Category: Winter 2012

When Catherine Frazee applied to study journalism at Carleton University in the 1970s, a senior official at the school told her she would not be able to “elbow her way into the scrum on Parliament Hill” and shouldn’t pursue a career in journalism because she was disabled. She then gave up her scholarship and her… Continue reading Journalists with Disabilities Just Want to Be Journalists

Francis Monroe McAllister lived in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside and died alone outside on a snowy night when the 650 shelter beds in the city were full. Mark Hume, writer for The Globe and Mail, told McAllister’s story in “Dead End Streets,” a 2006 series that painted an eloquent picture of poverty and urban struggle in… Continue reading Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside Is Easy to Sensationalize, Hard to Explain

A box full of private emails, handed over at a gas station across from Collins Bay Penitentiary in Kingston, helped change what Canadian journalists think of the Aboriginal Peoples Television Network news and current affairs division. APTN National News, which first went on air in 2002, positions itself as an alternative to mainstream broadcast news… Continue reading APTN Is Breaking Big with a Small Team of Dedicated Journalists

One morning in 2009, Brian Goldman interviewed Michael Wansbrough in the doctors’ lounge at Toronto’s Mount Sinai Hospital. They discussed a pill the two had used to get through long night shifts. Modafinil, the generic name for a drug originally developed to treat narcolepsy, has been approved for shift workers, but it’s still a controversial… Continue reading The Journalist Is In—and Dishing about Doctors