I as in the first and most important

SARAH MURDOCH

What is it about young female journalists that draws them to the vertical pronoun?

I was one, back in the late-70s at the Ottawa Citizen, my first newspaper job. I’d gone into journalism for two reasons. First, I wanted to write and working at a newspaper was a way to do so and earn a living. Second, I had a vague notion that having to talk to strangers would help me overcome my social unease. In those days, I thought shyness was a failing.

But, it wasn’t long before I figured out that first-person stories (what is now grandiosely called experiential journalism) would allow me to write and provide me with a subject – that is, me – who wouldn’t cavil at inaccuracies or misquotes. And let’s be honest: first-person stories scratched my itch to be noticed, make people more likely to remember my byline, maybe one day make me famous in that small, staid backwater, the nation’s capital. Alan Fotheringham called it Dullsville-on-the-Rideau and he wasn’t wrong.

I still had to do a lot of bread-and-butter reporting, of course, first on general assignment, later on the medical and science beat. But my adventures in personal journalism were always the best part of the job and I was always looking for subjects that would get me sprung from daily news assignments. Let me tell you about a few.

I lost weight during a weeklong supervised fast. A New You was housed in a Victorian brownstone in Toronto’s west end. For what then seemed an outrageous sum (if memory serves, $350 for the week), seven of us, six middle-aged women plus me, a twenty-something who didn’t need to lose weight, received a daily allotment of half a lemon, plus a wearying schedule of pep talks, exercise and weigh-ins. I lost nine pounds – mostly water, of course – and on my return to Ottawa wrote at length about what starvation felt like.

I quit smoking during a month-long smoking-cessation program that involved lectures, testimonials and scary films. The day after each of the weekly classes, I wrote about my journey. I started smoking again the day after I’d finished the final account.

I wore a blindfold for a weekend to take readers into the land of the blind, documenting my bumps and stumbles while making my way through Ottawa’s treacherous streets. Worst moment: when I missed the ashtray at my boyfriend’s apartment and butted out a cigarette on his new leather couch.

I was a contestant in the Great Canadian Race, a boondoggle I talked my editors into that got me sprung from work for about 10 days. I joined a group of about 50 people travelling from Toronto to Montreal via canoe, kayak, sailboat, bicycle, go-kart, roller skate, what have you. I started out walking and was crippled about 30 kilometres into Day One. I spent the rest of the trip travelling in regal comfort in the rescue jitney.

But my finest hour was the time I applied for a job with the city’s biggest escort service. Stan Wise was the ruling impresario of Ottawa’s rub-and-tug industry, founder of the Ottawa Dating Service, Rent-a- Date, Supergirl Shoeshine and a string of massage parlours. As part of the Citizen’s investigation of the industry, my editors assigned me to go undercover as a prostitute who had moved to Ottawa from Toronto and was looking for steady work.

(I remain proud of my sub-lead: “But was horizontal the right position for this new girl in town?”).

I regarded my article as a fine piece of consumer journalism, outlining the economics of hooking: Wise explained he kept $20 off the top but everything beyond the basic service was mine. He suggested I charge $60 to $70 for “everything,” but I should be prepared to negotiate. If the client didn’t want sex, he and I would split the $20.

Frankly, he could’ve been sent from central casting to play the grubby role he found himself in: a pudgy, balding loser who looked like he could use a shower. That said, he was courteous and businesslike. It would be easy to forget that selling sex and avoiding getting busted was at the heart of our conversation.

The job interview went very well right until the end when he told me to strip so he could check out the goods.

Affronted, I asked why he needed to see me naked. I asked myself why I hadn’t anticipated this.

To make sure you aren’t covered in bruises or needle marks, he explained.

Well, I huffed, taking off my clothes for an employer is strictly against my code of ethics, my sense of professionalism.

Even to my ears, that sounds lame. He seemed stunned. I’m pretty sure that exchange raised serious doubts with Stan about the kind of escort I’d make.

He told me he’d be in touch.

I picked up my purse, my tape recorder within it, and fled. My career as a sex worker was done.

My reporting career lasted a mere five years. I was one of those tortured souls who clung to my copy until seconds before deadline, then routinely jerked awake at 3 a.m., certain I’d made a grievous error in the second-last paragraph of a piece that had gone to press hours before. I would then lie in bed staring at the ceiling, mentally reconstructing the entire article – rewriting, fixing, tweaking, scrubbing – to produce the fine bit of prose I should have filed in the first place. Next morning, exhausted, I would slink into work certain I would be unmasked by my editors as Worst Journalist Ever by lunchtime.

Reporters must have courage and confidence. I had neither.

So I became an editor, a smart career move: It allowed me to work with words and spend my days among familiar faces. Plus, it paid better. Plus, I turned out to be good at it.

Over the years, I’ve worked mostly in features/lifestyle sections where I’ve had the pleasure of editing a number of women who were and are similarly attracted to the one-letter word. Indeed, you can draw a fairly straight line from me to them, though something changed over the years: I, at least, left the office and immersed myself in experience. But for a while there, especially in the early noughts, and largely taking the lead from British papers, pretty much every newspaper had a resident female columnist who would twitter on about their fascinating personal life and the people who passed through it.

Cases in point: at the National Post, I handled columns by Rebecca Eckler, then in her mid-20s, and Sondra Gotlieb, then in her mid-60s. Neither spared any detail of their lives.

Rebecca was and is a brilliant controversialist. Once she wrote blithely of how her affluent boyfriend, aka “the fiancé,” routinely left money for her inside her laptop after he spent the night – leading readers to conclude she was a kept woman. Some were outraged. I was among the many who enjoyed her brand of personal journalism.

She was smart and took me into a world other than my own: as when she advised that to survive an evening in teetering big-girl shoes take a few Advil before leaving home; as when she wrote a day-by-day account of how she and young women like her could make a supermarket rotisserie chicken feed her for an entire week. An entire week! (Such columns must always include exclamation points! Even two!!)

Sondra, too, was a treasure. She had a real gift for retailing her life in what sometimes seemed like hourly increments. She was a card-carrying member of Rosedale society – her husband, Allan, had been Canadian ambassador to the U.S. in the Reagan years – and could write assuredly about the art of entertaining – “Our tiny dining room table could seat no more than 12 people,” she once lamented; the famous people she’d met – Gore Vidal, rival Washington hostesses Pamela Harriman and Kay Graham – and her beloved dog Paxie, named after her anti-depressant.

In recent years our dailies have faced a precipitous slide in circulation and ad dollars coupled with fickle-eyed readers with short attention spans and a multiplicity of buzzy electronic choices. Our besieged city newspapers have concluded that survival requires a return to the good old core missions of hard news, to the extent they can afford to hire reporters to gather it, and massive dollops of informed comment, all of which addresses a handful of issues and marches in lockstep along political lines. The eyes glaze.

The I-writing women are still out there, but they’ve set up shop in the blogosphere, on the memoir shelves of bookstores, in the front and back of what remains of the women’s magazines. But in the papers, the days of cosmopolitans and yummy mummies are gone.

Many journalists, particularly of the pre-Internet, pre-legacy generation, are pleased the fluff has been scrubbed from the newsprint, that those narcissists have been banished from the business of serious newspapering.

Me, I’ll miss them. But then, I would.

SARAH MURDOCH was a reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, later an editor at Toronto Life, the Financial Times, The Globe and Mail, the National Post and, finally, the Toronto Star, where she continues to write a weekly column for the books section. She is also working on short stories and a novel.