Digital Presentation Editor
The Globe and Mail
2005 Graduate
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In the summer of 2005, when I earned my BHums degree and joined The Globe and Mail’s copy desk, it felt as if everything and nothing in my life had changed. At Carleton, I had spent four years reading voraciously, analyzing the core ideas behind great historical and intellectual events, discussing those ideas every week with the smartest people I knew, and summarizing my conclusions in clear English. At The Globe, all that changed was the style of writing and urgency of events. Also, they paid me.
I had known since high school that I wanted to be a journalist, but believed a broad liberal-arts education could help me avoid j-school groupthink. I could still access Carleton’s journalism know-how by volunteering at The Charlatan, and by convincing professors to let me into indispensable classes such as media law. (The combined BJ/Hums honours program could have made that easier, but it wouldn’t exist for another decade.) At the College of Humanities, I learned the most important skill of journalism: How to investigate the why of things, to be curious about where cultures, beliefs and institutions come from.
My unique academic path helped me to see career options that the j-school pack did not. They mostly clamoured for reporting jobs; I pursued editing. When The Globe hired me full-time, the interdisciplinary thinking instilled by the College helped me to be a sort of translator between its many editorial fiefdoms: News and business, text and photography, print and digital. This was the foundation of my current job on the Globe visuals team, where I build digital stories by co-ordinating between reporters, assigning editors, photographers, graphic artists and web developers to make sure their contributions blend smoothly into one article page.
The College also kindled my love of structural editing, another of my specialties at The Globe. In the 2010s, through my work with the live-news and visuals teams, I invented new formats of “what we know so far” explainers, designed to give digital audiences rich but accessible context on important topics. When building explainers, I sometimes thought of my old College self: What would a know-nothing student, desperate to grasp this issue quickly, want to have as cram material?
The news media is an ever-evolving industry, and I sometimes worry about its survival against the forces of technological upheaval, political polarization and misinformation. But the values I learned at Carleton are something I can count on in my work and life: Even when everything changes, they do not.