Don Obe

1936-2014

No better magazine editor ever put pencil to paper than Don Obe.

And that’s when he would have stopped me. “Awkward sentence, Paul,” he would have said. “And what kind of pencil? Short? Stubby? 2B? HB? Eraser? Details, Paul, details.”

I met Don at this time of year in 1961 when he was at The Toronto Telegram and I was at the Toronto Daily Star. We were both covering the Santa Claus Parade—a big deal because of Eaton’s. I covered it because I wrote fluffy stories for the Star. Perhaps 500 words with the impact of candy floss. Don was there as punishment because he’d described the Tely copy desk as a group of illiterates.

Years later, he told me there was an opening at Ryerson because he would be gone for a year and he needed someone to whom he could trust the Review.

I immediately took a 50 percent pay cut and signed on.

No easy man was Don. He sought perfection and tried to wring it from his students. His teaching was simple. He showed them how magazine stories were built and helped them put their own stories together. Then he took those stories apart and helped the writers build better ones.

Don reached back into his years as a magazine journalist and convinced talented writers and editors to devote hours to working with students one-on-one. Usually for a small sum of money. His goal was to ensure that his baby, the Review, remained what he had bade it: the standard against which all student-produced magazines in North America are measured.

Don was neat, precise, dedicated. He cherished the written word and honoured the accuracy of stories. He was not given to speeches or idle chat but when he spoke, he spoke to the point. And when hard words were needed, he could say them.

Of Don Obe, it should be said that he did what an editor does—he made stories better.

Let those words stand.

—Paul Rush, a retired writer, editor, publisher, radio host and journalism professor

When I graduated from newspapering to Peter Newman’s long-ago iteration of Maclean’s, Don was my first editor, overseeing a handful of my initial stories. During that brief, bright time in Canadian journalism, he taught me everything I know about magazines. I can’t remember a single pithy editorial axiom he proffered, since the Don I knew was a man of remarkably few words, nor did he dispense his thoughts by way of witty editorial marginalia. I remember getting back his first edit and puzzling over the red circles dotting my prose. It took me a while to get the message: try harder, dig deeper, excavate within oneself to find the real mother lode of the narrative or the telling metaphor. Never settle for the easy way out, no matter the pressure of deadlines or editorial attitudes that regard risk as a quality reserved for showbiz daredevils.

What I learned from Don was passion—the passion for a craft that he believed could help change the world. For me, he was a kind of one-man walking True North. The only aphorism of his that I remember was one he lived by: no matter how big or coveted the job, always carry your resignation in your back pocket. Always be ready to say no to the forces of co-optation and compromise. It was a belief that saw him frequently stomping off from Maclean’s, only to be cajoled back, and kept him moving from job to job, then eventually to Ryerson, the perfect incubator for imbuing his ideals in generations of young journalists to come. By that standard, I myself was a miserable failure, sticking it out under editors whose precise goal was to bulldoze every trace of individuality from journalistic prose—stints I justified as necessities to pay the rent. But through those bad times, and later, the good ones, Don and his standards remained the lodestars by which I strove to write and live, no matter the confines of the particular job or assignment.

Over the years and many long boozy dinners, the Don I knew was an incredible romantic, who often saw the best in flawed individuals and, when he did so, would defend them fiercely against all comers. For those of us he believed in, his elfin moustachioed smile was a benediction, one usually garlanded in smoke from his ever-present cigarette. My biggest regret is that, during those conversations, I basked in that gift and didn’t turn my interviewing skills on him.

Don’s own story could have been a novel, certainly a work of both inspiring and soul-searing personal journalism, but the maestro of words, who elicited such revelations from others, let slip scarcely a tell-tale clue about his own sometimes-tortured journey that began on Brantford’s Six Nations reserve. For me, he will always be the shaggy presence at the back of a meeting room, quiet, watchful, taking in every frayed cuff and sagging stocking that betrays its wearer, all the while shrinking from the limelight when he himself was the far more fascinating, and worthy, story.

—Marci McDonald, an award-winning magazine writer and author whose latest book is The Armageddon Factor: the Rise of Christian Nationalism in Canada

Around 1960, as the “zipper man” at The Vancouver Sun, the early twenty-something Don wrote slice-of-life stories about the 100-year-old man and such for the bottom strip of Page One. And, every Monday, he nicked a copy of a New York Herald Tribune supplement called “New York” from a colleague and pored over it. “We were seeing things for the first time,” he told me in his Toronto harbour–facing condo in 2008. “The Phil Spector profile, where Tom Wolfe describes how the raindrops are running off the plane windows, then Spector bolts off the plane—we’d never seen anything like that before.”

Don remembered his long piece about Quebec’s Quiet Revolution for The Toronto Telegram was runner-up for the 1964 National Newspaper Award in feature writing. This was fabulous news—recognition for his work, and being entrusted with ambitious features—except that he started to freeze up. “I don’t know what it was,” Don said. “I lost my nerve, my confidence.”

At 26, stymied, he became op-ed page editor. He was excited—op-ed was the “thinking part” of the paper (“Well,” he qualified, “as far as the Tely got”)—and he had the budget to pay freelancers. “There was a lot more leeway for people to write in their voice. It prepared me for magazine editing.”

In 1974, Don won the editor’s job at The Canadian, a supplement in weekend papers—the only time, he said, that he beat out John Macfarlane for a job. When Macfarlane became editor of The Canadian’s rival, Weekend, they started a weekly arm-wrestle to see who could produce the best stories, photography and illustration.

Don had been agitating for years to tear down all barriers to good writing. He wanted to get beyond the stylish, one-interview piece and to burrow inside a story and get at character through saturation reporting. “There was a newspaper tradition of horrible restraint when it came to any kind of creative writing. The desk hated it with vehemence—you could practically see the blood popping out the veins in their forehead when people started publishing this stuff.”

At The Canadian, Don had a chance to do it. “When I came out of college, the dream was, you’d go to work at a newspaper for maybe 10 years. You’d get your speed down, your style down, pay off your debts, and then you’d quit and write your novel. That was the dream of almost every reporter who cared about writing. With the coming of literary journalism, suddenly you didn’t have to write a novel to get the satisfaction of writing really well. You could experiment, you could write in your own voice. You could write stories.”

What Don championed, either you got it or you didn’t. The crusty sons-o’-bitches at the Tely weren’t having any of “it,” whatever it was. Don couldn’t wait to fling some of those “character” stories down onto page.

True to form, Don added, “When I got to be an editor-in-chief at The Canadian, well, ‘Fuck that! Let’s go!’”

—Bill Reynolds is graduate program director at Ryerson’s School of Journalism and author of Life Real Loud: John Lefebvre, Neteller and the Revolution in Online Gambling

Don made us all much better than we are. He was a fabulous editor who could save you from yourself, but his great genius was in assigning. You might have an idea, but he could refine it, focus it, polish it and make you far more excited about it than when you first dared suggest it. He also had his own ideas for you and they were received like a gift from the gods. Stories that began as topics became themes. Profiles became explorations that told us as much about ourselves as they did about the subject. He sent you off with a crystal-clear picture of what that story could be, and if somewhere along the way any preconceived notions changed, well, that was fine, too. His only rules were clarity and honesty. He made us excited to work for him.

He was also just damned good fun. There are a million memories, but I see him snickering like that long-ago cartoon dog while he sat and watched and listened to Earl McRae do absolutely dead-on impersonations of Don in a meeting: searching for his smokes, hemming and hawing, eyes and moustache dancing, open hand slamming on the desk and, of course, somewhere in the midst of his monologue some mention of “the human condition.”

