frank magazine. Its folding was duly reported but went curiously unremarked upon, as if the pundits it had routinely skewered knew that, if they got started, there’d be no end to their grave-dancing.

To my knowledge, I only made Frank once, when something I’d written in The National Post appeared in its “Drivel” section. I was elated. It was not commonplace for a writer outside the Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal axis to merit its scorn. (Despite some game efforts, Frank was generally as Upper Canadian as the publications and broadcasters it covered.) I felt I had passed some career milestone. And the fact that I couldn’t see anything wrong with what I’d written suggested to me they might be on to something.

Others, of course, were less delighted, when their extramarital canoodlings or unceremonious dumpings from various media or political aeries were revealed. But Frank was exactly what this snobby contry, with its left-over notions of aristocracy and deluded notions of meritocracy, needed. I understand it was based on the British magazine Punch, but having never seen its progenitor, it all seemed quite new and brilliant to me.

Frank relied on a network of “contributors” (read: tattlers) who provided fodder, often from inside various newsrooms and editorial offices. If one was oneself on the inside of an organization, it wasn’t particularly hard to figure out who the moles were; you simply came up with a mental list of likely suspects, and then waited to see what happened when they left or were fired. If items on that publication dried up, you knew you had your double agent. It was fun.

In recent months, I had come to appreciate it for additional reasons. Whenever anyone searched on the net for “Frank” and “magazine,” it tended to bring traffic to backofthebook, since my name is Frank and this is a magazine. Thanks, fellas. I also appreciated its entrepreneurial spirit. I was a subscriber to eFrank.ca, the electronic wing of the magazine, but earlier this year had decided I would let my subscription lapse — it was pricey, and I rarely had time to visit (though always found it rewarding when I did). I accomplished this, I thought, by simply not sending in my new credit card information. When renewal time came up, they sent me a “Hey, your credit card info is no longer up-to-date” message. When I ignored that, they apparently went through various possible new expiry dates until they found the right one. Despite my best efforts, I found myself still a subscriber after all. Some might consider that, oh, I don’t know, let’s use the word “shady.” I thought it was pretty clever.

And possibly also desperate. Seven months later, Frank publisher Michael Bate announced its closing. (An unrelated Atlantic-only edition continues.) It was a great run, Mr. Bate; thanks for the laughs.

Now who is going to keep the “braünnosers” and “fartcatchers” and “moist but garrulous” windbags in check?

I don’t receive the print edition of the Star, so I don’t know if there was any announcement in the paper about Zerby leaving her media-criticism job. Certainly, there was nothing on the Star‘s website about it. She wrote her last media-related column about diversity in TV ownership and then, poof, she was gone. No farewell to the world of media criticism. No subsequent word of explanation in her first column for the Life section, about the changes she would make if she was “Queen of the Planet.” Even Frank magazine, usually the first to pass along the best tidbits from the nation’s newsrooms, has been oddly silent about Zerby’s career switch. She did, apparently, tell her Facebook friends (I’m not one of them) that she has been lobbying for the new job since 2003, but I find this hard to believe. The passion and breadth of knowledge that she brought to the job of media critic made it a perfect fit for her.

Being the media critic for the Star meant that Zerby had the freedom to comment on how the news was being covered by broadcast and print journalists, including the journalists at her own paper. This meant she was watched nervously by both Star editorial management and the ink-stained wretches who toil for the paper. Rick Salutin, who used to do the same job at the Globe and Mail, told me once that he wrote every column as if it was his last. The Globe management tolerated his shots for eight years and then suggested he move to the op-ed pages. They discontinued the media watch column after he left.

Zerbisias wrote the media column for five years. Before that she had been the Star‘s television critic for five years. In each job, she courted controversy and made some enemies. The Ryerson Review of Journalism magazine dubbed her “Hell’s Belle” in a feature profile in its Spring 2006 issue. The article cleverly compared her to the Las Vegas magicians Penn and Teller, saying that both annoyed the people in their respective lines of work because they dared to reveal trade secrets.

She worked hard and produced great copy. As well as writing her daily column for what she called the “dead-tree” market, she authored a delightful blog for the Star, azerbic, that folded at the end of last year. Again, no explanation given. Zerby had temporarily stopped blogging, for health reasons, for a couple of months starting at the end of August 2006, and then stopped posting entirely at the end of December. Did Star management have a hand in the demise of her blog? We likely will never know.

She obviously still cares about some of the issues she covered in her media column. In a posting this week to the listserv of the Canadian Association of Journalists, Zerby signs herself “No Longer the Media Columnist” and urges fellow journalists to call on the CRTC to establish rules curbing media concentration in Canada. Too bad she couldn’t have written another piece on this topic for the Toronto Star.

All of which now leaves media criticism a non-starter as far as Canada’s mainstream media are concerned. The media take great pride in keeping a watchful eye on the rich and powerful in this country, but no longer shine the spotlight on themselves. John Doyle may occasionally write about TV journalism in his column for the Globe, but you never see him biting the hand that feeds him. Nor do you see the freelance media columnist for The National Post, political lobbyist Warren Kinsella, being critical of those who sign his paycheques. He plays it safe by directing his sights at such out-of-reach targets as the British tabloids.

As witnessed by the postings here and elsewhere, there still seems to be room in the online world for media criticism. Tyee.ca’s MediaCheck column is often worth reading, and eFrank.ca‘s Remedial Media column can sometimes be highly entertaining. Tyee.ca, however, has the limitation of being primarily West Coast-oriented and eFrank.ca now seems to be mostly unaware of what’s happening in newsrooms outside of Toronto. And both suffer from the disadvantage of being on the outside with their noses up against the glass. Zerby is a well-connected insider who knows the workings of the trade better than anyone. That’s part of the reason why her column often evoked angry letters to the editor from newspaper publishers and television company presidents. They could ignore what appears in Frank, because 60 percent of it is unreliable anyhow, but they couldn’t ignore Antonia Zerbisias.

When Zerby’s blog folded, I had the faint hope for a while that it might be on hiatus again, and that she would soon be back at her computer trying to keep control over the uninformed postings from her readers about the Middle East and feminism. Now I have the faint hope that she will soon be back writing a media column that continues to afflict the powerful and the comfortable. But I’m not holding my breath.

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.