NNC industry director (Torstar/Metroland)
On November 18, 2018, Toronto Star senior editor Doug Cudmore made his way through hordes of people and walked several blocks to the newsroom, still in costume. Cudmore marches in the city’s annual Santa Claus parade every year; this time he had decided to dress up as a clown.
Having spent nearly two decades at the Toronto Star, Cudmore oversees the paper’s courts and city hall coverage. He also sits on the National NewsMedia Council as one of the Council’s eight professional directors.
Cudmore explained that marching in the parade inspires a different perspective on the city and is his way of dealing with the hard stories he covers on a daily basis.
The subjects he covers are heavy, but the Star’s Senior Toronto Editor loves his job for two reasons. The first reason is that each day brings a new challenge.
“You have to get news out by the end of the day, so you’re literally becoming an expert very quickly on something that you never knew about before,” explained Cudmore, who has quickly primed himself on complex subjects, ranging from constitutional law to missing persons cases, sometimes over the course of days or even hours.
But some days are more challenging than others for the longtime journalist.
June 28, 2017, was a particularly challenging day, when Cudmore found himself on speaker phone with a man who had allegedly taken a hostage. From the Star’s radio room, Cudmore spoke to the man for nearly an hour in an effort to keep him calm and diffuse the situation until a police officer arrived to join the conversation.
Cudmore called the situation “horrible” but said that it gave him insight into the experiences of the people he covers every day.
“Sometimes when you’re covering things but you’re not in the middle of it, you forget about the empathy,” said Cudmore, explaining that he learned empathy for everyone involved that day, including the first responders, the alleged victims, and the “people who are apparently making bad decisions with their lives.”
Cudmore takes only minor credit for what happened that day. In recounting the tense situation, he stresses the fact that he was simply “on the phone helping someone,” and not in any physical danger. “I don’t like to overstate what I did—I’m just happy that I could be there to help out.”
His desire to “help out” underpins the other reason Cudmore loves his job: helping effect change in the city.
“[It’s] the notion that you’re trying to make the city a better place for everybody who lives in it but particularly those who don’t really have access to having a voice or a stage on their own,” explained Cudmore.
During his time at the paper, Cudmore has edited a range of subjects, from entertainment to immigration to transportation, and even served as the Star’s business editor.
But journalism was not always in his sights.
Cudmore was pursuing a theatre degree when he decided to take a year off to find himself. Instead, he found himself confined to his studio apartment battling a case of pneumonia. Couch-bound for a month, the then 21-year-old Cudmore “became addicted to Rolling Stone Magazine, at which point I kind of had to figure out what to do with my life, and thought, ‘well, this is cool, maybe I could be a journalist.’”
Soon after that realization, the former theatre major enrolled in Ryerson University’s journalism school, where he edited the student publication, The Eyeopener.
As Cudmore tells it, he was lucky enough to land a job at the Star after only campus paper experience.
Over the years, he has developed a deep appreciation for journalism’s responsibility to the public to report on “what’s happening in the corners of the world that aren’t being lit up by anybody else.”
While he is “not the kind of journalist who likes to speak in self-important language,” he does view journalism as an “independent guardian and questioner.”
“I think that readers having trust in journalism is more important now than ever,” said Cudmore.
“I also think that there are entrenched powers, and it’s a lot easier to push their agendas forward if they’re kind of questioning the quality of the journalism that’s covering them.”
That’s why journalism standards—and journalists holding themselves to the highest standards—are so important, he explained.
He views the National NewsMedia Council as a means for readers to have their concerns addressed and to build on this trust.
“Journalism is a tricky business because you’re always faced with new problems and new challenges, and they’re never what you expect,” explained Cudmore of the tough calls he has to make as an editor of a daily paper.
“What I bring to [the NNC] along with the other professional directors is that I deal with [these decisions] day to day.”
Cudmore recognizes that public perceptions of journalists can also influence trust.
“There’s a lot of cache in some corners in talking about media elite—and I can understand that, I mean, I’m an editor who works in the biggest city in Canada in a newsroom that’s downtown” said Cudmore.
But he and his colleagues are neither elitist, nor elite, said Cudmore.
“I come from a working class background; I coach my kid’s baseball team,” he said. “We’re just regular people like everyone else.”
Of course, ‘regular’ for Cudmore sometimes means dressing up as a clown to march in the Santa Claus Parade and writing fiction in his spare time, all while keeping tabs on some of the most pressing issues in town.
- Cara Sabatini is the NNC's Research and Academic Co-ordinator
