What do you think?
Rate this book
Above the Fold: A Personal History of the Toronto Star
A remarkable memoir and journalistic history of the Toronto Star , the newspaper that has shaped and continues to shape the issues most important to Canadians.
Don't let them ruin the newspaper. . . These were the dying words of Beland Honderich to his son, John. The newspaper was the Toronto Star , founded in 1892 by Joseph E. (Holy Joe) Atkinson and, to this day, one of the world’s leading and most respected socially liberal broadsheets. For the second half of its legendary—and sometimes controversial—history, both John and his father, as successive editors, publishers, and family owners, made it into the newspaper we know today. The Star has been, at different times, home base to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, Pierre Berton, June Callwood, Peter C. Newman, Gary Lautens, Robert Fulford, Richard Gwyn, Christie Blatchford, Michele Landsberg, Chantal Hébert, Joey Slinger, and many more. It also brandishes a corporate history unlike any other. In an extraordinary exercise of arbitrary power, the Ontario government held veto power over all of the Star's operations until the paper eventually evolved to the five families of the Torstar Voting Trust, one of which were the Honderichs. And in that process, those families committed in court to observe and promote the intellectual and spiritual basis on which the Star has always operated.
Completed just weeks before the author’s untimely death, Above the Fold gives us an on-the-ground account of how the Star , once known primarily for its tabloid sensationalism and screaming headlines, transformed into a bastion of journalistic quality that routinely wins the industry’s highest honours and accolades. Honderich writes about the paper he loved and the challenges it faced over the years, including crippling strikes, boardroom battles, soaring egos, the vicious newspaper wars with various competitors, and, most recently, the shift away from print. He also delves deeply into his relationship with his father, who could be remarkably cold and unfeeling toward his son and others, earning the nickname ”The Beast.” There was great love between the two men but it came at a cost both professionally and, of course, personally. Always worried about accusations of nepotism as he rose to the top job at the paper, John felt he needed to prove himself that much more, which he did—and then some.
Honest, frank, generous, and highly informative, Above the Fold is a personal history of one of the most storied and successful newspapers of our time, told through the lives of the father and son who ran it for close to half-a-century.
Don't let them ruin the newspaper. . . These were the dying words of Beland Honderich to his son, John. The newspaper was the Toronto Star , founded in 1892 by Joseph E. (Holy Joe) Atkinson and, to this day, one of the world’s leading and most respected socially liberal broadsheets. For the second half of its legendary—and sometimes controversial—history, both John and his father, as successive editors, publishers, and family owners, made it into the newspaper we know today. The Star has been, at different times, home base to the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Morley Callaghan, Pierre Berton, June Callwood, Peter C. Newman, Gary Lautens, Robert Fulford, Richard Gwyn, Christie Blatchford, Michele Landsberg, Chantal Hébert, Joey Slinger, and many more. It also brandishes a corporate history unlike any other. In an extraordinary exercise of arbitrary power, the Ontario government held veto power over all of the Star's operations until the paper eventually evolved to the five families of the Torstar Voting Trust, one of which were the Honderichs. And in that process, those families committed in court to observe and promote the intellectual and spiritual basis on which the Star has always operated.
Completed just weeks before the author’s untimely death, Above the Fold gives us an on-the-ground account of how the Star , once known primarily for its tabloid sensationalism and screaming headlines, transformed into a bastion of journalistic quality that routinely wins the industry’s highest honours and accolades. Honderich writes about the paper he loved and the challenges it faced over the years, including crippling strikes, boardroom battles, soaring egos, the vicious newspaper wars with various competitors, and, most recently, the shift away from print. He also delves deeply into his relationship with his father, who could be remarkably cold and unfeeling toward his son and others, earning the nickname ”The Beast.” There was great love between the two men but it came at a cost both professionally and, of course, personally. Always worried about accusations of nepotism as he rose to the top job at the paper, John felt he needed to prove himself that much more, which he did—and then some.
Honest, frank, generous, and highly informative, Above the Fold is a personal history of one of the most storied and successful newspapers of our time, told through the lives of the father and son who ran it for close to half-a-century.
