Whitney Wager

Editors in Distress

Editors in Distress

Low pay, high anxiety, long hours and short-staffed. The life of today’s magazine editor

The building that once housed James Lawrence’s Harrowsmith and Equinox magazines was a classic three-storey Victorian farmhouse constructed out of traditional red brick; there were wood-panelled walls and floors that creak. In the late 1980s, when Doug Bennet, then editor of Masthead magazine, a trade title covering the magazine business, visited Camden House Publishing, located […]

 Whitney Wager

Editors in Distress

Editors in Distress

Low pay, high anxiety, long hours and short-staffed. The life of today’s magazine editor

The building that once housed James Lawrence’s Harrowsmith and Equinox magazines was a classic three-storey Victorian farmhouse constructed out of traditional red brick; there were wood-panelled walls and floors that creak. In the late 1980s, when Doug Bennet, then editor of Masthead magazine, a trade title covering the magazine business, visited Camden House Publishing, located north of County Road 1 in the […]

 Whitney Wager

Reckless Disregard?

Reckless Disregard?

Amanda Lindhout has taken a lot of flak for her sally into Somalia. But maybe she’s more latter-day Kit Coleman than "cowboy"

When she was young, Amanda Lindhout pored over the pages of National Geographic and dreamed of travelling to the places she read about. In 2007, the Sylvan Lake, Alberta, native, then 25, abandoned her waitressing job in a Calgary pub and her flirtations with becoming a beautician to globetrot. In Nepal she climbed to the […]

 Whitney Wager

Human after all?

Human after all?

This week, the American Society for Professional Journalists issued a press release urging journalists in Haiti to respect their role as reporters of the news. The SPJ claims that some journalists have been blurring ethical lines, immersing themselves into their stories opposed to simply reporting the carnage. Some journalists have gone so far as to […]

 Whitney Wager

Stop the presses

Stop the presses

Stop the presses! There is an answer to our print newspaper problem! According to Michael Kinsley of The Atlantic the reason why people are not reading newspapers is because the stories are too long. He writes in a recent issue that dwindling readership “has nothing directly to do with technology,” but that the articles are too long-winded […]