Toronto Globe Research Articles

Framing Expertise: R. Alan Eagleson and the Toronto Globe and Mail , 1967–1994

R. Alan Eagleson, Executive Director of the National Hockey League Players’ Association from 1967 to 1992, had a major impact on the business of hockey. Although he was suspected of conflicts of interest, questioned for unethical behaviour towards athletes and was eventually indicted by the FBI in 1994 on multiple charges, Eagleson remained in his position of power over 20 years. This study used media framing to reveal that Eagleson’s expertise was one of the origins of his extensive power and why he was seen as the best candidate to protect and advocate for the rights of NHL players. The expertise frame was the only frame to emerge in newspaper coverage in Toronto’s The Globe and Mail consistently throughout Eagleson’s tenure, even when his power was challenged. However, there was a noticeable decrease in the use of the expertise frame once the FBI investigation was made public in 1991. This study revealed that a finite number of journalists deployed the framing elements, and the perception of his expertise may have played a role in how he was able to maintain power and influence in the sport for so long, despite allegations of conflicts of interest and criminal activity.

Dr. Mark A. Wainberg (1945-2017): Provocateur, Activist, and Champion for AIDS Care and Research.

Dr. Mark A. Wainberg (1945-2017): Provocateur, Activist, and Champion for AIDS Care and Research.

Contradictory mobility: child self-protection and automobiles in interwar Toronto’s Globe

AbstractTwenty-first-century Toronto recapitulates its early twentieth-century self in one important respect: the automobilism of present-day Toronto injures and kills pedestrians in the same way – in the city’s crowded streets – and at roughly the same rate. The difference between the two eras lies in the types of injury and causes of death among children. Interwar Toronto endangered its children on increasingly crowded and automobilising streets, with virtually no municipal policy to protect them, especially those aged four and younger. The Toronto Globe determined that the next best thing to a policy option was to advance child self-protection. The newspaper’s ‘Just Kids Safety Club’ trained young pedestrians ‘to look up and down’ before crossing the street. In this, the Globe and the Torontonians who supported the paper contradicted decades of child protection discourse, which required all adults to protect all children.RésuméLe Toronto du vingt-et-unième siècle récapitule celui du début du vingtième siècle à un égard: l’automobilisme du Toronto contemporain blesse et tue les piétons de la même manière – dans les rues bondées de la ville – et au même rythme. La différence entre ces deux époques réside dans les types de blessures et les causes de décès des enfants. Toronto, pendant l’entredeux guerres, mettait la vie de ses enfants en danger dans des rues de plus en plus bondées de gens et de véhicules, n’ayant pratiquement aucune réglementation pour protéger les enfants, en particulier ceux âgés de quatre ans ou moins. Le Toronto Globe détermina qu’en l’absence d’une telle règlementation, la meilleure solution était de promouvoir l’autoprotection des enfants. Le ‘Just Kids Safety Club’ apprenait aux jeunes piétons à regarder à droite et à gauche avant de traverser la route. Ce faisant, le Globe et les Torontois qui le soutenaient contredisaient des décennies de discours sur la protection de l’enfant selon lequel tous les adultes étaient responsables de la protection de tous les enfants.

Twenty years on …

The Nobel Prize Committee for Economics has been pretty good about drawing attention to innovative developments in economics since 1969, but in the past 20 years only one prize has been awarded for work that had a strong natural resources dimension, namely that on ad hoc cooperative solutions to the management of common property resources (Elinor Ostrom, University of Indiana). At least three Peace Prizes have been awarded for contributions to issues in conservation and the environment (Al Gore, the IPCC, and Wangari Maathai in Kenya for a tree-planting campaign). Toronto's Globe and Mail newspaper speculated in October 2012 that William Nordhaus would win the prize in economics, probably for his simulation model of economic growth and global warming (an Integrated Assessment Model). But to date only Ms Ostrom has been awarded the Economics Prize for essentially environmental economics. Thomas Schelling has circled back to environmental issues in his research over the years and was awarded the prize in economics, but it was for his contributions to game theory that he was singled out. Ronald Coase (Economics Nobel winner) focused the attention of economists on possible ‘markets’ for externalities, among other things, but few would refer to him as an environmental economist. Robert Solow set out the basic model of economic sustainability but again his prize was for other contributions. Observers in Stockholm and Oslo have thus made known their concern for environmental issues but have remained fairly agnostic about the significance of work by resource and environmental economists on such issues.

