Welcome to The Rewrite - a Substack dedicated to seeking and destroying bad journalism, correcting inadequate reporting and helping people remember that there are still good journalists doing great work.
I spent three decades in newsrooms and I was good at it. I started at weeklies on Vancouver Island, at times writing as many as 40 pieces of copy a week, maintaining a community calendar, taking, laying out pages, developing and printing photographs. After a few years of that, I joined the Calgary Sun on the sports desk because I was pretty excited about the upcoming Olympics. Occasionally, I got sprung as sports editor to do some reporting at events such as World Figure Skating Championships (the year Brian Orser won), Stanley Cup finals, NHL games and - my favourite - the World Cup in Mexico ‘86.
After the Olympics, I moved to the news desk and then to the Calgary Herald in 1990 as a night news copy editor and moved up from there through the Editorial Page Editor, Editor-in-Chief and Publisher positions before being (in retrospect gratefully) ejected from the industry in 2005. I won a National Newspaper Award in 1993 for leading a group project that was rigorous in its objectivity and another from the Association of Opinion Page Editors for similarly unbiased work.
I then spent a decade as a CRTC Commissioner as a part-timer, full time AB-NWT Regional Commissioner and finally as Vice Chair of Telecommunications. And, in what will probably have been my final “job,” I spent 5 1/2 years running the Royal Saskatchewan Museum as Executive Director - which was a wonderful experience. I have had an amazing - and rich - career and met and worked with many wonderful people. For several years, I was a judge for the National Newspaper Awards. Expect shameless name-dropping and story telling from time to time.
These days, I do a little consulting and a lot of writing on communications. I have authored a few policy papers and, hopefully, will continue to do so in my honorary role as a Senior Fellow with the Macdonald-Laurier Institute.
Over these past two, delightful, decades outside of the mainstream media industry, I have watched it collapse. This Substack will explore the reasons for that and ideas about making the news business sustainable. But the primary focus will be on the journalism itself and how its abandonment of once-cherished core principles by far too many of its practitioners is destroying the public’s trust in it. And how, without trust, there is nothing.
I believe in the pursuit of objectivity in reporting and that agendas are for columnists and activists. I believe in a free and independent press, fairness, accuracy, balance and allowing readers to draw their own conclusions.
The brickbats will be about the work, not the individuals. We all make mistakes. I will not abide those who use these posts to attack or mock individuals. Feel free, when it comes to the bouquets, to send yours along, too.
Suggestions and tips are welcome and encouraged, as will be paid subscriptions.
The first posts will go up later this month.
Congratulations on your new Substack, Peter!