Lost
Mir Mahdavi fled a death sentence. His so-called crime: battling corruption in an Afghan paper. Now he’s safe in Canada, shut out from his profession—and he’s not alone
By 8 a.m. most days, Mir Mahdavi is walking his customary 15-minute route from his home in western Kabul, greeting the same friendly faces and stopping in the same grocery store for cigarettes before arriving at the three-storey apartment building that houses Aftab (“The Sun”), the weekly newspaper of which he is founder and editor-in-chief. There he makes […]
Highway of Tears Revisited
Since 1969, 18 women have died or disappeared along a notorious B.C. road. So why is intense, investigative coverage fading along with them?
Travelling west on Yellowhead Highway 16, Vancouver Sun reporter Neal Hall took in the loneliness of the road, especially desolate in 23-below December weather. The isolated landscape was beautiful as the sun climbed and dipped, blushing the tips of the mountains in pink hues. After driving for an hour or more and not glimpsing a house, he […]
Full Moon
Obsessive. Temperamental. Brilliant. Looking back on the life of the late Barbara Moon, a storied magazine editor, whose quest for perfection haunts writers still
In the summer of 1994, David Macfarlane was among eight journalists at the Banff Centre in Alberta for the prestigious, month-long literary arts journalism program. A freelancer since the late 1970s, and, he jokes, notorious for missing deadlines, Macfarlane had managed to get his draft in on time after warnings from Barbara Moon, his editor. […]
State of Disarray
Chinese stations in Canada well serve their audience with popular fare from Hong Kong and the People’s Republic. Why the same can’t be said of their amateur news shows
“This job is really boring,” the reporter sighs soon after she begins transcribing an interview for a weekly news show in one of Fairchild TV’s editing suites in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The elevator-sized room is walled by a file cabinet, a ceiling-high shelf of Beta tapes and a sticker-infested desk with an analogue editing system […]
Battle Ready
Freelance writers march into war. The cause: increased rates, rights and respect. The enemy: publishers like Transcontinental. Who will retreat first?
Charles Oberdorf moves slowly to the stage. The veteran magazine editor and writer, tethered to an oxygen tank with a nasal cannula because of emphysema, looks older than his 67 years. Before him, the biggest names in the magazine industry cluster around tables with white linens, awaiting the presentation of the 31st annual National Magazine […]
Editors in Distress
Low pay, high anxiety, long hours and short-staffed. The life of today’s magazine editor
The building that once housed James Lawrence’s Harrowsmith and Equinox magazines was a classic three-storey Victorian farmhouse constructed out of traditional red brick; there were wood-panelled walls and floors that creak. In the late 1980s, when Doug Bennet, then editor of Masthead magazine, a trade title covering the magazine business, visited Camden House Publishing, located north of County Road 1 in the […]
The Calm after the Storm
It’s easy to lose your way in Saint John. Many summer mornings the skyline is shrouded in a heavy cloak of fog blown in from the Bay of Fundy. There are entire weeks when the cloud barely lifts, and the city becomes a ghostly whitewash. Some say flowers die in August from a lack of sunlight. But […]
The Selling of Sarah
We expect shameless self-promotion from our politicians. But did Sarah Thomson, who wants to be mayor of Toronto, go too far when she put herself on the cover of her own magazine?
The decision was a year in the making: If a viable woman ran for the Toronto mayoralty in 2010, Women’s Post would promote her. And when that woman turned out to be Sarah Thomson, the magazine’s owner (and, until recently, publisher and CEO), the plan didn’t change at all. First, she teased her intentions in […]
