The evening begins in a cheery reception room. Lined with appetizers and sparkling wine, and framed by tall ceilings, it seems much too formal and well-orchestrated for a magazine event. It’s December 2, 2024, and the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto is welcoming attendees to The Walrus Talks, a national event series hosted by The Walrus.
In August 1999, Karlheinz Schreiber sat in a corner of a bustling Toronto hotel restaurant, gesturing enthusiastically to National Post reporter Philip Mathias about an instant spaghetti cooking machine he was promoting. It was a strange scene for the German-Canadian businessman, whose name was synonymous with high-stakes deals involving planes, tanks, and whispers of political intrigue. Mathias, who had initially broken the story that connected former Prime Minister Brian Mulroney to the Airbus probe, listened carefully for the possibility that Schreiber might let something slip.
Have you ever nominated yourself for a journalism award and started second-guessing whether you made a typo? What exactly goes into picking a winner, anyway? Who decides? What does the competition look like? When will I receive my cash prize?
It’s early October 2024, and the Toronto Star’s conference room is abuzz with anticipation. Stephen Ghigliotty, a marketing strategist with expertise in artificial intelligence, is preparing to host a five-hour learning session on the impacts of AI on journalism. The space is warm and welcoming, but beneath the surface lurks an undeniable undercurrent of fear. Ghigliotty can feel it when he steps into the conference room.
In Canadian newsrooms, a silent force is shaping which stories get published and which ones don’t. It’s not editorial standards, audience metrics, or a lack of reporting skill—it’s fear. “The legal risk in journalism has always been a cost of doing business,” says Josh Lynn, a public relations manager at Animal Justice and a former journalist.
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.
“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.
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?
Tears poured from Knežević’s eyes when the towers fell, recalls Wency Leung, now a reporter for the Toronto-based outlet The Local. On September 11, 2001, Leung was in her early twenties and working at Reuters, her first professional journalism job.
Over the past few years, Canadaland has been facing scrutiny over its coverage of Israel’s war on Gaza, largely related to its founder, host, and publisher, Jesse Brown.
