Breaking Bad
Six journalists. Five newsrooms. One massive Montreal corruption scandal
Six journalists. Five newsrooms. One massive Montreal corruption scandal
Stories in the ashes: covering disaster in Lac-Mégantic
After a train exploded in a tiny Quebec town, some reporters stuck around and showed us the power of narrative journalism.
By Rebecca Melnyk Inside his west-end Toronto apartment, Justin Giovannetti was cocooned in blankets, sick in bed with a bad cold on his day off. His cellphone rang. Dennis Choquette, his editor at The Globe and Mail, wanted him in the office. Giovannetti rolled off his mattress, slipped into his least flattering clothes and schlepped in […]
A Woman’s Place in the News
The women's pages are back. But are the women?
Joanne Ramondt thought she had found a good example of male bias in the pages of the Calgary Herald. In a photo of a husband and wife business team, the husband was standing in the foreground, clearly the focus of attention, while the wife sat off in the background with the children. Ramondt is a […]
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, […]
The Art of Book Balancing
Readers lose out in the fight between pulp and purpose in Canada's literary pages
During the fall of 1990 a memo was sent by Montreal Gazette entertainment editor Brian Kappler to associate managing editor Michael Cooke regarding the book section. It read, in summary: Feature novels closer to public taste (Danielle Steele, Stephen King, Robert Ludlum). Scrap the French best-seller list. Limit commissioned reviews to five a week. Shorten […]
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 […]
The Quest for Holy Joe’s Grail
The crusade against free trade was the latest in a long tradition of dragon slaying at The Toronto Star
On page 20 last November 22, The Toronto Star admitted it had lost. The people of Canada had voted against it, had “spoken convincingly.” An editorial, a quietly disappointed concession speech, signaled the end of the paper’s three-year fight to undo the free trade initiative. It was an emotional fight, one in which the Star […]
