Hooked on Crime
Chasing the siren call of the police beat
Through the static of Rob Lamberti’s police scanner, the calm, detached voice of a female dispatcher announces that a car has crashed and is on fire on Queens Quay West. “Maybe we’ll get a Pepsodent smile tonight,” The Toronto Sun reporter says with a wry grin as he floors his red jeep and heads for […]
Tune in, turn on, print out
It's time Canadian journalists tap into computer-assisted reporting
Journalism has seen many evolutions-advocacy, gonzo, investigative and new journalism have all made their impact. But it’s precision journalism which may bring about the biggest change. Any journalist can join the movement. All it takes is a computer. Finding the unfindable is one goal of precision journalists. Adept statisticians, they are motivated by calculating precise […]
Globe 101
The Globe and Mail's new classroom edition blurs the line between education and advertising
Inside a portable in Toronto’s Leaside High School, Bill Velos, a short, dark-haired entrepreneurship teachers from his desk, picks up a piece of chalk and writes BANKRUPTCY on the board. Hearing idle students chattering behind him, he turns around to survey his class. The students are dressed in worn baseball caps and torn blue jeans […]
Xtra! Xtra!
Read all about the newspaper that works for Toronto's gay community
When the intellectual and controversial gay magazine, The Body Politic, folded in 1987, a part of it would not give up. Xtra!, the magazine’s gay entertainment supplement, has grown into Toronto’s most popular gay newspaper. Its readership and revenue have far surpassed TBP’s, and Xtra! is now the largest gay publication in the country. When […]
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 […]
Ethics R Us
Covering the media like a wet blanket
As this decade began, the trend watchers in the media predicted that it would bring a return to traditional moral values: the unscrupulous eighties would give way to the ethical nineties. Though I hate to give them credit-why does every 10-year period have to be tied up in a fashionable package and labeled like a […]
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 […]
Whipping Boy
Marty York is a hard-nosed reporter in a World of sports scribes. Is that what makes him so hated?
Marty York sits alone at the front of the plane. There are 35 players, coaches and other writers on board, but they shy away from him. While York displays no anger, his helpless expression reflects hurt and frustration. He looks like a misfit kid being picked on at recess only the bullies in this case […]
