This is a joint byline for the Ryerson Review of Journalism. All content is produced by students in their final year of the graduate or undergraduate program at the Ryerson School of Journalism. Live from the Plains of Abraham
It's Canada: A People's History, the CBC $25 million, 30 hour, 15 episode attempt to show us the way we were
Red, grey and black binders bearing such labels as “Metis, et al” and “Halifax 1890s-1915” are scattered across the boardroom table. Huge yellow boxes of slides are piled in a corner. “Those are all for the Confederation episode,” says Mark Starowicz as he enters the sixth-floor screening room in the Toronto CBC building. Seating himself […]
Powered by the People
Forget the bottom line, treat readers as concerned citizens, tackle serious problems and offer solutions. The trend is called "public journalism"—but isn't this what all journalism ought to be?
For Marc Tom Yew, a fourth-year industrial engineering student at Ryerson, it was a typical day during December finals. As usual, he stopped into a convenience store along his route to school and picked up a newspaper. When he slapped the money and paper on the counter, the clerk greeted him with a sudden laugh […]
Video Killed the TV News Star
Our lead tonight: A revolution in TV news as 50 years of talking heads give way to the twitchy visual energy of music videos. From Big Life to Media Television, current affairs reporting has never been so hip
We were acting like rave DJs, who are the hottest shit in music right now,” says Stephen Marshall, ex-frontman of the now defunct Channel Zero “video-news company.” “DJs take tracks and they assemble them into collages that keep people dancing for eight to 10 hours. I think that’s what we were doing. It wasn’t that […]
The Massacre That Never Was and the Terrorists Who Always Were
Reports and retorts from a Globe and Mail foreign correspondent who came home with a suitcase full of questions
Sometime in August 1993, I found myself rattling in an ancient Cessna over one of the densest parts of the Brazilian Amazon dressed partly in my pyjamas and a soiled pair of khakis that I had discarded in a dark corner of my hotel room the night before. I barely had enough time to dress […]
Courtroom Trauma
Burnout on the Bernardo beat. How three reporters lived with a monster
Barbara Brown squats close to the pavement outside the Ontario Courthouse, General Division, at 361 University Avenue in Toronto. Her left arm is straight up in the air, clutching her Sony microcassette tape recorder. Her arm is aching beyond belief. Brown, 43, who describes herself as a “tough-chick crime reporter,” has been on the crime […]
Chain Reaction
Bullied by the giants, the little weeklies are counting on their small-town savvy
Rick James walks through the century-old, red-brick building that houses his weekly newspaper, The Canadian Statesman, and describes what it looked like in days past and what it ‘ll become in the days ahead. In one room, pages for the following day’s edition of the weekly paper lie on the light green veneer of drafting-style […]
Where do we re-draw the line?
The shifting ethics of digital manipulation
You won’t find the June 27,1994 U.S. edition ofTime in any library. Nor can you order a back copy – all of them have been sold. The issue has become a collector’s item because of an error in judgment. On its cover, a colour police mug shot of ex-football hero O.J Simpson was darkened using […]
Report on Silver Linings
All the good news that's fit to print: facts and arguments against the Globe's special sections
By last spring many in the industry knew that Confederation Life was in dire financial trouble. Only four years earlier the company had posted earnings above $100 million. But by 1992 those profits had dropped to $1.9 million, and last year the company lost $29 million. Oddly, the Report on Insurance that ran in The […]
An Ominous Sign
For eight weeks last fall, there bruised and angry faces glared menacingly down on passersby from 30 massive billboards around Toronto. The four police-lineup-style mug shots—of an Asian and black man, and two white men, one of whom could be taken as Latino— were stamped with the word “deported” in large red block letters. Underneath, […]
Crime-Time News
How Toronto's TV stations distort the picture of what's really happening on the streets
It was the kind of suppertime news story that suspended your fork somewhere between your plate and mouth. It wasn?t a “big” story about “big” names. No dove-releasing picnic of brotherly love hosted by Arafat and Rabin; no prime-ministerial tantrums on Parliament Hill. In fact, what pushed this story to the top of three Toronto […]