Simply managing: what managers do and can do better

In 2009, Henry Mintzberg’s Managing was named one of the best books of the year by strategy+business and Library Journal magazines, the number two business book of the year by the Toronto Globe and Mail, one of the top ten academic titles by Choice magazine, and the management book of the year in a competition organized by the Chartered Management Institute in association with the British Library. So this is clearly a book every manager should read. But one of the issues Mintzberg addresses is the frenetic pace and relentless pressures of the job—most managers hardly have time to think. So Mintzberg has done some revising and some updating and has distilled the essence of his original 320-page book into a lean, action-oriented 216 pages. The core of the book remains the same: Mintzberg’s observations of twenty-nine different managers, from business, government, and nonprofits, working in diverse settings ranging from a refugee camp to a symphony orchestra. What he saw led him to develop a new model of management, one firmly grounded in his conclusion that it is not a profession or a science. “It is a practice,” he writes, “learned primarily through experience and rooted in context.” But context cannot be seen in the usual way. Factors such as national culture, level in a hierarchy, and even personal style turn out to have a far different influence—sometimes much less—than we have traditionally thought. Mintzberg also offers a compelling discussion of some of the inescapable conundrums of managing. How can you get in deep when there is so much pressure to get it done? How can you manage it when you can’t reliably measure it? How do you balance the need for change with the need for continuity? He concludes with a provocative look at what being an effective manager really means, which he describes as “engaging management.” This is the most authoritative and revealing book yet written about what managers do, how they do it, and how they can have the greatest impact. “Mintzberg does not accept conventional wisdom—he challenges it constantly…erudite as well as practical.” —Choice magazine

Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld: A “Modern Woman” of Sport and Journalism in Twentieth-Century Canada

Jewish-Canadian athlete Fanny “Bobbie” Rosenfeld has been remembered as an exceptional all-around athlete, whose career triumph occurred at the 1928 Olympics where she won a gold medal as the lead-off member of the 4 × 100-meter relay team, a silver medal in the disputed 100-meter race, and placed fifth in the 800-meter race. She was also a hard-hitting sports journalist, in an occupation dominated by men, who championed women’s issues at all levels—local, national, and international—through her daily column for the Toronto Globe and Mail from 1937 to 1958; a coach for the women’s track and field team at the 1934 British Empire Games; and a critic of sport policy, particularly amateur athletics. In 1950 she was named Canada’s woman athlete of the half-century, narrowly edging out figure skater Barbara Ann Scott. The only Jewish athlete ever to win a gold medal in track and field, she was inducted into the International Jewish Sports Hall of Fame in Israel in 1981. The accolades for Rosenfeld continued to mount. In 1991 the city of Toronto established the Bobbie Rosenfeld Park situated between the Sky Dome and the CN Tower. On 9 June 1996, the Canada Post Corporation paid tribute to the 100th anniversary of the Modern Olympic Games by issuing five stamps honoring Canadian Olympians who distinguished themselves at previous Olympics, and included Bobbie Rosenfeld among those recognized.1 Rosenfeld’s athletic career spanned that crucial period in women’s sport history between the two world wars, long recognized by sports historians as “the golden age of women’s sport in Canada.”2 Rosenfeld, with her bobbed hair—the derivation of her nickname “Bobbie”—her lean athletic body, independent career girl persona, and immigrant working-class background, was the embodiment of a new type of femininity that emerged in the interwar years known variously as the Modern Girl and the Modern Woman. As a collective of women’s historians demonstrated recently, the Modern Girl emerged quite literally around the world in the first half of the twentieth century.3 Historian Kathy Peiss writes, “The Modern Girl was variously a symbol of female social freedom, normative Western racial hierarchies, the universality of beauty, standards of hygiene and fashion, and a modernizing economy.”4 Whereas the Modern Girl is usually associated with the representation of the sexualized, commodified flapper in the scholarly literature, another version

