“Barenaked Mess,” the cover story in the current issue of Maclean’s, starts off with message board quotes regarding a fact never reported in the media — save for a lazy copy-and-paste a few months later in Frank magazine — prior to news that Steven Page was facing a charge of criminal possession of a controlled substance in Fayeteville, NY. Page didn’t hide his new girlfriend, Christine Benedicto, from the passengers on the annual Ships & Dip cruise hosted in February by the Barenaked Ladies — but, based on the forum postings after the event, consensus remained that Page’s split from his wife Carolyn Ricketts should be considered a private matter. Besides, who’d even think to gossip about this guy?
Naturally, circumstances leading up to Page finding himself hanging around a suburb of Syracuse with two mid-20s women — the other was Christine's roommate, 25-year-old Stephanie Ford — on a Thursday night in July have served as sufficient conversation fodder. The reputation Page continued to establish as a big thinker — last summer, he was hosting a CBC Radio series about the history of trends, All the Rage, while being filmed tracing his roots back to Poland for CBC genealogy program Who Do You Think You Are? — likely did its part to lead those not typically titillated by celebrity dirt to think thoughts about him. And did you hear that BNL just independently released a kids’ album called Snacktime? Well, you have now.
There’s also a blogger, Jason Chesworth, floating the theory that Page was essentially “whacked” — through the mainstream Canadian media if not the Fayeteville, NY police — as retribution for his vocal opposition to the contentious copyright Bill C-61.
With his day in court set for August 26, the Page-related news cycle will likely simmer down for the next four weeks. There haven’t been any reports of adult contemporary radio stations pulling their now-innocuous CanCon ballads from regular rotation. But while the arrest made the rounds on American websites like TMZ, where a headline like “Barenaked Lady Busted for Booger Sugar” helps the traffic flow money into the same Time Warner corporate coffers once filled by BNL, their creative legacy — whether as “One Week” one-hit-wonders, family-friendly live favourites, retro-‘90s modern rock nostalgia, sorority house staples or critically credible tunesmiths — was shown to be less enduring than manager Terry McBride might imagine. The news received little attention from American outlets specializing in music coverage, at best relegated to the dusty reaches of the where-are-they-now file.
When it comes to rehabilitating the image of the band, this may turn out to be a good thing. However, the saga proved irresistible fodder for the latest Maclean’s, in supermarket checkout racks through August 6.
Nicholas Köhler, a 33-year-old staff correspondent based in Calgary, was available to take on the assignment last week — with a background in crime reporting at the Ottawa Citizen and National Post, he was figured to be a good fit, sharing the byline with Toronto-based associate editor Cathy Gulli. While inside-out dissections of this kind of sensationalist article are commonplace south of the border, it seems few journalists in this country are ever called to dissect the motivation for covering a story a certain way, although Köhler was game for that kind of conversation.
“We tried to write a profile that would hang on the hook of the arrest,” he says. “But what I didn’t know beforehand is how fascinating a guy Steven Page is.”
Combined with some fairly benign character witness quotes from two putative Friends of Steve — theatre actor and director Geoffrey Pounsett, billed as a childhood pal, and NOW publisher Michael Hollett — background was pieced together from past interviews with Page, including an authorized 2001 biography by Paul Myers, Public Stunts, Private Stories. (Myers was contacted for further comment but refused participation.) And while being a publicly known figure since the early-‘90s meant 38-year-old Page wasn’t a likely candidate to be posting potentially sensitive information anywhere online — let alone spilling his secrets — 27-year-old Benedicto couldn’t be counted on to have exercised the same discretion, with a Flickr pro subscription displayed for mass perusal, along with a subsequently private page on MySpace. Page’s girlfriend’s soon-to-be-ex-husband Greg Benedicto not only has an easily-found weblog, Dreck Factory, he posted his own “Thoughts on Current Events” last Friday, offering reporter-ready bullet points explaining his separation, residential custodianship of the couple’s son, and distaste for swirling rumours that were allegedly being spread by a informant.
Köhler procured quotes from Greg confirming that he was relatively rational about the whole thing, and even appreciative of the connection Christine established with the singer-songwriter whose voice she now-infamously described as “like caffeine or cocaine,” accompanying a photo apparently deleted from Flickr.
How did crime reporters cover stories involving young people before these kind of Web 2.0 tools became the first place scraped for potentially salacious detail?
“It might be true that you can’t read a story like this anymore without a reference to Facebook, or MySpace, or what have you,” agrees Köhler. “But I wouldn’t say it’s different from using other documentation for sources. It’s not necessarily an easier layer — sure, going to a courthouse and pulling documents is more difficult, but it’s not that much more difficult. People are voluntarily putting their lives online. They don’t have the same authority over court documents.”
What public people like Page have greater access to, however, are the services of Los Angeles-based strategic communications firm Sitrick and Company, noted for their representation of Paris Hilton after her fleeting stint in a jail cell. The article makes an intriguing reference to Sitrick operative Tammy Taylor’s “unnerving habit of often knowing within minutes exactly who Maclean’s had spoken to in reporting the story.”
“She’d call back about something ostensibly different,” explains Köhler. “In the process, she’d reveal details about something she recently heard.”
Taylor was reached via email for this report on the report. The cordial response — “Thank you for the opportunity, but I am going to pass. Best regards, Tammy” — would have presumably been shared with her client at one stage or another today. Hi, Steve!
Maclean’s scribe Köhler is in the age bracket of Canadians who helped propel Barenaked Ladies to fame — indeed, he confesses to having once bought one of their albums, something a journalist in his mid-30s is unlikely enough to admit today. But did he feel bad for playing a role in helping to stoke any future TMZing?
“I don’t really know what to say. It’s a fair question, but it’s my job to write a compelling story about a compelling figure.”
What he wasn’t involved with was the choice of illustrations accompanying the story. The cover montage incorporates a contented self-portrait of the recently arrested couple. Debate over whether the default date registered by Flickr predates Page’s separation from his wife was countered by Benedicto’s caption that the photo was taken April 10, 2008 at the English wedding of Page’s hero-turned-collaborator Stephen Duffy.
More suspicious is the small-print credit assigned to the copyrighted image on the contents page: Flickr. Does that mean the photo sharing site is brokering content to glossies now? Quite likely not.
Maclean’s director of photography Andrew Tolson was on vacation during production of the story, and was unaware of whether permission was sought in his absence. With a new issue not being produced this week, other editors could not be reached for comment today.
Rachel Marsden, the New York-based political media muckraker, recently discovered a photo of herself and Bill O’Reilly lifted off her website to accompany last month's unflattering Maclean’s feature on her tabloidy antics. “It was copyrighted on my site,” she emails. “They ripped it off without asking — then when I billed them for it, they tried to talk me down to their ‘usual fee’ of $250 for a pic that size. I told them that would have applied had they actually checked with me, at which point I would have said no, anyway.” Marsden has submitted an invoice for $1000, and is waiting for payment.
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