I also recall one special incident. Don was every bit as competitive on a ball diamond as he was at the National Magazine Awards. The Canadian had dispatched me to Winnipeg to write a profile on an up-and-coming golfer. Our Toronto Men’s Press League fastball team—called “Toronto Life” but with writers, editors and ad executives from all over on it—was in the playoffs and up against bitter rival “Toronto Star,” headed by pitcher Martin Goodman. I landed in Winnipeg, settled in and fielded a call (pre-cellphone) from Don telling me I had to return immediately to Toronto. “We gotta beat these guys,” he said. I flew back, we played, won, and I flew right back to Winnipeg to continue the story.

My expenses were never questioned.

—Roy MacGregor, who worked with Don at Maclean’s and The Canadian

At The Canadian, Earl McRae drew caricatures of his colleagues, including this one, of Don Obe.

“We all hated them,” says Roy MacGregor, “but knew they were dead on.”

I had just finished dinner and was settling in for a quiet, at-home evening of reading freshly purchased magazines from Lichtman’s when the phone rang:

“Steve! Don Obe here.”

“Oh. Hello, sir,” I stammered, trying to sound calm.

This can’t be good news, I thought.

It was the late 1970s, I was a junior editor at Toronto Life and Don had been parachuted in to bring a greater degree of order and professionalism to the publication. There were rumours of major changes afoot. I presumed that included staff dismissals.

“Sorry for calling so late,” he said solemnly, and then proceeded to tell me he would be holding an editorial staff meeting the next morning at which he would be making some harsh comments and judgments.

He paused. I held my breath.

But, he added, his voice turning warmer, I wanted to let you know beforehand that none of it—absolutely none of it—applies to you.

I was astounded and robustly thanked him, as I would many times for many other reasons in the decades ahead.

It was his generosity of spirit toward me (and so many others) that I’ve been thinking about most since his death. Though I could go on at length about his prowess as an editor, writer, journalist, educator and (as he often added to Toronto Life cover lines) much, much more, I keep returning to memories of the out-of-the-office Obe: at a Jays game (he loved the near-the-beer disabled-seating area pre-SkyDome); at the Starbucks in the now-closed downtown Sears (where one day he sheepishly admitted to buying a bedskirt); or running into him on the street (and one day hearing good news about his daughter and seeing the immense relief on his face).

Don was a complicated guy leading a complicated life but perhaps that’s what made him such a terrific editor: he lived and breathed complexity and recognized that, though he couldn’t repair everything in his own life, he could, with enough intensity, drive, creativity, good and bad humour, fix a manuscript, a magazine, a school and, along the way, do hard-hitting journalism, foster great writing, throw a few overly pushy sales reps out of his office and do his part in training the next generation of journalists, which included limping, lurching me, whom he once described as “a talented young man with an italic gait.”

I met him over 30 years ago and there’s not a day goes by that I don’t quietly acknowledge him for his constant encouragement and support, particularly at a time in my life when I wondered just how welcoming and accessible the world of journalism could be.

—Stephen Trumper, who was honoured with the National Magazine Awards Foundation’s Outstanding Achievement award in 2013 and now writes the back-page column for Abilities

In my years at Toronto Life, everyone on the magazine, staff and writers, was guided by the mordant wit and solid professional standards set by Don. In the Obe years, you needed three independent sources to confirm every statement. He made damn sure that copy editors and fact checkers were vigilant and ruthless. But most of all, you had to convince Don that what you were writing was not just clever and forceful.

It had to be true.

Case in point: I won a National Magazine Award for “Drugs In The City,” a hardcore trip through the uglier precincts of Toronto’s drug scene. After the show was over, back in the bar, Don and I were mellowing out, savouring it.

A pause, and he said, “That was a great piece. Some of your very best writing. No, man. I mean it.”

I said, “Thanks, Don.”

Don smiled, sipped his Heineken.

“Know what I always think, when I see you writing your ass off like that?”

“No, I don’t.”

He gave me that sideways smile.

“I think, as far as actual content, you got dick-all, didn’t you?”

And he was right.

That was Don Obe.

—Carsten Stroud, an author whose novels include The Niceville Trilogy

Like all people who accomplish important things, Don was a bundle of contradictions. He didn’t suffer fools, but his door was always open. He prodded writers, but couldn’t prod himself to write. He had no interest in bureaucracies, but he handled them with success.

His younger self would have been surprised at how good a teacher he turned out to be. If he was being honest, or had had a drink or two, he would probably tell you he was suspicious of journalism schools. Yet there he was running one. He was too cranky to be a department head, but he was good at it. He transformed Ryerson’s journalism school from an old boys’ club to an open place, where standards mattered. Under his chairmanship, the magazine and broadcast streams came into their own and the school earned the reputation it had already garnered.

He was, at the bottom of it all, a fiercely focused editor. He made it look like an athletic activity—his blue pencil hovering in one hand, while he pulled at his moustache with the other.

He would have fit in with the old New Yorker crowd, especially for his dedication to writers. He was suspicious of those with power or money—on principle.

I am sure there are a lot of people who remember him as prickly. But there are plenty of others who would tell you he was loyal to a fault. If you were on his side, he would stick with you, through thick and thin.

—Stuart McLean, professor emeritus, Ryerson University

I wasn’t Don’s best student, but he was my best teacher—ever.

On the first day of class in September 1984, he warned us that he’d be grading our work by “professional standards.” And he meant it. My first carefully typewritten feature for “dobe” came back with constructive marginalia crammed all over its pages. My next draft fared a little better, and Don actually printed “nice!” in three places. (It still means a lot when I look at those small, neat words in grey pencil.) Over time, with his advice and encouragement, my efforts improved enough that he rewarded my final feature with an “excellent”—despite its “slight stiffness in places.”

Don instilled a love of long-form journalism in our class that would never leave us. (Thanks to him, I’ve worked as a magazine editor for more than 25 years.) To show our appreciation, at our graduation party, we presented him with a special honour: The Horse’s Ass Award. (It was a weird little statue of an equine posterior that I’d found in a store on Yonge Street.) Don was thrilled to receive it, and I suspect it meant almost as much to him as the Outstanding Achievement Award he would later win from the National Magazine Awards.

Twenty years after graduating, I was lucky enough to work with Don professionally. I was the sole editor of a small-but-award-winning magazine and desperately needed a bit of editing assistance. I called Don, knowing that he’d retired from Ryerson. I gave him a story by one of my stronger writers, hoping that he could turn an already good piece into something even better. When I got Don’s final edit, I read through the pages thinking nice! nice! nice! By the end, I realized (correctly) that he’d helped make the story a Gold Medal winner. I also realized that, though I was no longer Don’s student, there was still plenty he could teach me.

—James Little, who has won lots of National Magazine Awards but has yet to win a Horse’s Ass

At Ryerson, Don was like my magazine dad, and his equally talented and influential colleague Lynn Cunningham—they were later married—was like my magazine mom. You wanted to please both, but were, perhaps, more afraid of dad.

“Odd that you would crock this sentence so badly after three pages of clear writing,” Don wrote in his clean, pencilled marginalia on one of my assignments. “Do you ever read your stuff aloud?”

Ever since.

But Don’s hard-assed journalist persona was balanced by a soft side. He laughed a lot and had a boyish enthusiasm for things like a new electric pencil sharpener.

