Working in Canada?

Anyone know if newspapers in the Great White North are hesitant to hire Americans, especially if they don't already have a work permit. I wouldn't mind working up there myself.

 

It's a fun place if you like whale meat.

 

Yeah...lots of whale here in the GTA.

ANYWAY...

It's a tough market. I doubt you would get a sniff if you weren't already cleared to work in the country. There isn't enough jobs for Canadian journalists, frankly.

However, if you have an area of expertise (that the paper can demonstrate that they can't find in a Canadian) you might have a shot.

 

Joooking, man...I'm in the GTA too.

 

Aren't the actual styles in print and broadcast different? This is what I was taught in J School class. I don't mean just the spellings of words, but actual styles. Like CP in Canada differs a little in the States.

Maybe I was taught a bunch of bull....

 

The styles are close enough that any competent reporter could get by, just like the styles are different, say, at the Globe and the Star. I think the trouble, as mentioned above, is the shallow pool of jobs in this country, plus I'd think the money would be pretty rough compared to the American equivalent.

 

After being on this site for more than a year and reading a lot of posts about payscale, Canadian journalists are not far off their American brethern -- unless you're talking about the major metros in the States. That's where the discrepancies come in.

Also, AP and CP are very close cousins, barring the extraneous use of 'U' in our favourite words.

It's a pity we can't have a little cross-border openness when it comes to this profession as I would have loved to head south to ply the trade.

 

If I ever go south of the border, it would be New York. Love that place and the news industry there is always happening)

 

Oh I got it. It was a joke, very much like the funny kind, only different.

 

I think what I was thinking about is that in the States, I think there are a lot more papers between the major metros and the weeklies than we have... so if you're fairly good, you're more likely to get into a place that pays decent. I know some of their small town dailies' papers would likely compete with some of our larger cities too. Here, the drop off from major daily to small daily or weekly is more immediate, I guess.

 

The biggest problem, as already stated, is the lack of jobs, especially in the sports side of things. Their are a lot of weekly papers, but dailies are few and far between, especially west of Ontario. Manitoba I think only really has one or two. Saskatchewan has three I believe (Regina, S'toon, Prince Albert). Alberta only has I believe five outside of Edmonton and Calgary (Lethbridge, Medicine Hat, Red Deer, Grande Prairie, and Fort McMurray), and I'm not sure of BC. and those sports departments aren't exactly huge, two maybe three total staff.
I don't think going from AP to CP is that big an issue as every paper has their own style.

 

B.C.: Sun, Province, Times-Colonist, Kamloops Daily, Kelowna Courier, P.G. Citizen ... that's just off the top of my head.

So yeah, not a lot to choose from and the gangs I know in B.C. are lifers, not a lot of turnover. Union shops ... makes a difference.