The Law of the Land: The Advent of the Torrens System in Canada by Greg Taylor

As a former history student and erstwhile professor of first-year property, The Law of the Land: The Advent of the Torrens System in Canada by Greg Taylor offered me an opportunity to engage in academic reading with just a hint of “night table book” indulgence. As the title suggests, the author carefully traces the development of the Torrens registration system in Australia and its subsequent reception within Canada — an undertaking that even those within the legal profession may find as dry as the dust on the land titles records. However laborious the research, the book itself manages to bring history to life; chasing clues from Adelaide to the United Kingdom National Archives to the records of the Toronto Globe in an attempt to divine the motives and influences of the Torrens prophets and their opponents. The result is an original and interesting account incorporating law and politics spanning some 150 years of Canadian history.

Accrual Strategies for Cancer Genetics Research: Blurred Boundaries

and BRCA2 founder mutations in an unselected group of Ashkenazi Jewish women, with an astounding 2,000 women enrolled within 14 days of an article appearing in one of Canada’s most respected newspapers. Given the overwhelming interest among the target population, one might ask exactly what information prompted such an overwhelming response. The article in question was published on the front page of the Toronto Globe and Mail (Saturday May 24, 2008) with a large-font headline reading: “Cancer test a genetic crystal ball for Jewish women.” 2 The first line in the piece stated: “For the first time in Canada, Jewish women will be offered the chance to alter their genetic destiny by taking a test…” a patently untrue and sensationalistic statement, given that presymptomatic BRCA1 and BRCA2 mutation testing, including Ashkenazi Jewish founder mutations, have been available for many years through medical genetics services nationwide. The concept of altering genetic destiny remains a potentially very desirable goal for those at real or perceived risk but is highly problematic in the clinical setting as any involved with the provision of genetic and oncologic care can easily attest. The goal of the test was “to prevent cancer” as elucidated by one of the investigators in the article. Two rabbis were quoted, the first commenting that “The rate of the gene is so high, it will be one of the tests that is normally done,” equatingBRCA1 and-2 testing to screening for Tay-Sachs, a culturally specific heritable disease. The other stated that genetic testing was a no-brainer imputing Halacha (Jewish law) that “insists that one is obligated to take care of oneself” as rationale for testing. Risks of taking the test are described as “primarily psychological, such as depression and stress, or unpredicted implications for obtaining life or critical care insurance.” Although the authors note a number of limitations to their work, the ethical implications are not mentioned. How sensationalistic is a headline allowed to be in order to generate accrual to a research study? How appropriate is it to imbibe the research with culturally and religiously significant implications directly aimed at the ethnic group under investigation? How justified is it to minimize the potential emotional angst and psychological turmoil that genetic testing can engender for subjects and their families? What degree of overstatement can be accepted when describing bothBRCA mutation incidence as well as the evidence of benefit from testing, when approaching a susceptible population for research purposes? With the goal of the research summarized as “to prevent cancer,” along with supporting patient vignettes, religious calls to action, and minimization of the clinical, psychological and emotional dilemmas faced by all those undergoing genetic testing, who could resist making the call to enroll in the study? Although the potential benefits of presymptomatic BRCA1 and -2 mutation detection can be significant, the clinical, ethical, and emotional dilemmas surrounding genetic testing for hereditary cancer syndromes can be even more so. The recent American Society of Clinical Oncology policy statement update regarding genetic and genomic testing for cancer susceptibility 3 elucidates evolving concerns regarding direct-to-consumer genetic testing, which have relevance for both industry and academia.

Cluster Analysis and Rankings of Canadian Universities: Misadventures with Rank-based Data and Implications for the Welfare of Students

We present a data-based perspective concerning the Maclean’s magazine (November 17, 2003) rankings of Canadian universities, including two cluster analyses and other nonparametric analyses. These data are similar to those in recent university ranking exercises conducted by other magazines, such as U.S. News. In many cases, the cluster procedure showed that universities actually resemble and relate to each other in a manner different from their formal classification and final rank ordering by Maclean’s. Several pitfalls in ranking procedures, related to unreliable relationships among specific indices underlying the final ranks, are outlined. Comparisons are made also with the most recent student satisfaction rankings for 47 Canadian universities, published in November, 2003, by the Toronto Globe and Mail. The latter rankings do not reliably reflect the general results of the Maclean’s data. In their present format, and although they have become increasingly publicized and promoted, it remains difficult for the Maclean’s data to be consistently or empirically useful to students. Ranking exercises have unintended, though increasingly predictable, consequences, which likely bear heavily upon the intellectual and personal well being of students.

Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to the World, 1914-1929 (review)

Some Hustling This! Taking Jazz to World, 1914-1929. By Mark Miller. Toronto: Mercury Press, 2005. [207 p. ISBN 1-55128-119-8. $19.95] Bibliography, index, photographs. This is latest in an impressive series of books by Mark Miller, jazz critic for Toronto Globe and Mail. His earlier monographs include Miller Companion to Jazz in Canada and Canadians in Jazz (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2001), Such Melodious Racket: Lost History of Jazz in Canada, 1914-1949 (Toronto: Mercury Press, 1997), and Cool Blues: Charlie Parker in Canada, 1953 (London, ON: Nightwood Editions, 1989), among others. Miller has also written for Down Beat, Coda, New Grove Dictionary of Jazz, Encyclopedia of Music in Canada, and other publications. Four years of research and writing went into this project, which Miller describes as the product of a much longer interest in lost, forgotten and overlooked in jazz history (p. 9). As he explains, theoretical implications [of] early exposure to, and contact with, American jazz musicians [abroad] have become a popular subject for critical analysis, bringing together . . . interrelated cultural and sociological themes of modernism, primitivism, exoticism, racism, identity and otherness. . . . Missing from this body of writing, however, is a basic account of who went where, when, and did what. (p. 11) Beginning with first trip of singer-drummer Louis Mitchell to Europe in 1914 with Southern Symphony Quintette (a ragtime ensemble), and closing with precipitous demise of a night club Mitchell opened in Paris in 1929 and his subsequent return to United States, Miller covers intervening fifteen years, later known as Jazz Age, during which many American musicians followed Mitchell abroad, bringing their talents and nascent jazz genre to far corners of globe. This is an account of sojourns by those musicians, only some of whose names are still widely recognized, including Sidney Bechet, Freddie Keppard, Jelly Roll Morton, and Willie The Lion Smith. Meticulous research, incisive writing, and clear layout are hallmarks of all of Miller's books. For this project, in addition to checking normal historical, biographical, and autobiographical print sources, Miller viewed microfilms of many newspapers from around world, some long defunct. One wonders about state of his eyes after four years of such research, but these sources proved invaluable. For example, many letters from musicians them-selves were published in Chicago Defender and other stateside newspapers, giving first-hand accounts and impressions of their experiences abroad. These provide a significant counterpoint to reviews published in contemporary newspapers and periodicals. Puzzled, even hostile, reactions to jazz were a common journalistic theme from early years. book's chapter headings cite numerous examples, such as Fearsome means of discord (p. 22), Hellish disharmony (p. 87), Noisy antics (p. 40), Half a dozen cacophonists (p. 105), and Squirmy cerulean harmony (p. 118). Another theme book explores was marketing of, and reporting about, artists (p. 166), i.e., black musicians. book's title derives from a laudatory 1917 review of Louis Mitchell's drumming with second band he led in London, Seven Spades. As Miller points out, racial inference [of band's name] was direct, unlike subtler geographic allusion, for example, of 'Southern Symphony Quintette.' . . . [F]ew black jazz bands working in Europe even in 1920s announced their ethnicity so explicitly. At this early date, though, 'Seven Spades' may well have been chosen to celebrate group's race as one of its defining attractions, (pp. 34-35) Coverage of, for instance, opening of Five Jazzing Devils in Kristiana (later Oslo) in 1921, and of Thompson's Jazz Band in Copenhagen in 1923, was typical of that found in many foreign newspapers in its pointedly racist rhetoric, including simplistic allusions to . …

Adolescent Overscheduling: The Relationship Between Levels of Participation in Scheduled Activities and Self-Reported Clinical Symptomology

The past 20 to 30 years has seen an increase in the time children and adolescents spend in structured activities outside of the regular school day. This has resulted in a significant reduction in the amount of free time children and youth have for leisure time activities. While much discussion has been given to this topic in the popular press, little systematic research has been conducted addressing this issue. The purpose of this study was to identify whether there is a relationship between the number of regularly scheduled activities in which adolescents are involved, the amount of time adolescents spend participating in these activities, and self-reports of anxiety, depression, and physical complaints. Results indicated that the greater the amount of time students reported participating in activities both at the time of the study and for the entire year, the higher their self-reported level of anxiety tended to be. Similar results were not observed for depression or somatization.