Our 1987 edition of the Review won the coveted top prize from the Association for Educators in Journalism and Mass Communications. Dad and mom were thrilled. They somehow found the funds to fly editor Lisa McCaskell and me (as senior editor) to Portland, Oregon, to join them at the association’s annual conference. The awards were handed out at a luncheon. The winning magazine received a whopping $75 cheque.

“We were sorely disappointed when no wine was served at the luncheon,” I wrote in my diary. “Shortly after receiving the envelope, we escaped to the bar.”

Happy, perhaps more innocent, times. Thank you, Don.

—Doug Bennet, the founding editor of Masthead and co-author of five nature guides, including the best-selling Up North

Don was like the Lorax. There was the obvious physical resemblance: they were both shortish and gruffish, with that big bushy moustache and sawdust voice. But it was the depth of their passion that clinched it. The object of the Lorax’s fervor was trees. For Don, of course, it was words.

Until I met him, I never knew a person could have such intense feelings about a sentence. A good one was intoxicating to him: his eyes would take on a rapturous glaze when he read Tom Wolfe or Gay Talese aloud to his students. A bad one was excruciating—and he couldn’t hide his revulsion. I once saw him gag while reading a line from a first draft.

As a Don Obe student, handing in your work and waiting for his marginalia was often agonizing. But it was also immensely rewarding. It’s impossible to overstate how much we all learned from him. His love of words, of the perfect turn of phrase, was thoroughly contagious. And he got such a high out of sharing that passion—flipping on the switch in his students, cranking them up and watching them go. In 1989, I was managing editor of the Review. Don was my teacher, my editor, my confidant and my friend. Before the year was out, he got me a job at Toronto Life—a job I loved so much that I never left.

I don’t know where I’d be, or who I’d be, if it weren’t for him. And I’m not alone. Don took countless naïve, stumbling kids and gave us purpose, direction and an insatiable desire to go out there and make gorgeous sentences. Like the Lorax, he planted seeds and treated them with care. He was a cultivator of magazine people. He grew a forest.

—Angie Gardos, executive editor of Toronto Life

A wise and generous mentor, Don taught me to take teaching out of the classroom. He believed “journalism professors” should work as editors with our aspiring writers rather than lecturing. In line with that philosophy, his departmental evaluations of my teaching took place out of the classroom. We simply sat in his book-lined office and talked about my challenges, frustrations and questions about making the leap from doing journalism to teaching journalism.

Rather than tell you more, better I show you. Here’s what Don, in his own (abridged and edited) words, offered me two decades ago in his formal, written “teaching evaluations” on my track to tenure at Ryerson.

• Do they understand that you can’t write well without reading well? That, as Larry L. King says, it’s a requirement of the soul? After all, the way you learn standards is by reading the people who set them and then trying to get there yourself.
• They’re arrogant, most of them; they have an overblown idea of how good they are at this stage of the game … Which brings us round to that other thing at work here: the shaky sense of standards that fuels all that arrogance. It’s easy to get high on yourself if you don’t have to compete and you just about never get turned down. I know that from experience early and late. Working nights as a rookie on The Vancouver Sun, I’d revise and polish until dawn only to come in the next day and find all my copy on the chief rewriteman’s spike. I took a blood oath that before long, my words would be printed, not his.
• Yet, if you can show them they are selling themselves short, maybe you can push them toward the appreciation of excellence you so much want them to have.
• You might try something that works for me. On feature pieces, don’t mark first drafts. Get them in, tear them apart (including calls for re-reporting) and send them back to be done again. Talk over the fixes one to one. That way, you can deal with individual strengths and weaknesses, and perhaps get across the idea that writing is perpetual revision, that standards are immutable (they are not subject to discounts according to mood or market). The idea isn’t to get an A, but to get better.
• I don’t know what kind of nerve all this maundering advice will strike in you. Whatever it’s worth, it’s offered with respect.

His words were priceless, timeless. He made a difference to me and to so many others.

—Kathy English, public editor of the Toronto Star

At first, I knew Obe by reputation only. He was never officially my teacher; by the time he became chair of Ryerson’s School of Journalism, I was working in the business. He was never officially my editor; as a journalism student I’d dreamed of writing for Toronto Life but he’d stepped down as editor-in-chief by the time I sold my first story. After my friend and editor Lynn Cunningham finally introduced us, we would spend hours talking about feature writing, discussing the merits of Gay Talese’s “Joe Louis: The King as a Middle-aged Man” or Joan Didion’s “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream.”

Unlike some gurus, Obe didn’t ostentatiously collect followers like baseball cards; they gravitated toward him and he had time for anyone who was serious about journalism, although I noticed that if other disciples proved to be slow learners, he would impatiently raise his voice, as T. S. Eliot once described Ezra Pound, like “a man trying to convey to a very deaf person the fact that the house was on fire.”

He asked me to come into his classes to talk about “the life of the freelance writer.” A year or so later, he asked if I’d teach a night course in freelance writing. A year after that, he hired me to teach freelance writing to full-time students. When I asked him later what made him do that, he said, in his characteristically gruff way, “Thought you might have the gene.”

Soon we were guests in each other’s classes. Once, after he’d tutored my students on the fine art of transitions, one earnest fellow asked, “So is the goal to have a neat transition between every paragraph in the story?” Obe’s face reddened and he snapped, “No! You wouldn’t have a story, you’d have a goddamn doily!”

Yes, he could be ferocious, but his insights were razor-sharp. For a long time, I gave him almost everything I wrote—from the first draft of a magazine feature to a rough pass at a book proposal—to get his reaction. He was often blunt. (“It’s like driving along on a smooth highway until the middle of page six,” he once said. “Then it’s like someone forgot to pave the road.”)

As time passes, relationships begin, flourish, fade and either regenerate or die. After Obe’s second marriage ended, there was a misunderstanding and a meteorite hit our long friendship. We eventually made up, but it was never the same. To me, though, even the sadness of that tough ending is eclipsed by the profound, immeasurable influence and richness he brought to my life.

—David Hayes, a Toronto-based freelance writer, editor and teacher

In 2000, Don’s Review masthead students gave him an old Tely newspaper box

Most writers’ retreats give a writer the luxury of time and isolation. The Banff Literary Journalism provides an editor as well, which is much of the reason it is has been such a potent well of creative non-fiction for 25 years. Don was the first editor of the Banff program in 1989. (He was soon joined by the formidable Barbara Moon.) He would work intensively with his writers through several drafts and coach them through the sometimes harrowing roundtables with the other writers.

I arrived at Banff in 1997 with what I thought was a brilliant lede, a couple of thousand words I thought were OK, and an outline for the rest of the essay that I thought was plausible. Don sat down with me the first day and told me the piece was going to work and that I would be presenting it in the second roundtable (a scary proposition for an inchoate draft). He then told me the lede was crap and to lose it, to move some sections around and to develop some themes I’d mentioned in my proposal and omitted in the draft.

I retreated to my cabin for four days of intense writing. Don’s eye became my eye as I reworked my copy. Can I improve these words? Is there a better image here? Can this paragraph be tightened? Can this be funnier? Is this section even necessary? Why is it important to me that I’m writing this?

The roundtable went well, and Don’s direction over the ensuing three weeks elevated my writing to a new height. (He would probably cross out that last phrase and write, “CLICHÉ.”) As Dan David, one of my seven writing colleagues that summer, said in a Facebook tribute to Don: “More than anyone, he knew there was something ready to bust out of my gut like that little creature in Alien.”

Don was an editor at Banff for 10 years. He left his mark on the program forever. He made sure the writers toiling in their cabins in the mountainside forest didn’t get lost in the woods.

—Ian Pearson, a Toronto writer and editor who was an editor in the Banff Literary Journalism program for eight years following the Obe era

When I arrived at Ryerson to study journalism in 1983, I knew I wanted to write for magazines. Learning from masters like Don Obe was a dream. The man had such great taste, was so sharp in his critiques, and had such a dry wit. You knew he did not suffer fools gladly, and that you did not ever want him to think you were a fool.

Later, he was my editor in the Literary Journalism program at the Banff Centre—another dream. What luxury to have his astute, measured editorial feedback, and to bask in his withering humour—fortunately, not aimed my way (at least, not while I was around). When my piece was workshopped, one of the participants critiqued the story for not including references to certain writers he thought essential. Privately, afterwards, Don was hilarious as he lampooned what he saw as nitpicking pomposity. “What does he think this is, a fucking PhD oral?” The story ended up in Brick magazine. So lucky to have a guy like that on your side. Will never forget his brilliant mentoring.

—Moira Farr, a freelance writer, editor and instructor at Carleton University and Algonquin College in Ottawa

“L’affaire Hannon” is how Don came to refer to it, those grisly months nearly 20 years ago now when Ryerson’s School of Journalism made headlines of the most lurid sort—and nearly came apart at the seams. I was in the pillory for an article I’d written some two decades earlier, and for engaging in sex work and talking about it rather shamelessly. The administration wanted me gone. The journalism department split. Don, then acting chair, fought relentlessly to get the truth on the record and to keep me in my job as a teacher of magazine journalism. It was not remotely in his interests to defy the administration, and agree to countless exhausting interviews and media appearances to defend a man whose views he often disagreed with. I worried and regretted that my writing and my past and my shamelessness had dragged him into a battle that wasn’t his and was probably unwinnable. I think the demands of it drained him, but a battling Obe, an Obe defending free speech and journalistic integrity was an Obe in his element. He was fierce and articulate and passionate, almost the definition of the kind of journalism he’d spent a lifetime doing, espousing and teaching. I shouldn’t have worried about him. He was a fighter, and I think he loved every minute of it.

—Gerald Hannon, who recently retired from both journalism and sex work, was a multiple National Magazine Award-winner over his long career

Over the years, Don and I worked together in Toronto for many different publications. We enjoyed working with each other. He respected me and I certainly respected him. I think we worked so well together because we were from similar working-class backgrounds—two lads from the wrong side of the tracks. Our fathers went to war. Don’s Scottish mother and my Irish mother ran our households with loving iron fists. We weren’t rich, neither were we poor; we had to work for every single penny.

Jazz was our music of choice, beer was our drink of choice and pool was our sport of choice. We thought we could play the game fairly well, but we couldn’t. It was the beer we drank after each shot taken that made us think we were ready to challenge Willie Mosconi.

One day in 1983, he telephoned to tell me he was starting a magazine at Ryerson and asked if I would help. “I have only $200,” he told me, “but things will get better, trust me.” And they certainly did get better. What an incredible passport to the magazine industry each student received after working on the Review with Don.

The last time I saw him was in the Toronto General Hospital. His speech was so difficult to understand that he communicated with me by grabbing my hands so tight, and staring at me so hard, and for so long. I didn’t realize he was saying goodbye. He passed away a few hours later. I miss him now and I’m going to miss him for the rest of my life. He was a true pal.

—Jim Ireland, founding art director of the Review

Don and I cohabited for several years way back in the day. We began as colleagues and ended as loving friends. This list is personal, not professional, since other people will undoubtedly attest to his extraordinary skills as a magazine editor and journalism professor.

• He was loyal, brave and true, to himself and to others.

• He treasured his Eames Barcelona lounge chair. He would throw himself into its soft, black-leather arms and listen to Miles Davis’s Sketches of Spain at max volume. It was his throne, and a damned stylish one.

• When I met him he had a frighteningly awful haircut. It was so ghastly that eventually, bossy me persuaded him to have it styled differently. Success! He looked fabulous, as well he should.

• In the ‘60s and ‘70s, he hung out with the bad-boy painters who were invading and changing the Toronto art scene: Graham Coughtry, Robert Markle, Gord Rayner, Bill Ronald. He was hilariously parsimonious—his sense of what something was worth in dollars dated from c. 1930—but he bought their work with pleasure.

• His laugh was as contagious as a sneeze and kind of sounded like one, too.

• He loved Spain. He had a Spanish friend who told him, “Live life, Don Don.” He did just that and then some.

— Jocelyn Laurence, an editor, writer and former Toronto Life staffer

Photos courtesy of Lynn Cunningham and David Hayes

More on Don Obe:

“Legacy of a Legend” (A tribute to Don Obe by Review instructor Tim Falconer)

“Good Stuff, Kid” (A profile of Don Obe, Summer 2013, Ryerson Review of Journalism)

“Roto Retro” (A look back at The Canadian  and other rotogravure supplements, Spring 2004, Ryerson Review of Journalism)

“Ten Years of Popping Off” (A history of the Review after its first decade, Summer 1993, Ryerson Review of Journalism)

“Game Point” (A short, unpublished piece written by Obe about his pool game attire, Fall 1986)

To donate to the Don Obe Memorial Fund, click here. All proceeds go to Ryerson School of Journalism students in need of emergency funding.

This is a special guest post about Don Obe, the founder of the Review, by Tim Falconer, the current instructor on the Review.

Don Obe died yesterday.

He was an old newspaperman, so I hope he would appreciate a lede without euphemism or bullshit. But he was best known as one of the most influential editors in the history of Canadian literary journalism so maybe he’d want me to open with a rich scene full of detail and spark. Either way, I care what he’d think.

Though neither of us knew it, Don first influenced me when I was a teenager and he was the editor of The Canadian, one of the rotogravures, or rotos, that came in the Saturday newspapers. He’d been a newspaper reporter, including at the Toronto Telegram, and an editor at Maclean’s back in the days when it was a monthly. But at The Canadian he was able to assemble a dream team of staff writers (yes, there were staff writers at magazines in those days). In the mid-1970s, when I read stories he’d edited—stories by Roy MacGregor, Earl McRae and others—I started to think that if neither the NHL nor rock stardom worked out, maybe it would be cool to be a writer. Or, to use a term Don liked, a scribbler.

I took a wrong turn along the way (two weird years as a mining engineering student), but eventually I became a journalist and met Don. By that time, he’d been the editor of Toronto Life at the beginning of its golden era, and moved on to Ryerson, which was not yet a university, to be chair of the School of Journalism.

I was never lucky enough to have him as an editor or a teacher, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t learn so much about writing, editing and teaching from him. I still hear him in my head: “Magazine writing is an intellectual exercise: it involves a lot more thinking than anything else”; “If you can’t write better than other people talk, you’re in the wrong business”; “Style at the expense of clarity is a waste of words.” But quoting his advice does nothing to capture his passion for journalism and writing, especially narrative non-fiction, or his love of sharing that passion.

When he arrived at Ryerson, he was determined to start a journalism review, a watchdog of the watchdogs, as he imagined it. There was no money, of course, but that didn’t stop him. And since the first issue in 1984, the Review has celebrated and criticized Canadian journalism, winning dozens of awards and pissing off lots of people. Just as he intended. That’s part of his legacy and his legend, but not all of it.

Because Don could be curmudgeonly and incredibly stubborn, he sometimes pissed people off, too. But that’s okay. To me, he was a great guy and a true character; to so many journalists in this country, including me, he was a mentor and a friend. I’m not sure anyone can leave a better legacy than that.

I’ll miss you, man.

The Review will have a special tribute to Don Obe in the coming days. Don Obe’s wake will be Friday, November 21 at 5:30 p.m. in the East Common Room of Hart House.

By Jessica Galang

Image via Blogging 4 Jobs, appropriately.

The unpaid internship has <a” href=” been a point of contention, especially among journalists: do these internships provide eager, budding journalists with the opportunity to gain new skills and get their foot in the industry’s door, or is it akin to slave labour?

If the latter, who is to blame?

This question reached a head in recent weeks, with the Ontario Ministry of Labour <a ” href=” down on illegal unpaid internships at The Walrus and Toronto Life. The CEO of St. Joseph Media, which publishes Toronto Life and Quill and Quire, hinted that other internship programs in the province would soon face the same scrutiny.

It’s important to understand why these internships cause so much backlash; it mostly comes down to the fact that the boundaries between legal and illegal unpaid internships are unclear. There are six criteria for a legal unpaid internship in Ontario according to the Ontario Ministry of Labour’s website, and they <a ” href=” simple enough. But until this recent crackdown, there seemed to be little oversight from the province to ensure that interns don’t, for example, replace someone else’s job, effectively providing the employer with free labour. No one would know about such abuses unless an intern complained to the ministry.

While still exploitative, it’s somewhat understandable that smaller publications in an unstable industry are looking for any way possible to stay afloat; unpaid interns are tempting, and for a long time the province didn’t seem to mind. But some larger corporations take advantage of the seldom-enforced criteria; last year, <a ” href=” Canada and <a ” href=” Media came under fire for apparently flouting the regulations.

While many are sympathetic to the broke intern’s plight, some say that the labour ministry is taking a simplistic view of a complex issue. As Alexandra Molotkow, a former Walrus intern and now senior editor atHazlitt, <a ” href=” in a recent piece, “The rule of thumb for any internship program should be: is this as good as, or better than, J-school?” Rather than looking strictly at the companies that provide them, Molotkow writes, the government should also consider financial supports for those who turn to unpaid internships for a leg up.

But she also acknowledges that when she did her unpaid internship, she had the rare opportunity to be immediately hired, and was supported by her parents. That’s a problem that many point to—the fact that it’s mostly rich kids who can entertain an unpaid internship creates what some have called a “media elite.” In an industry that thrives on presenting diversity—of people or of ideas—in its work, an unbalanced workforce that favours the privileged is dangerous.

The notion of the unpaid internship is not to blame; the problem is that the definition of the intern has changed. Now, interns are those so desperate for a stable 9-5 in a shitty economy that they will edit, fact-check and do work they know they should be paid for, just for a tiny chance that someday, hopefully, theywill be paid. And for that eventual paycheque, they might not report unfair labour practices. Hopefully, now that the labour ministry has done that for them, publishers will take a good, hard look at the ethics of their operations, and either provide truly valuable opportunities for their interns, or just start paying them.

Remember to follow <a ” href=” class="s1">the Review and <a ” href=” class="s1">its masthead on Twitter. Email the blog editor <a ” href=”mailto:ronan.obeirne@ryerson.ca”>here. And of course, don’t miss the features from our Spring 2014 issue <a ” href=” class="s1">here. 

By Michael Thomas

Don Obe has just learned, after an in-person meeting with Peter C. Newman, that he is going to be an associate editor at Maclean’s. It is early 1972. Since Maclean’s has the same level of prestige in Canada as The New Yorker in the United States, this is big news. Everybody wants to work at Maclean’s because that’s where a writer will be noticed right away. It’s a huge career boost.

For Obe, it’s what he wanted “more than anything,” so he celebrates. After he returns to his home in Toronto’s Moore Park, he gets out a snifter “about the size of a pail,” and fills it with cognac. He puts on a seven-inch vinyl single of Simon and Garfunkel’s “The Boxer” and cranks it loud. He heads to his Eames chair but lands on the footrest. He begins to spin around while singing the lyrics at the top of his lungs. Despite his jubilation, however, he isn’t sure what he is getting himself into at Maclean’s.

Obe is proud to have made it to Maclean’s. He thinks about where he started. Born on March 1, 1936, in Brantford, Ontario, a small industrial town. Mother a mix of British Isles blood, mostly English. Raised five children. Father a full-blooded Mohawk who grew up on the nearby Six Nations reserve. Dad becomes stoker, first class in the Royal Canadian Navy, feeding coal to a frigate’s boiler in the North Atlantic during the Second World War. While Dad is away, Obe shares his first house—a rundown, wooden two-storey place near a dump toward the town’s north end—with his mother, two siblings, two grandparents, an aunt and uncle, and their brood of children. Eventually the family moves to Terrace Hill, a working-class district in Brantford’s core. Obe’s dad returns in 1945 and resumes work as a fitter-welder.

Despite being of mixed native and European blood, Obe is never treated like an outcast. He attends Brantford Collegiate Institute and Vocational School, a little north of Brantford’s Grand Island. Upon graduation, he works two jobs to make enough money to attend the Ryerson Institute of Technology in 1956. He graduates in 1959. In his first year studying practical journalism at Ryerson, Obe learns how to run printing presses and make plates. The embryonic program hasn’t acquired its prestige at this point. “While Carleton and Western would supply the Stars and the Globes, Ryerson would supply the Simcoe Reformers,” Obe says. “It really was the sort of scruffy kid of post-secondary education.”

Obe helped to change that. Over his teaching career from 1983 to 2001, he mentored and inspired numerous journalists. Bertrand Marotte, Quebec business correspondent for The Globe and Mail, was in Obe’s 1984 to 1985 class. He wrote a feature for the second issue of the Ryerson Review of Journalism on the quality of news journalism at Citytv, and served as the magazine’s production manager. He says getting positive notes from Obe was “like getting a blessing from the Pope.” Author, editor, and journalism instructor Moira Farr, who was reviews editor of the 1985 RRJ, and has been a contributing editor since the mid-’90s, says, “The fundamentals I have learned—it does all go back to him.”

Obe mostly worked the 4 p.m. to midnight shift—later if he hadn’t finished his work. The main mode of communication between editors and reporters was through an open-faced cabinet of mail slots. Obe was often assigned “folo” stories—short for “follow-up”—looking for local reactions to bigger news stories. An assistant city editor would notify Obe of the assignment via an article clipping. “Mr. Obe, pls folo,” the attached note read. “It was always formal, never ‘Don.’”Folo assignments helped Obe to fine-tune his basic reporting skills. “I learned what just about every journalist who went into magazines learned,” he says. “It got you up to speed and you learned certain aspects of your craft.”Obe picked up his writing skills quickly from his work at the Sun, and his editors noticed. “If they liked a piece of yours, they would clip it out and send it to you attached with a piece of copy paper, and with some wonderful old cliché like ‘Good stuff, kid!’ So I got my share of ‘Good stuff, kid!’”Now Obe looks at aEsquire.

While at the paper, Hedley, Obe, and other writers were amazed and inspired by features published in the magazine under the direction of Harold Hayes, such as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and Tom Wolfe’s Esquire.

While at the paper, Hedley, Obe, and other writers were amazed and inspired by features published in the magazine under the direction of Harold Hayes, such as Gay Talese’s “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” and Tom Wolfe’s Torstar Corporation, brought in marketing experts to make the magazine a more effective ad vehicle. The consultants decided the magazine’s focus should be Canadian heroes. Obe saw the recommendation as a sign to move on: “I’m not gonna stick around and put out a formulaic magazine that celebrates Canadian heroes, thank you very much. So I went toToronto Life.”
Toronto Life would prove to be another challenge. Says Marq de Villiers, who was writing freelance for the magazine at the time, “I remember Obe was hired, he took one kind of horrified look around and put his head down and started to work.” The magazine was suffering after its previous two editors, Hedley and Alexander Ross, who emphasized writing and magazine culture over production deadlines. Issues of Toronto Life under their watch were regularly late to newsstands. “Those guys didn’t give a shit about deadlines,” Obe says. “When you have a magazine that’s full of listings of things to do and it gets to the newsstands after half of those listings had already happened, you’re not going to succeed.” Star writer David Olive, whom Obe hired at Toronto Life, also noted the missed deadlines. “The magazine was still run in a somewhat amateurish way with regards to production,” he says. “That’s the first thing that Don fixed.” Not unlike Clay Felker atNew York magazine, Obe focused on and maintained a deep respect for service journalism. “You’ve got to do that,” continues Olive, “because 90 percent of your readers, that’s what they’re there for. They’re not there for your fancy New Journalism.” Hedley, who directly preceded Obe, occasionally edited the magazine out of a restaurant named Café des Copains on Wellington Street, more or less across from Toronto Life’s Front Street offices. Hedley picked up the habit of editing outside the office during his time at Esquire, on Harold Hayes’s recommendation that editors should be out in the field. That romantic view of editing wasn’t happening under Obe’s watch. 

Jocelyn Laurence, who worked as chief copy editor under Obe, remembers his commitment to staying on budget. She dreaded every time she had to tell him that a page needed to be opened, meaning fixing typos at a late stage. Obe would always remind her that it cost money to do that. “So finally I went to him and I said, ‘Well, how much does it cost to open a page?’ I was thinking a couple hundred bucks or something, and he said something like $5,” Laurence says. Obe regretted not having enough money to hire Ian Brown, but worked with plenty of other writers like Carsten Stroud, Philip Marchand, Judith Timson, and Tom Alderman.
Obe quit his editor-in-chief job in 1981 because he missed writing, and began contributing a media column freelance for Toronto Life. One of his columns, “The Dissident Rabbi,” won a 1982 National Magazine Award for religious journalism. “By the time I left, Toronto Life was right on the verge of thriving. And of course it did. It went on to become fat and glossy and no fucking good.”
Obe’s freelancing didn’t last much longer than a year, but during that period he contributed about a dozen media columns and did some editing. Author and freelance writer David Hayes, who picked up the media column after Obe, used his columns as models. Obe’s deep industry knowledge also helped Hayes find sources. “He knew so much about media,” Hayes says. “I’d be talking to him about any media story I was doing.”
Obe had to quit freelancing for two reasons. First, he was rusty as a writer, having mostly been editing for the last decade. And second, his first marriage to author and journalist Sheila Gormley had fallen apart. “I wanted to be as generous as I possibly could be, and I paid off the mortgage,” he says. “I just lost everything. I was just absolutely stone broke.”
Tom Hedley has recently made a couple of hundred thousand dollars from the sale of the script for Flashdance, and he’s invited Obe to come and stay at his place in Malibu. It is early in 1983 and Hedley and Obe are enjoying an extension of their lifestyle in Toronto—frequenting bars, hanging out with writers and poets, and, as Hedley puts it, “living in the period.”
Later that year, Obe sees an ad in the newspaper looking for a new chair of Ryerson’s School of Journalism. He applies and is accepted. The transition from writer and editor to professor isn’t seamless. “For my first class, a three-hour class in magazine writing, I scripted the whole thing. I wrote the whole three-hour talk,” Obe says. “There wasn’t so much as a break for a piss. I just read for three solid hours, scarcely 
looking up!”

Now it is September 1983 and Obe, Jim Ireland, and “the Intrepid Eleven,” the nickname for the first RRJ group, are sitting in a converted broom closet, located in the basement of the school of journalism. Nearly everyone smokes. Ashtrays overflow. Obe smokes Winstons. Hanging on the wall are manuscripts and undeveloped photos. Ryerson Polytechnical Institute will soon have its first professional magazine, the Ryerson Review of Journalism, published at the end of the school year, April 1984. “I just loved the idea,” says Ireland of Obe’s new project. “It was something new for Ryerson—something new for me.” Ireland worked on the issue for next to nothing. “Bleak” is how he remembers the early process. “We tried our hardest to make it professional.”
Kit Melamed, features editor on the first issue and now a producer for CBC’s the fifth estate, concurs with Ireland’s assessment. “We had no money,” she says. “We had to scramble to find ways to do things cheap. I do remember driving along Bloor Street—in whose car I don’t know—stopping with Laurie Gillies, the editor, to see if she had indeed found the right, cheapest, and best printer we could find to do the magazine.” Those kinds of adventures were “totally uncharted territory,” and to this day she considers that first magazine production cycle a highlight of her career.

Not only was it hard to build a magazine on a shoestring, but the students had to push themselves to write to Obe’s satisfaction. “The knock was Ryerson students knew how to write a lead but they didn’t know how to think,” he says. “So it was mechanics. I thought of the Review as a way of breaking down that reputation. The stuff had to be written and produced on a level that was highly professional and could not be taken for trade school work.“The thinking in the magazine pieces was on a higher level so that we could break down that bad rep through sheer excellence.”

Drinking has played a role in Obe’s life for most of his journalistic career, occasionally to deleterious effect. “It’s sort of classic, old-timey newspaper guy kind of behaviour,” says Lynn Cunningham, his second wife (and instructor for this issue), from whom he’s been separated for 10 years. “He was by no means unusual. I’m not saying this was a good thing—it wasn’t.”
After retiring from Ryerson in 2001, he decided to quit drinking, checked into the Bellwood Health Centre, and came out sober 21 days later. “I was extremely proud of him,” says David Hayes. However, his drinking resurfaced in 2003. The year before, his only child, from his first marriage, died suddenly at 36. Kira had long been troubled, a runaway at 15, eventually the mother of five children, none of whom she raised for long. The fourth, Andrew, was born in 1990 with fetal alcohol syndrome, and raised from 1992 by Obe and Cunningham, then Cunningham alone. The family attributed Kira’s tragic death to a bad combination of alcohol and codeine, to which she was addicted.

Battles with the bottle weren’t Obe’s only struggles. In 1992, another front opened when he was diagnosed with lung cancer. Fortunately, it was discovered early enough and was operable. He lost a third of one lung, but didn’t require chemotherapy or radiation. He only took a one-semester leave from teaching at Ryerson in fall 1992, a move he later regretted, as he hadn’t fully regained his stamina. And in 1995, yet another front opened, this time a political tilt, when Obe took a strong stand in the so-called Hannon affair at Ryerson. Toward the end of 1995, the Toronto Sun published a sensational story about Toronto writer and Ryerson journalism instructor Gerald Hannon. The Sun’s Heather Bird reminded readers that back in 1977, Hannon had written a Body Politic article entitled “Men Loving Boys Loving Men,” espousing the view that men and boys in some instances could have healthy sexual relationships. Bird was gnashing her teeth for the benefit of right-wing readers, but then she broke the news that Hannon was also working as a male prostitute. Obe was acting chair of the school, and rather than withdraw from the press and wait for the issue to die down, Obe told Hannon to answer any and all questions because there was nothing to be ashamed of. Obe even debated Toronto Star reporter Judy Steed on TVO’s Studio 2; she had tipped Bird to the story originally, and firmly believed that Hannon shouldn’t be allowed to teach at Ryerson. “Defending yourself is one thing, but defending someone else is a lot harder,” says Hannon. “Especially when the issues are so delicate as alleged pedophile support and sex work and all the rest of it—it didn’t seem to daunt Don at all.” Obe’s fight for academic rights, impassioned as it was, still wasn’t enough to convince Ryerson to renew Hannon’s teaching contract.

After the first RRJ issue in 1984, it took little time for the magazine to start winning awards. Many were from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication, and RRJ writers have since won six National Magazine Awards and dozens of AEJMC awards. “When I entered the competition that first time and we won the best magazine award, you can see we were on the way,” says Obe. “Trade school, my ass. Nobody at the University of Missouri journalism school had heard of Ryerson. They sure as hell have now. In fact, they complain that we win too many awards.”
Obe extended his mentoring reach a few years later. In 1989, he became senior editor at the Banff Centre’s Creative Nonfiction and Cultural Journalism program, which he did for 10 years. His “negotiated editing” technique became popular there: rather than rewrite copy, he would make suggestions. That way, writers could take more pride in authorship. One of the writers he nurtured was Moira Farr, who would go on to become a senior editor with the program, now called Literary Journalism.
Others Obe mentored include Erna Paris, whose Banff article became part of her book Long Shadows. Obe had previously worked with Paris at Maclean’s in the early ’70s, where she was hired as an associate editor. “I was completely ignorant about magazine editing and production,” says Paris. “In fact, I can’t imagine why I was hired in the first place! Don was tremendously supportive. I don’t think I could have managed in that environment without his help.”
All of this editing and teaching and coaching began to add up to something dauntingly impressive, and Obe was recognized for his talent by his peers. He proudly shows some of the nomination letters he received when he accepted his 1993 Foundation Award for Outstanding Achievement, which the National Magazine Awards considers its most important annual prize given to one person. There were letters from Robert Fulford, David Olive, Jim Ireland, and many more. Roy MacGregor’s nomination letter included the following: “Personally, I do not write a single sentence without wondering how he would react to it—and this, 14 years after I last worked for him, I know I am not alone.”

Photograph Courtesy of John Reeves

]]> http://rrj.ca/good-stuff-kid/feed/ 0 http://rrj.ca/ten-years-of-popping-off/ http://rrj.ca/ten-years-of-popping-off/#respond Wed, 09 Jun 1993 20:04:09 +0000 http://rrj.journalism.ryerson.ca/?p=932

Early last April, the Ryerson Review of Journalism hit the newsstands and the newsrooms of every major media company in Toronto. On the cover was a dramatic black-and-red illustration of a powerful hand squeezing blood out of a Maclean’s magazine. The headline read: “Strong-Arm Tactics: How the Life Gets Squeezed Out of Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine.” [...]]]>

Early last April, the Ryerson Review of Journalism hit the newsstands and the newsrooms of every major media company in Toronto. On the cover was a dramatic black-and-red illustration of a powerful hand squeezing blood out of a Maclean’s magazine. The headline read: “Strong-Arm Tactics: How the Life Gets Squeezed Out of Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine.” Inside, student writer Andrew Leitch attacked the magazine for prose he called homogenized, standardized and without viewpoint or voice, the product of a ruthless and often debilitating editing process.

The story caused immediate waves within Maclean’s. So much so that four senior editors decided to troop down from their offices on the seventh floor of the Maclean Hunter building to the nearby Ryerson School of Journalism. This unofficial delegation was made up of assistant managing editors Michael Benedict and Robert Marshall, national editor Ross Laver and foreign editor Bruce Wallace. They had arranged to air their grievances with Review instructor Don Obe and school chairman John Miller. As Obe recalls it, the visiting editors argued that the Review had unfairly criticized Maclean’s for failing to deliver a brand of creative writing that actually doesn’t belong in a newsmagazine. Though the tone of the 45-minute meeting was largely civil, says Obe, editor Laver was particularly upset and at times agitated. “He seemed to take what the article said as being directed at him personally.”

Laver, the only one of the four Maclean’s editors who will talk about the meeting, doesn’t hesitate in repeating his harsh opinion of the Review story. “It’s a shoddy piece of journalism,” he says. He charges that it was poorly researched, included much dated information and relied too heavily on unattributed sources to smear Maclean’s. Leitch counters that he would have preferred to name more names but that Kevin Doyle, then editor of Maclean’s, “has a reputation for not forgetting people who cross him, and the people I talked to didn’t want to burn any bridges.” Obe adds that he trusted Leitch’s sources because he knew their identities and they had all been taped. He concludes of the meeting: “We agreed to see them as a professional courtesy, but in the end we told them we liked the piece and stood behind our writer.”

The whole Maclean’s episode reflects the clout that the Ryerson Review of Journalism can have when it questions the journalistic establishment. This year the Review, written entirely by senior journalism students, is celebrating its 10th publishing year as a unique voice of press criticism in Canada. The response of the Maclean’s editors to their experience under its lens reflects an ongoing debate about whether its student writers are qualified to be effective and fair media critics. “The Ryerson Review of Journalism puts a lot of professional publications to shame,” says Stephen Kimber, a free-lance writer and journalism instructor at King’s College in Halifax. “It’s the only magazine in this country that looks at journalists critically-and God knows we’re not perfect.” On the other hand, Ian Urquhart, managing editor of The Toronto Star, feels that students don’t have enough expetience in the field to write analytically or to judge the media’s ethics, and says Review articles reflect that. “It’s admirable that Ryerson is trying to put out a magazine that attempts to analyze the actions of the media,” he says. “Canada needs a magazine like that. But in many respects the Ryerson Review of Journalism falls short of its mandate, and I feel it’s because the articles are written by students.”

It can’t be denied that the students lack experience, but that’s why they’re in the magazine program at Ryerson-to upgrade their skills for employment after school. Obe, who founded the Review in 1983, says he did partly aim to create a media watchdog (“There wasn’t any magazine in Canada that was an effective journalism review”). But he also wanted the Review to train students to think critically about their chosen profession. “I wanted students to develop a spirit of reform and not just accept things as they are,” he says. “We’re not interested in sending people out to be foot soldiers to the industry. If that’s all we did we’d be little more than a trade school. Working on the Review teaches them to challenge the status quo.” While their various challenges may have upset their targets, Review writers have gained many admirers among their peers in student journalism internationally. In 1987, the American-based Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication created a competition for student-produced magazines in North America. Competing against some of the top journalism schools in the United States, the Review won the award for best single issue of an ongoing magazine four years in a row, and placed third last year. What’s more, Review writers have twice won the AEJMC award for best consumer magazine article by an undergraduate: Mark Richardson in 1989 for “The McPapering of London, Ontatio,” and Anthony Seow in 1992 for “Whipping Boy,” about The Globe and Mail’s lone wolf sportswriter Marty York.

