John Stackhouse

The Globe is giving us no practical indication whatsoever of how seriously it takes plagiarism

New Globe editor John Stackhouse is clearly less worried than his predecessor was about being labelled a wonk. No sooner was Stackhouse in the saddle than he began commissioning a series of articles about Canada’s productivity challenge. Which is a horse tranquilizer of a topic, I know, because I sometimes write about it too. But the articles are surely worth doing, even if they can be a bit of a slog. Konrad Yakabuski kicked off the productivity agenda with a long article on July 4, and Shawn McCarthy followed up this weekend with an even longer one about the Nortel unpleasantness and What It All Means. And a deck over the article in the print edition even promises this will be an “occasional series.”

Colleague Anne Kingston’s article on the big changes at the Globe and Mail is here. It has fun gossip. Anne’s piece doesn’t mention, but we have talked about this and it’s such a striking change I’m surprised nobody else has remarked on it, that within days after the new guy Stackhouse took over, the paper’s daily Ottawa file took a marked turn toward serious and often un-sexy questions of policy and governance, and away from the paper’s seven-year fixation on High School Confidential crap. All of which is to say that, while I had no expectations regarding Stackhouse one way or the other, I think that in the early going he has made very encouraging moves.

Globe publisher Philip Crawley announced this week that editor Ed Greenspon had moved on to ‘new challenges’