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Quick Reads

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Short, snappy pieces that should take you 10 mins or less to read!

A person looks down at their laptop while icons circle around them, causing them stress.

Impassioned but Exhausted

When Twitter was first on the rise, Talia Ricci recalls how hectic it was to live tweet while filing on deadline.
An illustration three ex-broadcasters, Alan Carter, Amber Kanwar, and Graham Richardson, looking into a shutdown newsroom, with boxes laid around and an attention sign on the television screen on the left side.

The Last Showrunners

On February 10, fans of Breakfast Television were stunned when co-host Devo Brown announced on-air that Meredith Shaw and Sid Seixeiro were let go from the morning show. A Rogers sports and media representative told Postmedia that these latest moves were an “evolution” for the program and new plans would be announced in the coming weeks. Days later, Broadcast Dialogue reported that Corus Entertainment confirmed another round of staff cuts—part of the company’s plan to cut 10 percent of its workforce and streamline operations.
Illustration of Krishen Persad Brainstorming at his CBC desk

Connecting Kids to News

CBC launched its Kids News digital platform in 2018 to help Canadian children stay informed while developing their media literacy skills. However, when the pandemic hit in 2020, the platform became increasingly relevant to younger audiences due to the reliable, age-appropriate health information it provided them.
An illustration of five Canadian media company logos sitting in a courtroom. The five companies are the Globe and Mail, CBC-Radio, Toronto Star, Postmedia, and The Canadian Press.

Big Tech, Big Lawsuit

“Big tech, again and again, shows itself to be an industry that moves with entitlement and lack of care,” wrote author Michael Melgaard in a contribution for The Walrus in 2023. Not long before the magazine’s interviews with Melgaard and other Canadian writers, The Atlantic’s Alex Reisner had exposed the contents of Books3, a text database used to train LLaMA, Meta’s large language model (LLM) for AI-generated text.

Let’s Get Personal

Back in December, I shared a personal experience of a microaggression in an episode of We Met U When . . . , a documentary podcast series that explores the power of news stories and the experiences of the people in them. I recorded this experience unexpectedly while wrapping up a phone interview with a professor about a Black scholar she mentored.
An Illustration of a person’s hand holding a newspaper, flipping through the pages.

In the Year 2025…

Journalism is facing a tough choice: evolve or die. Journalism has always thrived on asking tough questions, so here’s one for the industry itself: What should we do better this year?

The Last Dance

Just a couple of decades ago, dance journalism was common in Canadian magazines such as The Dance Current, Dance International, and Dance in Canada, with dance reviews and dancer profiles present in major publications and radio shows.
Gabby McMann (right) and Carrie Davis (left) are hip-hip. McMann wears a white tank top and a floral satin skirt. The colors are pink, magenta, black, blue, orange and green. The skirt has embroidered flowers and leaves with green and pink, and larger blue tulip petals with a pink flower bud. To the left, Davis wears an orange Saagajiwe Indigenous Studio orange t-shirt that has a blue, green, orange, logo shaped symmetrically in an embroidered stitched pattern in the centre.

Journalists: Report Indigenous Joy

A CBC News article recently caught the attention of Gabrielle McMann, an Ojibwe journalist, advisor and lecturer on Indigenous reporting, and a member of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation—but not for the right reason.
An illustration of Bob McKeown, sitting behind a CBC desk, with a martini in his hand, toasting to the camera which is live, on air.

Last Toast

On the crisp evening of Nov. 28, the Toronto Reference Library is quiet with anticipation as images from five decades of The Fifth Estate illuminate the walls. As the hundreds of guests in the Bram & Bluma Appel Salon settle, a voice calls for everyone to take their seats.

Journalism Finds a Way

Krista Langlois, a long-time freelance writer for Hakai Magazine based in Colorado, joined the editorial team at the start of 2024 and was ready to move to Canada. Her husband had given his notice at work, and she was applying for a Canadian work visa. They found renters for their house in Colorado and secured a rental home in Victoria, B.C.