On the Eve of Destruction
In the mind of John Stackhouse, the Globe of the future could involve tearing down much of what readers value most. Will it mean brighter days or trigger an unmitigated disaster?
Visitors to The Globe and Mail’s Toronto headquarters often comment on how sedate the place is—nothing like the frenzied, shouty bullpen newsrooms of pop culture. It’s more akin to a mid-sized corporate office; a grey and workmanlike place where serious people are engaged in serious work, putting together a very serious newspaper. So by Globe […]
Heart Attack
Despite many evolutionary changes, beat reporting remains the lifeblood of newspapers.So why is the Globe clogging its arteries with marquee columnists, a glut of Ottawa coverage and so much “news you can use”?
On a late fall morning, Kirk Makin walks out of room No. 13 in Ottawa’s Elgin Street courthouse. His tall, imposing figure stands above a clutch of lawyers and court officials. The hearing he’s covering — Her Majesty the Queen vs. Ontario Power Generation, John Tammadge and Robert Bednarek — has just finished, and Makin’s […]
Mighty Mouth
Heather Mallick is a well-heeled leftie with a soft heart and a strident style
Inside a classroom in the Bancroft Building at the University of Toronto, fluorescent lights buzz above Heather Mallick’s head as she sits behind a long desk, poised in a long-sleeved dark blue dress, wide-eyed and nodding at a student in her continuing education course, Town Hall: The Bush Legacy. It’s her first time teaching this […]
Right or Wong?
When Jan Wong blamed Kimveer Gill's Dawson College rampage partly on Quebec's pure laine distinction, Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Premier Jean Charest fired off letters of protest to The Globe and Mail. Buried in the rubble of the battle was the reporter's right to call it as she saw it
On Wednesday, September 13, the calm of a rainy early afternoon at Montreal’s Dawson College was broken by gunfire. Kimveer Gill entered the campus carrying a semi-automatic Beretta and began shooting like a child at a midway game. He fired 60 shots, wounding 20 people and killing one before turning the gun on himself. Three […]
Back Where he Belongs
Forced from the Globe four years ago, Norman Webster says he's happy at the Gazette
This is a story of cliches. An interview with Norman Webster sounds like a journalism 101 class, or an introduction to journalistic ethics. Norman Webster is fair to the extreme and adamant in his belief that every point of view has a right to be heard. If there is a “Queen’s scout” of Canadian journalism, […]
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 […]
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 […]
Just another Saturday Plight
Saturday Night, the magazine that hasn't made a penny for more than 40 years, has always been a hard sell.
Saturday Night, the magazine that hasn’t made a penny for more than 40 years, has always been a hard sell. And now that the venerable but perennially money-losing magazine is operating on a controlled-circulation basis, few media forecasters are predicting an easier economic future. At the magazine’s glitzy launch party last October at Toronto’s Royal […]
Looking Back on a Legend
Ralph Allen 1913-1966
Ralph Allen was angry. You could tell by the way his face changed color, and it was now a deep shade of red. The staffers of Maclean’s magazine, all sitting at tables in a private room of a Bay Street restaurant, shifted uneasily in their seats. The 1950s were drawing to a close, and Maclean’s […]
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 […]
