Obituaries were among my favorite to write because they have elements no other news stories have - a story from start to finish with a proper conclusion.

That's a paradox I've noticed, too: The news business held little romance for me, yet writing about it somehow stirred my affections.

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.

Journalists who are devoted to strictly factual reporting take particular pleasure from satirical news outlets that have the liberty to laugh and even mock the hypocrisy that reporters and editors must simply observe without comment.

Acting allows me to tell a lot of stories, you know start at the beginning, finish at the end, and tell everything in between. Modeling is just an image.

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.