Writing across the Rural-Urban Divide: The Case of Peter McArthur, 1909-24

From 1909 until his death in 1924, Peter McArthur became one of Canada’s most popular writers by describing life on his Middlesex County farm in articles for the Toronto Globe and the Farmer’s Advocate of London, Ontario. That he was able to appeal to both rural and urban readers is interesting in two respects: it suggests that the lines between the country and the city were considerably more amorphous than contemporary rhetoric has suggested, and it provides an example of anti-modernist writing that gave as much pleasure to the “folk” as it did to the urban middle-class.

Regulating the Market in Human Research Participants

In the past couple of years, several investigations by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) of the US Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS) have drawn attention to the use of recruitment incentives in research. In 2003, Toronto's Globe and Mail reported that the pharmaceutical company Biovail became the subject of an investigation because it paid $1,000 per patient to American physicians who managed to renew prescriptions of its new drug Cardizem LA for at least 11 patients. The company argued that the payments were a reward for data gathering for post-marketing research [1]. Less successful physicians received only $250 per patient. In 2005, the OIG started an inquiry into payments made by Advanced Neuromodulation Systems to physicians who implanted a pain-management device in their patients for a five-day trial [2]. According to the Wall Street Journal, those who managed to implant the device in at least five of their patients received $1,000 for “data collection and management of the trial process.” The practice of paying research participants is inadequately regulated. Although the OIG has not yet released results of either investigation, it previously documented in 2000 other examples of troubling practices in a special report on the use of recruitment incentives [3]. Among them were an Internet advertisement by a family medical practice, highlighting their ability to quickly recruit patients for drug trials and post-marketing studies using two full-time research coordinators and their computerized patient database; and an industry article on recruiting patients into studies, recommending that researchers secure “an endorsement by your well-respected newspaper reporter or TV news anchor” to generate “more phone calls needed to fill studies.” These examples have to be understood in the context of the pervasive commercialization of medical research. General concerns relating to commercialization have received considerable attention. The practice of paying research participants has also been extensively debated [4–8] but remains inadequately regulated [9]. Much less attention has been paid, however, to issues surrounding “finder's fees” and other recruitment incentives issued to physicians for successfully referring patients to clinical trials investigators. This article aims to partly fill this void.

Putting the Humanity Back into Quantum Physics

The Feb. 16, 2004, edition of the Toronto Globe and Mail carried an article subtitled “Canada fails to teach the drama of science.” From what I have seen, I doubt that this is a shortcoming peculiar to the Great White North. Under pressure to “get through the material,” the tendency is to teach the concepts and theories, without mention of their origin, or at least of the human components of their origin. This is understandable to a certain extent: There seems to be ever more material that we should teach physics majors before sending them off to graduate school or on to the job market. We hope that they will be curious enough, as many of us were, to look into the human factor on their own. This works to some degree, but fails completely when teaching science to nonscience majors.

