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 […]
Why Didn’t I Know this Africa?
What Canadian newspapers too often don’t show you
In the 1970s, there was Idi Amin. The vicious dictator made big news in the West with his brutal murders, rapes and torture of Ugandan citizens. Amin was ousted in 1979 and a few years of further instability ensued. In 1986, the current president, Yoweri Museveni, took over. The Globe and Mail praised him for being part […]
Drawn but not Quartered
The crisis in art criticism
“Here we have the usual Roy Arden stuff—garbage, rubbish, scraps—very boring, of course,” Brussels-based curator Dieter Roelstraete harrumphs in front of Canadian art star Roy Arden’s black-and-white photographs. Arden’s body of work is part of a group showing in Antwerp, Belgium, called Intertidal: Vancouver Art & Artists, that Roelstraete has co-curated. Wait—the curator just called […]
Risky Business
To prosper during the Great Recession, Canadian Business got a major makeover. New editor Steve Maich thinks he has the winning formula, but do the numbers support his optimism?
Canadian Business editor-in-chief Steve Maich sits at a two-seater table at a Timothy’s coffee shop in late October 2009, a short walk from Rogers command central, the hulking mass at the north end of downtown Toronto. He strikes what I can only assume is his signature pose, the same one he has in the portrait accompanying […]
Beyond Repair
CBC hoped its news renewal would revitalize the sputtering network, but how much can you do with the same broken engine under the hood?
In the din of the newsroom, an orchestra of hammers struck the first note. Old sets were hastily torn down and replaced by transparent desks, luminescent backdrops and television screens. As the sound of buzz saws and workboots grew louder, so did the pressure to meet the on-air deadline. Newscasters rehearsed their standups on unfinished […]
Much ado about Precious Little
The digital age was supposed to usher in an exciting new era of “citizen journalism.” The result so far: some very useful news tips, great on-the-spot images of breaking events and an avalanche of lovely weather shots
At the end of the 20th century, a promising new phenomenon appeared—amateur reporters and commentators who came to be known as “citizen journalists.” They presented their writing on the internet, called web diaries, weblogs or simply blogs. The people maintaining these sites were writers unhindered by conventional journalism practices who wanted to tell stories from […]
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 […]
