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Keys to Alex’s career path:
-When she was in grade two she read 15 books in one night, so that she could win a library contest.
-She was always good at spelling. She was working at a grade five level when she was in grade three.
-In grade five she won the current events award.
-When she was in grade seven she was tested as spelling at a grade 11 level.
Conclusion: Alex decided to become a journalist.
In grade eight she went down to the CBC for a school project. She learned that reading Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style would help her career in journalism. She bought the book, but has never read it all the way through; although it sits on her booskshelf right beside The Chicago Manual of Style and The Canadian Press Stylebook.
Fast forward through high school, skipping unfortunate experiences in biology classes (she never did finish that project on genetics), starting to work at HMV and her favourite teachers, Mr. Skilleter and Mr. Penman. Alex is now in the Journalism program at Ryerson. She is happy there. Stuart McLean is her radio teacher! This impresses her. She learns how to edit tape by hand in this class. She still wants to do something with this skill, someday. Maybe work in radio.
Speaking of radio, in second year Alex begins co-hosting and producing a radio show called Wired for Sound on CKLN, a community/college station on the Ryerson campus. She owes this to her friend Yvette Ray, whom she met while writing a story on one her favourite bands, Cub (RIP). Yvette was the previous host, but she passed the torch on to Alex. Alex works with the show’s other co-hosts, Daibhid James and Alan Miller, who help her a lot. She goes out to clubs and records bands like Versus and Sebadoh. She even gets to meet Claire Danes while recording Ben Lee’s concert at the Rivoli. Working on the show means that Alex has to learn how to use a four-track tape recorder and deal with sometimes helpful and sometimes gnarly sound technicians. Alex learns a lot. She also has to deal with concert promoters and club bookers. She will use this knowledge in the future, as you will see. All the while Alex is still working at HMV (five years at this point)
She soon starts co-hosting another radio show with her friend Sharon Mulholland, called 7-11. The concept of the show is to play either the seventh or the 11th track on a CD. This is a fun show. Sharon and Alex are compared to Beavis and Butt-head. The ladies decide to try their hand at concert promotion. The result: aPOPalypse Now!, a two-day music festival, inspired by the popfests they’ve heard of on the indiepop list. Everything goes well. They are featured in eye weekly.
By this point Alex has decided to focus her studies on the magazine side of journalism. She learns all about editing and writing from her teachers, Don Obe, Stephen Trumper, Lynn Cunningham, David Hayes and Cynthia Brouse. She writes a feature article for the Ryerson Review of Journalism on editorial cartooning. She also works as one of the visuals editors for that magazine. She is still working at HMV (six years)
The radio show has now been re-born as 123!. Sharon and Alex play what they want, and occasionally feature interviews with the likes of Larry Crane from Tape Op magazine and Jackpot! studios and Joe English from Noise Factory records. Around this point, Alex puts Wired for Sound into the capable hands of her friends Pam Hong and five:seventeen. (Yes that’s his name. He had it legally changed). Five:seventeen also takes over Sharon’s place as co-host of 123!, around this time.
Alex graduates from university and sets out to find a job. She is still working at HMV (seven years). She tries her hand at helping to create an internal database library at Chatelaine magazine, interning at the YTV Youth Achievement Awards and freelancing as a fact checker at Canadian Business magazine. Then she starts working as a freelance fact checker for MoneySense, where she gets her first shot at writing a story. She writes an article about the EnerGuide for Houses program. It gets published. She is still working at HMV, for almost eight years at this point.
She fact checks an article on salmon farming for Outdoor Canada magazine. This article later gets nominated for a National Magazine Award.
MoneySense then offers her a chance to get more regular work as their main fact checker. She says yes, and goodbye to HMV. She worked there for over eight years. While she is happy to be moving on, she will miss HMV, and not just her staff discount.
She has been working at MoneySense for almost seven months now. She has written a few more articles for them too, including one about working at HMV. Alex has also been writing music reviews and articles for Broken Pencil magazine, as well as copy editing for them. Speaking of copy editing, she recently helped copy edit a textbook on project management for the aerospace industry (who knew she had it in her!). She also helps copy edit, iDEa/iDEe, webzine of DigitalEve Canada. So that’s about it, for now. What she does next may be up to you.
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