Shawna Leigh Richer - 2009 Fellow

SHAWNA LEIGH RICHER, editor, The New Brunswick Telegraph-Journal

Shawna Leigh Richer is currently the editor of the Telegraph-Journal, a 40,000 circulation provincial daily based in Saint John, New Brunswick, Canada, where she runs a 50-person newsroom, directing editorial content and design and special projects.

She has spent nearly two decades in the newspaper business, and came to the Telegraph-Journal after a decade at the Globe and Mail in various reporting positions in Toronto, Montreal and Halifax. Shawna spent much of her time at the Globe as a sports writer, and even after she’d moved to news, sports writing was still very close to her heart.

Her last major assignment for the Globe – and favorite – came at the end of the National Hockey League lockout in the fall of 2005. She proposed a project documenting No. 1 draft pick Sidney Crosby’s rookie season as a means of chronicling the return of their national past time and all it touches in their hockey mad country – their sporting life, sociology, the business of hockey – and spent a year living in Pittsburgh for the series and a subsequent book.

Shawna came to the Telegraph-Journal because she loved what the publisher was doing with the newspaper that had given her her first job as a reporter back in 1989, and she wanted to move into a senior editing and management position. After coming on as weekend editor and launching a Saturday arts and culture section that won a National Newspaper Award in its first year, she took on the role of editor, and will soon be adding the challenge of revamping the editorial content on the Telegraph-Journal web site to her duties.