Best tools of reporters are words
Friday, November 21, 2008
Celebrating 60 years of journalism at Western
In the summer of 1957, a young reporter named Clark Davey was one of only three journalists in the country to get an interview with the newly minted prime minister John Diefenbaker.
They were in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan and Davey had to get his copy back to Toronto – fast. He banged it out on a manual typewriter, handed it over to a telegraph operator who took it to the railway station and sent it back “on a brass key,” said Davey, speaking to a rapt audience at a reception for the 60th Anniversary of Journalism at the University of Western Ontario last week (Oct. 16, 2008).
It was a different world back then, said Davey, 80, who went on to become a managing editor of the Globe and Mail and later served as the publisher of several major Canadian dailies including the Montreal Gazette and the Vancouver Sun. But, he emphasized, despite the decades that separate them, today’s journalists are inextricably linked to the reporters who practised their craft 60 years ago.
“The best tools they have at their disposal are still words,” said Davey, who graduated along with 26 other men and women from the very first journalism class at Western in 1948.
Avis Favaro (Class of 1982) agrees. The award-winning medical correspondent for CTV National News, Favaro’s first job in journalism was as a news writer for Global Television in 1982. “It was my foundation in the business. I had to learn to write quickly and for different voices,” said Favaro, 48, in an email interview. “I studied how senior reporters wrote to pictures, and how to construct a TV story.”
Favaro, whose work has won her a Gemini among other awards, says Western’s journalism program gave her a foundation. “Journalism school taught me the basics. However, once you get out into the real world, you must start anew. The technology is always changing... you are learning all the time.”
Carly Weeks (Class of 2004) has been learning non-stop since her graduation only a few years ago. The 28-year-old has already had five different jobs in two countries and just recently landed her dream position in the Life section of the Globe and Mail. She’s covered life in London, politics in Washington. D.C., Ottawa’s city hall and worked in CanWest’s Parliament Bureau. For Weeks, journalism school gave her a sense of what working in a newsroom would be like. “It was good practice in terms of writing and preparing for the demands of editors.”
Those demands, which now include filing for the Internet and using digital technology, continue to grow. That’s why, in a strange way, Peter Desbarats, 75, former long-serving dean of the program, does not regret the crisis in the early 90s when the program was almost closed down by the university. Desbarats, a former news anchor at Global Television, with the help of many alumni, rallied and saved the school, but the event forced the faculty to move the program to a new model. “We were rather lucky that the shock had occurred...because we thought about it differently and new technology was adopted,” said Debarats.
The class of 1948 attendees from left to right are: Clark Davey, Hugh Macaulay, William French, John Cranford, and Neil MacCarl.
Other graduates of the class of ’48 who attended the party at the Intercontinental Hotel in Toronto, were John Cranford, former editor of the Sherbrooke Record, William French, the Globe and Mail’s famed books editor, much-loved baseball reporter Neil MacCarl and Hugh Macaulay, who in his storied career served as the Chairman of Ontario Hydro and the Chairman of the Board of Directors of Canadian Tire Corporation.
Paul Benedetti is a fulltime faculty member who teaches in the graduate journalism program in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies.
Information & Media Studies, Visit: www.fims.uwo.ca/
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