Meet a Journalist

A journalist's profile, stories and career in the field of journalism. Know a journalist who should be profiled here? Send an e-mail to Janet E. Bardon

January 4, 2002
Linda Barnard
formerly @ The Toronto Sun
BarnWeasel@aol.com

I have been asked to tell you what would I do if I weren't a journalist. When the question has been posed before, I have always replied that I have no idea.

After all, my 20-year career has taken me around the world, from covering Toronto's 1996 Olympic bid in Japan, to AIDS conferences in Europe. I've covered Elvis Presley's 60th birthday at Graceland (or what would have been his 60th if you believe he's actually dead); the futile hunt for three missing children in the New Mexico desert; AIDS orphans in New York; the separation of Siamese twins and one of the first infant heart transplants in California. I've met princes and queens - the royal kind and the drag kind.

I've sat through endless council debates, hung out in sub-zero weather waiting for a guy holed up in his house with a rifle to come out, and even worked as a clown in the Santa Claus parade.

What else would I do?

Well, I guess it's time to find out.

After 18 years with The Toronto Sun in a variety of jobs from section editor to columnist, I have decided to take a buyout package and go out into the world beyond the newsroom doors.

As sad as I am to leave the Sun, I realize that journalism in North America has changed dramatically. You need only add up the layoffs in newspaper and TV newsrooms across Canada and the U.S. to see which way the wind is blowing.

This should not deter young journalists, the ones with the right mix of drive, determination and pure love of the craft. I got my first newspaper job upon my graduation from Ryerson in 1982. That was mere months after the Ottawa Journal and Montreal Star newspapers folded. There are always jobs out there for the capable - and the lucky.

Sure, the job was a weekly in Campbellford, Ont. (another paper which has sadly folded) but it was a great place to start. My advice to young journalists is to take a similar route. Go to the smaller towns. Learn how to do everything on a paper and become good at it by doing it over and over. At the same time you'll learn a crucial lesson about how your work as a reporter truly impacts on people in your community.

After Campbellford, I went to the daily in Cobourg and then to The Toronto Star as a freelance cop reporter. It was all exceptional training, an apprenticeship that taught me skills I could only learn on the job.

Journalism is a craft, as my reporting teacher used to tell us. You only get better at it by doing it. Think about it. Would you rather fly with the pilot who has 5,000 hours in the air, or the person who just completed ground school?

I had spent a summer as an intern at the Sun and was hired there as a general assignment reporter in 1984.

Along the way, many people helped bring me along in my career, but the person who was by far the most helpful and a true mentor was Trudy Eagan. Trudy is now CAO and a vice-president at the Sun and likely queen of several small countries somewhere. She was, and remains, my touchstone. She kept me on track in my career and was always available to offer advice or a kick in the slats - whichever I needed more at the time.

I have done my best to mentor young journalists along the way, just as Trudy has done for me. I believe it is crucial for people to find someone to take on a mentor's role in their lives and to be willing to pass on the favours done for you to someone else.

The biggest challenge facing journalists today is to find ways to reinvent the art of newspapering. Print will never die. But we have to find ways to bringing the news to people in a way that speaks to them and serves their needs in 2002. It all comes back to my days in Campbellford, when I realized the role of community journalism in newspapers. We have to continue as an industry to serve the reader first - ahead of advertisers' demands and the shrill cry of the bottom line.

I leave this industry with no small measure of sadness, but with a great deal of hope about a future elsewhere. The way I see it, I'm leaving a spot open for a younger version of me to slide in and start that long apprenticeship. I envy you what waits ahead for you.

Linda Barnard is an award-winning reporter who has covered beats including news, city hall, medicine and lifestyle. She has also been section editor of The Londoner in The London Free Press and Sunday Living in the Sun. She has left The Toronto Sun as of December 7, 2001.