2003 was a difficult year for the newspaper baron by Michael Higgins

Many Canadians took pleasure in what Bob Rae coined Conradenfreude -- vicarious delight in the travails of the Lord of Crossharbour. The ex-Canadian press baron has had a difficult autumn. Hollinger, Hollinger International, and the Ravelston Corp. have all been under media, financial and legal siege.

Non-compete fees to senior executives, payouts of legal and moral dubiety, and profound shareholder discontent have all combined to make the future of Lord Black's media empire quite uncomfortably bleak.

Although he continues to bask in surprisingly uniform critical praise for his massive (could it be otherwise with Black) biography of U.S. president Franklin Delano Roosevelt, with the notable exception of Michael Janeway's review in the New York Times Book Review, the heavy waves of turbulence his corporate bodies are now experiencing must surely have drowned his earned writerly plaudits. This unfolding drama bears close watching -- not because of its hubristic quality -- but because the future ownership and direction of such major media entities as the Spectator, the Daily Telegraph, the Sunday Telegraph, the Jerusalem Post, the Chicago Sun-Times, etc., have serious consequences for discerning readers scattered across the globe.

CanWest Global Communications Corp. -- the Asper empire that purchased several Back newspapers, and most particularly its flagship, National Post -- although not faced with problems comparable to the Hollinger scandals, still has troubles of its own.

Sure, Mike Bullard left CTV for Global, but the viewership statistics have failed to soar. To date, they appear to have gone the other way. Although the hemorrhaging of talent at the Post appears to have been stanched, that is not true of its fiscal lifeblood. Whether the media convergence strategy that the Asper family has so aggressively pursued will yet prove justified, there is no question that CanWest's enhanced national presence is at best a mixed blessing. The coming year may well prove the defining year for the Post's future.

The CBC's Radio service suffered serious setbacks during the dying days of the Alex Frame-Adrian Mills alliance. Massive program and editorial overhauls of the English-speaking radio section of the national network -- Radio One specifically -- proved a disaster. Since Frame's retirement in the spring and Mills' termination at the Mother Corps. during the same period, the CBC has managed to rally, re-energize and rejuvenate.

For the first time, the Bureau of Broadcast Measurements stats indicate that CBC's Radio One Metro Morning show with host Andy Barry has secured first spot ahead of CHUM, CFRB, and TALK Radio, particularly among young listeners. The CBC, under the leadership of president Robert Rabinovitch, appears to be consolidating its public broadcasting image over and against the private cable and digital universe not by replicating their strategies, but by defining itself more and more as a unique and necessary cultural reality.

One of the most exciting new ventures emerging from Toronto with genuine national implications is the appearance of the Walrus, the best thing, in truth, to happen on the Canadian magazine scene for quite a period of time. This magazine delivers the real goods on substance and style. The current issue has articles of impressive length and depth on such topics as Russia's inadvertent re-armament with the help of its former enemies and Tony Blair's struggles with his Iraq legacy, as well as other features including a substantive review of Romeo Dallaire's visceral indictment of the Rwanda inferno by Stephen Lewis. On the basis of the first two issues I believe the editors of the Walrus are well on their way to realizing their exalted goals as a publication: "Our intention is to give writers the resources they need to dig beneath the surface of news-driven 'stories' and to assemble and contribute real narratives to the public discourse. We will go after the bottom line of a story, the stuff that helps to make sense of the words and deeds that might otherwise seem like random acts. We hope, in this way, to play a modest part in helping to create a better-informed public and a larger cadre of writers and public intellectuals."

The year 2003 also ushered in the new Toronto-centred television station, Toronto One. Perhaps 2004 will usher it out. Derivative, fluffy, sometimes scabrous and often silly, it was launched with the chutzpah of Moses Znaimer's Citytv, but with none of its originality and genius.

Next week, part two of the year-end review.

Michael W. Higgins is President of St. Jerome's University in the University of Waterloo.