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Eleanor Dunn
by Richard Kamen
Eleanor Dunn joined the Ottawa branch of the Canadian Women's Press
Club (former name of the Media Club of Ottawa) in the late 1960's while
she was working at the Ottawa Citizen as a reporter and editor.
It was a time when women were just starting to branch out from the
social departments of the newspaper, and move into the newsroom. Ms.
Dunn joined the club because many of her co workers from The Ottawa
Citizen, The Ottawa Journal and Le Droit were members of the club. At
this time women were joining the club for two main reasons. Firstly it
was a great place to network with other female journalists and secondly
many of the members were trying to liberate the National Press Club
which excluded women at the time. While in the club Ms. Dunn held a
number of executive offices in the media club including Presidency.
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In
high school Ms. Dunn realized that she had a passion for reporting, so
she pursued this and realized that she wanted it to be her profession
when she worked on a high school program called the "Saturday Date"
which reported on high schools around the Ottawa area.
After graduating from Journalism at Carleton University Ms. Dunn went
to work for a weekly newspaper which she eventually purchased part
of. Ms. Dunn's goal at this time was to get a job at a daily
newspaper. A job came available at the Ottawa Citizen as Assistant
Women's Editor and Ms. Dunn of course took the job, and sold her
portion of the weekly newspaper to her partner. The job at the Citizen
was an opportunity for Ms. Dunn to cover more areas of news which
included police and courts which had never been covered by a woman in
Ottawa before. |
This was just
the start of Ms. Dunn's career which lead to freelancing for CBC radio,
The Toronto Star and The Ottawa Sun. During this time Ms. Dunn was very
busy as the president of the Ottawa Newspaper Guild, while also being a
member of American Newspaper Guild.
During her time on CBC and with the guilds Ms. Dunn became an expert in
labour relations, which she claims "served her well later in her
career". She left the Ottawa Citizen to become an on air reporter at
CJOH-TV in Ottawa, working with Max Keeping. Once leaving CJOH,
Ms. Dunn taught Media studies at Algonquin College. Upon completion of
teaching, she (I'd use "briefly" here instead of "shortly") shortly
joined Ottawa Today until it folded. This was when Ms. Dunn changed
careers and went into the labor relations field, until she took her
last job as Vice President of Human Resources and Public Relations at
the Riverside Hospital of Ottawa.
Ms. Dunn left the Media Club when she retired from full time
employment. Today she lives in Ottawa and is active in the Ottawa
Hospital Riverside Campus Auxiliary, as well as being an avid golfer
and traveler. Ms. Dunn still has a strong passion for municipal
politics in Ottawa and has a blog to discuss and criticize current
political issues in Ottawa. Anyone interested in the blog should visit
http://thepitchfork.blogspot.com.
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