"Starting today, we'll bring you passionate, energetic stories about your personal lives, from health and fitness to food and wine to family and relationships: We'll tell you why your kid keeps getting the flu (hint: it's your fault); why cheating on your spouse isn't always such a bad thing, how the latest must-buy wine came out of war-torn Lebanon," writes Globe Life editor Jill Borra in Monday's Globe and Mail.
Ms. Borra was online earlier today to take your questions on Globe Life in print and online – its vision, what it has to offer and what's to come.
Your questions and Ms. Borra's answers appear at the bottom of this page.
Editor's Note: globeandmail.com editors will read and allow or reject each question/comment. Comments/questions may be edited for length or clarity. HTML is not allowed. We will not publish questions/comments that include personal attacks on participants in these discussions, that make false or unsubstantiated allegations, that purport to quote people or reports where the purported quote or fact cannot be easily verified, or questions/comments that include vulgar language or libellous statements. Preference will be given to readers who submit questions/comments using their full name and home town, rather than a pseudonym.
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Rasha Mourtada, Globe Life web editor: Welcome, Jill, and thanks for taking online reader questions on the new Globe Life section. Can you start by sharing a little bit of background on how this new section came to be?
Jill Borra: Thanks Rasha. The genesis of Globe Life goes back to the summer of 2005. A number of senior editors at the paper were talking about the future of newspapers and how we should be moving forward. They decided to put the question to the staff. A project called Reimagination was launched, in which almost 200 people – from all parts of the paper, editorial, IT, sales, production – volunteered to tackle questions about content and how we work as a news organization. One of the things that came out of that process was the recognition that while our strengths lie in news and business, we wanted to give our readers more stories about the things that affect them in their daily lives. We're good at authortiative and insightful. We wanted to be better at passionate and energetic. When we asked our readers what they thought they agreed - they wanted more lifestyle - more food and wine, more health and fitness, more about family and relationships.
So the idea for Globe Life was born. The Globe and Mail is already successful in embracing our readers as citizens (with excellent news reporting and analysis), businesspeople (with first-rate business coverage), and as consumers of entertainment (in Sports and Review). Now, with Globe Life, we can address that vital fourth area of readers' lives – speaking to them about how they live, work and play in their private lives.
Lisa, Toronto: Will there be lots of overlap with other sections? Such as Style, for example?
Jill Borra: Hi Lisa,
That's a very good question. We thought a lot about this when we were developing the Globe Life section. While there are a number of areas of the paper in which we already touch on lifestyle subjects, Globe Life expands on that content and brings it into focus, in one place, every weekday. One way we distinguish ourselves is that we are a very current, newsy section, with breaking stories that matter in our readers lives today. For example, on Monday, we looked at the Alec Baldwin debacle and wrote about how children of divorced parents are using the Internet and other forms of technology to shame their feuding parents into good behaviour. Yesterday, when the story broke that the Governor General was taking time off because she was suffering from exhaustion, we wrote about how over-tiredness is a condition that is increasingly affecting Canadians.
