Blog by John Miller

Missing the story

May 20th, 2017
Sometimes if you need to wander into a forest to look for something, you can't find it. But you’re often so busy looking, you miss something more important – like a hungry bear stealing up on your flank. That’s what happened to one of my favourite journalism sites, J-Source. “Canada’s National Newspaper Awards have a diversity problem,” it announced recently, following an analysis of the Nat ...

A humble suggestion

May 13th, 2017
Since I wrote about the controversy over a columnist’s activism at my old newspaper, I have been criticized for betraying long-held standards of journalism that say editorial employees cannot be both actors and critics. Journalists, in other words, cannot allow their outside activities to taint the paper’s reputation for objectivity. Desmond Cole resigned his twice-a-month column on the Toro ...

Wake up. It's 2017

May 13th, 2017
Sometimes, when you do something stunningly boneheaded, you can get away with it. More often, you do not. So it doesn’t take a genius to know that, if you’re devoting an issue of your magazine to a celebration of Indigenous writers, you don’t take the opportunity to encourage more white people to write about those subjects. I mean, as if we haven’t had enough of that! Hal Niedzviecki paid t ...

Silenced!

May 4th, 2017
This is a tale of two columnists, and how they were treated very differently by Canada’s largest newspaper. All they have in common is that neither is still writing there. That loss, I say, is the reader’s. Catherine Porter is white and a longtime staff writer who wrote a column on social justice issues -- climate change, international development, women's rights, poverty and community ac ...

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