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. The New Protocol of War
Reporters are now targets, just like the armies they cover
Someone had to take Peter Brysky’s camera home. Peter Brysky was from Toronto; he was a free-lance stills photographer who was killed at Karlovac in Croatia on October 6,1991. A team from “The Journal” was in Croatia covering the war at the same time, staying at the same hotel, the Intercontinental in Zagreb. The hotel […]
Reflections on the Black Press
Left: After enduring six years as editor of the militant newspaper Contrast, Lorna Simms launched Dawn, a much softer, reassuring publication the staff of Contrast had just put the most recent issue of the weekly newspaper to bed. Editor Lorna Simms and production manager Paulette Grant completed the art boards and packed them into a […]
Dances with Journalists
A Mohawk writer on media racism
“And everyone laughed. It was so preposterous, as if I said to you that the world is flat. People don’t realize how unanimous and overwhelming the conventional wisdom was.” – Michele Landsberg, recalling an incident in the 1950s as a first-year student at the University of Toronto. She had told a group of students that […]
Understated and Understood
A columnist explains why she'd rather reason than rant
My first unfavourable review hurt more than I let on. It was 1989. I had been The Toronto Star’s national affairs columnist for four years and I was beginning to feel comfortable in the job. “No one expects her to persuade or entertain,” wrote Charlotte Gray in Saturday Night. “Were a strong opinion or a […]
The Wholesome Story
Canadian Living's recipe for success
When Canadian Living published its 150th issue in 1989, Norma Taylor of Summit Lake, British Columbia crocheted a blanket and sent it to the staff to mark the occasion. Taylor isn’t a former Canadian Living staff member and she’s not the editor’s mother. She’s just one of thousands of loyal readers across the country who […]
The Drive for Quality at Thomson Newspapers
Huh?
This is crap…it’s truly dreadful. This headline doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t want to read such a piece of shit.” Tony Sutton, the in-house design consultant for Thomson Newspapers Corp., is critiquing the prototype of a new Sunday edition of The Daily Mercury of Guelph, Ontario. He’s standing in his office on the 24th […]
On Being Fired
How the Globe's Fifth Columnist got the unkindest cut of all
It was mid-May of 1991 and I was fresh off the plane from Vancouver, sitting in a Queen Street West restaurant eating Thai noodles with Globe and Mail editors John Cruickshank and Phil Jackman and explaining the cognitive indignities I had planned for their readers in the coming year. After nearly a year as the […]
Days and Nights on the Kid Shift
What newspapers are doing to support working parents and what they aren't
It’s seven o’clock on a frigid November morning, and Toronto Star feature writer Patricia Orwen is scurrying about her small Etobicoke home as though she were working against a deadline in the newsroom. She enters the kitchen with her two daughters in tow and begins to make coffee from a pan of water on the […]
On Being Chilled
Let us now praise powerful people. What other choice do we have?
A few hundred years ago, during a night of drunken carousing, young gentlemen would argue, like men everywhere, about women and money. But instead of simply punching an opponent in the nose, a gentleman would thwack him across the face with his glove, crying: “You cad, sir! ” The cad would stagger to his feet […]
Keeping Up Appearances
For most women on camera, being young at heart is not enough. A look at the role that youth and beauty still play in TV news
In February, 1991, the CBC’s Toronto station, CBLT, aired a clever, facetious television commercial for its six o’clock newscast. In it, Barbie and Ken style dolls sat at an anchor desk, their plastic hair perfectly coiffed, grins stuck permanently in place. Staring vacantly into space, they engaged in some idle chatter: HE: Over to you, […]
