A Visit to the Toronto Star

The Star showed off some memorable front page news

This weekend was Doors Open Toronto, where over 160 buildings and sites in the city are open for the public to check out. Unfortunately for us this year, the weather was atrocious, especially yesterday with rain pelting down all day and it was windy too.

Places like City Hall, Osgoode Hall, Legislative Assembly of Ontario, Toronto Archives, Bata Shoe Museum, as well as many churches, fire stations, and even Billy Bishop Toronto City Airport opened their doors for people to have a tour and learn a bit more about these places.

Rainy but nice views of downtown Toronto

Unfortunately the website doesn't organise the places alphabetically or geographically, so having to go through 17 web pages is tedious.

However, I was very interested in checking out the Toronto Star newspaper, which recently moved to its new location in an office/retail complex called The Wells near the harbour front.

When we arrived we saw two long lines, one to visit the Netflix corporate office, the other for the Toronto Star, and we began lining up for the latter literally braving the elements.

About 15 minutes later we were under a covered area, but in a wind tunnel, which made waiting in line feel even colder. About 40 minutes into our wait, a man asked us how long we were waiting and told us he'd just been to the Netflix office. We asked him how it was and he showed us pictures. It looked like any other corporate office.

Shared work desks with curved screens

Finally about the 60-minute mark we were finally inside the lobby area and started defrosting from the cold. We were each given a blue star stamp on the back of our hand and waited just a bit longer to get into the elevator.

Inside we saw important front page news, the open space shared desks with curved screens, as well as fantastic views of the city from 10 floors up (and rain). 

The newspaper was known as the Evening Star when was first published in 1892, and then changed to the Toronto Daily Star in 1900 under Joseph E. Atkinson, who was the publisher from 1899 to 1948.

He believed a progressive news organisation should contribute to the advancement of society through the pursuit of social, economic, and political reforms. The core principles, which the paper follows today are:

* A strong, united and independent Canada

* Social justice

* Individual and civil liberties

* Community and civic engagement

*The rights of working people

* The necessary role of government

A fun fact is that Ernest Hemingway had his first-ever byline in the Star in 1920 for a story about getting a free shave at a barber college. He later became a foreign correspondent for the Star.

Russell talking about news photography

Another interesting tidbit is that Joe Shuster, co-creator of the Superman comics, credited his time delivering papers for the Star as inspiration for Clark Kent and his day job as a journalist!

Back in the tour of the office, one of the photojournalists, Steve Russell showed several of his photographs and explained how he shot them or why he photographed them in a specific way, how having people in pictures is important to show emotion to draw people into the story. He said if there is are good photos to go with the story, there are studies that show people are more likely to read the story.

He showed pictures of his breaking news stories, spot news, where there are planned events, sports where you can see the emotion on people's faces if they won or lost, and features. Russell showed a portrait up close of an Asian man holding up his finger wrapped with red thread and three needles. It was to illustrate a story on influencers and this man in particular upcycled clothes.

Then Russell showed us his cameras, too technical for me, but he also admitted using his smartphone if he was not working but saw something interesting. One time he was in his car parked near the CN Tower and it was raining. He looked up and saw the raindrops on his window reflected the tower and it made for a fantastic image.

Many visitors took a copy of the paper home

He said he could have talked for hours about photography, but the next group of people were waiting.

I also met Jim Rankin, another photojournalist who also does investigative pieces into race, policing and crime. I asked a staffer what the print circulation was these days and he said about 90,000 copies. Rankin piped in to say at one point it was over 1 million, and how the paper was much thicker then as it was full of advertisements.

Meanwhile another staffer sat at a computer and asked people what specific day they wanted to pull up for the front page, and most people picked their birthdays to see what was the news that day.

Before we left we got a copy of the weekend paper, and the Toronto Star encouraged visitors to subscribe to the newspaper. It was a great way to use Open Doors Toronto to promote the paper and hopefully reel in some more subscribers. Hope they succeeded!