368 pages, Hardcover
Published November 1, 2022
5 people are currently reading
59 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
March 12, 2023
DNF.
This book contains about 30,000 more words than it requires. Just couldn't subject myself to keep reading.
This book contains about 30,000 more words than it requires. Just couldn't subject myself to keep reading.
December 22, 2022
Toronto Star executives fought boardroom battles for control as newspaper industry collapsed
Above the Fold: A Personal History of the Toronto Star provides inside details on owners disputes
In his history of the Toronto Star, published in November, just months after his death at 75, we learn that John Honderich had a strained and rather strange relationship with his father Beland.
But John was not alone in that. His father ruled the paper with an iron fist for years and while his friends called him Bee, most employees knew him as The Beast. Beland’s regular walks through the newsroom caused a chill that brought most work to a halt.
On the other hand, John was friendly and outgoing with a smile usually leading his way.
John and his father combined to lead The Star as publisher for 49 years, from 1966 until 2018, its golden years as a wealth generator and its declining years early this century.
Full disclosure, I spent most of the 1980s and ’90s at The Star as a reporter and editor. I never worked closely with John but knew him as someone who usually had a smile and a friendly word as he breezed through the huge newsroom that was home to about 300 editorial employees at its peak.
John details his father’s rise from a reporter in Kitchener to Toronto Star owner, in conjunction with four other families who took over after the death of the paper’s founder and publisher Joe Atkinson. Atkinson wanted the paper left to a charitable foundation that would continue to promote the progressive, liberal causes he had long pushed such as unemployment insurance, union rights and welfare. The book provides a wealth of details about how the Conservative government of the day thwarted that plan and how Honderich’s father mortgaged his home and raised enough money to get control.
For most of the next 30 years Beland skillfully marshalled the support of the families and retained control as the paper spun off millions. This action happened largely behind the scenes. Most of us who worked there would have had trouble naming the five families, let alone sorting out who was allied with who at any time. Their names usually only popped up when one of their children wound up with a job in the newsroom or circulation.
John goes to great lengths to demonstrate that he didn’t rise to the top because of his name, and it seems clear he believed that. But the reality is that he didn’t have his father’s devious, iron-willed abilities. Growing up with a father who was rarely at home, John was determined to follow a different path and first went to law school. When he decided that he did want to try journalism, he deliberately didn’t start at The Star and went to the Ottawa Citizen, where by all reports he did an excellent job as a reporter. He was never an elegant writer and that shows in this book. Its first paragraph refers to his father’s froideur, and no, I have no idea what that means either. At another point he uses the pretentious word sportif, when sports would have been better.
After a few years at the Citizen, John got an offer of a job at The Star, and he recounts how one friend shook his head at John’s statement that he was putting The Star on probation as an employer. The fact that he could afford and thought it natural to have this sort of attitude about a job offer at Canada’s largest newspaper clearly shows that he was operating in a different environment than the rest of us.
John clearly was hurt in 1992 when the board of Torstar, parent company of The Star, appointed him publisher, with one dissenting vote, his father’s. In his mind, this illustrates how he made it on his own. I suspect Beland’s vote was more like a strategic one at a tribal council on Survivor. He no doubt knew that the other votes were all going to John and used his No vote to keep the board and his son off-balance. It worked.
John talks at length about the importance of the small ownership group’s role in protecting what became known as the Atkinson Principles. He largely ignores the fact that control was only possible because of the two-class share structure that allowed regular investors to buy some shares, but kept the voting shares controlled by the families.
That two-class share system, used by others such as Ted Rogers and Frank Stronach, is fundamentally unfair to common investors and often leads to the company being run to benefit the small ownership group, not the many who have put their money on the line.
In the late ’90s John’s pursuit of the Atkinson Principles was shown by his determination as publisher to push for changes to the way the municipality was governed. It kicked off with a front-page editorial written by John outlining his “crusade for a new deal for municipalities.” For months on end the Star’s front page carried story after story on this topic.