La presse et la politique étrangère canadienne

This article reports on the findings of what appears to be the first content analysis of all aspects of Canadian press coverage of Canadian foreign relations. Six major/newspapers were chosen on the basis of national significance and linguistic and regional considerations: the Halifax Chronicle-Herald, Le Devoir (Montréal), La Presse (Montréal), the Ottawa Citizen, the Toronto Globe and Mail and the Vancouver Sun. During the period studied (the last quarter of 1982), these newspapers averaged nearly nine items per issue on Canadian foreign relations and relied predominantly on Canadian sources for their material. However, there was a relative lack of analytic coverage and only a limited number of items that adopted supportive or critical positions on the various issues in Canadian foreign policy. Commercial matters received both the most extensive and the most sophisticated treatment, while the reporting of political subjects was generally less detailed and often superficial. In terms of relationships, that with the United States was arguably the only one to receive adequate coverage, while from the standpoint of issues there were several that received insufficient attention, such an environmental problems in relations with the United States, Canadian concerns at the United Nations, and international developmental matters. One of the most notable differences in coverage among the papers studied was the variation found in the attention paid to the international role of Quebec, which received only scant attention in the English-language press but was the single most frequently coded theme in the Quebec newspapers. While analytic coverage was found to be more extensive and profound in the Globe and Mail, Le Devoir and La Presse than in the other three papers, the authors in general agree with De Montigny Marchand that Canadian newspapers are "an uncertain intellectual force in the definition and interpretation of Canadian foreign policy".

Seeing Beyond the Ruins: Surveillance as a Response to Terrorist Threats

Following the September 11th terrorist attacks, the notion that everything has changed became a common theme. This paper argues that one of the most important areas of change occurred in the practice of surveillance. Utilizing news articles from the New York Times and Toronto Globe and Mail, we analyze the politics and social dynamics of contemporary surveillance. Our analysis is not a study of terrorism and September 11th per se, but rather uses the political reaction to September 11th to ground an examination of how surveillance policies and practices can paradoxically bring with them both an increased sense of security and a host of new dangers. We detail how September 11th provided a convenient opportunity for the security establishment to lobby for increased surveillance capacity, despite lingering questions about whether such devices can achieve their professed goals.

An Update on the Use of Ranks in Calibrating and Marketing Higher Education

ABSTRACT An analysis of ranking data, taken from Maclean's magazine's 2001 rankings of the 47 Canadian universities, is presented. Consistent with previous research, the rank data show that the specific measures and indices used by the magazine are inconsistently related to each other and to the universities' final assigned rankings. Some implications for the counselling and welfare of students, with special reference to selected issues in higher education, are outlined. Comparative information from related analyses, involving 2002 rankings of American universities recently published in U.S. News, and 2002 student satisfaction rankings published in the Toronto Globe and Mail, using increasingly popular evaluation indicators, is also presented.

Edward Gorey, Children's Literature, and Nonsense Verse

Edward Gorey, Children's Literature, and Nonsense Verse Kevin Shortsleeve (bio) "A lot of my books I've intended for children primarily." —Edward Gorey (Wynne-Jones 543) "Ted Gorey is perfect for children; and that's the saddest thing of all, that they [his books] weren't allowed to be published that way." —Maurice Sendak On April 15, 2000, Edward Gorey, author of a notorious canon of verse and prose, departed this life. In the wake of his passing—and during his own lifetime—there appears to have been a great deal of disagreement as to whether or not the works of Edward Gorey should be categorized as children's books. Obituaries on and critiques of the curious author run the gamut on this issue. Kate Taylor of the Toronto Globe and Mail affirmed that "Gorey is not a children's author" (R-5), while Mel Gussow commented in The New York Times that Gorey was "sometimes mistakenly categorized as an author of children's books" ("Edward Gorey" B-8). For others, Gorey's obituary was the perfect opportunity to warn any who might make that very mistake: in London, Brian Sibley of The Independent reported that "It might be argued that [Gorey's verses] were, by their subject matter, quite unsafe for children" (R-6). With less conviction, Myrna Oliver, writing in the Los Angeles Times, offered that his texts were merely "hard to categorize as children's books," suggesting that indeed, they might be children's books after all (B-6). The Daily Telegraph reported that "most of his material was aimed at reasonably small children" ("Edward Gorey: Recluse" 31), and Celia Anderson and Marilyn Apseloff, in Nonsense Literature for Children: Aesop to Seuss, confirmed that many children do appreciate Gorey's verses (139) and suggested that the dark themes depicted in them are indicative of their affiliation with a subgenre of nonsense literature (35). Completing the spectrum, Amy Hanson exhibited no apprehension whatsoever when, in a 1998 article in Biblio, she enthused that Gorey "has written many gently humorous books that are suitable for young readers" (20). My purpose in this essay is to confirm that Edward Gorey was a children's author and, further, that his contributions to the field of nonsense verse are both unique and valuable precisely because his work and career raise doubts about the accuracy of current understandings of children's literature. I will begin by examining why Gorey's work has been so difficult to categorize, suggesting that an unusual publishing decision and Gorey's steadfast ambivalence about his own career combined to prevent his acceptance as a children's author. An examination of Gorey's thematic concerns and personal background confirms that childhood was one of his principal themes and that Gorey worked solidly in the tradition of nonsense literature, his verse inspired by the nonsense rhymes of Lear, Carroll, and Hoffman. The violence in Gorey's work is both largely innocuous and, indeed, necessary to this genre. Ultimately, I will suggest that because his verses combine the traditional mores of the fathers of nonsense with a liberating blend of modern and postmodern tendencies, Gorey's works represent a valuable advance in nonsense literature. The author's dark verses are, in fact, uniquely situated to offer a rewarding set of challenges to the child reader. Because of Gorey's complex public persona, we must dismantle the legend before we can examine the mechanics of his verse. It is significant that throughout his career, Gorey was involved in the field of children's literature and, particularly, children's poetry. In 1959, shortly after he began publishing his rhyming picture books, Gorey became a founding editor at The Looking Glass Library, a short-lived imprint of Random House, dedicated to releasing children's classics in hardback, including Edward Lear's Book of Nonsense and The Looking Glass Book of Verse. In the 1960s and 70s, Gorey worked tirelessly as an illustrator of children's books. He provided art for numerous volumes and was especially effective when accompanying the verses of children's poets like Lear and John Ciardi. For many years, in fact, Gorey's main source of income was as an...

