Taking a look back - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Last week, I had the opportunity to speak with a young student from the University of Guelph at Humber College about the work I do here at The Citizen. The student called me from Humber’s north campus, which is where I studied (though I get the distinct impression that it has been upgraded quite a bit since I went there).

 

It was for one of his courses and, because he’s originally from Wingham, he reached out to a working journalist in his home community for this assignment. It gave me a chance to reflect on all that’s changed (or not changed) since I was a student there and how I was able to tackle a similar assignment when I was a journalism student at Humber many years ago.

 

For one thing, I was too nervous to reach out to the media professionals at my local newspaper: The Pickering News-Advertiser. The name of the paper has real it-does-what-it-says-on-the-tin energy, as an aside, but I just didn’t think they would give me the time of day. Now, as someone who has worked for a community newspaper for nearly 20 years, I’m sure that wouldn’t have been true and that they would have been lovely and accommodating, but that was my thinking (fear) at the time. 

 

I lucked out in that my mom worked with a fellow whose brother was a columnist at the Toronto Star. That columnist’s name is Jim Coyle and he still writes for the paper today, ushering the power of the pen for more than 40 years. After a rocky start - I called him when he was on deadline and he thought I was a telemarketer; completely understandable - he was tremendously kind to me. I asked about either meeting for a coffee or simply doing the interview over the phone and he offered to take me through the famed Toronto Star building. (The historic building - located at one of the city’s most famous addresses, 1 Yonge Street - was home to the newspaper until 2022.) There, we sat in a conference room overlooking Lake Ontario and the Toronto Islands while I nervously interviewed him, utilizing a tape (tape!) recorder so I didn’t miss anything.

 

That was one of the few interactions I had with a real-life, working journalist throughout my time at school, though Coyle was a columnist, who was a bit removed from the day-to-day reporting of the Toronto Star. Many of my teachers were not active in the field, but there were some. I remember rolling into class on the morning of Sept. 11, 2001 only for our teacher to never show up. He was a producer for CTV News and it didn’t take us long to put together that he might have had his hands full.

 

One other course focused on community journalism, taught by a veteran of the world of community newspapers. In retrospect, that was the course that was most important for me for the years that were to come, but I didn’t know it at the time. At the time, I didn’t really get why finding a local angle to a national or even international story mattered so much. Again, evoking 9/11, he said that a story on 9/11 wouldn’t be of particular interest to your readers (national and international news outlets would be doing that work for you), but if a tragedy like that had touched a member of your community, it was your responsibility to report that out and tell your readers everything you could about that local connection.

 

Back to journalism school, I remember eating up stories from my professors of being on the same media bus as a young Hunter S. Thompson or being an international correspondent in war-torn countries half the world away, but, as I told this student, the local stories are the ones that affect us most deeply; are most intertwined with our day-to-day lives.