School of Journalism

Biography:

John McCallum is professor emeritus of newspaper journalism.  During most of his time on faculty he was responsible for The Ryersonian.  He wrote a daily commentary on the paper called Petals and Pebbles which can still be found in the archives. Although he was born in Montreal and graduated from McGill, he began his newspaper career in England.  He started on the Wolverhampton Chronicle, a newspaper founded in 1789, the year of the French Revolution.  He served as a copy editor on Reuters, British United Press, The Times, Reynolds News, Daily Sketch and was assistant art editor on that paper.   He was Canadian (Toronto) stringer for The People (now The Sunday People). He was a parachutist in France and Belgium during the Second World War. He was 15 in 1939 and lied about his age to enlist.

In Canada he served two years on CBC Television News before becoming one of the four founding scriptwriters on the CBC children’s show, Razzle Dazzle.   He has either worked for or served on every daily and Sunday newspaper in Toronto including the long-defunct Telegram and excepting the National Post.   He launched, published and edited the Independent Businessman and in 1981 he started a feminist newspaper, Breakthrough for Women.  Germaine Greer, commenting on that paper, said McCallum was just like all other men, trying to make money on the backs of women.   He lost $20,000 of his money on that venture.

In 1982, UNESCO sent him to China to help improve the standards of English-language journalism at Xinhua, China’s national news agency.   Following that he worked on all of the English-language media in Beijing, including China Daily, Beijing Television, Foreign Languages Press and others.   He fell in love with China and lived there for 11 years. He wrote of his time in China in a book, Where do you park your elephants now?. It was published in China.   When he saw what the publisher had done to his book, he thought a more appropriate title would have been How they castrated my elephants. He retired in 1989.