When the intellectual and controversial gay magazine, The Body Politic, folded in 1987, a part of it would not give up. Xtra!, the magazine’s gay entertainment supplement, has grown into Toronto’s most popular gay newspaper. Its readership and revenue have far surpassed TBP’s, and Xtra! is now the largest gay publication in the country. When… Continue reading Xtra! Xtra!
Category: The Magazine
The Drive for Quality at Thomson Newspapers
This is crap…it’s truly dreadful. This headline doesn’t tell me anything. I don’t want to read such a piece of shit.” Tony Sutton, the in-house design consultant for Thomson Newspapers Corp., is critiquing the prototype of a new Sunday edition of The Daily Mercury of Guelph, Ontario. He’s standing in his office on the 24th… Continue reading The Drive for Quality at Thomson Newspapers
On Being Fired
It was mid-May of 1991 and I was fresh off the plane from Vancouver, sitting in a Queen Street West restaurant eating Thai noodles with Globe and Mail editors John Cruickshank and Phil Jackman and explaining the cognitive indignities I had planned for their readers in the coming year. After nearly a year as the… Continue reading On Being Fired
Days and Nights on the Kid Shift
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… Continue reading Days and Nights on the Kid Shift
Ethics R Us
As this decade began, the trend watchers in the media predicted that it would bring a return to traditional moral values: the unscrupulous eighties would give way to the ethical nineties. Though I hate to give them credit-why does every 10-year period have to be tied up in a fashionable package and labeled like a… Continue reading Ethics R Us