As touchy as cabaret performers and as stubborn as factory machinists....

They had holes to fill on every page and jammed in any vaguely newsworthy string of words provided it didn't include expletives, which they were apparently saving for their own use around the office.

The newspaper journalists like to believe the worst; they can sell more papers that way, as one of them told me himself; for even upstanding and respectable people dearly love to read ill of others.

Journalism delivers news, but not necessarily relevance.

There are journalists who are drawn to the most extroverted, aggressive jobs because they get an ego high from it. It can be shocking to encounter them and even worse to work with them.

When I left Toronto and entered journalism in the late 1990s, I had many notions about the news business, nearly all of them wrong, as it turned out.