Costa Maragos signs off after 31 years
After 31 years in broadcasting — including 23 years in Regina — Costa Maragos wants to be remembered as a “good old Prairie boy who came to work every day and delivered the news.”
On Thursday, Maragos, 54, hosted his last Regina supper-hour newscast on CBC Saskatchewan.
Other than remain in Saskatchewan with his family, he admits he doesn’t know what he’s going to do, but is proud of the fact that he’s leaving on his own terms.
“I just felt it was time to do something else while I still can. Plus, I still have my hair,” he said with a laugh.
Raised in Regina on the 2200 block of Lorne Street, Maragos realized he wanted to pursue a career in journalism as a paper-boy for the Leader-Post.
As a teenager, he moved to British Columbia with his family and later studied print journalism at Vancouver’s Langara College.
“That was my dream — to be a sports columnist. So, my heroes were sports columnists like Jim Taylor and people like that. But somehow I veered into broadcasting and never looked back,” he said. “I was trained to be a print guy. I’ve never had any formal broadcast training.”
In 1982, Maragos’ career in broadcasting began at CBC-Radio in Prince Rupert, B.C.
“I was really scared when I started, but Prince Rupert gave me immense opportunities to get stories on the network,” he said. “We were all so young — all of us. And you know, we worked hard and played hard ... it was a blast.”
From there, Maragos moved on to CBC-Radio in Windsor for five years as the morning show host. Eventually he made his way to Regina.
Thinking back, Maragos is thankful to the team he worked with for so many years and that he “survived 31 years on the air.”
“I’ve been through format changes, management changes, strikes, lockouts — all sorts of things,” he said.
Maragos also survived a battle with a rare form of cancer called thymoma. Since having an egg-sized tumour removed in 2001, Maragos has been cancer free.
“I was pretty lucky to survive that,” he said. “I dodged a pretty big bullet.”
Maragos said a highlight of his career was a one-hour documentary he made in 2005 about former Saskatchewan Roughriders general manager Roy Shivers — the first black general manager in professional football. What interested him about the story was its connection to social change and the Roughriders.
“It was a labour of love. It took six months of my life to do that documentary,” he said.
As Maragos departs, one thing that hasn’t changed in the industry is that good content “will always be king.” However, he is also troubled about newer trends in journalism, such as “surface journalism,” that asks reporters “to do too much on too many platforms.”
“We’re losing out on depth in journalism,” he said. “CBC, I believe, is something that has to survive, to be valued by Canadians. And if it’s not valued by Canadians, it’s not going to last.”
Also concerning is the trend in journalism that favours shorter stories.
“I worry about that, to be honest,” he said.
“I think that a lot of stories probably don’t deserve a lot of time to be told. (But) I think the philosophy should be in every newsroom a story should run as long as it needs to run, which is more difficult to determine than no story more than 90 seconds. I think people at home, if it’s a good story, they will sit through it.”
tmceachern@leaderpost.com