More full disclosure, I left The Star at the end of 1998 for a few reasons, including the fact that I thought the crusade was boring our readers to death, and more importantly that the Internet was poised to replace newpapers and The Star was not moving quickly enough in this area. I went to Canoe.ca, just as it was purchased by Pierre Karl Peladeau, another media boss with father issues.
John goes into great detail about the so-called Newspaper Wars in Toronto as The Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Sun, battled the upstart National Post. They threw hundreds of millions into fight. To my mind, they were generals fighting the last war, since they were focused on hurting each other at the exact moment their readers were starting to abandon them and their business model was collapsing.
It’s unlikely The Star could have thrived in the online age as the entire newspaper industry was hammered, but it certainly could have made better attempts than the millions wasted on Star Touch, an iPad-based magazine approach that just showed that The Star was out of touch with its audience.
For years The Star gave away its news for free on the internet and now that it has a paywall it is still scrambling to attract paying readers.
The book’s tale of the 2000s is largely about John’s battle to retain that control as board Chair John Evans and CEO Rob Prichard make various attempts to push him out. Ultimately, he survives but is unable to stop the collapse of the newspaper business and sold the company for $60 million in 2020.
He recounts how most everyone was against him, even people he had earlier promoted. A skeptical reader is left wishing we had the views of those opposing executives and editors who disagreed with John’s approach, they may not all have been wrong.
Above the Fold: A Personal History of the Toronto Star provides inside details on owners disputes
In his history of the Toronto Star, published in November, just months after his death at 75, we learn that John Honderich had a strained and rather strange relationship with his father Beland.
But John was not alone in that. His father ruled the paper with an iron fist for years and while his friends called him Bee, most employees knew him as The Beast. Beland’s regular walks through the newsroom caused a chill that brought most work to a halt.
On the other hand, John was friendly and outgoing with a smile usually leading his way.
John and his father combined to lead The Star as publisher for 49 years, from 1966 until 2018, its golden years as a wealth generator and its declining years early this century.
Full disclosure, I spent most of the 1980s and ’90s at The Star as a reporter and editor. I never worked closely with John but knew him as someone who usually had a smile and a friendly word as he breezed through the huge newsroom that was home to about 300 editorial employees at its peak.
John details his father’s rise from a reporter in Kitchener to Toronto Star owner, in conjunction with four other families who took over after the death of the paper’s founder and publisher Joe Atkinson. Atkinson wanted the paper left to a charitable foundation that would continue to promote the progressive, liberal causes he had long pushed such as unemployment insurance, union rights and welfare. The book provides a wealth of details about how the Conservative government of the day thwarted that plan and how Honderich’s father mortgaged his home and raised enough money to get control.
For most of the next 30 years Beland skillfully marshalled the support of the families and retained control as the paper spun off millions. This action happened largely behind the scenes. Most of us who worked there would have had trouble naming the five families, let alone sorting out who was allied with who at any time. Their names usually only popped up when one of their children wound up with a job in the newsroom or circulation.
John goes to great lengths to demonstrate that he didn’t rise to the top because of his name, and it seems clear he believed that. But the reality is that he didn’t have his father’s devious, iron-willed abilities. Growing up with a father who was rarely at home, John was determined to follow a different path and first went to law school. When he decided that he did want to try journalism, he deliberately didn’t start at The Star and went to the Ottawa Citizen, where by all reports he did an excellent job as a reporter. He was never an elegant writer and that shows in this book. Its first paragraph refers to his father’s froideur, and no, I have no idea what that means either. At another point he uses the pretentious word sportif, when sports would have been better.
After a few years at the Citizen, John got an offer of a job at The Star, and he recounts how one friend shook his head at John’s statement that he was putting The Star on probation as an employer. The fact that he could afford and thought it natural to have this sort of attitude about a job offer at Canada’s largest newspaper clearly shows that he was operating in a different environment than the rest of us.
John clearly was hurt in 1992 when the board of Torstar, parent company of The Star, appointed him publisher, with one dissenting vote, his father’s. In his mind, this illustrates how he made it on his own. I suspect Beland’s vote was more like a strategic one at a tribal council on Survivor. He no doubt knew that the other votes were all going to John and used his No vote to keep the board and his son off-balance. It worked.