How Demographic Variables Affect Newspaper Delivery

Reliability of newspaper delivery is a serious concern for circulation managers because, unfortunately, failed newspaper delivery or other unsatisfactory performance from carriers is not uncommon. The literature has focused on news consumers' dependency on and uses for the media, and to some extent, their reactions to failed delivery, but an empirical assessment of reliability and satisfaction coupled with a comparison of some factors that may affect those measures is needed. Commentary and rhetoric from newspaper industry officials and jour nalism scholars raise more questions than they answer. Some say that youth carriers are unreliable, but others defend the little merchant system as more efficient, if not more reliable, than an all-adult carrier force. Some insist that costs can be cut and reliability boosted by having a smaller group of adult carriers deliver longer routes, but are the differences the result of carrier age or route length? Others say that reliability problems lie with a high rate of carrier turnover. They suggest that the longer a carrier holds a route, the better the service will be because reliability will improve with experience. Are young carriers less reliable than adults? What about carrier experience, he number of customers on a route, route length, or route density? This paper begins to examine how these factors relate to carrier reliability. Literature review In the 1940s, Bernard Berelson took one of the first looks at failed newspaper delivery. New York City's newspaper carriers had been on strike for 17 days, and the city was virtually without paper service when Berelson conducted his study to determine what people miss most about their paper when they can't get it.1 His results showed such strong reaction among a sample of 60 customers that a new genre of media research was born: dependency theory. As the name suggests, dependency theory indicates a reliance and a need for the media, as compared with a want or desire associated with uses and gratifications theory.2 About 13 years after Berelson's study, the New York City Newspaper and Mail Deliverers' Union struck again, leaving the city without papers for 19 days. Penn Kimball, a professor of journalism at Columbia University, used the situation to conduct a study following in Berelson's footsteps. He surveyed 164 New Yorkers who regularly read a paper, again asking the question: How much do people miss the newspaper in times of failed delivery? Kimball found the same strong dependency on newspaper. In 1998, Clyde Bentley, a doctoral student at the University of Oregon, had a local newspaper provide him with a daily list of customers who had been missed on the delivery route. He then called these people and asked 10 qualitative survey questions. Bentley's results suggest that people miss their paper very much when they don't get it. His and other contemporary studies have found the newspaper to be such a powerful component of media dependency theory that terms such as habit and ritual have been used to describe people's reliance.3 However, Berelson, Kimball and Bentley stopped short of exploring a solution. Because news consumers depend on reliable newspaper delivery, there is good reason to explore ways to provide that service. Most circulation concerns being discussed today seem to stem from a contentious debate concerning youth versus adult carriers. Several newspapers, including the Portland Press Herald, Maine Sunday Telegram, San Francisco Chronicle, San Francisco Examiner, Belleville Democrat, Toronto Globe and Toronto Mail have eliminated youth carriers or are considering the change.4 Many cite safety concerns for the youth, but most also offer business reasons for the decision. Some contend that young carriers are not as reliable as adults.5 In 1984, the Toronto Globe and Mail had 3,400 youth carriers who were generating about 4,200 to 4,500 complaints each week. After switching to a streamlined delivery force of adult carriers with longer routes, the papers' 550 to 580 adult carriers produced 932 complaints weekly. …

