NEWSWORTHY

THE LIVES OF MEDIA WOMEN

In this book you'll meet some of the best-known women in Canada, past and present: Barbara Frum, Betty Kennedy, June Callwood, Ann Medina, Doris Anderson, Hana Gartner, Pamela Wallin.

Susan Crean has written profiles of more than a hundred Canadian media women, print journalists, writers, editors, radio and television broadcasters. They tell the stories of their careers, and the obstacles they've overcome in pursuit of success and power. Women are more prominent than ever before in the media--but as this book makes clear, many barriers to advancement remain.

Newsworthy: The Lives of Media Women offers lively portraits of many of Canada's most successful media personalities.

WHAT REVIEWERS ARE SAYING

"Timely, well-written, full of facinating anecdotes and gossip."

George Kerr

London Free Press

"An insider's report on media stars ... fun to read."

Stevie Cameron

Ottawa Citizen

"Chock-full of heroics, grand imaginings and larger-than-life characters."

Irene Seiberling

Regina Leader Post

AUTHOR'S NOTE

I’d been working as a freelance journalist for over a decade when I began researching this book. It is largely based on interviews with women working in newspaper, magazine, radio and television journalism as reporters, editors, presenters, and producers. However, the back story includes the contributions of early pioneers like newswomen Cora Hind and Kit Coleman, and radio personalisties Claire Wallace, Helen James and Judith Jasmin whose stories I gleaned from archives, and the memories of the younger women they’d mentored. Among the major figures featured are Barbara Frum, Adrienne Clarkson, Jan Tennant, June Callwood and Michele Landsberg, Barbara Amiel and Margaret Trudeau. The model I used was Giorgio Vasari’s The Live of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, a collection of biographies published in 1550. Vasari, who was himself a painter and architect, is still read but was not highly regarded by my art history professors who considered the book more gossip than scholarship. I see The Lives as documentary, actually. Primary source material.  The sketches of the artists living and working in Italy in the 16th Century constitute a firsthand account by someone who was part of the scene when the Renaissance was happening. We’d call it cultural history, or creative non-fiction today. Or first-person journalism.

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Author: Susan Crean
Pages: 352
Subjects: Women broadcasters--Canada--Biography, Women in the mass media industry, Women journalists--Canada--Biography.

Publisher/s: Stoddart; Goodread Biography

Publication Year: 1984; 1985

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