John talks at length about the importance of the small ownership group’s role in protecting what became known as the Atkinson Principles. He largely ignores the fact that control was only possible because of the two-class share structure that allowed regular investors to buy some shares, but kept the voting shares controlled by the families.
That two-class share system, used by others such as Ted Rogers and Frank Stronach, is fundamentally unfair to common investors and often leads to the company being run to benefit the small ownership group, not the many who have put their money on the line.
In the late ’90s John’s pursuit of the Atkinson Principles was shown by his determination as publisher to push for changes to the way the municipality was governed. It kicked off with a front-page editorial written by John outlining his “crusade for a new deal for municipalities.” For months on end the Star’s front page carried story after story on this topic.
More full disclosure, I left The Star at the end of 1998 for a few reasons, including the fact that I thought the crusade was boring our readers to death, and more importantly that the Internet was poised to replace newpapers and The Star was not moving quickly enough in this area. I went to Canoe.ca, just as it was purchased by Pierre Karl Peladeau, another media boss with father issues.
John goes into great detail about the so-called Newspaper Wars in Toronto as The Star, The Globe and Mail, and The Sun, battled the upstart National Post. They threw hundreds of millions into fight. To my mind, they were generals fighting the last war, since they were focused on hurting each other at the exact moment their readers were starting to abandon them and their business model was collapsing.
It’s unlikely The Star could have thrived in the online age as the entire newspaper industry was hammered, but it certainly could have made better attempts than the millions wasted on Star Touch, an iPad-based magazine approach that just showed that The Star was out of touch with its audience.
For years The Star gave away its news for free on the internet and now that it has a paywall it is still scrambling to attract paying readers.
The book’s tale of the 2000s is largely about John’s battle to retain that control as board Chair John Evans and CEO Rob Prichard make various attempts to push him out. Ultimately, he survives but is unable to stop the collapse of the newspaper business and sold the company for $60 million in 2020.
He recounts how most everyone was against him, even people he had earlier promoted. A skeptical reader is left wishing we had the views of those opposing executives and editors who disagreed with John’s approach, they may not all have been wrong.
March 24, 2023
2.5
Bloated self-serving memoir. If you work or worked in Toronto media it would have more interest. The writing is pretty flat and the narrative dry. It could have been so much better.
Bloated self-serving memoir. If you work or worked in Toronto media it would have more interest. The writing is pretty flat and the narrative dry. It could have been so much better.
December 25, 2023
Mr. Honderich most certainly wrote a "personal history" of the newspaper. The through-line in the book is the author's sometimes-fraught relationship with his father and how that dynamic affected the Toronto Star. The first-quarter of the book gets rather deeply into the weeds as regards the struggles for control of the newspaper in its early days and much of the last-quarter does the same with the back-room and boardroom machinations that decided the eventual fate of the paper. Honderich does make some mention, in passing, really, of the editorial and reportage history of the esteemed Toronto Star but not enough for my liking. There is a rich history there that is only touched upon here.
July 17, 2024
In his retelling of his father's and his own time at the Toronto Star, John comes across as bitter, vindictive, self-righteous, and arrogant. He constantly describes his opponents in unflattering ways, and always seems to want to justify his actions in advance of any criticism. While he repeatedly tries to downplay the role his family played in his career trajectory, his story reeks of nepotism and privilege.
Something that really stood out was the unhealthy personal relationships described in the book. Both John and his father Bee focused on their work rather than their families, a fact that is demonstrated by a near total lack of mentioning of John's own family in the book. The relationship between father and son itself is described as tough, unfeeling, unsupportive, and cold.
Finally, I was surprised by the stance that John took against Toronto's Jewish community in this book, coming back to it again and again. He described them in antagonistic terms that reek of antisemitic tropes, such as implying that Jews are a monolith and that they are more loyal to Israel than to whichever country they are citizens of.
Certainly, the book has value for shedding light on many of the backroom dealings that went on in the newspaper industry in Toronto in the past century. But, John ultimately comes across as intensely unlikeable.
