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Introduction.

Article Excerpt
This special journalism issue of TSC departs from tradition. Though it begins with three scholarly articles, and contains others, it also offers several rather unusual additions: three short pieces written in full-blown journalistic style (read: fun, in your face, no footnotes) by high-level Canadian journalists. They're short, snappy, wonderfully individualistic--in brief, what you might expect to see in the editorial pages of a good newspaper, rather than in the annals of refereed journals.

While the transition may jar, the editorial point (the thinking behind this departure) was precisely to get the academics and the working journalists "on the same page" for once; to see what could be achieved by allowing divergent approaches to appear side by side; to de-polarize the position-taking and concentrate on possible solutions.

Over the decades of my own career as a journalist, first as a practising print journalist and now as a teacher of journalism, I've straddled these usually discrete camps: the scholar (who offers insight from on high, with the distance required for the accumulation and unfettered expression of such insight) and the reporter (who must gain her insight on her feet, so to speak, and under the excruciatingly real pressure of daily deadlines and despite the increasing interference of ownership prerogatives in the erstwhile sacrosanct editorial space of the newsroom proper).

In the interests of full disclosure and scholarly rigour, then, I ought to confess: my loyalties are fiercely divided. The truth is that I can't bear to hear a member of one camp put down a member of the other without jumping to the defence of both. Finally, since the ranks of journalist-turned-scholar have grown significantly in the last decade or so,...