Master and Commander
He's obsessive, feared, optimistic and controversial-and he's got a bold plan to radically transform news at the CBC. Tony Burman's journey to the far side of the media world
Tony Burman can’t sit still. He shifts and fidgets, changes position, taps his foot, leans back in his chair, never losing balance. He gestures wildly as he talks, touching his hair, then his face, snapping his fingers to emphasize epiphanies. He doesn’t seem bored or distracted. Instead the movements seem like a physical manifestation of […]
A Puzzling Question
Why aren't the country's two major journalistic organizations more effective? The harsh answer: Canadian journalists don't care
Saving Tesfaye Kumsa’s life may have destroyed his reason for living. In 1992, Kumsa, a documentary and features program producer for Ethiopian Television in Addis Ababa, was imprisoned in a concentration camp after refusing to abide by government imposed censorship laws. When released 11 months later, he was undeterred and organized a handful of colleagues […]
Big Push, Big Worry
Torstar's latest strategy is to gorge on smaller regional papers like the Stoney Creek News, but nothing's beefed up about its ability to inform the community
Mark Cripps, senior editor of The Stoney Creek News, strides into the Animal Control Centre with a mission. He’s here to take pictures for a regular animal adoption spot in his paper, called Pet Pause, which he started at a local girl’s suggestion. “Hi Mark. I didn’t get my paper last week,” a woman at […]
Let’s be Frank
Thousands and thousands of Canadians have been Franked. Even I've been Franked - indirectly. So what was it about the satirical magazine's new owner that didn't make me want to throttle him?
Do you have time to tear it up and start from scratch? Because we’re thinking about becoming a medical magazine.” Fabrice Taylor was advising me on how to update my feature. It felt like -50 C in the Frank magazine office. Taylor suggested his attire would set a good scene: scarf, black toque and gloves […]
Which Way Did He Go?
Just who is Matthew Fraser anyway? Where did he come from? And how did he land that job? On the trail of the National Post's elusive editor-in-chief
The search for the real Matthew Fraser began last September with a phone call to the editor-in-chief’s office at the National Post. Fraser had left a shallow footprint in media circles up to his surprise appointment, at age 44, to the Post’s top newsroom job four months earlier. Nobody knew much about this guy who […]
Market Indifference
Will Stan Sutter's latest relaunch of Marketing stop the melting away of readership?
The Rogers campus at 1 Mount Pleasant Rd. in Toronto is a towering, pinnacled, cathedral-like edifice of brown brick and mirrored green glass. The lobby is sunlit and impersonal with white floors and grey and white granite walls, three-storey windows, and a giant stone and steel spiral staircase. Marketing Magazine is cloistered on the seventh […]
Out of Africa
It isn't news that AIDS has reached pandemic proportions. But shouldn't it be?
It was baking hot in Nelie Alfredo Marinze’s little mud-walled shack, but we sat inside and she pushed the tin door closed against the prying eyes of her village. With the help of a translator who spoke her native Shonga, she told me how her husband left Lionde, in southern Mozambique, to work in the […]
Left Behind
Rabble and its struggle to stay afloat - and out of the mainstream
In early March 2002, Byron Christopher, senior journalist for CHED radio in Edmonton, stumbled onto a story. While looking into a lawsuit against Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc., he discovered that the company had been accused of bombing, raping, enslaving, kidnapping and executing citizens in Southern Sudan, where it operated the Heglig and Unity oil fields. […]
Where’s the Beef?
Why commercial radio news grinds out garbage instead of real meat
It is 6 o’clock Monday morning. A man sits quietly in front of his computer with headphones on, seemingly oblivious to the world around him. The smell of Kentucky Fried Chicken fills the small room as a young guy named Scott breezes in and perches on his chair, fingers greasy, to update the traffic report. […]
Roto Retro
A look back at "a brief and shining moment that will never come again." How the freebie inserts changed Canadian journalism
Toting his notes, thermos of coffee and a pack of Salem Light Menthol cigarettes, Earl McRae would creep into the closed Simpson Tower on Yonge Street and ride the elevator to the 11th floor – home of The Canadian magazine. Squeezing into his office with barely room for a desk and chair, he’d begin pounding […]
