Where are they now: Verity Stevenson
Whether as a result of summer jobs and internships or other twists and turns in the road, many people have passed through the various newsrooms at The Record over the years. Despite being a comparatively small operation, it is not at all unusual for a reporter out on assignment to find the person they are interviewing suddenly jumping off topic to talk about the time they once spent working at the paper.
Over the course of this summer, The Record will be taking a look back at some of the individuals whose bylines have graced the pages of the paper in the past to see what they hold onto from their time in the Townships and where they find themselves now.
We begin this week with Verity Stevenson, who is currently working as a reporter for CBC Montreal.
Stevenson has history with The Record that reaches back before she was born, with her father Scott having worked for the paper in the 1990s, and her grandmother, Barbara Verity, having been the editor from 1974–1977. Looking back on where she started, the journalist admitted that she initially reached out to the Record with that in mind, not as a way of getting special treatment but just with the thought that it would be interesting to carry on that family legacy.
“I remember calling the newspaper at some point in the spring of 2013 to see if there were any internships or summer work,” Stevenson shared , explaining that up until that point she had written no more than four stories in total for the student newspapers at Concordia University. “There weren’t any but the editor, it was Daniel Coulombe at the time, wrote me an email back saying that the paper had this summer student program during the (Canada Summer Games). I applied for that and got it. I was super excited.”
Stevenson ended up being one of three summer students hired to cover news related to the Canada Summer Games in Sherbrooke.
“It was such a great way to start a career,” she said. “We had the choice of which events we wanted to go to just as long as we provided interesting content with photos.”
As someone who had not done much sports writing yet, Stevenson said that the experience writing about the games proved an interesting exercise in understanding how to build a story from a sporting competition.
As significant an experience that summer job may have been to the young writer, it’s important not to ignore the fact that her byline first appeared in the paper a month before, on the Monday following the Lacmégantic rail disaster.
“Lac-mégantic was really the first news story I had done,” she said, sharing that she filed a few stories for The Record form the community while there to freelance for the Globe and Mail. “That was really the beginning.”
After her time in Sherbrooke, Stevenson went back and forth between continuing her studies and taking on a variety of internships and freelancing contracts including more for the Globe and Mail, Maclean’s magazine, The Telegraph Journal in Saint-john New Brunswick, and The Toronto Star before ending up with the CBC.
Over the course of those various jobs, the journalist also covered significant national news stories like the Ile Verte senior’s home fire in 2014 and the Quebec City mosque shooting in 2017.
Asked about what appeals to her about her work as a journalist, Stevenson at first joked that it gives her an excuse to be nosy, but after a moment’s reflection on what she’s seen and the people she’s talked to, she speculated that the real answer might have more to do with exploring human resilience.
“I’ve put a lot of thought and learning into how to approach trauma in writing,” she said. “I like to think that I approached things with sensitivity from the start, but for sure I’ve learned to become more sensitive to how speaking to media can be difficult for people who have experienced a traumatic event and understanding trauma on a larger scale.”
“I really try to make more of an effort to inform people of what will happen to the words that they say after the interview,” Stevenson shared, noting that there are changes going on in the world of journalism at the moment when it comes to the idea of consent and ethics.