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 […]
Leading Men
Power! Influence! Drama! Pulling back the curtain on four of Toronto's top theatre critics
The theatre performance du jour in Toronto is Soulpepper’s adaptation of Harold Pinter’s The Caretaker. Having just finished their opening night performance, the three actors return to the stage to take their bows. A sparse standing ovation springs up for the 2005 Nobel Prize winner’s 1959 classic. The audience members process what they’ve seen. “That […]
Home Alone
For the Toronto Star's David Olive, one of Canada's most respected business journalists, writing isn't what he does for a living. It's his life's work. But at what personal cost?
It’s near midnight in October on Bloor west near Keele in Toronto’s west end. All is quiet except for whirring winds and the thunder of late-night transports, but the neighbourhood coffee shop-reminiscent of a garage-turned-game show set-is still open for business. Under the pulsating glow of the flashing bulbs bordering the Galaxy Donuts sign, a […]
Disconnected
The phone doesn't ring for small-town stringers anymore
They were the lifeline between the city papers and the small rural communities across Ontario. Individually, they were mail carriers, housewives, teachers and journalists; collectively they were called stringers. They could be counted on to report on events happening in their area. Some would call with tips and names of people to contact, while others […]
Days and Nights on the Kid Shift
What newspapers are doing to support working parents and what they aren't
It’s seven o’clock on a frigid November morning, and Toronto Star feature writer Patricia Orwen is scurrying about her small Etobicoke home as though she were working against a deadline in the newsroom. She enters the kitchen with her two daughters in tow and begins to make coffee from a pan of water on the […]
On the Blink
A jaundiced glance at Eye Weekly
It was Toronto’s civic event of the season. Last fall’s mayoralty race saw the two front-runners crash head-on, flinging bits of cant and rhetoric, and the city’s three dailies hustling to cover the carnage. To no one’s surprise, The Globe and Mail and The Toronto Sun supported June Rowlands, the conservative candidate promising business booms […]
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 […]
Taking on Toronto
Notoriously unpredictable Star columnist Rosie DiManno pushes the city's limits
It is going to be a hard night for Jack Layton. Pre-election polls have forecast defeat of Toronto’s NDP mayoralty candidate at the hands of his Tory opponent, and at 7 p.m. on election day, time is ticking away. And here is Layton, sweating in his overcoat and red scarf, rushing from door to door […]
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 […]
Pressed for Time
The perils of preprinting: will the real Mexio please stand up?
Last Sept. 21, a page-one headline in The Toronto Star‘s Saturday edition read “Reeling Mexico battered again.” The second earthquake in two days had rocked an already devastated Mexico City and its Pacific coast. The government had estimated that the final death toll might be as high as 4,000. Everyone mourned for Mexico as images […]