At 6 p.m. on a typical evening, when most Ryerson students are bustling off the campus after a long school day, the students and instructors working on the Ryerson Review of Journalism are just about to start work. It’s been that way since the premier edition when they met evenings and weekends to get the magazine out. The only space they could find was a former storeroom into which they could barely fit a bench, table and filing cabinet. “Sometimes there was so much smoke in the room you could hardly see the person sitting across the table from you,” recalls Kit Melamed, a features editor on the first issue. This year the journalism school has a new home in the Rogers Communications Centre, where Review students now work out of a space at least 20 times the size of the original, equipped with 10 Macintosh computers, a conference room and two private offices.

The Review was conceived in the summer of 1983 when Don Obe became journalism school chairman. The former editor of Toronto Life and The Canadian magazines, Obe immediately recognized that the school offered inadequate training to students interested in entering the magazine profession. To fill the gap, he decided the students should produce a real consumer magazine, something that no other journalism school in Canada had ever done. Better yet, he reasoned, it could have a modest role in shaping journalism in Canada if it aimed to critically review the profession.

The Ryerson Review of Journalism was born in April 1984, exactly nine months after its conception, at Imprint Typesetting in Toronto. Obe and the 12 students who worked on the first issue set a standard for all the mastheads that followed. “We knew from the start,” recalls Obe, “that every aspect of the magazine, from writing to production values, had to be up to professional levels.”
In the first year, the magazine’s biggest problem was lack of money. Obe managed to scrape up $1,000 from the school’s budget, and negotiated to have a $3,000 Reader’ s Digest grant for student travel applied to the magazine instead. But this $4,000 paid only for a cheap printer and stock, leaving Obe to improvise and pressure colleagues for donations of time and skills: “I shamelessly exploited all of my friends in the business to make the magazine become a reality.”

James Ireland, a veteran art director who had worked with Obe at several magazines, was intrigued by the Review and agreed to design it for a mere $500. He’s stayed on ever since. “Working on the Review went beyond a friend coming out to help,” says Ireland, who now has his own design firm. “By investing in the stu3ents’ future, it turned out, I was investing in my own. Every year I make contact with people who will soon be professionals-that is to say, potential clients. I’ve got work from a number of them since they graduated.”

The Review’s launch issue featured a glossy cover containing a self-caricature by political cartoonist Ed Franklin. Inside were 48 newsprint pages, with no colour or advertising. Launch stories examined the controversy surrounding Shirley Sharzer being passed over for the job of managing editor at The Globe and Mail, the effect of upscale circulation on the editorial content of magazines and the changing voices of the ethnic press.

In the spring of 1984, Maclean Hunter, thinking the magazine program a worthy investment, gave the school $125,000, to be spread over five years. In 1990, it upped the grant to $35,000 annually and renewed it for two more years. The second issue was the first to carry adsthough there were only six pages of them. But as ad revenue grew, the magazine added colour, better paper stock and increased in size, from 52 pages in 1987 to 88 pages in 1989. With increased enrolment in 1990, the school decided to split the magazine students into two separate staffs and produce two issues. The additional issue is supervised by journalism instructor Paul A. Rush, the former publisher of Moneywise and The Financial Post 500 magazines.

Each year, seven or eight students at the Review get a chance to work closely with some of the country’s top magazine editors and writers, who act as handling editors on their stories. “It’s like a special apprenticeship,” says Obe. “They probably won’t get another opportunity to work that closely with a top editor until they’ve been out of here for some years.” Student Andrew Leitch had Joann Webb, former editor of Harrowsmith and Canadian Business, as his handling editor last year. He says the advice and guidance he got from her helped him through the tough times. “Joann did the real hand-holding. I’d be on the phone with her for an hour in the evening talking about my article, and I could hear her kids in the background, playing and making noise, and she would be on the phone calmly helping me work through the piece.”

Review instructors also help students with job tips and references after graduation. For instance, Angie Gardos, managing editor of the 1989 Review, got a summer job as a copy editor and fact checker at Toronto Life on Obe’s recommendation. She and Leanne Delap, who was also on the 1989 Review, are now both associate editors at Toronto Life. Other Review alumni appear on the mastheads of consumer and trade magazines ranging from enRoute to Canadian Grocer.

By the time their Review work is finished, many students have acquired some hard-won insights into their chosen profession. Many are most surprised to learn that working journalists are often reluctant to talk about what they do and are sensitive to criticism. When writing his profile of Marty York, Anthony Seow ran into dozens who neglected to return his calls or hung up on him. “It really pissed me off,” he recalls. “I mean, give me a break; they’re journalists too. They had to start somewhere. I guess they forget where they came from. There were times when I really wasn’t looking forward to making the next call.”

The subject himself also proved a challenge. “York was fine in my interviews with him when he thought I was on his side,” says Seow, “but when I started asking him tough questions he immediately changed his tone and began acting very cold.” When York sensed that the piece would be critical, he threatened to call up Seow’s sources, and eventually came down hard on the student. “He blasted me for 45 minutes one night, trying to scare me and make me feel guilty. He told me that he didn’t want the story published and was going to call his lawyers and complain to my instructors.” In 10 years the Review has never been sued, but Seow says that at the time he sensed York was serious, and the whole experience didn’t give him a very good taste of the business. In the end, after the Review came out, York called Obe and told him he thought the article was fair and balanced.

Another dilemma Review students face is whether writing a controversial piece about the media will affect their employment prospects. Joan Breckenridge wrote “The Patience of Shirley Sharzer” in the first issue of the Review. The story took a critical look at upper-management attitudes toward women at the Globe-where Breckenridge very much wanted to work.

“I did wonder at times if writing this sort of article might hurt my chances of getting a job later on,” she says. But the Globe was more impressed by her honest reporting than annoyed by her criticism. After graduation she was hired by the Globe and has worked there ever since.

As it faces its next 10 years, the Ryerson Review of Journalism is at an impasse. Obe would like to see it increase its frequency to quarterly so it could have a greater impact on the Canadian media. However, he fears that students could not produce that volume of work themselves without having to trade off the learning experience of working at their current, more studious, pace. “The magazine couldn’t remain student-produced unless we were willing to accept inferior work,” he says. Professional journalists could be invited to contribute to a quarterly, but that might harm students’ sense of their own contribution. While Obe hasn’t abandoned the latter idea, he’s still thinking it through.

A more pressing concern for the Review right now is whether it will continue to receive its annual $35,000 grant. “Technically, the grant has run out, but Maclean Hunter has seen fit to continue providing the funds,” Obe says. “While we’re grateful for that, it still means a year-to-year sweat over whether the money will be forthcoming.” The Review usually nets about $20,000 from advertising, which is split – between the two issues, but that money alone isn’t nearly enough to produce even one issue that would meet the magazine’s present standards. Leitch remembers one day last year he went into Obe’s office in the back of the old journalism building to talk. Obe, who was sitting at his desk, looked up at him and said, “I don’t just want the Review to be the best student magazine in North America, I want it to be the best magazine in Canada.”

This year will be Obe’s last as one of the Review’s instructors. He will continue his involvement with the magazine as the school’s director of magazine journalism and as the instructor of a third-year writing course. Obe feels the writing course will be vital in preparing students to write their Review articles in their final year. After 10 years, he feels he’s done all he can as the Review’s instructor and now it’s time to move on. “The magazine is like a child to me. You work with it and guide it to a certain point and then when it’s grown, you let go. I’ve decided it’s time to let go.”

Whatever changes are made to the magazine in the future, it will likely continue to be the controversial and critical journalism review that Obe and the students have created in the past decade. “The Review is a shit-disturbing publication by its own mandate,” says Obe. If the magazine stays true to that original mandate, Ryerson students will continue to write stories that rattle the cages of media industry giants.