AROUND APRIL FOOLS’ Day, 1993, Scott Milsom, editor and lone employee-of New Maritimes, sliced open an envelope bearing the Canada Council logo. It was a letter Milsom had anxiously awaited each spring since 1988, when his Halifax-based magazine had received its first small grant-$10,000-after six years of trying. Across town, another April Fools’ Day missive… Continue reading The Art of the Matter
Category: The Magazine
CP Rewired
“If CP didn’t exist, we’d have to create it.” That’s the traditional view of fans of Canadian Press, Canada’s only national news-exchange cooperative. After 76 years in business, CP can certainly be called an institution in Canadian journalism. But in the newspaper world of the nineties, it’s threatening to become a misfit. CP is a… Continue reading CP Rewired
Journalism Inc.
It’s impossible to serve two masters at once-we have no lesser authority than the Bible for that-yet the news media try to do it every day. Working journalists like to think their primary role is to serve the public by letting it know what’s really going on. But the higher-ups, the media managers, have a… Continue reading Journalism Inc.
The New Protocol of War
Someone had to take Peter Brysky’s camera home. Peter Brysky was from Toronto; he was a free-lance stills photographer who was killed at Karlovac in Croatia on October 6,1991. A team from “The Journal” was in Croatia covering the war at the same time, staying at the same hotel, the Intercontinental in Zagreb. The hotel… Continue reading The New Protocol of War
Ten Years of Popping Off
Early last April, the Ryerson Review of Journalism hit the newsstands and the newsrooms of every major media company in Toronto. On the cover was a dramatic black-and-red illustration of a powerful hand squeezing blood out of a Maclean’s magazine. The headline read: “Strong-Arm Tactics: How the Life Gets Squeezed Out of Canada’s Weekly Newsmagazine.”… Continue reading Ten Years of Popping Off