I spent much of my early days obsessed with playing, watching, and analyzing hockey. I would devour the sports news pages of the The Toronto Star and Toronto Sun each day, reading columns and examining standings and statistics. My father ran the local hockey club and coached me throughout my youth. The sport ran in our veins.
I entered journalism school in the mid-1990s with ambitions of being a hockey writer, but quickly realized I was not alone in trying to achieve that goal. So I shifted my focus to the production side of journalism and found a quicker route to working in the world of hockey.
While attending Humber College, I interned for a year at The Hockey News as an editorial assistant to editor Steve Dryden on the magazine’s Top 100 NHL Players of All-Time project. During the following school year, I worked part-time as a production assistant and photo editor. After my teaching contract at Humber expired in 1998, I was hired as The Hockey News’ first art director.
Over the next five years I contributed to over 200 issues, led major redesigns of the weekly magazine and yearbook, helped design and launch the magazine’s first website in 1998, and produced special collector’s edition magazines for Wayne Gretzky’s retirement in 1999, Century of Hockey in 2000, and the 2002 Winter Olympics.
During the final year of my tenure, I worked as a newsstand design specialist producing over 125 covers for a variety of magazines, annuals, and special issues for the magazine’s parent company Transcontinental Publications.
The Hockey News proved to be the perfect the launching pad for my career. Working in a mainstream and corporate environment would prove difficult for me at the time, as it clashed with both my personal ideals and sleeping schedule, yet it provided me with loads of experience working for a successful and distinguished publication. I was able to art direct photo shoots with the NHL’s superstars of the time (Wayne Gretzky, Dominik Hasek, Jaromir Jagr, Mike Peca), conceptualize and execute special publications from scratch (Century of Hockey), and received a deeper understanding of the business side of publishing in discussions with colleagues such as distribution directors, production managers, and publishers.
