As a Research Fellow with the Department of Journalism at Stellenbosch University, I investigate issues and mentor emerging scholarship related to press freedom and information integrity. I currently lead an international interdisciplinary study of news reporting’s “essential standards,” based at Laval University’s Centre d’études sur les médias. Since retiring as a full professor of journalism at Toronto Metropolitan University, I have served as a Senior Fellow for the Centre for Free Expression.
My peer-reviewed scholarly research explores aspects of journalists’ professional identity. I’m an advisor (and founding Principal Investigator) for the Canadian Worlds of Journalism Study, an editorial board member of Journalism Studies, and the executive producer of After Fact (2020) a cinema-verité movie by Lindsay Fitzgerald documenting the working lives of four journalists in the midst of a news-business crisis.
My latest book, The Disputed Freedoms of a Disrupted Press, was published by Routledge in 2024. It’s widely available as an e-book, in paperback, and in hardback and can be borrowed electronically through libraries worldwide.
In my beginning was the 1953 birth in Benoni, South Africa of a small human who never got especially large. I sold my first freelance article at the age of 15 to The Cape Argus in Cape Town and wrote news stories about apartheid that were published in English and in translation in local and European newspapers. My last and politically riskiest job in South Africa was as editor of the Anglican Church’s newspaper, for which exposing the impacts of apartheid on people’s lives was a core journalistic mission.
After moving to Canada in 1985, I was a contributing editor of Saturday Night and wrote feature articles for Toronto Life, The Walrus, Maclean’s, Today’s Parent and The Globe and Mail‘s Report on Business Magazine, among others. My first book-length work of literary journalism was What God Allows: The Crisis of Faith and Conscience in One Catholic Church (Doubleday, New York: 1996). I juggled my writing with editing at Chatelaine magazine, where my last position was managing editor. From 1997 until joining the academic life in 2001, I worked as a freelance writer and consultant to publishers and non-profit organizations.
I started teaching journalism at TorontoMet (then named Ryerson University) in 2001 and occupied successive academic leadership positions including Chair of the School of Journalism (2011-2016) and then Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education and Student Affairs in the Faculty of Communication and Design from 2017 to 2019. I was the founding editor of J-Source (2007-2009) and chaired the ethics advisory committee of the Canadian Association of Journalists from 2009 to 2016.
I’ve been lucky in academic life and grew especially passionate about teaching ethics and feature writing. I’ve come to believe that encouragement and empathic engagement with young adults’ minds is more important long-term than the ephemeral knowledge and skills one can share as a teacher. It’s also a privilege to have supervised 25 graduate research projects and my federal-government grants helped several young research assistants afford university degrees.
My research has been published in Journalism Studies, Digital Journalism, Canadian Journal of Political Science, Journalism Practice, Canadian Journal of Communication, and Newspaper Research Journal, and as chapters in several books. I frequently referee submissions to academic journals, and am an occasional contributor to The Conversation.
As a journalist, I was honoured six times at the National Magazine Awards between 1989 and 2004 and was a finalist for the Canadian Association of Journalists’ award for investigative journalism in 2004. My writing has been chosen for several anthologies, and I edited The Bigger Picture: Elements of Feature Writing (Emond Montgomery Press, 2008).