From the Cold War to the Gaza conflict, from Johannesburg to Kyiv, journalists have spent decades keeping Canadians informed about a changing planet
a collection of history essays from Globe writers past and present, coming Oct. 15 from Signal/McClelland & Stewart.
that the 1950s witnessed an “acute consciousness of Canada’s rising status as a middle power, with unlimited natural resources, an established manufacturing capacity, and a friendly, even compassionate, interest in world-wide redevelopment.” In the paper’s earliest days, George Brown received dispatches from a London correspondent. During a nine-month reporting assignment to South Africa at the end of the Boer War, correspondent Frederick Hamilton was “present at every action in which the Canadian infantry has been engaged, and was frequently under fire,” The Globe claimed in July, 1900. Stringer George Ashton sent occasional dispatches from the battlefields of France during the First World War.
The Globe finally had a network of correspondents, based abroad and charged with describing the world to Canada. Flush with advertising revenues, Roy Megarry, The Globe’s ambitious new publisher, dispatched Oakland Ross to Mexico City and Michael Valpy to Harare, the latter to cover the unfolding drama in South Africa without paying taxes to the regime there.
In 1991, in the wake of the first Gulf War, Patrick Martin won a years-long battle to convince The Globe to open a Middle East bureau, in Jerusalem. John Stackhouse, a future editor-in-chief, created a unique beat that saw him based in New Delhi, but focusing on long-form reporting on poverty and development around the world. For a few years, The Globe and Mail was one of the most important outlets anywhere when it came to covering international news.
Foreign budgets surged with the so-called War on Terror, under a new publisher, Phillip Crawley, a Brit who came to The Globe in 1998 from foreign postings of his own, having served as editor of the South China Morning Post and managing director of The New Zealand Herald. The Globe gave full-time coverage to the war in Afghanistan for a decade, with correspondent Graeme Smith living for much of that time in Kandahar, where Canadian troops were based.
At right, Chrystia Freeland, then The Globe’s deputy editor, and Geoffrey York, then the Moscow correspondent, interview Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2000. Ms. Freeland would trade journalism for politics in the 2010s, and is now Justin Trudeau’s deputy prime minister.Linda Hossie, right, was The Globe’s Latin America correspondent when she found herself caught in the middle of a 1989 gunfight between Salvadoran rebels and U.S. troops.
It’s a model that’s hardly cheaper. The Globe spends millions each year maintaining its network of correspondents, and paying for them to fly to cover the stories of the day . It’s a system the paper’s management sees as more suited to a constantly changing global scene, even as veterans of the craft see a danger in moving away from having correspondents based full-time in the countries they cover.
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