In recent weeks, we've been introducing the members of our editorial team. Today, we feature Bob Bruton.
Bruton is a reporter for BarrieToday whose work includes covering city hall, politics, news features and opinion columns.
1. Where did you attend post-secondary school, and what did you study?
The University of Western Ontario (now Western University), and I studied political science and history. I went to Western because it was farthest away from the little northern Ontario town where I grew up. The University of Toronto was too close to my home town. Queen’s University was too much like home, since both my parents were from Kingston and I had many relatives there.
2. What drew you to journalism?
I got my journalism training at the Strathroy Age-Dispatch, a weekly newspaper just outside London, Ont. I did everything there — covered township councils, the police beat, wrote sports, did feature stories, took photographs, helped lay out the newspaper, drove the truck to pick up the newspapers from the printer and helped mail them to readers. But the attraction was writing and story telling, especially about politics.
3. What have been some of the highlights of your journalism career so far?
Barrie city council 2006 to 2010 (Dave Aspden as mayor), Five Points fire coverage, including photography (2007), Barrie Food Bank story (February 2009), Allandale Station land lawsuit stories (2011 to the present), civic accountability of municipal councillors stories (2020).
4. What brought you to the area?
A job as a sportswriter and photographer with the Barrie Examiner, along with the opportunity to work on a daily newspaper. I arrived on June 1, 1985, the day after an F4 tornado tore through Barrie, causing death and destruction. I worked in sports for three years before moving to news, then shortly afterward began covering city council. Except for six months as a crime reporter, I did that until the great newspaper swindle of November 2017 shuttered the Examiner.
5. What are your favourite stories to write?
Ones which tell the reader something he or she might not want to know, but needs to know. Many city council stories are like this — on property tax increases, unpopular residential development plans, a potholed street left off the new road construction list again. I also like writing stories out of my usual beats — a preview of a 2017 Bob Dylan concert in Barrie, reviewing Bruce Springsteen’s new album in 2020. Or the 2017 story about a pregnant, recently homeless woman living in the RVH birthing unit who did find a place to live.
6. What do you find is the most challenging part of writing a story?
Every story has many sides and angles. The challenge is to include as many as possible in my story, to make it as complete as possible, and still make deadline. But there’s no news story which covers every angle, every possible side. Some don’t emerge until after your story is written and have to be included in the next one, if there is another one. Some angles you just don’t think of, because they are outside of your experience. Which is why the more people you talk to about a story, the more ways to tell it will emerge.
7. What is one of your journalism career goals and/or dream story?
I’m a little long-of-tooth to have career goals or dream stories. Besides, oftentimes the stories you are looking forward to don’t turn out to be highlights, and the ones which seem trivial end up having real teeth. I remember one particularly dull Barrie city council meeting which livened considerably when one councillor called two others ‘manure machines’, refused to apologize and got sent home for the evening by the mayor. Beats a rezoning story every time. On the other side of the scale, all those media events by upper government levels just to tell people about some new funding which is really just giving them back their own money, paid from income taxes.