The Polls and the 1995 Quebec Referendum

Abstract: We perform a meta-analysis of 23 voter polls reported in the news media during the two-month period preceding the 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum. Contrary to common interpretations of the course of the referendum campaign, we find that there was a smooth and general increase in support for the sovereignty option during this period, and that Lucien Bouchard's dramatic intervention on behalf of the yes campaign on October 9 apparently had little effect on voters' stated intentions. The same was true of other putatively consequential events that transpired during the referendum We conclude that the pre-referendum polls slightly, but systematically, exaggerated the level of support for sovereignty. Resume: Nous executons une analyse meta de vingt-trois sondages qui sont annonce dans les journaux devant une periode de deux mois avant la 1995 referendum sur la souverainte du Quebec. En contraste des interpretations conventionelle pendant le cours de la referendum, on trouve un tendance positive pour la souverainte dans tout la periode et que l'intervention de Lucien Bouchard au commencement de 9 d'octobre sera pas de consequence. Ni les interventions des autres evenements touche la direction. On conclus que les sondages avant le referendum, exagere, un peut, le support pour la souverainte du Quebec. The October 30, 1995 Quebec sovereignty referendum is surely the most dramatic electoral event in recent Canadian political history. Substantial attention has been paid to the referendum in the popular press and, to a lesser extent, in the scholarly literature, both during and after the event. Nevertheless, while there is substantial commentary on pre-referendum polls, we are aware of careful statistical analysis of the dynamics of the campaign as revealed in the polls -- a task that we carry out in this paper. The period leading up to the 1995 Quebec referendum was notable for the intensity of political polling -- 23 general polls of voters were reported in the news media in the two-month period preceding the referendum, and by all accounts many more private polls were commissioned by interested parties.(1) Characterisations of the Referendum Campaign In an analysis of the 1992 Canadian constitutional referendum, LeDuc and Pammett (1995: 5) argue that while referenda in parliamentary democracies can be understood in much the same terms as elections, their outcome is even more dependent on the short-term elements of the campaign. At the start of the 1995 Quebec referendum campaign, the yes forces were under the formal leadership of the then-premier of Quebec, Jacques Parizeau. The no forces were captained by the leader of the Quebec Liberal Party, Daniel Johnson. Parizeau's leadership was widely regarded as ineffective. On October 9, in a dramatic gesture, Parizeau ceded direction of the yes campaign to Lucien Bouchard, then the leader of the Quebecois. Just as Parizeau's leadership was considered ineffective, Lucien Bouchard's takeover of the campaign was widely interpreted as giving the yes forces an important boost -- an interpretation that persists to this day. For example, on the day after the referendum, the Toronto Globe and Mail ran an article with the headline, Bloc Quebecois Leader Lucien Bouchard brought big gains when he took over the reigns of the Yes committee (Picard, 1995).(2) It would not be difficult to produce literally dozens of similar statements. While the dominant interpretation, the efficacy of Bouchard's intervention on the referendum campaign is not universally accepted. Writing in the Montreal newspaper La Presse, Quebec sociologist Pierre Drouilly (1995b) pointed to a generally rising trend of support for the yes option in polls conducted during the pre-referendum period. Likewise, in a paper published shortly after the referendum, Universite de Montreal political scientist Edouard Cloutier identified four potential turning points in the referendum campaign (Cloutier, 1995: 37): On September 24, Claude Garcia, Chief Executive Officer of the Standard Life Insurance Co. …