Category: Quick Reads

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

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.
2025, Labour, Quick Reads, Spring 2025, Stories

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.

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.
2025, Corruption, Quick Reads, Spring 2025, Stories

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.

2025, Quick Reads, Spring 2025, Stories

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.

2024, Fall 2024, Quick Reads, Stories

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. 

2024, Fall 2024, Quick Reads, Stories

Free as a Zine

As community-focused storytelling becomes increasingly rare, zines offer readers connection and truth to niche subjects. While mainstream media often prioritizes clicks over community, zines like Rage, What Is to Be Done, and A Black Image Manifesto are carving out spaces where liberation movements can thrive and under-represented voices can flourish.