Mental health: why journalists don’t get help in the workplace
Reporters are finally telling empathetic stories about depression, anxiety and other mental illnesses, but newsroom culture keeps journalists’ own struggles in the dark.
By Megan Jones In the early afternoon, fear crept in and drove Dave Seglins back to bed. Now he’s coming undone. He lies still, held by terror, unable to roll over, let alone get up and do something besides think, think, think. The outside world continues to move around him, but Seglins doesn’t notice. All […]
Why conservative columnists can’t live up to Peter Worthington
A tribute to the Toronto Sun co-founder, risk taker and fierce journalist.
By Luc Rinaldi & Abigale Subdhan In May 1976, three Mounties walked into Peter Worthington’s glass-walled Toronto Sun office with a search warrant. They wanted a leaked RCMP letter that contained information about Canadians charged with espionage and treason, which the Sun editor had recently mentioned in a column. He refused to hand it over. When they pleaded for […]
A novel approach
Fiction and journalism are contradictory, but equally relevant ways of getting at the truth.
By Jennifer Cheng It’s September 1982, and Linden MacIntyre has just sneaked into the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut with his camera crew and a taxi driver. Lebanon is in the midst of a civil war, and a week earlier, Christian militia had slaughtered hundreds—possibly thousands—of Palestinians. As the CBC broadcast journalist watches a front-end loader […]
My name’s Amelia. I’ll be your server tonight.
The tables are filling up quickly and the kitchen bell is ringing, just as more diners arrive. I seat them before running back for the food. The young woman at the door doesn’t have a reservation, but I happen to know who she is.
By Amelia Brown The tables are filling up quickly and the kitchen bell is ringing, just as more diners arrive. I seat them before running back for the food. The young woman at the door doesn’t have a reservation, but I happen to know who she is. Her photo appeared in a story with my byline. […]
I don’t always play by hometown rules
As I reach for the voice recorder on the desk, the professor asks, casually: “You’ll send me my quotes, right?” I freeze. I’m sitting in an office on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, finishing up an interview my classmate and I are conducting for a story about legalizing weed.
By Lisa Coxon As I reach for the voice recorder on the desk, the professor asks, casually: “You’ll send me my quotes, right?” I freeze. I’m sitting in an office on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, finishing up an interview my classmate and I are conducting for a story about legalizing weed. Trying to […]
I may not be an expert, but I play one in print
There was more booze on that bar’s back wall than I’ll drink in my entire life.
By Luc Rinaldi There was more booze on that bar’s back wall than I’ll drink in my entire life. Yet I sat on a stool, staring at 400 bottles of alcohol, as the bartender pointed out the most popular spirits, showed off several different types of glasses and compared brandies to bitters (like I knew […]
Fear and loathing on the campaign trail
When journalists Chrystia Freeland and Linda McQuaig ran for office in a Toronto Centre by-election, what did they lose along the way?
By Graeme Bayliss Chrystia Freeland walks as though she can’t keep pace with her own excitement. Dressed in Grit red, she sashays down the aisle of a Toronto Reference Library auditorium, the last candidate to arrive, flanked by hundreds of supporters and watched by dozens of journalists. On this September afternoon, the author and former […]
Stories in the ashes: covering disaster in Lac-Mégantic
After a train exploded in a tiny Quebec town, some reporters stuck around and showed us the power of narrative journalism.
By Rebecca Melnyk Inside his west-end Toronto apartment, Justin Giovannetti was cocooned in blankets, sick in bed with a bad cold on his day off. His cellphone rang. Dennis Choquette, his editor at The Globe and Mail, wanted him in the office. Giovannetti rolled off his mattress, slipped into his least flattering clothes and schlepped in […]
How BlackBerry execs bullied journalists and why nobody fought back
The story Canadian writers missed when they didn't report on Research In Motion's abysmal press relations.
By Christina Pellegrini When John Stackhouse first met Jim Balsillie at a business social almost a decade ago, the co-CEO of Research In Motion didn’t mince words. Once Balsillie figured out who Stackhouse was—the freshly appointed editor of The Globe and Mail’s Report on Business section—he pointed a finger at him and launched into an attack […]
Selling the second-screen experience
How CBC’s and Global’s interactive approach keeps stories alive and viewers coming back.
By Harriet Luke Five medical experts enter the Ideas Room on the third floor of the Canadian Broadcasting Centre in downtown Toronto. They’ve flown in from Saskatchewan, Wisconsin and England to help tackle some complex data. It’s 9 a.m., and the glass-walled room provides a sense of openness as Anita Elash, an associate producer at The […]
