Way Out of Bounds
How an ugly incident prompted the Star's Mary Ormsby to tackle locker-room sexism
In 1985, Toronto Star sportswriter Mary Ormsby became one of the first women in the history of the Canadian Football League to report from players’ locker rooms. By then, Ormsby had been in dozens of male athletes’ locker rooms. In her four years on the job, Ormsby, then 25, had learned to accept the reality […]
The Incredible Shrinking Newscast
For a lot of radio programmers, no news is good business
In 1981, the Federal Communications Commission deregulated radio in the U.S. and changed the character of American stations. Among the regulations relaxed were those governing news content-a station is no longer required to broadcast any news whatsoever-and the result has been that too many stations have become little more than free jukeboxes. The reason is […]
No Mean Businesses
As the editors of two leading business magazines, Joann Webb and Margaret Wente are hard-driving rivals-but they don't sell each other short
Joann Webb’s office door is usually open. Busy as she is, it’s the policy of Canadian Business’s 36-year-old editor to allow the publisher or a staff member to pop in during the day to discuss anything from next month’s budget to a copy-editing problem. But today the glass door is closed. Visitors are ignored, phone […]
More in Anger
George Bain's bitter leave-taking from The Globe and Mail
Suddenly in April, 1987, George Bain, dean of Canada’s political columnists, disappeared from The Globe and Mati’s editorial page. Three months earlier, he had written his last column for the Globe’s Report on Business Magazine. Although inquiring readers were sent letters to the effect that Bain had simply quit writing the columns, they never learned […]
Harvesting Hope
George Atkins's farm radio network sows seeds of knowledge for 100 million subsistence farmers in the Third World
The elevator door slides open to a ninth-floor corridor tiled in black-and-white marble in a downtown Toronto office building. A sign on the receptionist’s desk announces that this is Varity Corporation, until two years ago known as Massey Ferguson. Behind the woman, on a cabinet, a miniature fleet of Massey-Ferguson tractors looks ready to harvest […]
Ms. Taken
Why the media are missing the message of Canadian feminism
There hasn’t been another political movement like it. Of all the grass-roots revolutions born of the idealism and outrage of the sixties, the women’s movement is the only one that came and actually stayed. Who even remembers the youth movement, when students organized, demonstrated and hitchhiked across the country, so alarming their elders with their […]
Monkey Business in Bestseller Land
The fact and fiction of a suspect system
On March 2, 1987, Carsten Stroud’s newly released book Close Pursuit: A Week in the Life of an NYPD Homicide Cop was glowingly reviewed in Maclean’s magazine. It was, said the magazine, a “compelling portrait of New York City homicide detective Eddie Kennedy.” Two weeks later, Close Pursuit was tenth on the magazine’s nonfiction bestseller […]
Upwardly Immobile
In the newsrooms of the nation a woman's place is seldom at the top. Gillian Steward and a handful of others are the exceptions that prove who rules
It is becoming increasingly apparent that if employers want to avoid legislation requiring them to institute affirmative action programs, they are going to have to do much better on a voluntary basis at hiring and promoting women into higher-paying jobs and employers should stop assuming that women can’t do nontraditional jobs: if they have the […]
Lost in gloss
Searching for substance in Canada's magazines
If only this were printed on scratch’n’sniff stock, there would be so much less explanation required. A smell, slightly sickly, a bit cloying, an odor caused by clothes too warm and yesterday’s cut flowers and the suffocating sorrow of the viewing room, yes-for this is how one who once worshiped Canadian magazines feels when invited […]