Something that really stood out was the unhealthy personal relationships described in the book. Both John and his father Bee focused on their work rather than their families, a fact that is demonstrated by a near total lack of mentioning of John's own family in the book. The relationship between father and son itself is described as tough, unfeeling, unsupportive, and cold.
Finally, I was surprised by the stance that John took against Toronto's Jewish community in this book, coming back to it again and again. He described them in antagonistic terms that reek of antisemitic tropes, such as implying that Jews are a monolith and that they are more loyal to Israel than to whichever country they are citizens of.
Certainly, the book has value for shedding light on many of the backroom dealings that went on in the newspaper industry in Toronto in the past century. But, John ultimately comes across as intensely unlikeable.
November 13, 2022
3.5 Stars
“Above the Fold” is John Honderich’s personal history and memoir of his family’s long tenure/ownership of Canada’s largest newspaper “The Toronto Star”. Strictly speaking, this is a very uneven read. There are sections that are eminently interesting - his father’s youth and shunning as a Mennonite in Baden ON, as well as the intricacies of Honderich’s fight for survival with Rob Pritchard who became CEO of The Star after his Presidency at the University of Toronto. But a lot of the book has the same kind of tedium that Barack Obama’s huge memoir presented - far too much detail and a tendency to name drop ad nauseum (see index). For newspaper insiders, though, this might be considered a bonus! The voice is also inconsistent at times taking on a kind of formality that is kind of off-putting. There is also the enduring ambivalence that John Honderich felt towards his father Beland (and nemesis) which he fails to address adequately although it is this relationship which largely defined his whole life.
“Above the Fold” is John Honderich’s personal history and memoir of his family’s long tenure/ownership of Canada’s largest newspaper “The Toronto Star”. Strictly speaking, this is a very uneven read. There are sections that are eminently interesting - his father’s youth and shunning as a Mennonite in Baden ON, as well as the intricacies of Honderich’s fight for survival with Rob Pritchard who became CEO of The Star after his Presidency at the University of Toronto. But a lot of the book has the same kind of tedium that Barack Obama’s huge memoir presented - far too much detail and a tendency to name drop ad nauseum (see index). For newspaper insiders, though, this might be considered a bonus! The voice is also inconsistent at times taking on a kind of formality that is kind of off-putting. There is also the enduring ambivalence that John Honderich felt towards his father Beland (and nemesis) which he fails to address adequately although it is this relationship which largely defined his whole life.
February 25, 2023
Interesting history of the Toronto Star from the viewpoint of its long-time publisher, the late John Honderich. Long winded at times. As in any personal history there were topics it didn't touch on that would have been useful in a "history" to have discussed/justified like Torstar's decision to shutter the Guelph Mercury newspaper and its immediate shuttering of other papers it acquired in a swap with Post Media a few years after that. One has to wonder if that was edited or simply not touched on.
January 15, 2023
Read this because I love newspapers & the Star; A bonus was reading about Honderich Senior being a Mennonite from Baden/ New Hamburg. My spouse is also a Mennonite from there so she knew all the names & families referenced in the early chapters. A solid read.
May 29, 2024
Informative book on the history of the Toronto Star.
I grew up reading the Star on Saturday mornings.
It is a terrible shame the state of the newspaper industry today. Most people consume news through social media and print media is struggling to survive.
I grew up reading the Star on Saturday mornings.
It is a terrible shame the state of the newspaper industry today. Most people consume news through social media and print media is struggling to survive.
April 16, 2023
A very personal look back at the history of an iconic newspaper. Some valuable lessons in corporate governance as well!
January 14, 2024
It was fascinating to me until he became the publisher and then it was so inside baseball even me, a seasoned journalist who worked for the newspaper, found it dry and tedious.
September 9, 2023
Although understandably a personal telling that wouldn’t offer all perspectives, this story of media history in Toronto is riveting if you are in the industry. It’s also the story of a promise to maintain principles amid profits that makes this a unique and compelling business story - and shows adhering to doing the right thing can be strong long-term business model.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews