New Kids on the Block
Tunes and roans make way for news and views as MuchMusic and YTV gamble on journalism
THEY DESCENDED ON LAST SUMMER’S TORY convention with a fury and spread out across the Ottawa Civic Centre like a crack battalion of Keystone Cops. It was the crowd from the nation’s music station, MuchMusic; newcomers to the political scene, a bunch of partiers in their 20s and 30s with no pretensions and a lot […]
Lost at Sea
For over 100 years, The Toronto Star steered a sure course. John Honderich's predecessors knew which way to go. Why doesn't he?
BRIGHT NOVEMBER SUNSHINE SHONE through the windows in John Honderich’s corner office the day after his fifth anniversary as editor of The Toronto Star. He relaxed in his swivel chair, hands clasped behind his head, and talked about the last five years, a half-decade marred by economic and personnel catastrophes that would curl the hair […]
Vision Impossible?
Bill Gates thinks journalism, as we know it, will die. It certainly will if we don't find some new ideas
In the March 1991 edition of the Ryerson Review of Journalism, Jack McIver, then editor of The Globe and Mail’s award-winning travel magazine Destinations, boldly predicted the magazine would survive despite a suspect balance sheet and a deep recession that was biting into ad revenues. “I think the Globe’s committed enough to hang tough,” said […]
Peter Desbarat’s Last Stand
When Western attacked his beloved journalism school, its dean turned the battle into a personal crusade. He won, but the tactics he used mean the school could face the next campaign alone
WHEN I WAS APPROACHED IN the Windsor Star newsroom last May to sign a petition to save the University of Western Ontario’s Graduate School of Journalism, my reaction was immediate: No Way. I thought closing the school wasn’t a bad idea. I knew times there were tough, since the university had to cut between $10 […]
The Art of the Matter
Three magazines have to cover the arts the federal government's way-or else
AROUND APRIL FOOLS’ Day, 1993, Scott Milsom, editor and lone employee-of New Maritimes, sliced open an envelope bearing the Canada Council logo. It was a letter Milsom had anxiously awaited each spring since 1988, when his Halifax-based magazine had received its first small grant-$10,000-after six years of trying. Across town, another April Fools’ Day missive […]
CP Rewired
Can a seventy-six-year-old news service make itself relevant to the newspapers of the nineties? Should it even try?
“If CP didn’t exist, we’d have to create it.” That’s the traditional view of fans of Canadian Press, Canada’s only national news-exchange cooperative. After 76 years in business, CP can certainly be called an institution in Canadian journalism. But in the newspaper world of the nineties, it’s threatening to become a misfit. CP is a […]
Journalism Inc.
The media once got to the bottom of things now they go only as far as the bottom line
It’s impossible to serve two masters at once-we have no lesser authority than the Bible for that-yet the news media try to do it every day. Working journalists like to think their primary role is to serve the public by letting it know what’s really going on. But the higher-ups, the media managers, have a […]
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 […]
Ten Years of Popping Off
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.” […]
Audible Minority
When you enter the lobby of CFRB, the popular radio station that bills itself as “Toronto’s News Leader,” the first things you notice are the head shots of all the station’s on-air personalities. The second row on the right-hand wall includes a photograph of Anne Winstanley, who has been a newscaster with the station […]
