Category: Summer 2006

Highway 60’s single lanes span 254 kilometres from Huntsville to Renfrew in Eastern Ontario, through Algonquin Park, past the blink-and-you-miss-them hamlets of Whitney and Madawaska and the Murray Brothers Lumber Company, one of the largest employers in the region. The highway cuts through evergreen forests and spruce bogs, continuing southeast past my parents’ inn, until… Continue reading The Great Newspaper War of Barry’s Bay

Last September, after less than a year on the job, Kim Pittaway resigned as editor-in-chief of Chatelaine, citing editorial interference from publisher Kerry Mitchell. Although there was no particular dispute that prompted her resignation, Pittaway says she had growing concerns over advertising issues. “I inevitably ended up negotiating into programs and approaches that I was… Continue reading Too High a Price

Just minutes after the latest issue arrives in cardboard boxes, a boisterous Weekly Scoop office falls to a dead silence. It’s just been delivered from its Quebecor-owned printer in Aurora, and the editors and staff writers eagerly devour the result of their week’s work. At the recently established downtown Toronto headquarters on Peter Street, this… Continue reading Celebrity Shocker!

Sharon Burnside tilts her head upward and squints, as if the story she is about to tell is written not in her own memory but on her office ceiling. It happened in February 2005, a few weeks before she was set to start her new job as public editor of The Toronto Star. At a… Continue reading Liar, Liar

“He’s taking me to see the beast,” I think, as Scott Anderson leads me through an ill-lit warren of cubicles, through a door and down a bright, narrow hallway. He stops and, twisting a knob, swings another door open. The ceiling jumps eighteen metres above my head. Silent hulking machines, beset with buttons and knobs,… Continue reading Going Down