“This job is really boring,” the reporter sighs soon after she begins transcribing an interview for a weekly news show in one of Fairchild TV’s editing suites in Richmond Hill, Ontario. The elevator-sized room is walled by a file cabinet, a ceiling-high shelf of Beta tapes and a sticker-infested desk with an analogue editing system… Continue reading State of Disarray
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Battle Ready
Charles Oberdorf moves slowly to the stage. The veteran magazine editor and writer, tethered to an oxygen tank with a nasal cannula because of emphysema, looks older than his 67 years. Before him, the biggest names in the magazine industry cluster around tables with white linens, awaiting the presentation of the 31st annual National Magazine… Continue reading Battle Ready
Editors in Distress
The building that once housed James Lawrence’s Harrowsmith and Equinox magazines was a classic three-storey Victorian farmhouse constructed out of traditional red brick; there were wood-panelled walls and floors that creak. In the late 1980s, when Doug Bennet, then editor of Masthead magazine, a trade title covering the magazine business, visited Camden House Publishing, located north of County Road 1 in the… Continue reading Editors in Distress
The Calm after the Storm
It’s easy to lose your way in Saint John. Many summer mornings the skyline is shrouded in a heavy cloak of fog blown in from the Bay of Fundy. There are entire weeks when the cloud barely lifts, and the city becomes a ghostly whitewash. Some say flowers die in August from a lack of sunlight. But… Continue reading The Calm after the Storm
The Selling of Sarah
The decision was a year in the making: If a viable woman ran for the Toronto mayoralty in 2010, Women’s Post would promote her. And when that woman turned out to be Sarah Thomson, the magazine’s owner (and, until recently, publisher and CEO), the plan didn’t change at all. First, she teased her intentions in… Continue reading The Selling of Sarah