Torstar chair joins News Hall of Fame
CTV reporter Craig Oliver also honoured for significant contribution to journalism
John Honderich, a lifelong newspaperman who is chair of the board of Torstar Corp., has been named to the Canadian News Hall of Fame.
He will share the honour this year with CTV reporter Craig Oliver, a veteran newsman who started with a CBC radio station in Prince Rupert, B.C., in 1957 and moved to CTV in 1972, where he ultimately became Ottawa bureau chief.
“It’s something that you don’t think about, but when it happens it’s a wonderful surprise and a great honour,” said Honderich, whose career began in 1973 at the Ottawa Citizen, where he started out as a copy boy working nights.
“It was the bottom rung,” Honderich said. “You get the news clips, you put them in piles, you do errands. I used to get sandwiches and drinks for all the staff at midnight. I can still remember the orders.”
Honderich joined the Star’s Ottawa bureau in 1976 as an economics reporter, working his way up to bureau chief before moving to Washington to cover the 1980 election.
After moving to Toronto in 1983, he
JOHN HONDERICH
was the deputy city editor, business editor and editorial pages editor. Honderich became the Star’s editor in 1988, and then publisher from 1994 to 2006. “You get a marvellous experience by seeing the whole paper,” Honderich said. “The personality of the Star is unique in this country, committed to progressive principles. It was a sacred trust to carry on that tradition.” He said the Star’s Michener Awards for its Rob Ford coverage and the investigations of racial profiling by Toronto police have been the greatest highlights of his time at the paper so far. Looking back, Honderich said his decision 30 years ago to take that
“It’s something that you don’t think about, but when it happens it’s a wonderful surprise and a great honour.”
newspaper copy boy job — even though he had a law degree and no journalism experience — couldn’t have paid off better.
“I’ve had an incredible life,” he said. “Just to be involved with some extraordinary journalists, extraordinary people at the Star . . . I couldn’t have asked for a more fulfilling or a better life in that sense.”
Honderich’s late father, Toronto Star publisher Beland Honderich, was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1986.
Honderich, 68, who is also a member of the Order of Canada, served as special adviser to the premier of Ontario on the future of the GTA and also on the attorney general’s panel on justice and the media from January 2005 to December 2006.
He also served as the Toronto Mayor’s Special Ambassador on Urban Issues from May 2004 to February 2006.
Honderich and Oliver will be inducted at a gala banquet in Toronto on Oct. 15.