Ivor Shapiro named chair of Ryerson School of Journalism

Ivor Shapiro, at one time the managing editor of Chatelaine magazine, has been appointed to a five-year term as chair of the Ryerson University School of Journalism in Toronto, effective July 1st. 

Shapiro had been undergraduate program director after holding a number of posts  in the school since joining the faculty as an assistant professor in 2001. His new position gives him overall responsibility for the school's academic and operational affairs including the ongoing review of the future direction of undergraduate and graduate programming. Ryerson is very well known for its emphasis on magazine education. 

At present, Shapiro chairs the ethics advisory committee of the Canadian Association of Journalism, and is the founding editor and is ethics editor of the Canadian Journalism Project (J-Source.ca), a national website which provides information, commentary and resources related to the practice of journalism.

He has written for a number of magazines, including Toronto Life, Maclean's, The Walrus, and Report on Business Magazine and Saturday Night. He has also authored the critically acclaimed book What God Allows: The Crisis of Faith and Conscience in One Catholic Church, published by Doubleday in New York. (Shapiro took undergraduate and graduate degrees in religious studies.) The Ryerson release adds:

In addition to his feature writing and editing, Ivor has produced numerous papers for refereed journals, conferences and associations. In 2009, he edited The Bigger Picture: Elements of Feature Writing, which is now prescribed in journalism schools across Canada and elsewhere.  

More recently, he contributed the chapter "What's a good story? Recognizing quality in journalists 'work' in The New Journalist: Roles, Skills and Critical Thinking. 

He has been honoured six times at the National Magazine Awards and in 2004, was a finalist for the Canadian Association of Journalists Award for Outstanding Investigative Journalism. Since 2002, Ivor has been awarded three separate research grants and seven Travel Grants from the Faculty of Communication & Design. He has also received a SSHRC Standard Research Grant in collaboration with a colleague at Laval University for the 2010 - 2013