Do you have time to tear it up and start from scratch? Because we’re thinking about becoming a medical magazine.” Fabrice Taylor was advising me on how to update my feature. It felt like -50 C in the Frank magazine office. Taylor suggested his attire would set a good scene: scarf, black toque and gloves… Continue reading Let’s be Frank
Category: Spring 2004
Which Way Did He Go?
The search for the real Matthew Fraser began last September with a phone call to the editor-in-chief’s office at the National Post. Fraser had left a shallow footprint in media circles up to his surprise appointment, at age 44, to the Post’s top newsroom job four months earlier. Nobody knew much about this guy who… Continue reading Which Way Did He Go?
Market Indifference
The Rogers campus at 1 Mount Pleasant Rd. in Toronto is a towering, pinnacled, cathedral-like edifice of brown brick and mirrored green glass. The lobby is sunlit and impersonal with white floors and grey and white granite walls, three-storey windows, and a giant stone and steel spiral staircase. Marketing Magazine is cloistered on the seventh… Continue reading Market Indifference
Out of Africa
It was baking hot in Nelie Alfredo Marinze’s little mud-walled shack, but we sat inside and she pushed the tin door closed against the prying eyes of her village. With the help of a translator who spoke her native Shonga, she told me how her husband left Lionde, in southern Mozambique, to work in the… Continue reading Out of Africa
Left Behind
In early March 2002, Byron Christopher, senior journalist for CHED radio in Edmonton, stumbled onto a story. While looking into a lawsuit against Calgary-based Talisman Energy Inc., he discovered that the company had been accused of bombing, raping, enslaving, kidnapping and executing citizens in Southern Sudan, where it operated the Heglig and Unity oil fields.… Continue reading Left Behind