The celebrity status of a veteran columnist was reaffirmed Wednesday as news leaked Christie Blatchford had quit The Globe and Mail after eight years for a new role with the Postmedia chain.
Like some of her contemporaries, though, the 60-year-old Blatchford has expressed some dismay over how professional journalism has been rattled by the ability for anyone to share information online.
When news first broke of her departure from the Globe on Twitter, some journalists questioned whether the information was true, as Blatchford herself was tight-lipped about details until they were announced by her new employer.
Postmedia defined the new position, which will officially start June 13, as a Toronto-based writer for newspapers across the country.
Blatchford was previously a marquee writer at the National Post, which recruited her from the Toronto Sun for its 1998 launch. She stuck around until just after the departure of its first editor-in-chief, Kenneth Whyte.
"I'm glad to be back in the fold," Blatchford said in a statement. "It feels like my natural home. I never stopped reading the National Post every day. I think it's the prettiest and best-written newspaper in the country."
Still, it hasn't been the most widely read in the years since Blatchford left for the publication where she began her career as a copy editor more than 30 years prior.
"In some ways, I suppose I'm coming home," Blatchford expressed in a memo to her Globe colleagues in June 2003.
"The Globe and Mail is where I started; the first place I wrote a column. It was a brave thing to give a 23-year-old a column in the country's most prestigious newspaper."
While she started out as a sports writer, Blatchford is probably best-known for her coverage of criminal court proceedings in the Toronto area, along with personal musings published on Saturdays.
She also published two books based on her Globe and Mail reporting: "Fifteen Days: Stories of Bravery, Friendship, Life and Death from Inside the New Canadian Army" in 2008, and "Helpless: Caledonia's Nightmare of Fear and Anarchy, and How the Law Failed All of Us" in 2010.
And while rumours of the shutdown of the National Post began around the time she bailed out in 2003, Blatchford will return to its pages for a weekly column in which self-indulgence surely won't be deterred.
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