Saddam Hussein circles Lanny McDonald, preparing to spit venom at the retired hockey player. Twirling his moustache, McDonald stares the dictator down. The Iraqi leader and the hockey legend line up head-to-head in the cipher, preparing to face off in the final round of the battle of the moustaches. They bump mikes, declaring lyrical warfare.… Continue reading Up From the Underground
Tag: canadian journalism
Dead in its Tracks
It’s a cold, mid-November night, but inside at Shift‘s annual “State of the Net” party, things are heating up. The scene: the vast open space of the Guvernment, a Toronto nightclub, where the thump, thump, thump of the bass is pounding so forcefully that it feels like a second heartbeat in your chest and where… Continue reading Dead in its Tracks
Wheels of Fortune
Robert Reid has seen the advertorial battle from the front lines of his own newsroom. As a reporter and union chair for the Kitchener-Waterloo Record, Reid remembers when the advertising department tried to introduce advertorial production into the newsroom back in 1989, just as staff were about to ratify their first union contract. At other… Continue reading Wheels of Fortune
Home Alone
It’s near midnight in October on Bloor west near Keele in Toronto’s west end. All is quiet except for whirring winds and the thunder of late-night transports, but the neighbourhood coffee shop-reminiscent of a garage-turned-game show set-is still open for business. Under the pulsating glow of the flashing bulbs bordering the Galaxy Donuts sign, a… Continue reading Home Alone
Watered Down
Coastlife magazine was conceived in November 1998 around a coffee table laden with a pot of tea, mugs and bowls of hummus and chips. Kyle Shaw, Christine Oreskovich, Catherine Salisbury and Heidi Hallet had gathered at Shaw and Oreskovich’s Halifax home for the fall board meeting of The Coast, at the time a five-year-old weekly… Continue reading Watered Down